Date: 25 October

Start time: 9:00am

End time: 5:30pm

Location: West Court, Main Building Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place

Organising Committee: Dr Penny Travlou (ESALA, University of Edinburgh) and Professor Luigina Ciolfi (Sheffield Hallam University)

Website: https://ethnocol2019.wordpress.com/

In this one-day research conference on Friday 25 October 2019, we  bring together interdisciplinary scholars to explore ethnographic accounts and understandings of collaborative economy practices and communities, and therefore contributing to the development of a multi-faceted view on sharing and caring practices. The conference also focuses on the methodological aspects of studying collaborative economi(es) e.g. collaborative ethnography, participatory action research, co-design etc. We see this conference as an opportunity to develop a more holistic perspective on studying collaborative economies, and to connect this scholarship to recent research on sharing and caring practices.

The conference is supported by the COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy” (CA16121, 2017-2021), developing a network of actors focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice focused approach.

The Conference is free, but places are limited. So registration is required via eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ethnographies-of-collaborative-economies-conference-registration-72955109697

Event title: EU COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy” Working Group Meetings and Core Management Meeting

Date: 23 – 24 October

Full Day

Location: West Court, Main Building Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place

Host Organiser: Dr Penny Travlou (ESALA, University of Edinburgh)

Project Leader: Dr Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick, Ireland)

Website: http://sharingandcaring.eu/

The main objective of this EU COST Action is to develop a European network of actors (including scholars, practitioners, communities and policy makers) focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice-focused approach.

On 23 and 24 October 2019, the Working Groups 1, 2, 3 and 4 will meet in Edinburgh to discuss their up-to-date activities and outputs for the COST Action. The programme includes a selection of invited speakers, as well as presentations by COST Action members. On 24 October (afternooon), there will also be the Core Management Committee meeting where the Project Leader, Dr Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick) together with the Working Group Leaders will report on the current activities of the COST Action.

The host organiser for all above meetings is Dr Penny Travlou (ESALA) who is part of the MC and WG1 Leader.

From January – August 2019, we completed work on the ‘Making Connections’ project. OPENspace carried out the evaluation for the project. You can find out more on our website http://www.openspace.eca.ed.ac.uk/research-projects/making-connections/. The project also made a short video which you can watch below.

Last month Dr Simon Bell, Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of OPENspace, spoke at the EUROPARC Conference 2019, Latvia which took place in Kemeri National Park from September 24-27. He talked about balancing accessibility and use of nature (the pressures of visitors to protected areas especially) with the capacity and limitations of the natural landscape – so as to prevent physical and ecological damage or disturbance as well as to ensure a good experience by the visitors. If you would like to hear his talk please see the video below.

Time: 12.00-13.00, 4 July 2019 (Thursday)
Venue: Drummond Street, Room (2.01)
Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP

Title: Urban greenery and mental wellbeing in adults: Mediation analyses on multiple pathways based on streetscape greenery measures

Speaker: Professor Ye Liu – Sun-Yat-sen University, China

Multiple mechanisms have been proposed to explain how greenery in the vicinity of people’s homes enhances their mental health and wellbeing. Mediation studies, however, focus on a limited number of mechanisms and rely on remotely sensed greenery measures, which do not accurately capture how neighborhood greenery is perceived on the ground. This study aims to examine: 1) how streetscape and remote sensing-based greenery affect people’s mental wellbeing; 2) whether and to what extent the associations are mediated by physical activity, stress, air quality and noise, and social cohesion; and 3) whether differences in the mediation across the streetscape greenery and NDVI exposure metrics occurred. We used a population sample from 2016 of 1,029 adult residents of the metropolis of Guangzhou, China. Two objective greenery measures were extracted at the neighborhood level: 1) streetscape greenery from street view data via a convolutional neural network, and 2) the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from Landsat 8 remote sensing images. Single and multiple mediation analyses with multilevel regressions were conducted. Regression results show that mental health and wellbeing and both streetscape and satellite-derived greenery seem to be both directly correlated and indirectly mediated. Our findings signify that both greenery measures capture different aspects of natural environments and may contribute to people’s wellbeing by means of different mechanisms.

Bio of the speaker:
Dr. Ye Liu is currently a Professor in the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, China. Prior to joining Sun Yat-sen University in 2017, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of St Andrews (UK), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong), and University of Lethbridge (Canada). His primary research interests focus on Health Inequalities, Health and Wellbeing in the Urban Environment, Migration and Urbanization. His research works have been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Regional Studies, Urban Studies, Population Space and Place, Landscape and Urban Planning, Cities, Urban Geography, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Environment International, Journal of Affective Disorders and Environmental Research. He is sponsored by the Recruitment Program for Young Professionals of the ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ (qian ren ji hua). He is the Principal Investigator of two research projects funded by Natural Science Foundation of China.

‘Enhancing Health Through Access to Nature: How Effective are Interventions in Woodlands in Deprived Urban Communities? A Quasi-experimental Study in Scotland, UK’ is the title of a new paper that’s just been published online (Open Access), relating to our NIHR-funded project on Woods In and Around Towns (WIAT). Click here to read more or to download a PDF version of the paper.

We are hosting 3 events at the end of March 2019 to present the results of the study and provide an opportunity to meet with some of the researchers and rangers involved in the project.

We will be hosting events at the following locations: 
– Linwood on Monday 25^th March (book here)
– Pollok on Tuesday 26^th March (book here)
– Mayfield on Wednesday 27^th March (book here). 

All events will run as drop-in sessions from 6 – 7pm, so feel free to turn up whenever is convenient (although booking is preferred).

Please note there will be a short presentation at 6:15pm. Refreshments will be provided.

Our animation below is a summary of research that’s been conducted on woods and wellbeing in Scotland. In particular, we focus on a study we completed that examines the impact of Forestry Commission Scotland’s ‘Woods In and Around Towns’ (WIAT) programme on community stress levels and wellbeing. 

If you would like more information about the study please visit our Community page, where you can also download a summary of the research, as well as our final report. 

This book explores how natural landscapes are linked to positive mental wellbeing. While natural landscapes have long been represented and portrayed as transformative, the link to mental wellbeing is an area that researchers are still aiming to comprehend. Accompanying five groups of people to rural Scotland, the author considers individual, external and group motivations for journeying from urban environments, examining in what ways these excursions are personally and socially transformative. 
Far more than traversing mere physical boundaries, this book illustrates the new challenges, experiences, territories and cultures provided by these excursions, firmly anchored in the Scottish countryside. In doing so, the author questions the extent to which people’s own narratives link to the perception that the outdoors are positively transformative – and what indeed does have the power to influence transformation. 
Grounded in extensive qualitative research, this contemplative and ethnographic book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of the outdoors and its connection to wellbeing. 

Dr Rebecca Crowther is a transdisciplinary ethnographic researcher working between, across and beyond disciplines within the arts, humanities and social sciences. Her research interests lie in the phenomenological experience of natural landscapes.

email: sharingnaturalscotland@gmail.com 

website: www.sharingnaturalscotland.com

OPENspace is pleased to host Jung-Hwa Kim and welcome her to the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores contemporary landscape architecture, the redevelopment of botanical gardens, showing them as the theatre of plants; an emblem of the human relationship with nature. She will be reviewing the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, as well as others in the UK. In this blog post you can find out more about Kim and her research project at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

Biography

Jung-Hwa Kim is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh and a Visiting Researcher of the Environmental Planning Institute at the Seoul National University. Before launching her academic career, Kim worked as a landscape architect in several design firms in Seoul, Korea. She holds a PhD in Engineering and has received an MLA and a BS in Agriculture from the Seoul National University. She has previously served as a lecturer at the Graduate Landscape Architecture Programme of Gachon University in South Korea in 2015 and 2017 and as a short-term fellow at the International Centre for Jefferson Studies in the US. Her scholarly interest focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape history and global, contemporary landscape architecture. Her work explores the global transfer of ideas and the role of politics, technology, and plants in the field.

Research Project at IASH

1. Outline

Since their origin as teaching gardens at medical universities, botanical gardens have functioned as a platform to collect and display plants for educational purposes. They have served as living ‘encyclopaedias’ showing knowledge about nature, as exemplified by the title page of Theatrum Botanicum by the famed seventeenth-century herbalist and botanist John Parkinson.

However, the role of botanical gardens is changing and expanding today. Botanical gardens in the 21st century not only contribute to the spread of knowledge about plants but also inspire people to take steps to conserve or cultivate plants. The new social role of botanical gardens requires fresh modes of nature and display. Accordingly, landscape architecture studios have created innovative botanical displays. As a result, many historic botanical gardens have been reinvented through new master plans. The redevelopment of botanical gardens is especially prominent in the United Kingdom, which possesses many botanical gardens with a long history.

At IASH at the University of Edinburgh, her research project aims to explore a phenomenon in contemporary landscape architecture, the reinvention of botanical gardens, by placing it in a longer lineage to show botanical gardens as the theatre of plants, an emblem of the human relationship with nature. She will review recent master-plan projects of botanical gardens in the UK, such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

2. Previous accomplishments

Kim has studied the history of botanical gardens in Korea, with an emphasis on the transnational transfer of ideas, technology, and plants. By reviewing the introduction of Neo-Confucianism and the change of perspective on nature and plants in the thirteenth century Kora, she has revealed that the interest in native medicinal plants had grown and promoted to establish royal physic gardens. Through a review of Korean intellectuals’ visits to botanical gardens in the West from 1876 to 1910, she has found that establishing gardens was regarded as a means of civilisation. In an analysis of the Changgyeongwon Botanical Garden from 1910 to 1945, she has shown that the first botanical garden in Korea played a role in developing knowledge and taste.

As a short-term fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in Virginia, US, in March 2018, she has investigated the background and significance of Thomas Jefferson’s Botanical Garden at the University of Virginia. Furthermore, she has participated in planning the Seoul Botanic Park, which will open to the public this year.

3. Relevance to Edinburgh and collaborative outcomes

The UK contains many historic botanical gardens, such as the Oxford Botanic Garden, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Chelsea Physic Garden. Edinburgh is a central city in the network of Scottish botanical gardens, with the second oldest botanical garden, Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh. Edinburgh is also home to the GROSS. MAX. design studio, which proposed a new master plan for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) at the Edinburgh College of Art already has a good working relationship with the Botanical Garden Edinburgh and regularly holds classes there. This would also provide her with the opportunity to contact Edinburgh-based landscape architecture studios. Through collaborations with ESALA, she will access the previously networked botanic gardens in Edinburgh and practitioners, which are essential resources for her research.

In collaboration with OPENspace she will develop seminars/workshops about design approaches to the issues of health and well-being in botanical gardens.

Today, on World Cities Day 2018, we’re launching our animation and infographic about research into woods and wellbeing in Scotland.

We’ve worked with a fantastic team: animator Kevin Rob (http://kevinrob.com/) and illustrator Sophie Powell-Hall (http://www.sophph.com/) to create this summary of research that’s been conducted on woods and wellbeing in Scotland. In particular, we focus on a study we recently completed that examines the impact of Forestry Commission Scotland’s ‘Woods In and Around Towns’ (WIAT) programme on community stress levels, funded by NIHR, which is forthcoming (https://www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/programmes/phr/10300518/#/).

We were able to produce the animation and infographic from funding awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Working with partners Forestry Commission Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage we have been working on a project to share findings from the WIAT study more widely on social media. We hope that you find it useful and interesting – please use and circulate widely!

The funding also allows us to host a seminar to present evidence on the health and wellbeing benefits and challenges in enhancing access to woodlands and natural environments, including presentations on the Woods In and Around Towns NIHR research study in more detail. The seminar will include contributions from Forest Research, Scottish Natural Heritage, and key international speakers. Those with an interest in how woodlands and the natural environment can be used to improve public health and wellbeing should watch this space for more details coming soon…