Neighbourhoods Green
The quality of people's homes is influenced by the spaces around them. There is increasing recognition that well-designed, well-managed green spaces next to housing developments are crucial to contributing to people's quality of life and making neighbourhoods liveable.
However, of all our urban landscapes, those of social housing estates are generally some of our worst, apart from some notable exceptions. The quality of open spaces within and around social housing estates has declined dramatically since their creation, leaving many under-used, in a state of neglect, or no-go areas. Accumulative dis-investment, the lack of statutory obligations, a haemorrhage of 'green' skills, and the competition for car-parking are just some of the factors that have contributed to their decline.
More information about the project: link
Update July 2010
The project came to an end in 2007 due to lack of funding, but has now been continued with the new CABE action plan to help social landlords: link. The action plan has been developed as a result of their research "Community green: using local spaces to tackle inequality and improve health".
This study follows earlier research commissioned by CABE, Urban green nation: building the evidence base, which found that if you live in a deprived inner city area, you have access to five times fewer public parks and good-quality general green space than people in more affluent areas. In this second piece of research, we focused on ethnicity because diversity is increasing and the majority of black and minority ethnic communities in the UK live in the most deprived wards in English inner cities. The poverty rate for Britain's black and minority ethnic residents overall is 40 per cent, double the rate for white British people. Furthermore, child poverty is highest, up to 74 per cent, among Bangladeshi children.
Urban green nation also revealed that in areas where more than 40 per cent of residents are black or minority ethnic, there is 11 times less green space than in areas where residents are largely white. And the spaces they do have are likely to be of a poorer quality. Full details: link.
