The idea that connecting with the natural world is good for human health and wellbeing has become of a commonplace, underlined by many people’s experiences during the lockdowns of the last two years. ’Nature connectedness’ is now influencing thinking among landowners such as the National Trust and healthcare practitioners who are testing how ‘green social […]
Category: change
The changes in the retail character of our town and city centres may be as sweeping and significant in their way as the effects of de-industrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s, and similarly irreversible. If proof were needed that the shopping-centred high street of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is disappearing, the £517m pre-tax loss posted by […]
What can we do in the face of two overarching crises: a crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss, and a crisis of social injustice characterised by the systematic removal of support from places and communities? For two days last week I was part of a group that discussed, debated and shared stories with an […]
Kelham Island is a tale of regeneration, of an industrial landscape now buzzing with human life. Last year it won the Academy of Urbanism’s Great Neighbourhood award. In the last decade property prices have increased by a quarter. New flats are going up and new restaurants are opening. This is the dominant story. If […]
Twenty years ago today the first issue of New Start magazine was published, with a mission described as ‘bringing together the partners in community renewal’. I and two colleagues set it up and recruited a team of writers, advertising and production staff to fill what we saw as both an evidence and a commercial gap: […]
The gloomy deliberations of the COP24 deliberations in Katowice focused attention on a problem political, institutional and business leaders are all aware of but have not worked out how to resolve: the gap between aspiration and action. That gap is evident in a series of increasingly urgent reports from the scientific and policy world. UNEP’s […]
Julian Dobson 