PeopleScapes Research and Knowledge Exchange Centre

• To increase academic insight on key challenges at the interface of people and environments
• To provide methodological evidence to achieve practical solutions, enhancing professional practice, policy formulation, its implementation, and strategic planning
• To create interdisciplinary approaches and solutions that transcend and blend traditions of social, economic, natural, and health sciences, and humanities
• To work with international, national, regional, and local levels of policy-making and strategic planning
• To engage communities in projects, including citizen science approaches, enabling external capacity development
• To promote our work to wider audiences at public forums and network opportunities
• To engage with students, and, through training opportunities, enhance their skills in research and knowledge exchange (RKE) 

Knowledge Exchange partners

• AONBs
• CITIZAN
• Chambers of Commerce and a number of corporate private sector organisations
• Community Groups, Charities and Community Interest Companies
• Government authorities including Natural England and county and local councils
• European Union Global Diaspora Facility
• International Union for Conservation of Nature & World Commission for Protected Areas 
• Landscape Institute
• National Trust
• National Park Authorities
• NHS Trusts
• Public Health England
• Royal Geographic Society 
• Wildlife Trusts

Higher Education partners

• Bournemouth University
• University of Buckingham
• Flinders University, Australia 
• Pernambuco State University, Brazil 
• University of Plymouth
• University of Seville, Spain
• Tongjin University Shanghai, China 
• University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados 

Research interests

Our research interests are wide-ranging and cover a variety of aspects of people/place/environment relationships. Cross-cutting themes are:

• Sustainable development
• Place, identity and attachment, and the group-based dynamics of people/place relationships
• Society-environment interactions
• Multifunctionality of spaces
• The values and health benefits of public spaces including natural environments, urban greenspaces and workspaces
• Nature-based solutions to socio-economic and environmental challenges, in areas of cultural and environmental importance such as National Parks, World Heritage Sites and coastal areas in the UK and internationally
• Heritage as a tool for social justice, education and empowerment

Other key research strands:

• Children's engagement strategies around natural heritage (National Trust) sites (read the Phase 1 report: PeopleScapes Centre National Trust Audit)
• Place and memory of the Old Jewish East End of London using digital tools

International reach

Much of our research, and our engagement with institutions, takes place at the international level of policy making.

We are members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the IUCN's World Commission for Protected Areas (WCPA) and the IUCN/WCPA COVID-19 Protected Areas Task Force. The Task Force aims to collate information and insights on the impacts of COVID-19 on protected and conserved areas and to collate and disseminate principles and good practice for rescue, recovery and rebuild, to strengthen and expand systems of protected and conserved areas which contribute to human health and welfare. We also play a key role in the IUCN Health and Wellbeing Specialist Group which promotes the health and wellbeing benefits of nature across the conservation, health and other sectors.

Key recent activities:

• IUCN Technical Note, urging increased support and investments in protected and conserved areas as part of COVID-recovery strategies, along with guiding principles encouraging effective, equitable, and durable outcomes.
• PARKS Journal Special Issue on COVID-19: COVID-era policies and economic recovery plans, a TED-style video highlighting findings of a study in the early pandemic on rollbacks and economic recovery plans during the onset of the pandemic that supported and/or undermined conservation areas.
• IUCN and WCPA at COP26: video on protected areas as solutions for climate change and biodiversity crises.

For further information, contact Prof. Denise Hewlett.

Other key international research strands:

• Digital toolkits for community heritage in West Africa and the Caribbean
• Urban heritage and community in Shanghai, China
• Digital heritage strategies among youth diaspora groups from Barbados, Brazil and Rwanda

Projects

Our projects have a strong citizen science aspect. They include:

• Broadly Engaging with Tranquillity
• Broadly Engaging with Tranquillity Easy and Refined (BETER)
• Caribbean Community Heritage projects
• South Devon Rivers Discovery Project
• Significant Sanctuaries
• Volunteering Research Hub

Forthcoming

PeopleScapes Centre launch, date TBC.

Recent

17 May 2022: Embodied Cartographies: Archaeology, Art and the making of place-scapes, a virtual seminar with Fay Stevens, Adjunct Professor at University of Notre Dame.