Policy and Practice

We produce reports, policy briefs, think kits, evidence submissions, and policy-focused webinars to engage with local and national policymakers. They have influenced nationwide conversations and shaped the framing and practice of policy, specifically on culture and place-making, pride in place, and the use of qualitative data for understanding lived experience.

This report for the AHRC Where Next? Programme outlines the specific cultural needs of towns and small cities. The project worked with local communities, expert partners and stakeholders to understand the role that culture and heritage played in developing, writing and launching Towns Fund plans. We combined the disciplinary approaches of researchers working across arts, humanities and the social sciences to understand how towns used, deployed and imagined culture as a strategy for social and economic regeneration.

Our response to the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee provides evidence and recommendations on:

We hosted a series of webinars that invited policymakers and academics to explore understandings of Levelling Up and the pride in place mission.

WATCH: Levelling Up: Histories, Cultures, Challenges

What might a cultural history of Levelling Up tell us about the new political narratives being shaped around this agenda? How might the government’s emphasis on ‘stronger towns’ rebalance our economic map of the UK? What does ‘Levelling Up’ mean, and how will we know if it has succeeded? This event includes micro-presentations from a range of perspectives and disciplines across policy and research.

Speakers include: * Melissa Benn (Writer and Campaigner) * Andrew Haldane (Chief Economist, Bank of England) * Will Jennings (University of Southampton) * Owain Lloyd-James (Historic England) * Helen Nicholson (Royal Holloway) * Jenny Hughes, (University of Manchester) * Simon Szreter (University of Cambridge) * Jonathan Gross (King’s College London)

WATCH: Whose Pride Is It Anyway?

The way people feel about where they live remains relatively undefined and under-examined in policy documents and practice. What does “pride in place” actually mean? Why is it so important to policymakers? What is the impact of this political agenda on the communities whose pride is so eagerly sought? This event includes short presentations from perspectives and disciplines across policy, practice and research.

Speakers include: * Gavin Sullivan (IPU Berlin) * Will Jennings (Univ. of Southampton) * Jack Shaw (Institute for Public Policy Research) * Alice Butler-Warke (RGU Aberdeen)

WATCH: What Does Pride Do?

“Civic” or “local” pride is cited to reanimate declining high streets, attract economic investment, boost tourism, and celebrate festivals such as UK City of Culture. What do we expect to happen if we increase pride in place? How will measuring pride in place lead to better decision making? What do community organisations need to address pride in place? This event includes short presentations from perspectives and disciplines across policy, practice and research.

Speakers include: * Charlie Ingram (Coventry University) * Sarah Bartley (University of Reading) * Jack Shaw (Institute for Public Policy Research) * James Harrison (Community Ownership Fund)

Feeling Towns launched the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Place-Based Research Programme Policy Brief Series. This brief argues that current metrics for measuring “pride in place” are not developed, and the language of pride has been used inconsistently across Levelling Up policy materials. It uses insights from the AHRC-funded project to make recommendations for Levelling Up stakeholders about the significance of understanding pride in shaping and evaluating policy.

We commissioned the poet Ella Frears to provide a creative response to the government’s mission to “restore pride in place” across the UK, as a part of its Levelling Up agenda. Ella wrote the poem, “How Proud?” We then collaborated with the award-winning director Annlin Chao to visually reimagine Ella’s work, which resulted in an animated film. Both the poem and film have been widely used in stakeholder training and public engagement.

This Feeling Towns resource was developed with our partners in Historic England and DLUHC, specifically the Community Ownership Fund. It demonstrates creative ways—emoji mapping, poetry collage, photo elicitation, timeline drawing—to learn about how policies affect people’s understanding of place. The Think Kit draws findings from applied research and research-led practice, as well as from policy and academic disciplines. This collaborative, interdisciplinary approach seeks to understand people’s pride in place within hyper-local communities.

For Neighbouring Data, this resource pack supports practitioners to investigate the possibilities of visualising, representing and connecting datasets that comprise short narratives, images, videos and maps, sampled from our research projects. We are interested in how a range of practices interpret and engage with this data at different scales, and what the possibilities for a cross-practice conversation might be.

This report outlines the interim findings of Neighbouring Data, which explores the creation, use and representation of hyper-local qualitative data in place-based decision making. The project has built on several research projects that were concerned with using qualitative data in place-based decision making. It is part of a national conversation seeking a more joined-up approach to place-based data, and it understands the qualitative data observatory as a mechanism for these discussions.

This peer-reviewed journal article explains how the government’s narrow conception of pride as a mechanism of affective governance illustrates tensions in places at different scales: between national and local issues; between public and private spheres; and between individual and collective identities. Based on the research from Feeling Towns, it claims that a more meaningful understanding of pride must be predicated on people’s collective capacity for felt and emotional responses.