Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives: How can Narrative and Biographical Perspectives Improve Landscape Decision Making?

‘Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives’ is a two-year AHRC research network, funded by the UKRI’s Strategic Priorities Fund and led by Dr Jeremy Burchardt (PI, University of Reading) and Professor Paul Readman (CI, King’s College London). The network’s aim is to bring together research and thinking about the deeply personal ways landscape matters to us. Local, regional and national landscapes are intertwined in complex and overlapping ways with individual, family and community narratives that profoundly shape our sense of identity. Vital as they are, however, these biographical and community narratives do not mesh easily with the formalised structures and processes of landscape planning.

Following Brexit and in relation to the climate crisis, the UK’s landscape decision-making structures are at their most significant crossroads for over seventy years. By bringing together several of the UK’s leading landscape researchers and stakeholders, including the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, the Museum of English Rural Life, National Parks England, the National Trust and the New Forest National Park Authority, the network hopes to identify ways in which personal and community narratives can be more fully and effectively incorporated into the new architecture of landscape decision-making that the UK will develop over the next few years.

The Changing Landscapes project is part of a wider Strategic Priorities Fund programme called the Landscape Decisions Programme. Details can be found on their website https://www.landscapedecisions.org/ and they are also on Twitter @LandscapeDecis1

The Landscape Decisions Programme Coordination Team general contact address is Landscapes@leicester.ac.uk (details can also be found here https://www.landscapedecisions.org/contact-us/)

The Changing Landscapes project also has a dedicated page on the Landscape Decisions website –  https://www.landscapedecisions.org/changing-landscapes-changing-lives/