David Lerner on the future of the Don

Perceptions of urban river corridors are changing, oscillating between fear of flooding and a desire for ‘blue space’ to enhance the quality of city life. The rapid changes in land use as their brownfields are redeveloped offer opportunities to make big and small changes.

URSULA is the acronym for a new project about rivers in urban areas, led by the University of Sheffield. The project’s researchers hope to encourage people to create desirable places for living, working and playing in – that is, sustainable, high quality communities. The idea behind URSULA (Urban River Corridors and Sustainable Living Agendas) is that there are significant social, economic and environmental gains to be made by integrated and innovative interventions in urban river corridors.

People are at the heart of the urban area, both using it and taking the decisions that shape its future. Our central theme is to work closely with all stakeholders, discover what they want and how they value choices, and use this to guide our research.

Involving local people

Using the River Don as a case study, one of our first tasks will be to talk to local people about what they want for the river. As with most urban rivers, there are numerous people and organisations who are interested in the future of the Don.

There are many bodies that have some management responsibility towards the river, such as the local council, the Environment Agency and groups of citizens like the Five Weirs Walk Trust which have been established to raise awareness of the river in the city. But we also aim to explore the views of the myriad of people who have a view of the water from their house windows, who want to fish, walk or cycle along the riverbank, or who work alongside the waterway. ‘The opinions of those who will use the corridor for recreational purposes or run a local factory have just as valid a point as those who can see the water from their bedroom windows,’ commented Dr Steve Connelly, from the University of Sheffield’s planning department.

URSULA is going to select some specific locations along the river corridor, and then talk to many different people and groups about their perceptions and aspirations for those places. ‘We all find it much easier to work out our views about a specific site, rather than expressing our views in the abstract,’ explained Dr Connelly.

Amplifying soft voices

It must also be recognised that in any group there will be dominant personalities who often overshadow the views of quieter or more softly spoken citizens. URSULA team member Dr Liz Sharp, from Bradford University, explained the sorts of techniques the team will be using to overcome this problem. ‘It is often better to get a small group to do a fun task, like building a model of their ideal river bank, and then use the conversations while building the model to help understand what people really want,’ she said.

Stakeholders want their opinions to be taken into account, but they often don’t know how to get involved and are sceptical about whether their views will be heard. People often say, ‘Why should we bother? Experts won’t take any notice of us.’ However, Dr Sharp said, ‘By bringing people together, the project hopes to be able to listen to all the voices, and perhaps amplify those which are more softly spoken.’

Bringing people together isn’t as simple as it may seem: engineers, developers and ecologists all measure their ideas in different ways, so we need to keep everyone informed in a comprehensible way. ‘Our aim is to identify or develop “win-win” situations, as well as make conflicts explicit. Bringing together people who otherwise wouldn’t talk to each other may foster understanding and appreciation. Sometimes people have to compromise, but sometimes better solutions that please everyone can be found,’ said Liz Sharp.

Programme scope

URSULA wants to work at the strategic scale for the River Don and its corridor, but at the same time draw the focus in to particular developments. This will allow us to drill down and identify all the processes at work as the different projects go ahead. We also want to contrast a people-centred project with an engineering one, to explore whether decisions are made in a different way in different fields. In three to five years we hope to offer new ideas which have been approved by both the technical experts and those who will be living, working and playing in our river corridor.

Professor David Lerner is Director of the Catchment Science Centre at the University of Sheffield, and Consortium Director for the URSULA project. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with significant in-kind support from Sheffield City Council, the Environment Agency, and many other bodies