Green Minds – Living Lab

The project involves the co-creation of a series of toolkits and an open data platform that develop and test the Nature, People, Place nexus. It treats non-human, natural inhabitants as equal participants and stakeholders in the project – wildlife, trees, marine and river.

To address the challenges and opportunities for greenspace governance and engagement, this included an initial stage of stakeholder conversations to co-produce the briefs for managing differently, and testing in pilot sites across Plymouth. We have worked with a range of stakeholders to identify and refine the challenges to be addressed and has been mapped against measures of nature connectedness to create a path to impact.

The second stage involves a series of prototyping workshops that will take place in various pilot sites across the city that represent a range of greenspaces. The Green Minds toolkit is being tested in these pilot sites and linked to the evaluation model of health and wellbeing measures.

To draw together the citywide data experiments we will develop and implement an open data platform that explores ways in which nature itself can identify and map those things it finds important too. This includes creating new ways to interact, use and contribute to the open data resource that links to the social impact measures.

Working over a period of two years, with local schoolchildren, park visitors and stakeholders to deliver surveys and hands-on workshops in the park, the team have identified the challenges to be addressed. This has led to the development of a ‘nature data toolkit’ to test the Nature, People, Place nexus.

Data is an important tool to help us understand what is happening in our natural environment and the impact of human activity. Using digital technologies such as live sensors in the parks in Plymouth we can monitor wildlife activity, air quality, temperature, humidity and the number of visitors.

The team have installed a series of low cost and low power sensors using a technology platform called LoRaWAN. LoRa is the abbreviation of "Long Range Wide Area" and is a low-power wireless network platform – it allows sensors to send and receive data without power or an internet connection; enabling the sensors to be placed in remote locations.

The Green Minds project aims to put nature at the heart of decision making and inspire a new wave of citywide investment in nature-based solutions. This means fundamentally challenging existing attitudes and behaviours towards nature: how we think about it; how we engage with it; how we work with it. 

It is led by Plymouth City Council’s Strategic Planning and Infrastructure Department in collaboration with a range of civic partners. Green Minds is funded by the ERDF Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) programme that provides urban areas with resources to test innovative solutions to address urban challenges, see how these work in practice and respond to the complexity of real life.  

Plymouth is a waterfront city with more than 30% greenspace. Increased pressure on local government budgets has reduced the amount of funding and investment into greenspace, which has led to a decline in green space quality. Currently, 50% of Plymouth’s greenspaces do not meet quality thresholds. In addition, Plymouth’s green/blue infrastructure is owned and managed by multiple organisations that have traditionally not worked in partnership.

As part of the city’s growth there is a need to plan high quality green and blue infrastructure for Plymouth communities that maximise the benefits for health and wellbeing, social value, biodiversity, the local economy, and climate resilience.

Green Minds aims to deliver a more integrated planning and management system for urban nature and help maximise the social value created through sustainable land-use management and nature-based solutions. Changing attitudes and behaviours to give natural infrastructure higher priority and foster a management approach that works with nature rather than against, calls for a significant campaign to change minds. The project plans to combine approaches to urban development and governance that are entirely new or in their infancy – creating green mindsets; urban rewilding; and complexity management. 

National and international research shows that these challenges are common to other geographical areas and the learning from Green Minds aims to provide solutions, tools and techniques that can be used more widely beyond Plymouth.