Inclusive Landscapes Network

We live, breathe and move through landscape, from our neighbourhood parks to the more iconic settings of the coast and countryside. Decisions made about the management of these landscapes are often based on narrow assumptions about how such settings are perceived, experienced and valued. By bringing these assumptions to light, we aim to develop a deeper understanding of why varied landscapes matter and for who.

Landscapes are increasingly managed for biodiversity. Our Inclusive Landscapes Network aims to complement this approach with a focus on human diversity. Through the network, we will foreground the complex ways in which landscapes become meaningful to different people through their senses, personal memories and shared histories.

With a particular focus on management decisions pertaining to health and wellbeing, we adopt a broad interpretation of landscape, recognising that moments of health and wellbeing can unfold through the smallest scales of landscape encounter (for example, within city allotment plots, urban public parks and hospital gardens) to more expansive encounters with country parks, national parks, heritage coastlines and historic estates.

Supported by a series of networking activities over two years, we will demonstrate how arts and humanities research can offer valuable insights into four key questions of particular relevance to landscape policy and practice:

1. How is landscape sensed and made sense of by different individuals and groups?
2. What are the cultural historical underpinnings of landscape experience?
3. What are the tensions between personal and collective landscape meanings?
4. How can we learn from human diversity to facilitate genuine landscape inclusion that moves beyond basic access provision?

The Network will create space for productive and timely arts and humanities-led discussions with policy-makers and practitioners involved in diverse landscape use and management. We will organise four workshops, a 'living' exhibition and participate in a series of public engagement events. Network activities will be shaped by key partners, including Historic England, the National Trust, the Woodland Trust, the Sensory Trust, Sense, and Natural Inclusion.

Our findings will be shared across the academic community through co-authored journal articles and collaborative conference sessions, and more broadly through an online network hub, themed policy briefings and the production of an ethnographic film shared as part of the living exhibition.

Though the Inclusive Landscapes Network, we aim to embed inclusion at the heart of UK environmental policy making. Such efforts are particularly timely with vast areas of environmental policy currently being re-framed and re-written as the UK prepares to leave the European Union. In doing so, we will support land use and management decisions that reflect the diverse social and cultural values associated with landscapes, including often unseen, intangible landscape qualities.

Through our network activities, we will demonstrate how insights from arts and humanities research can be integral to inclusive landscape decision-making by challenging and shifting how different policy-makers and practitioners currently frame and orientate themselves to ideas of landscape access and inclusion. Foregrounding such issues, the activities proposed for the 'Inclusive Landscapes Network' will generate both 'conceptual' impact (e.g. reframing policy debates, social attitudes etc.) and 'instrumental' impact (e.g. altering the development of policy and practice). While the network will include a range of different publics, organisations and groups, we will work most closely with four key stakeholder groups:

1. Local and national policy and service delivery representatives (e.g. Defra, Natural Resources Wales, Scottish Natural Heritage, Natural England, National Parks UK, Environment Agency, Local Authority environment departments): with the UK set to leave the European Union within the next few months, areas of environmental policy are currently being re-framed and re-written. By sharing examples of best practice through our Inclusive Landscapes Network - within Workshops 1-3, two policy briefing papers, a short accessible film and a dedicated Wordpress site, and by participating in additional meetings throughout (e.g. with the National Outdoors for All Working Group) - we will demonstrate opportunities to scale up this positive work, bringing inclusion to the heart of UK environmental policies, such that inclusive landscape decision-making becomes a mainstream, taken-for-granted and unremarkable aspect of policy and practice.

2. Natural and cultural heritage organisations (e.g. National Trust, Historic England, Woodland Trust, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, Wildlife Trusts, National Association of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty): network workshops and outputs will promote opportunities to access useful and usable arts and humanities research activities to support growing efforts to promote heritage experiences 'for all'. Network members will gain valuable insights into how to embed a genuinely inclusive approach to landscape management and heritage visitor experiences within their organisations, shifting from viewing embodied and cultural diversity as an 'access' need to a source of knowledge, engagement and learning.

3. Landscape architects and planners (e.g. via the Landscape Institute, the Town and Country Planning Association, the Design Council) will be supported to engage with arts and humanities research to better understand and design for embodied and cultural diversity within varied heritage contexts. Opportunities for countering persistent, identity-limiting stereotypes of difference through inclusive design will be explored, building on the work and accessible guidelines already produced between network members (e.g. Bell with Sensory Trust and OPENSpace, White with Sensory Trust).

4. Health and wellbeing practitioners (e.g. nature-based social prescription activity commissioners and providers, health focused third sector organisations) will forge partnerships with the natural and cultural heritage sector, while also gaining the opportunity to situate their efforts in its historical context (e.g. asylum gardening, horticultural therapy, forest bathing). Doing so will offer valuable opportunities to learn how contemporary practices are rooted in history, while drawing on more current research to tailor activities and programmes appropriately to the diverse landscape needs, values and priorities of their patients and activity participants.

The specific activities that will be organised to maximise opportunities for these impacts are described in the 'Pathways to Impact' and 'Case for Support'.