Partners for Play: Living with Nature to Playing the Archive

Alison Somerset Ward (The University of Sheffield)
Helen Elizabeth Woolley (The University of Sheffield)

In a climate of ongoing reducing local government finances and resources in the UK it is a continuous challenge to keep community landscape projects active and engaging once project funding has finished. Ensuring sustainability, in terms of value and relevance to users and contribution to the surrounding green network is hard to achieve. Partners are one way forward and this presentation addresses four lessons about Partners for Play in Sheffield.

‘Living with Nature’, a three year project, worked with communities in 24 social (public) housing areas in Sheffield to improve the quality of play offer and biodiversity in neighbourhood green spaces. Partners who were beyond the main sector of play were critical to take this agenda forward and came from housing, green space, landscape architecture, a wildlife trust, a university and individual communities. The purpose of the partners was to bring different benefits: ownership of the land, maintenance of the land, ability to source funding, design skills, research knowledge and potential users of the sites. The capacity of the partners was influenced by time, funding, processes and even changes to governance within one partner. Local communities have remained involved in the ongoing development of some of the sites. But once the main project funding was spent there was a need to find new partners. These opportunities are rare but through the Playing the Archive research a new partner, the Site Gallery in the centre of the city, is working with two of the original partners to seek to link together some of the play spaces into a trail.

More than eleven years since the first partnerships began we reflect on how research informed practice and practice informed research has improved the quality of, underused and sometimes forgotten, neighbourhood and civic open spaces, focussing on the new initiative of the playtrail.