Earlier this month, Marcus Collier, European Research Council grant holder and principal investigator of the NovelEco project and his team met with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forestry Service supported by colleagues from the Urban Systems Lab, New York, to present and discuss the project.
NovelEco is a five-year programme that will co-design research with citizen scientists to investigate how society values informal wild spaces in cities. Urban informal wild spaces can include unmanaged or abandoned areas, such as a derelict piece of land or a ‘weedy’ overgrown area next to a community building. It’s a global project with case studies being conducted in Dublin, London, Melbourne, and Copenhagen and plans to carry out fieldwork in New York in the early summer.
The talk formed part of the USDAs Brown Bag seminar series, which provides international stakeholders with an opportunity to pitch their projects to communities that might be interested in getting involved. The event was a great success, with 50 different stakeholders from across the UDSA Field Stations, NYC Parks, academics and research scientists attending. Several different community groups have already begun to reach out to NovelEco and the team are working collaboratively with the Urban Systems Lab to organise a series of co-design workshops that will be held in New York in early summer. These workshops will explore how all communities value informal wild spaces in cities and co-create research questions for an online citizen science tool.
If you’d like to find out more about the project or know a community group that might like to participate in a co-design workshop or would like to take part in the Delphi process, please contact the below. You can also access a presentation on NovelEco via Youtube here.
