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, the project included an initial stage of stakeholder conversations to co-produce the briefs for managing differently, and testing in pilot sites across Plymouth. The project team have worked with a range of stakeholders to identify and refine the challenges to be addressed, which have 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 green spaces. The Green Minds toolkit is being tested in these pilot sites and linked to the evaluation model of health and well-being measures.

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

The Green Minds project aims to put nature at the heart of decision-making and inspire a new wave of city-wide investment in nature-based solutions. This means fundamentally challenging existing attitudes and behaviours towards nature: how we think about it, engage with it, and 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, which 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% green space. Increased pressure on local government budgets has reduced the amount of funding and investment into green space, which has led to a decline in green space quality. Currently, 50% of Plymouth's green spaces 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 well-being, 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 (rather than against) nature 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.