Julian Dobson

Sheffield Hallam University | SHU · Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research

Abstract: Cities are sites of human, ecological and institutional stress. The elements that make up the city – its people, landscapes and metabolisms – are engaged in continual processes of assemblage and disassembly, joining and pulling apart. Reporting the findings of a three-year multi-disciplinary deep case study, this paper examines the role o...

Empirical research has long shown positive connections between urban green spaces and their users’ wellbeing. But compelling evidence does not always lead to appropriate investment. In a study of the contribution of urban nature to mental wellbeing in Sheffield, UK, the authors identified greenspace investments that could lead to improved wellbeing...

Urban Crisis, Urban Hope resurrects the concept of the city and its neighbourhoods as a crucible for new ideas and a site of innovative action when cities in the UK are struggling with an unfolding crisis, exacerbated by a policy vacuum and lack of strategic vision about how to resolve a series of growing divisions, social problems and injustices....

Policymakers and practitioners working in urban greenspace management want to know what kind of interventions are effective in promoting mental wellbeing. In practice, however, they rely on multiple forms of knowledge, often in unwritten form. This paper considers how such knowledge is interpreted and used by a range of stakeholders to identify gre...

Long term urban resilience demands a transition to a low-carbon society but poses a dilemma: the institutions that stabilise and perpetuate sociotechnical systems must become agents of radical change. The possibility of alternative futures challenges the logics and values central to institutional identity. ‘Sustainability transitions’ thus raise qu...

This chapter introduces the key themes of the volume, providing historical and policy context for the concept of the civic university. It argues that, given the right resources and commitment, a civic orientation has the potential to produce deep, broad and lasting benefits for communities. The idea of the civic university offers a driving logic th...

The final chapter, reflecting on and drawing together the insights of the book’s contributors, sets out an agenda for action. It argues that universities need to examine both their relevance to local communities and their purpose in contributing to the civic good. That requires not only an increase in civic activities within higher education, but m...

This book addresses the need for a comprehensive reappraisal of what it means to be a ‘civic university’. For two decades the ‘civic’ agenda has been driven by a concern with economic impact and regional economic development. While recognising the importance of these aspects of universities’ civic influence, there is a need to more comprehensively...

One of the most telling criticisms of Boris Johnson’s manifesto commitment to ‘level up every part of the United Kingdom’ (Conservative Party, 2019) is that it was almost impossible to explain what it meant. The Levelling Up White Paper (HM Government, 2022) is a 297-page riposte to that accusation. It is a riposte, though, that continues to raise...

At the tearoom in Bury Market there's a chalkboard with a cheery-looking rag doll beside it. The board advertises Jackson's rag pudding – ‘a little bit like chippy pudding but better’ – for a modest £3.50. Few people south of Lancashire have come across rag pudding. You wouldn't call it a delicacy, but it's substantial and filling, the kind of dish...

Sitting in the stripped-out hollow of an old-fashioned department store in Ripon, Anthony Blackburn was at his wits’ end. Philip Hall, the store he had taken over in the North Yorkshire town seven years earlier, had failed after 62 years of trading, with debts of more than £400,000. ‘You think about its former glory in the sixties and seventies, an...

It's a bright, fresh day in Bedminster, just south of Bristol city centre. On shopfronts and house walls along North Street are brightly painted giant insects, the Bugs of Bedminster. It's a Friday morning and the street is starting to stir. At Mark's Bread, the independent bakery, an aroma of fresh loaves combines enticingly with the coffee brewin...

The long main street of Totnes in Devon springs from Old Market, with its fine views across the Dart Valley. Dropping swiftly past Rotherfold, where the bulls used to be penned on market days, it eases the casual visitor past Drift record store, Social Fabric knitting shop, Sacks Wholefoods, The Happy Apple, the colonnaded Butterwalks, and a succes...

Burly and crop-headed, Neil Stockwell patrols the perimeter of his fruit and veg stall at the entrance to Queen's Market in Upton Park, East London, like a lovable bull terrier. For 35 years he's exchanged banter with all-comers, from Asian elders to young West Ham United supporters on their way to a match. Every passer-by seems to know him. Queen'...

Shortly before the Second World War, the illustrator Eric Ravilious created a series of lithographs of British shops. The medium, with its simple colour schemes and bold treatments of light and shade, was itself evocative of a past that would never return. There was the baker and confectioner, bright-eyed in the early hours of the morning while it...

At Waterloo Bridge, the Thames turns 90 degrees, flowing from Westminster to the City of London. Go into any of the pubs and bars on the north side of the river and the talk is likely to be of politics or finance, while most of the prominent buildings and public spaces represent the interests of one or the other. In between are the cloisters of the...

Jamaica Street 10 years ago was a road most Bristolians would avoid. Warehouses and homes had been left to rot. If you were on your uppers in Bristol, this street in Stokes Croft is where you might end up – as a squatter if you were lucky, as a client of the Salvation Army or queuing for methadone at one of the local drug advice services if your lu...

The night of 21 April 2011 witnessed a first in the history of Britain's biggest supermarket chain. Tesco, the corporation that had grown from humble barrow-boy beginnings in London's East End 92 years earlier to control almost one third of the UK's grocery market and billions of pounds of household spending, was attacked by rioters in Bristol. Eig...

In August 2013, a 64-year-old man died after a fist fight over a parking space at an Asda store in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. It would be hard to dream up a more apt illustration of the misery of modern shopping. All humanity seems to go to the supermarket or the mall, yet it's where humanity often goes missing. Catherine O’Flynn's first novel, Wha...

Anyone looking for a microcosm of middle England should take a trip to Letchworth Garden City, nestling in the placid undulations of Hertfordshire. Places don't come much more middling than this. Match the local census data against the national picture and the fit is almost perfect. There are a few more Sikhs, the population is a notch or two above...

At the dead of night on 29 May 2012 a posse of council workers, heavily supported by police and security staff, descended on a North West London suburb. Their mission? To remove books from a library. Out went the biographies, histories, reference books and travel guides. Out went the children's fiction. Out went the novels and poetry. Out, too, wen...

Research has suggested that connexions between humans and the natural world lead to increased well-being and generate pro-environmental attitudes, which in turn benefit nature. This article asks whether users of outdoor public spaces in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 experienced greater connectedness with nature, consistent with the fi...

Covid‐19 has focused attention on the importance of urban green and blue spaces (such as parks and watercourses) for human wellbeing. Less attention has been devoted to how those spaces might contribute to a wider rethinking of relations between humans and the more‐than‐human world in post‐pandemic cities. This article outlines how Covid‐19 opens u...

One of the ironies of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK has been the sudden prominence of public parks and green spaces, as these spaces have been the undervalued poor relations of urban planning for more than a decade. This chapter draws on recent research on the importance of urban green spaces for mental wellbeing and the impacts of COVID-19 on us...

COVID-19 is an invisible threat that has hugely impacted cities and their inhabitants. Yet its impact is very visible, perhaps most so in urban public spaces and spaces of mobility. This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19 across the world, both those resulting from official...

The climate emergency and crisis of biodiversity loss show that the human-nature relationship is failing. This paper introduces the psychological construct of nature connectedness as a measurable target for improving the human-nature relationship, and therefore helping tackle the warming climate and loss of wildlife. The 'pathways to nature connect...

This chapter addresses questions of the decision-making processes concerning investment in urban green spaces. It considers how evidence is deployed in processes of governance, and how nuanced understandings of costs and wellbeing benefits are backgrounded as evidence becomes a bargaining chip in a struggle for resources. Calling on empirical resea...

As both a reflection on the book and a proposal for next steps, this chapter emphasises the importance of context in its widest (social, cultural, political, ecological, economic…) sense when seeking to understand the limits to many urban green spaces’ positive contributions to human wellbeing. Exploring the mismatch between policy rhetoric, practi...

There is already a plethora of research which amply demonstrates multiple benefits of urban nature for health and wellbeing, culture and identity, biodiversity and a sense of place. Alongside this, political rhetoric and planning strategies make well-meaning and eloquent statements about how important urban green space is, but this is not followed...

The role of the third sector in promoting action on carbon reduction is often that of a third party, lobbying and working from the sidelines and occupying ‘green niches’ (Seyfang, 2010) without direct access to levers of power. This article examines how visions of low-carbon futures promoted by third sector actors are both integrated and marginalis...

This book aims to understand how the wellbeing benefits of urban green space (UGS) are analysed and valued and why they are interpreted and translated into action or inaction, into ‘success’ and/or ‘failure’. The provision, care and use of natural landscapes in urban settings (e.g. parks, woodland, nature reserves, riverbanks) are under-researched...

The role of urban green spaces in supporting mental and physical wellbeing is well evidenced. At a time when mental ill-health is seen as a major factor limiting the life chances of the poorest groups in society, the case for the provision and protection of natural urban environments would appear indisputable. Yet establishing direct causal links b...

Britain’s town centres have witnessed economic, social and physical upheaval over more than half a century, linked to sweeping changes in retailing and consumption. Yet they are also places where activists are seeking to fashion alternative futures and test social and economic models that challenge neoliberal norms. Reflecting on recent development...

The ‘place or people?’ dilemma is a recurring refrain in local economic development. The contested question of the future of Britain’s high streets and town centres both transcends this binary and locates it in the broader question of what kind of economic development is required to revitalise struggling places and who benefits from it. Drawing on...

‘Resilience’ has become a watchword in the discussion of local economies in general, and the state of UK town centres in particular. This paper argues for a shift in focus by researchers and practitioners from resilience to transition. While both concepts draw on complex adaptive systems theory, ‘transition’ emphasises the need to move to a changed...

The increasing use of emergency food aid in UK communities has highlighted growing social inequalities, exemplified by a rise in the use of food banks, while food waste remains a persistent challenge. Meanwhile the policy debate on food security remains focused on international trade and global risks. This paper examines the rise in community-based...

Has the age of the internet killed our high streets? Have our town and city centres become obsolete? How to Save Our Town Centres delves below the surface of empty buildings and 'shop local' campaigns to focus on the real issues: how the relationship between people and places is changing; how business is done and who benefits; and how the use and o...

A healthy independent retail sector, important as it is, will never be enough to revive the UK's town centres. As the Portas Review indicated, a wide-ranging rethinking of the High Street is required. Putting such rethinking into practice will be a challenge. The immediate aftermath of the Portas Review has highlighted the pitfalls as well as the p...

The UK will dispose of an unprecedented amount of state-owned military land following the restructuring of its armed forces. New government policies to encourage 'localism' and community ownership could provide opportunities to reuse military land and assets in ways that provide public benefits. These policies, combined with new strategic guidance...