Know Your Bristol On The Move

Place is fixed, but people move. Bristol's peoples move through life and across the city; they move to it and out of it; they move across the globe, and - sometimes - back again. This fluidity runs along and around fixity: ties to people and places elsewhere, which link individuals and the city itself to other points around the world, as well as the immobilities of 'marginalised' communities. This project explores strategies and tools - digital and otherwise - to trace and link the fluid and the fixed.

Know Your Bristol On The Move builds on a track record of community co-production initiatives and the 2012-13 AHRC 'Know Your Bristol' and 'Know Your Bristol Stories' projects, collaborations with Bristol City Council's Know Your Place (KYP) team and community partners, which developed a heritage research co-production toolkit. This helped partners develop community archives to support their own research, and showcased how they could be used in the KYP web resource www.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace. This award-winning resource, launched in March 2011, provides greater access to archives, encourages community interaction with and reuse of this material, informs neighbourhood planning exercises, and enhances Bristol City Council records through direct community, or crowd-sourced contributions to the Historic Environment Record (HER).

Our project asks key questions:

1) how does the collection, interconnection and presentation of contemporary, crowdsourced digital materials created and shaped through community partnerships generate new understandings of history on the move?
2) how do mobility and longer histories of dwelling affect people's senses of place and how might this be visualised with digital mapping tools?
3) what are the conceptual and technical challenges involved creating digital networks across different archival sources, existing tools and institutional structures?
4) how might the intellectual property inherent in cultural heritage be shared across communities, research institutions and the public sector and what questions about ownership and data management might be generated by different approaches to web-based tools and mobile applications?
5) how might communities co-develop archival frameworks to include domestic and informal materials that produce new understandings and experiences of place?
6) as one size will not fit all and given the diversities of (and within) communities concerned, what repertoires of complementary tools and approaches might best support and enable different 'types' of group?

To answer these questions, the project will create: a mobile view of the existing KYP site, a new platform for community digital mapping, as well as two new apps for it. A 'Know Your Bus' will form a different kind of sustainable mobile platform: a space for digital creation and co-production of research and learning, an equipped space that can travel to sites & communities. We will augment an archive at the heart of the Council's infrastructure, and we will explore the creation of mobile archives, treasure chests for family history. We will work with 8 different communities, co-developing and assessing different portfolios of tools for community research, deploying high-, low- and no-tech, working with makers, artists, software developers, the old, the young, communities of interest and communities of place. We will build on the City Council & University of Bristol collaboration, as well as related activity more widely within the university and city.

Know Your Bristol on the Move will impact on a range of beneficiaries outside of academia, both during and after the project. The most immediate impact will be on community partners and this includes giving a voice to communities who may feel excluded from research and decision-making processes. The Know Your Place web resource is a direct link to local planning policy and placemaking, managed by the Bristol City Council Planning Department. Any contribution to the web resource by a member of the public becomes potential material consideration within planning decision processes. In this way communities directly contribute to the shaping of their neighbourhoods. They can express the values they have around parts of their neighbourhood that others may overlook. This project focuses on value as emergent rather than fixed. Events and collaborative activities will enable each community to tailor toolkits to their needs and to develop ownership frameworks for their own Community Maps and digital assets. The project will draw on research developed internationally about cultural heritage and intellectual property (http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/) in order to address questions of different levels of community access and shared use; as such, this project has the potential to impact on the ways in which digital community assets can be governed by communities themselves, while retaining the regulatory power involved in planning processes. In short, communities, local planning policy and national and international bodies and policy makers with cultural heritage remits have the potential to be impacted by this project. Due to the immediacy of technical development, impacts at local level will be realised during the lifetime of the project, while impacts at national and international levels would be expected within a year following the end of funding.

Another impact will be on wider multiple and diverse users of the KYP site and the technical developments created in the project. The mobile interface will allow maps, trails and pathways to be followed in situ, not just by the communities that developed these resources but by other inhabitants of Bristol and visitors to the city. The apps for mobile devices will enable the collection and presentation of information on the move and facilitate physical user interaction. This in turn will help increase the amount of information available, thus increasing the value of the site to those who use it. More data also benefits the City Council who use the information in their own decision-making processes about the future of Bristol. By joining an international network of projects working with geographical data, digital archives and communities, the specific technical challenges and approaches to landscape characterisation presented by Know Your Bristol On The Move has the potential to impact on global public sector initiatives and to inform community-led cultural heritage tourism.

KYP, its technical developments and the stories and materials collected during the project will be publicised through the University's existing communication channels, the project website and blog, the films and the commemorative booklet. Communities will also be able to design their own communication strategies, facilitated as necessary by the University and project partners. The learning around engagement and co-production will be shared with other organisations, primarily through the CPE and its links to the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). The NCCPE has established a Community Partner Network which aims to influence Higher Education policy and practice and provide resources for improving community university partnerships focused on tackling inequalities. Through the network and other activities organised by the NCCPE there is an opportunity to engage a range of non-academic stakeholders, both in the UK and internationally.