Copyright and licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. (CC BY 4.0)
It can be downloaded at https://research.mysociety.org/publications/prototyping-nature
Summary
This is a report on the third of a series of "prototyping weeks" run by mySociety in 2022. The central question for the week was:
How might digital services inspire local emissions reduction through improved access to nature?
Our prototyping weeks so far have focussed on more direct sources of emissions – local authority procurement, and home energy – but, like biodiversity, the dwindling access to nature experienced by those in towns and cities is intricately linked to the challenges that local authorities face on addressing and reducing their carbon emissions. We explore more on the challenges and linkages between access to nature and local carbon emissions, in the Background section, below.
The week began with workshops to identify the successes and challenges faced by stakeholders in this area. Participants were particularly interested in solutions that might make existing nature more accessible, might enable more informed natural interventions (like selecting the right species for pocket parks and guerrilla gardening) from residents, or that might cultivate more community buy-in from neighbours and councillors for those interventions.
It was noted that this is already a busy space, and we were keen to avoid duplication of existing services that already address access to nature from a number of other worthwhile angles. We chose to prototype a solution inspired by our work in a previous prototyping week, that helps neighbours self-organise and gain critical mass for natural interventions in their local area. Along the way, they are provided with advice, and potentially connections with the local authority, to help their ideas become a reality.
Feedback on the prototype was generally positive, but it wasn't clear that the service fully overcame the barriers that busy, disconnected neighbours might face in coming together around a local change like this. It may be that a stronger focus on a particular demographic—for example, parents of young kids—might help. It was suggested that one way councils could support actions like this—if not financially—might be in the provision of council meeting time, which is a particularly interesting idea, mirroring the approach of, say, the UK Parliament petitions process.
Given the full feedback from testing, the team's instinct was that this particular service isn't taking quite the right approach. But, if further time were to be spent here, we'd encourage exploration of a more data-focussed service, which used open datasets, information about local biodiversity and climate, and data submitted by residents, to enable local communities and local authorities to make lasting improvements to the access to nature in their areas.
About the prototyping weeks
mySociety is the charity behind UK civic services like TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, and WhatDoTheyKnow. We build open, digital solutions to help repower democracy, in the UK and around the world.
Our Climate programme has the goal of reducing the ~30% of UK carbon emissions that are either directly controlled or influenced by local government. We are doing this by deploying data and digital services to support a faster, fairer, more collaborative response to climate, enabled by local democratic institutions and processes.
We believe that digital services have a role to play via:
- More public participation to drive political action
- Local government learning, action and innovation
- A better information ecosystem around local democratic climate action
We're exploring ideas for new digital services, and actively looking to identify opportunities to work with and in support of other organisations. One way we're doing this is through prototyping weeks – where we work with others to research, explore, prototype and test ideas.
Themes for each prototyping week are chosen in advance, and participants for the week are invited from our own network of contacts, as well as relevant industry / public sector networks.
The theme for the prototyping week and therefore the subject of this report was enabling local emissions reduction through improved access to nature. What follows is a summary of what we did and found during that prototyping week.
Background: access to nature
Back in 2010, the government's ‘Making Space for Nature' report (colloquially known as the ‘Lawton Report') noted that:
"People are more likely to support and care about the establishment and maintenance of an ecological network if they have direct experience of wildlife and are aware of the benefits they receive from it."
Green space is not only good for people (eg: improving mental wellbeing, reducing stress, increasing academic performance for children, and reducing hospital admissions) but it is also inextricably linked to climate adaptation – for example, reducing both temperatures and flood risk through increased vegetation cover.
Yet, ten years after the Lawton Report, citizens' access to nature is still dwindling. A June 2020 study by the National Trust reported:
"Coronavirus has exposed deep inequalities in access to green space. Nationally there are 295 deprived neighbourhoods of 440,000 people that are grey deserts, with no trees or accessible green space."
A more recent 2022 study by the New Economics Foundation found that not only has the proportion of local authority parks in ‘good condition' fallen from 60% in 2013 to 40% in 2021, but the quantity of park space has also fallen, with post-2000 developments being within range of 40% less green space than pre-2000 developments. This lack of accessibility has resulted, they suggest, in 9 million fewer trips to green space every year.
This lack of green space does not affect all of us uniformly. Of particular concern is the inequality in access to nature for the UK's marginalised groups:
Friends of the Earth reported that "almost 40% of people of BAME backgrounds live in England's most green space-deprived neighbourhoods, compared to 14% of white people." Only 1% of visitors to national parks are BIPOC, and in a 2020 Ramblers/YouGov poll, only 39% of BAME respondents reported living within a 5 minute walk of green space, compared to 58% of white respondents.
Access for people with disabilities can often also be limited – whether because of a lack of accessible walking routes, nearby parking spaces, or navigational information in accessible formats like braille. mySociety tools like FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow are often used to report maintenance issues that prevent people with disabilities from using public rights of way.
Local authorities, however, have no statutory requirement to provide green space, and property developers lack incentives to factor high quality public green space into their developments. This is a complex problem space, with a number of actors, including:
- UK residents – in particular, those in urban and high deprivation areas.
- Organisations focussed on increasing access to green space by traditionally excluded people, such as Land In Our Names, Black Girls Hike, and May Project Gardens.
- Local authorities – including their safety and enforcement departments (which are often tasked with park maintenance) and their transport and planning departments.
- Local government bodies, such as the LGA, Local Partnerships, UK100, the WLGA, and the Improvement Service in Scotland, as well as more climate-related bodies like Climate Northern Ireland.
- National government agencies such as the Connected Places Catapult, the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, and the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales.
- Nature and wildlife charities, such as Ramblers, the Wildlife Trusts, CPRE, and ACRE.
- Organisations interested in the use of public space, such as Shared Assets, the Land Workers Alliance, and the National Allotment Society.
- Planning, development, and building professionals.
In terms of statutory requirements, access to nature is supported—but never directly ensured—by a patchwork of legislation:
The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 granted a ‘right to roam' over some classes of uncultivated land in England, but critics have noted that the vast majority of the countryside is exempt from the Act, and effectively locked off to the public. Access rights are historically much stronger in Scotland, and were codified most recently in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003.
While not legislation, DEFRA has a 25 year environment plan that aims to provide "high quality, accessible, natural spaces close to where people live and work, particularly in urban areas."
In Wales, the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 provides a powerful tool through which public bodies (including local authorities) can be forced to consider the physical and mental wellbeing of citizens, and the aim to build a "biodiverse natural environment", as part of public decision-making. But it doesn't explicitly mention access to green space.
A number of community groups, most notably the Incredible Edible network, have long campaigned for a "Right to Grow" in the UK, based on their members' success in turning underused public spaces into community-maintained gardens and orchards.
Workshop outputs
We were joined by participants from organisations including the Wildlife Trusts, Ramblers UK, New Economy Law, Ecosulis, and Climate Northern Ireland, for the week's opening prototyping workshop, aimed at uncovering the challenges and opportunities around reducing local emissions through greater connection to nature.
We used a 'lightning decision jam' format first, to gather examples of success indicators and challenges. Positives included:
- Lots of examples of initiatives already improving access to nature – such as the Incredible Edible Network, ‘Open Gardens', grass-roofed bus stops in Leicester, bee bricks in Brighton, and more traditional concepts like allotments.
- Nature as an ‘easy sell' – the benefits of increased local green space (like better air quality, more safety, new places to spend time) are immediately visible.
- Studies showing the mental and physical health benefits of access to nature.
- Mainstreaming of the citizen science movement – through primetime TV shows like Springwatch, and mobile apps like iNaturalist and eBird.
- The potential for technology to help identify plots suitable for afforestation/rewilding, or to connect and organise people with an interest in improving nature in their area.
Challenges noted by participants included:
- Complexity of the field – it's hard for a regular citizen to know what they can or should be doing to support different species/habitats in their area. What we might see as ‘desirable' nature might not be best for the actual flora and fauna in a region.
- Coordination challenges – significant changes to the landscape often require approval from multiple stakeholders, including land owners, the local authority, and local communities. Residents have been shocked by the amount of paperwork required to make even small interventions to the public realm, like planters and parklets.
- Local authority inflexibility – whether for financial or cultural reasons, green space is often low down on a local authority's list of priorities, and ‘guerilla' modifications by residents often don't align with the council's existing contractor arrangements or health and safety obligations.
- Slowness of change – planning decisions around infrastructure and the build environment can ‘lock in' barriers to nature for decades to come.
- Opposing forces – at a planning level, additional space for nature must compete with other (equally progressive) urban land uses like sports fields or community amenities. In urban centres, there may even be competition with housing needs, or push-back from highways and transport planning departments. Property developers aren't incentivised to connect their developments with nature in a meaningful way.
- Accessibility issues – where is my nearest green space? How do I get to it? When I get there, will there be wheelchair-accessible paths? Will it be over-crowded? Will I feel safe there?
Related successes and challenges were then prioritised through dot-voting, drawn out into groups, and investigated through the generation of "how might we" statements on four overall themes. Through consideration of these statements, along with rapid-fire "Crazy Eights" ideation and open discussion, a number of potential ideas for prototyping emerged, which we have listed below, under each theme.
How might we make existing rural/urban nature more accessible, discoverable, and welcoming? How might we collect and share more information about access routes? How might we promote a network of connections between green spaces? How might we make more land available for nature?
Ideas for testing included:
- A FixMyStreet instance for reporting dis-used plots of land, with integrated Land Registry data to lookup the owner and begin a dialogue over potential green uses for the land.
- Using satellite imagery / maps to identify industrial unit roofs that would be suitable for allotments. Potential tie-in with local economic / cultural benefits of building an allotment here, such as farmers' markets, increased footfall, etc.
- Using satellite imagery and colour palette extraction to create maps of how "green" postcodes are – potential campaigning lever for local community groups looking to demonstrate how far behind their area is.
- A service that gamifies the identification of ideal urban forest locations – use data about population density, natural resources, climate, and existing green space, to adjust your parameters and cover the maximum number of people with your new forest's sphere of influence. Sort of like participatory budgeting, but for urban greening.
- Child-friendly cities – Community-curated showcase of natural walks for kids – with Streetview-style photos of the route, from a kids' eye level.
- Marketplace for private landholders to sell a short-term lease on unused space, at low cost, to be converted into pocket parks, planters, etc. Could potentially bootstrap with one or two large, national retailers (eg: supermarkets, DIY stores, garden centres) who could offer parking spaces for sale. Emphasise the PR value of being part of the scheme.
How might we make a ‘progress bar' for access to nature, to motivate coordinated change? How might we help people design their local nature for ongoing community buy-in? How might we make owning a nature reserve cool?
Ideas for testing included:
- Archive of action guides for communities wanting to get started on improving access to green space. Collaborate with existing big players like Friends of the Earth, Wildlife Trusts, Ramblers, RSPB. Present a curated ladder of first- and third-party content, to demystify topics like land ownership, picking the right flora/fauna for a specific area, community ownership of land, etc.
- Snakes and Ladders-style game, inspiring community greening action. "Hold a party first, then… oh no! A snake! A resident's parking zone was refused!"
- YIMBY ("Yes In My Back Yard!") – nominate and vote for natural interventions in your locality – coordinate improvements with your neighbours. Perhaps once an idea has sufficient support, it might be sent to the local authority, to see whether they'd have the resources to support it?
How might we make what we've lost (and what we could gain) more concrete? How might we connect the degradation of nature into people's everyday lives? How might we build knowledge of people's rights around access to nature (eg: contacting councils about obstructions on a public right of way)?
Ideas for testing included:
- A FixMyStreet for reporting accessibility or maintenance issues on public rights of way – especially in parks and green spaces.
- A campaign site that uses geotagged Instagram photos to find popular "spots", and then shows that they all either have great architecture or great nature.
Prototype: Street Seed
By the middle of the week, we had narrowed down to a handful of complementary issues:
- Encouraging community co-creation of (micro) green spaces / interventions, as a solution to the lack of green space in urban areas
- The complexity of coordinating stakeholders – residents, councillors, land-owners
- The complexity of deciding the best intervention to make in a given area
With the experience of our previous prototyping week (on conditional commitment services around home energy) still fresh in our minds, we began to wonder whether a similar approach could apply here – where neighbours could ‘pledge' their support for a nascent greening movement in their immediate area, and once critical mass has been reached, further information and support could be unlocked.
Given the quantity of data available on green space provision across the country, we chose to experiment with using this data as a hook to increase the virality/shareability of the service. Users would first be drawn in by a comparison of how their access to nature compares locally (with the service most likely emphasising how that access could be better than it currently is), in the hope that they'd then be energised to make a change in their neighbourhood.
We built a prototype to test the following questions:
- Are the statistics about nature in a user's area a strong enough hook to get them to sign up to make a difference with their neighbours?
- What are the most inspiring projects / changes we can suggest to users?
- Are there specific audiences who might be more or less receptive to this? (For example, should a service like this be tailored much more specifically to parents of young children?)
- Are there any concerns around sharing data with neighbours, or the local authority?
- What are the practicalities of taking action? (For example, how would people go about finding out who owns a piece of land somewhere?)
- Does the local authority have any powers to support residents in taking these actions?
We quickly storyboarded and built a point-and-click prototype that would help us explore these questions, available at https://mysociety.github.io/street-seed. A selection of screens from the prototype are included below.
After entering their postcode on the homepage, users are shown some statistics about the green space in their area, along with social sharing buttons, and information about the steps they could take—with their neighbours—to improve access to nature in their area.
We were interested to test the effectiveness of the statistics as a hook to encourage both sharing of the service and also signups to the group action.
Once they sign up to either "join the movement" or "stay informed", users are encouraged to share the service with their friends and neighbours, and to request the support of their local councillor.
Once the threshold of 10 neighbours is reached in the group, users would be sent a notification that leads to a page like this, encouraging them to make contact with each other.
We were interested in testing what sorts of call to action would work best on this page, and whether users would feel able to self-organise into a movement for local change.
Prototype feedback
We tested the prototype with eight target users:
- A Liverpool city centre resident with a young family
- Councillor and deputy leader at City of York Council
- A project officer at Dorset Wildlife Trust
- A coordinator at Wildlife and Countryside Link, the largest environment and wildlife coalition in England
- A delivery manager at JNCC, the public body that advises UK government on nature conservation
- A director at GiGL CIC, which collects data on greenspaces in London
- A software engineer and data activist, with an interest in democracy and transparency
- The founder of a data and technology startup working to improve quality of life in cities
Future rounds of testing could definitely benefit from the input of more city centre residents, in particular those with different types of tenancies and income levels.
Still, these users' feedback helped us answer our prototype's questions:
A number of testers picked up on the ambiguous "Grade E" figure that was displayed in the statistics, asking us what "Grade E" means. Future iterations of the service should try to make the statistics clearer, or maybe link to the third party sources of the statistics. Still, it was encouraging when testers then said they'd want to see the grades of other nearby neighbourhoods – clearly there was at least some interest in comparing how their area scores in comparison to others.
The statistics were a distraction to some people. One wondered whether the site would provide walking directions to the "nearest green space". Another complained that "the stats assess stuff that's out of my control, that won't be affected by the actions you suggest below".
It appeared that statistics alone weren't strong enough to result in signups. A number of testers expressed their reticence to commit without more information about what their commitment would ultimately involve. Perhaps more specific pledges (like those in the late 2000s mySociety service PledgeBank) might help with this – essentially "I'm looking for 5 neighbours to help me build and stick up 20 insect hotels in this area" versus the more generic "I'm looking for 5 neighbours to improve access to nature".
Another alternative is that neighbours could be pledging simply to "find out more" at a later date. In fact, we added this second option ("I'm not in a place where I can help with this right now, but keep me informed!") to the prototype site after our first few testing calls, as it was suggested twice. (Notes)
"I'm a bit cynical of groups. So often they just become a load of talking, and no action. But I'll join if there's a clear benefit, a clear outcome."
— User testing respondent
"I would want to know what commitment I'm signing up for, in advance. Or am I just getting more information and maybe I can commit later?"
— User testing respondent
Feedback was generally positive on the types of actions we suggested in the website's copy, but a couple of testers noted that the service feels quite quite wordy – "Wow, a lot of text!" one said, before adding, "but it's very friendly." Work could certainly be put into summarising a lot of the content, to more clearly focus on the immediate calls to action: check how your area compares → express your interest in making it better → meet up with your neighbours and discuss what to change first.
There was some discussion with a few testers about the order of the ‘Five steps' on the homepage – one wondered whether "enjoyment" should appear, another felt that groups should get advice earlier in the process.
A number of testers mentioned their reticence to make changes in public spaces, out of fear that their hard work might be undone by people who haven't been involved in the process – vandals, other neighbours who disagree with the changes, or even the local authority. This re-emphasises the importance of ‘bringing people with you' and finding changes that a wide range of people can support.
A number of other potential actions were suggested, including:
- Putting up information signs about what the group is planning, or highlighting invisible little bits of nature in the neighbourhood that could easily go unnoticed and would benefit from improvement.
- Signing a petition for a legal right to nature.
- Reading your area's Nature Recovery Strategy (in addition to the local authority's Climate Action Plan) to see the kinds of changes that the local authority might actively support.
- Asking the local authority to pilot areas with no insecticide spraying, or no weeding.
- Growing your own food.
- Leaving your lawn unmowed.
One person wondered whether there would be a way to upload their own photos or comments – perhaps to share bits of nature that they've found in their area, or ideas for improvements that could be made. This would, of course, then create an overlap with more general purpose neighbourhood communication tools like Facebook Groups and Nextdoor.co.uk. (Notes)
"I would put bird box up on my balcony, but in a public space I would be concerned that it might get taken down, so I'd want more backing from the council."
— User testing respondent
"My big bugbear about nature is that we've scienced the shit out of it, obfuscated everything under latin names. People say ‘I don't get this. I can't be a gardener,' and I say ‘Sure you can, just look at which plants the insects are landing on, and plant more of those.'"
— User testing respondent
A core question we had at the end of our workshop process, was whether it would be more effective to build a service focussed at a particular demographic (such as families with young children), or a service that's equally applicable to everyone in a given neighbourhood. Discussions with our testers on this subject were inconclusive.
It's clear that any service should cater to people in all sorts of housing situations and tenancies ("not everyone has a garden", one tester reminded us), but the sheer volume of existing initiatives and campaigns in this space does suggest that we might find more success if we start with a service tailored to a more specific audience.
Our conversations with the two city centre residents on our list—both of whom were parents of young children—reinforced that there's a strong intrinsic motivation for parents to be introducing their children to outdoor play and activities, but a service aimed at families would need to understand that these are often the most time-poor residents on a street (compared with, say, students or retirees).
As with our previous prototyping week on conditional commitment, there was some discussion of whether someone in the community (or the local authority) might be able to take on the nature equivalent of a retrofit coordinator – assessing potential interventions that could be made, coordinating stakeholders, managing budgets and timescales. A number of testers said they feel traditional volunteering structures are a poor fit for today's lifestyle, and members expect more of a "plug in plug out" model of interaction, to work around their availability. Perhaps a service could provide value by allowing coordination tasks to be effectively shared between a series of time-poor volunteers? (Notes)
"Generally people who like plants, like other people who like plants."
— User testing respondent
"People don't just get involved to do the thing itself – it's the social side, meeting other with a similar interest."
— User testing respondent
We received less feedback on this point – but we expect many of the findings from our previous prototyping week also apply here, such as neighbours being reticent to share potentially socially stigmatising data (such as income, affordability, benefits) with other neighbours.
One tester assumed that her data would end up "with people behind the website" – when we asked what sort of people those might be, she said it looked like "a corporate institution" and that made her a little reluctant to share too much information. Yet, by her own admission: "We give our emails out all the time. We don't have any problem handing it over to get 10% off shopping."
There would certainly be questions to be answered around what details would need to be collected from neighbours pledging their support, and how that would be communicated to the neighbourhood organisers. (Notes)
"We did something in our city, tried to organise people, set up a site to make it easy, but everybody just ended up using WhatsApp or whatever instead. A lesson to be learned there!"
— User testing respondent