By Nicola Spurling and project partners
Photo by Cory Woodward on Unsplash
In Spring 2020 I led a bid for a public engagement research project titled ‘Repainting the City’, in collaboration with Lancaster City and Lancashire County council, Street Spirit Design and Sustrans. In this collaborative bid between Sociology, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Transport Planning, we proposed an experimental intervention in Lancaster which would repaint a street for one summer.
The bid built on the ideas I developed in Lancaster Lines.
The purpose was to explore with publics, how changing conventions and standards of line painting might play a part in ‘ruling out’ the car and ‘drawing in’ alternatives. The intended output from this proposed public engagement research project, was an implementation guide which would provide insights and advice for councils around the UK on how to deliver temporary public realm for low carbon initiatives in specific places, and the barriers, permissions and liabilities involved.
To have city and county planners on board with this unusual and experimental bid was amazing, especially for a small city like Lancaster, because smaller cities generally miss out on these kinds of creative public engagement projects.
Unfortunately the project wasn’t funded, yet just a few months later, cities around the world transformed themselves through redrawing their urban lines to temporarily rule out the car and make space for publics, pedestrians and cyclists in the first summer of the Covid 19 pandemic, and there was intrigue and excitement about the potential of these interventions to make cities more sustainable in the long term.
I took these emerging practices as my data, and developed the proposal ideas into a peer reviewed book chapter (titled Lines: Material Cultures of Future Mobility) in The Routledge Handbook for Social Futures.
Nicola Spurling 