ABSTRACT
This chapter collects together the collaborative and co-creative work produced with communities local to our case study urban commons, drawing out the current preoccupations and future hopes and concerns of those communities for their urban open green spaces.
A range of methods were employed across all of the urban commons, though some of those methods came to predominate on some commons. These methods were based either on walking conversations – those at Mousehold Heath form the majority in this chapter – or made collaboratively with architecture and design students at Town Moor and Valley Gardens. Some of these projects, the design of small mobile structures for both urban commons, for example, were principally pedagogical and some, in particular at the Town Moor, also engaged with local commons users. Co-creative engagement activities at Clifton and Durdham Downs are represented by writing workshops with local school children.
Shared by many of the locals we talked to was a sense of pride in their common’s status as a site of learning and biodiversity, though sometimes tempered by a fear for the potential loss of their common or at least its erosion. Often, there was a strong, if often vague, sense that these places were historically significant or special, in a sense which contributed to their sense of mutual belonging with their urban common.
