Lee Crookes

Understanding local communities: bridging the gap between official and local understandings of place

In recent years, local authorities have made considerable efforts to extend and improve opportunities for public participation. The kinds of knowledge deemed to be valid, however, have remained unchanged and planners and policy-makers continue to privilege 'expert', scientific and technical knowledge over local knowledge - the understanding that comes from an intimate, everyday familiarity with a specific place or system. The failure to accommodate local knowledge has major implications for how events, issues, places and situations are framed and acted upon, leading to plans, programmes and implementation strategies that are poorly aligned with 'street-level' realities.

Focusing specifically on local knowledge in relation to people's everyday experience of place, the proposed research will be principally concerned with investigating how local authorities can access and accommodate local knowledge as a basis for developing a better understanding of the people and places they serve. The research will take the form of a case study of an area of privately-owned terraced housing in northern England. Efforts to regenerate the area have frequently stalled as local residents and the Council have disagreed over the nature of the place as it is now and the place they would like it to become. The research will focus on official and local understandings of place and identify and trial participatory techniques that might better represent local people's perceptions of place to the authority. It will further seek to address how such alternative ways of knowing can be incorporated into the authority's 'conventional' decision-making framework.

email : trp04lc@sheffield.ac.uk