TOPIC 2

Host Lead: Amelia Browne 

Fellowship Title: Nature, Value and Voice: Creative Inquiry into Urban Nature Investment 

Fellowship Topic Summary  

As investment in urban nature grows, important questions emerge about who defines value, whose knowledge informs decisions and how communities can influence funding priorities. Through collaboration with a Creative Fellow, we aim to explore how creative practice can support more inclusive and community-led approaches to nature investment. 

Overview 

This fellowship will explore how social value is understood, experienced and represented within investment in urban nature. Across the UK, investment in urban nature is increasingly being positioned as a response to interconnected climate and health challenges, including extreme heat, flooding, biodiversity loss, health inequalities and declining wellbeing. Yet important questions remain about whose values shape these investments, how benefits are defined, and what kinds of knowledge are privileged in decision-making processes. 

This matters for the Net+ Centre’s aim of healthier, fairer and more sustainable places: if urban nature’s health, wellbeing and climate benefits are defined without the people who live with them, investment risks missing the people it most needs to serve. 

The partnership between Net+ Centre and the Nature Towns and Cities coalition addresses a growing need within UK climate and health research to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of climate adaptation and nature recovery. While there is increasing recognition that access to green and blue spaces can support health and wellbeing, these relationships are often experienced in complex, place-specific and deeply personal ways that can be difficult to capture through conventional research approaches. As a result, lived experience, local knowledge and alternative ways of understanding value may be overlooked when evidence is gathered, interpreted and translated into policy or investment decisions. 

Rather than approaching creative practice as a mechanism for communicating research findings, we are interested in how creative inquiry with a Creative Fellow might help us ask different questions in the first place. The fellowship would create space to explore what becomes visible when creative practice is brought into conversations about social value, nature investment, climate resilience and health.  

Questions that particularly interest us include: who gets to define the value of urban nature; what forms of knowledge influence decisions about investment and management; and what may be lost when lived experiences are translated into evidence frameworks and metrics?  

Location and Timings 

The Creative Fellow can be based anywhere in the UK. While some activities may be undertaken remotely, a willingness to travel would be essential as aspects of the fellowship are likely to be place-based and could involve engagement with communities experiencing urban nature investment.  

The intention of the Nature Towns and Cities coalition is to work across a diverse range of places and communities, reflecting different social, economic and cultural contexts. We are particularly interested in engaging with communities and regions that have been underrepresented in previous research, including those experiencing social, environmental and health inequalities.  

Subject to the Fellow’s availability, we envisage the main collaboration taking place between spring and summer of 2027, leaving time for relationship-building at the start, and reflection and dissemination afterwards.  

Why do we want to work with a Creative Practitioner? 

Collaborating with the right Creative Fellow would provide an opportunity to explore these uncertainties and open up new lines of enquiry together, not by communicating findings or collecting data more engagingly, but by bringing different ways of noticing, questioning and valuing. We are interested in what artistic practice might reveal about the assumptions built into how we define and measure value, and how it might open different relationships between communities and decision-makers. 

Building Shared Value  

We see this fellowship as an opportunity to develop a genuine creative partnership built on mutual learning and shared exploration. While we would bring experience in social value, urban nature and participatory research, we hope to learn from the Fellow’s creative practice and perspectives. We are particularly interested in how creative approaches might challenge assumptions and provide different ways of understanding participation, power-sharing and community experiences.