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By LeavesWe Live

How many people think twice about a leaf?

Yet the leaf is the chief product and

phenomenon of Life: this is a green world,

with animals comparatively few and small,

and all dependent upon the leaves.

By leaves we live. – Patrick Geddes

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Foreword

Professor Iain Boyd Whyte, University of Edinburgh, Advisory Panel Chair.

‘By leaves we live’ was conceived and launched by Planning

Aid for Scotland as an exciting and challenging initiative

that explored our perceptions of community, forestry, and

sustainability through a broad spread of artistic media.

Scheduled to mark and celebrate PAS’s twentieth anniversary,

it promoted the collaborative engagements of PAS volunteers

and artists with the legacy of Patrick Geddes, the Scottish

biologist, sociologist and city planner, and with his holistic

understanding of the relationship between humans and their

environment. The project coincided with the celebration of the

Year of Natural Scotland in 2013, and its launch with the 150th

anniversary of Geddes’s birth.

The energy and enthusiasm of all concerned illuminates the

project and the results achieved are striking in both their novelty

and their diversity. My particular thanks are due to Planning Aid

for Scotland for instigating this exemplary project and to the

members of the Advisory Panel, who played a crucial role at the

inception of the scheme and in the selection of the artists.

‘We need to give everyone the outlook of the artist, who begins with the art of seeing and then in time we shall follow him into the seeing of art, even the creating of it.’

Patrick Geddes

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Patrick Geddes

What do we know about Patrick Geddes? To quote Professor

Murdo Macdonald, Professor of History of Scottish Art, University of Dundee, Geddes was a pioneering ecologist, an influential botanist, a highly original theorist of cities, an advocate of the importance of the arts to everyday life, a committed community activist, a publisher, and – of course – a founder of town planning. Geddesian ideas helped to shape the ‘By Leaves We Live’ project

• ‘by leaves we live’ – a poetic expression of the scientific concepts of ecosystems/biodiversity

• ‘heart, hand and head’ – engaging the emotions as a motivating force in learning and understanding

• ‘by living we learn’ – having direct experience as part of learning experience (as opposed to theoretical learning)

• ‘by creating we think’ – taking what has been learned and using it creatively to progress in a positive direction.

Geddes was keenly interested in ecology, an advocate of nature conservation and strongly opposed to environmental pollution. Some claim he was a forerunner of modern Green politics.

He was born in Ballater in Aberdeenshire on 2 October 1854 and spent most of his childhood and youth in Perth. For the major part of his career the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh was the point of reference for his international activities, first in Europe and later in India and

Palestine. He died at the Scots College he had founded at Montpellier in the South of France on 17 April 1932.

He had a life of extraordinary vitality, variety and interest. He was appointed in 1888 as the first Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee. Thirty years later he became the first Professor of Civics and Sociology at the University of Bombay, a university that he himself had helped to found. As a student he studied evolution with T.H.Huxley in London, where he came into direct contact with Darwin. Later in that city he was one of the founders of the Sociological Society.

In Edinburgh, in the 1880s he supported the conservation and development of Old Town communities through his founding of the Edinburgh Social Union, and in the 1890s, shifting to an educational role, he commissioned and subsequently worked from that iconic Arts and Crafts condominium of Ramsay Garden. There he was a moving force behind the Celtic Revival in Scotland. In due course he made common cause with the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh on the one hand and the great Gaelic scholar, Alexander Carmichael, on the other. Geddes advocated not just a Celtic Revival but a Scottish renaissance, an idea that the poet Hugh MacDiarmid adopted to great effect.

As a student, both from a scientific and a cultural perspective he was drawn to France where he studied biology in Paris and Brittany, and absorbed the sociology of Comte and the anarchist politics of the geographer Elisée Reclus.

Introduction

‘By leaves we live’ was designed to bring together planners and other professionals who have an interest in Scotland’s natural environment and want to find ways to engage the wider public in considering the challenges posed by economic development versus sustainable natural landscapes.

• 2013 was the 20th anniversary of the founding of Planning Aid Scotland.

• 2013 was designated the Year of Natural Scotland.

• Patrick Geddes FRSE (1854 – 1932), founding father of modern day town planning; his vision of ‘folk’ planning is echoed in planning reform in Scotland. Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He introduced the concept of ‘region’ to architecture and planning and coined the term ‘conurbation’. Primarily a sociologist, it was his close social observation and ability to turn this into practical solutions for city design and improvement that earned him a revered place amongst the founding fathers of the British town planning movement.

• PAS has a role to engage people in decision–making relating to the sustainability and protection of Scotland’s environment and landscape.

• The project brought together built environment professionals through art and artists to find solutions to communicating and engaging the wider public in celebrating and protecting Scotland’s natural environment.

• The project was committed to engaging some of Scotland’s most experienced and talented artists who demonstrate strong bodies of work related to the natural environment and their understanding of the challenges to its future.

• PAS developed a dialogue with Creative Scotland staff who recommended that in order to deliver the project on time and to a quality artistic standard, there should be six groups, with a budget and time allocated to each artist.

• The project brought together 6 artists and 6 groups of planners to work together in 6 locations. Each project took the form of an artist’s residency and the artist facilitated the project guided by a lead planner who brought in expertise and guidance when needed.

• The project was environmentally themed, relating to our partners (Forestry Commission Scotland, and Creative Scotland) with support from Scottish Natural Heritage, rather than being location–specific. PAS allocated one project solely to reflect and celebrate the philosophies of Patrick Geddes and the relevance of his teachings and work in relation to urban green space planning.

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America, India and Palestine, developing his ever–increasing interests in art, social welfare and town planning.

In Geddes’s farewell lecture to his Dundee students he asked, ‘How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.

Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. But the world is mainly a vast leaf–colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.

But growth seems slow: and people are all out for immediate results, like immediate votes or immediate money. A garden takes years and years to grow – ideas also take time to grow, and while a sower knows when his corn will ripen, the sowing of ideas is, as yet, a far less certain affair.

Star–wonder, stone and spark wonder, life–wonder, folk–wonder, these are the stuff of astronomy and physics, of biology and the social sciences… To appreciate sunset and sunrise, moon and stars, the wonders of the winds, clouds and rain, the beauty of woods and fields – here are the beginnings of natural sciences.

We need to give everyone the outlook of the artist, who begins with the art of seeing – and then in time we shall follow him into the seeing of art, even the creating of it. In the same way

the scholar and the student may be initiated… into the essential outlook of the astronomer and the geographer, of the mathematician and the mechanic, the physicist and the chemist, the geologist and the minerologist, the botanist and the zoologist, and thence more generally, of the biologist. Next, too, the anthropologist… and the economist.

But this general and educational point of view must be brought to bear on every specialism. The teacher’s outlook should include all viewpoints… Hence we must cease to think merely in terms of separated departments and faculties and must relate these in the living mind; in the social mind as well – indeed, this above all.

And so – with art inspiring industry, and developing the sciences accordingly – beyond the attractive yet dangerous apples of the separate sciences, the Tree of Life thus comes into view.’

For the full text see Amelia Defries, The Interpreter: Geddes, London, 1927. T

What more apposite comment could there be with respect to the wider sustainable development of the planet? In the end it is vegetation, not money, which is the issue.

Although best known as the founder of modern town planning, Geddes’s background was in biology and sociology. Geddes lived in the New Town, like most reasonably affluent people at the time, however he wanted to improve slum conditions in the Old Town, and so he moved to James Court, off the Royal Mile, near to the Camera Obscura and improved its appearance, whitewashing

Philip Boardman wrote of Geddes that he was an ardent Scot, and ‘that he was an equally loyal and intellectual son of France’, but also that ‘he placed himself no less convincingly in a third category, of world citizenship, without abandoning either France or Scotland.’ This internationalism carried over into his approach to education, for example at the Outlook Tower and Ramsay Garden in the 1890s, he pioneered some of the first international summer schools. So: that is a little of what we know about Geddes.

Some particularly prominent thoughts come from Geddes’s final lecture to his students at University College Dundee in 1918, and the wider passage contains not just comment on global finance but a profound statement about planetary ecology. In that same lecture Geddes reflects on the interdependence of arts and sciences and how each should inform the other. For Geddes, the economist required the complementary insight of the ecologist and such opportunities for mutual illumination applied across all the arts and the sciences.

This generalist view gives insight into his approach to planning. For Geddes, planning risks losing touch with the communities, cities and regions that it sets out to serve, if it does not take a multiplicity of approaches into account. His philosophy of planning, which he submitted as part of a 1915 report, was written at the behest of Lord Pentland, not in Scotland but in India: Geddes’s generalist views permeated everything he wrote and said. In 1915 he said

‘Town–planning is not mere place–planning, nor even work–planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk–planning.’

‘By creating we think, by living we learn’.

The quotation that now headlines the University of Dundee homepage is by Geddes, from a paper he gave at a Town Planning Conference in Amsterdam in July 1924. The motto was more often used by Geddes in Latin: ‘Vivendo Discimus’ (by living we learn) and

‘Creando Pensamus’ (by creating we think). The sayings are thought to reflect his core ideas that learning should be rooted in real life experience and that the best original thinking is a creative process.

When Geddes held the Chair of Botany at Dundee, he quickly established a reputation for the interdisciplinary quality of his lectures – one former student remembered that the topic

‘might quite as likely have been Ancient History or Fine Art or Political Economy, as a note about the structure or habits of one of the prescribed plants.’ Geddes’s post required him only to teach in the summer term, and the rest of his time was spent in Edinburgh, London, France,

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the dull walls and introducing plants. He created the first University ‘halls of residence’ at Milne’s Court, setting it up as an idealistic, self managing community with the mission being, not just to live there, but to influence those around.

In 1892, Patrick Geddes bought the Tower on the Royal Mile in a public auction. He re–named it the Outlook Tower because he wanted to change people’s outlook. Geddes also used the camera obscura to change the way people perceived the interaction between town and country.

When taking tours, Geddes would first rush people up the original turnpike stair, all the way to the top. After the quick climb, with blood rushing to their heads, visitors were shown the Camera Obscura. In the foyer outside the Camera were different coloured stained glass windows with subjects such as ‘botany’, ’zoology’ etc. Geddes wanted to stop people seeing life only through their own interest, or one colour window, but to grasp the wholeness and interdependency of life. The Camera showed the reality – all colours together. After seeing the Camera Obscura, visitors sat in a darkened meditation room – the inlook room – to internalise what they had learned, making it their own. Then visitors went down through the Tower – through the ‘Edinburgh Room’, then down through exhibitions about Scotland, Language, Europe and finally the World.

Geddes’s famous analytical triad – place, work, and folk, corresponding to the geographical, historical, and spiritual aspects of the city – provides the basic structure of this examination of his urban theory. Subsequent writers such as Volker Welter have

examined Geddes’s ideas in the light of nineteenth–century biology – in which Geddes received his academic training – showing Geddes’s use of biological concepts to be far more sophisticated than popular images of the city as an organic entity. His urbanism was informed by his lifelong interest in the theory of evolution and in ecology, cutting–edge areas in the late nineteenth century.

Balancing Geddes’s biological thought is his interest in the historical Greek concept of polis, usually translated as city–state but implying a view of the city as a cultural and spiritual phenomenon. Although Geddes’s work was far–ranging, the city provided the unifying focus of nearly all of his theoretical and practical work.

Reforms of the planning system in the last 40 years have sought to tackle the subject of community involvement in planning urban and rural areas. Helen Meller reminds us that ‘…for him (Geddes), the key problem for a planner was to gain a consensus of support for future social developments from the whole community… the most important part of the whole exercise of planning. Planning was not a matter of ironing out the technical and physical problems of modern city life.’ Techniques such as Participatory Appraisal, Cognitive Mapping and Charrettes have been developed for use in Scotland, and elsewhere. Transect Walking, Cognitive Mapping, and even Story Telling are being explored as ways to engage more successfully with communities.

‘By Leaves We Live’ was developed to mark the twin events of the PAS 20th Anniversary and 2013 Year of Natural Scotland, and a number of interesting and potentially fruitful techniques have

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The Projects

been tried in the field by groups of planners, all volunteers with PAS, all working with artists.

• Photography and Sketching future development options on overlays.

• Panoramic/Palindromic sketching of landscapes .

• Using drawing as a tool for collective analysis and survey of coastal sites, by engaging intuitive, sensory and subjective responses.

• Use of Poetry and photo imagery in the aesthetic design of forests.

• Using the sensual qualities of sculpture to express personal experiences of the value of biodiversity.

• Facilitating people to express their own feelings about their own locality, through a technique called Our Place In Our Words which is used to produce People’s Placebook Surveys.

PAS hoped that by engaging with artists who understand the value of communicating complex and challenging topics through art, new ways of reflecting and communicating our work would open up. Art is a softer approach to planning engagement. PAS’s training is delivered by planning professionals and relays planning policy and management to the public and built environment professionals. This project gave an opportunity to deconstruct how PAS works and reconstruct it by researching and exploring new ways of contextualising, communicating and visualising our role and the role of our planner volunteers. It was important

that the artists understood the differences between urban design and spatial planning.

Often there is a tendency to focus on the ‘design’ elements of an area; in ‘By Leaves We Live’ we are interested in engaging in the debate and discussion about everyone’s needs and viewpoints in relation to the natural environment and exploring decision–making, responsibility and personal/collective choice.

PAS chose art forms that would lead to a series of outcomes such as films, photographs, prints, artists’ books, carvings, sound recordings and written work that will have potential to engage people in wider public events to discuss these issues in relation to Scotland’s natural spaces and places. By selecting artists who clearly demonstrated they understood the brief we aimed to achieve quality artistic products.

PAS is an impartial independent organisation, and whilst artists in their own practice may research and develop work from a particular view point, we required them to prepare projects that were impartial and exploratory with an open view point. They had to be willing to be objective and open to enquiry about their work.

We are all stakeholders in the management and sustainability of Scotland’s resources and we are all consumers with needs. For example, our current carbon output is 10.2 tons per person per year. How much responsibility does each person take in reducing this figure and how can better awareness of planning help them?

East Coast Biodiversity & Coastal Challenges Tayside & Grampian

Urban Forestry Easterhouse

Renewable Energy & Natural Landscape Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park

West Coast Biodiversity & Coastal Challenges Oban & West Central Glasgow

Forest Restructuring Scottish Borders

Patrick Geddes City of Edinburgh

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Urban Forestry, Photography

EastErhousE

Participants

Becky Duncan (Artist), Martin Patrick (Lead Planner), Alison McCandlish, Gordon Roger, James Weir, Katrine Dean, Lesley Porteous, and Hamish Neilson

About the Artist & their Practice

Becky Duncan Photography: Becky is a professionally trained freelance photographer specialising in third sector documentary imagery (with clients such as GCV Green Network, Scottish Natural Heritage and many Scottish Housing Associations).

Becky also owns and runs Open Aye, a participatory photography social enterprise, providing bespoke photo projects for diverse and varied groups. With over 15 major participatory photo projects done in the last few years, Open Aye has worked with partners such as British Red Cross, Scottish Refugee Council, Impact Arts, SNH and a host of others, on varying issue–based projects. With a range of outputs including outdoor poster campaigns, advocacy–based exhibitions at local shopping centres & the Scottish Parliament, various press, radio and online coverage, Open Aye projects can have profound and far reaching impacts on the participants, partner organisations and public at large.

Becky has an honours degree in Film & Media / Documentary and a PDA in Professional Photography & Digital Imaging. In

between studies she worked for 7 years in advertising, in London and Glasgow, working across big budget brands, but eventually chose to specialise in social marketing, concentrating on charity and governmental campaigns. In her time in advertising she was in the Drum magazine’s ‘30 under 30’, she was a finalist in the Fresh Young Media Person of the Year and in 2007 she was part of a client/creative/media team which won a Marketing Society for Scotland Award for Excellence – Non Profit Sector, for her work on a charity over a number of years.

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The artist and the lead planner designed a workshop that involved contextualising what urban woodland is, what its benefits are, and who the stakeholders are in determining how they are sustained. What could urban woodlands look like in the future and ultimately will there be any?

Project participants were asked to consider how stakeholders from planning, forestry and other related agencies can work together to achieve a balance and how they can relay this to the wider public. Artists are often engaged in areas of multiple deprivation to engage the public in connecting with their local area. What can other professionals learn from this?

It is important for the public at large to be engaged in the planning system. Everybody should have access to the relevant knowledge and information available and a wide, diverse range of stakeholders should feel empowered to have their say when it comes to their communities. The people directly involved in an issue are often best placed to contribute to ideas and solutions. Community acceptance of any changes has a higher chance of success when the community has invested itself and its ideas to the process of that change. An effective, cohesive, compassionate community requires certain things to exist. Understanding, good communication and a sense of communal purpose are all vital to the process.

Through participatory photography workshops, Open Aye inspired the planners to work collaboratively, through 4 workshops based around urban woods and planning.

The photography was designed to enhance planners’ skills by photo–mapping of areas being considered for development, basics in lighting, composition, portraiture and environmental macro techniques.

Consideration of Geddesian ideals, and how they relate to planning today, enhanced the planners’ work, and they benefitted from talks from urban woods partners, the Forestry Commission Scotland, and the Central Scotland Green Network on contextualising urban woods and the future of urban green spaces, within the Scottish Government’s National Planning Framework.

The photographs attempt to portray social value, environmental benefits and economic impact as well as paying homage to the ethos and words of Sir Patrick Geddes, the father of modern urban planning: ‘Place – Work – Folk’. The planners evolved their own Tree of Planning, with its roots firmly in Geddes’s teaching.

By building skills, knowledge and confidence, by empowering local people to consider, communicate and engage, planning offers communities the chance to help shape their surroundings, their lives and their futures. This project aimed to celebrate the work and role of FCS in relation to Scotland’s natural environment, while also examining the relevance of urban forestry to planners.

Through the National Planning Framework 2, Central Scotland Green Network is supported by the Scottish Government and administered by FCS and SNH. CSGN’s work focuses on areas of multiple deprivation where there are high percentages of vacant / derelict land and an identified need to provide and manage local green space.

Project Summary

People who live by some of Scotland’s many urban green spaces are fortunate, as these green spaces have enormous benefits on citizens’ health and well being. A harmony between urban needs and environmental issues is a challenge for planners. Becky proposed to create a body of photographic work to help.

Social realist documentary photography can highlight the importance and benefits of urban green spaces, contextualised within our changing built environment. As a professional photographer, Becky has a personal interest in seeing the two issues converge into one cohesive solution. She would create a series of photographs based around Easterhouse’s urban green areas, which considers the land, nature, residents, businesses and ideals of the area.

The library of photographic images would be a product of collaboration between relevant planning stakeholders. The planning professionals would be engaged by a series of participatory photo workshops, in which the volunteers are given a camera and some basic skills. The workshops covered:

• What are the planning objectives? Challenges and competing demands.

• Contextualising urban woodland .

• What could the future of urban woodlands look like?

• What do the public want to happen?

Learning from these pieces of work, images taken by participants and insights gathered from the whole process fed into Becky’s own personal photographic work on urban woodlands. By the end of the project Becky and the planners had collectively created photographs and texts to be viewed as part of a travelling exhibition, designed to encourage wider consideration and participation around the issue.

Project Essay

This project focused on the importance, benefits and need for natural spaces in densely populated areas. Scoping discussions with Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) staff identified potential themes for the project rather than specific locations. This was helpful in ensuring the project did not become solely related to a geographic location, but drew out common issues and themes within a type of area.

Participants were led by the artist and a planner with input from FCS. Commitment from the lead planner was six days. The lead planner and FCS staff met with the artist for one day of development and planning of the group workshop, capturing the themes to be explored, some of the points to bring out and some of the challenges that might be identified and how to capture them in a creative and engaging way.

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The project theme of Urban Woodland was derived through the context of the development and delivery of the Central Scotland Green Network. The implementation of the Network’s role is resourced by means of the allocation of funding to the CSGN Development Fund, as well as tree planting and management schemes.

Low tech images/information gathering by the planners were used as discussion points around the themes in urban forest planning and the process concluded in a professional portfolio of images illustrating the key points explored by the group.

Outcomes:

The planners taking part have:

• identified, through art, new ways to understand the competing demands of woodlands in urban areas.

• been re–invigorated in terms of their own knowledge and enthusiasm for urban woodlands and their benefits to the wider community.

• explored the benefits and challenges of urban woodlands from a professional perspective in relation to NPF3.

Quotes from Participants

• I have learnt how photography can improve community engagement.

• It was so good to get away from the office and out into the countryside.

• It gave me insight into how photography can be utilised as a tool to highlight planning issues to colleagues and the public especially in terms of landscape and the natural environment.

• It was interesting to do something different in terms of the planning profession.

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Forest Restructuring, Poetry

scottish BordErs

Participants:

Gerry Loose (Artist), Roland Bean (Lead Planner), Tim Ferguson, Maggie Gilvray, Chloe Campbell, and David Baxter

About the Artist & their Practice

In his submission, artist and poet Gerry Loose remarked that it’s worth remembering that Geddes was first a biologist, but these words (‘By leaves we live’) of his are those of a poetic mind, seeing to the heart of things. They also reach into the heart of his sociological thinking and his town planning. Our lives are leaves: like pages of a book riffled by wind; our lives are interleaved: there is an interdependence between us and other animals, between town and country and all the shades, all the pages between. If the concerns of planning are with the future, nothing looks further into that future than the planting of a tree.

The notions of what a forest is and the place it plays in the memory of a nation; the questions of who and what forests are for; the hitherto largely neglected aesthetic design of forests were among subjects Gerry proposed to explore, especially in the Borders with its swathes of forest in 14 locations.

In this way, we might collectively articulate enhanced forests, with new designs on the ground, to encompass the diversity of users and natural communities. Gerry has long experience of both design of plantings and the poetic, as well as collaborative approaches. His approach and combination of these disciplines, in tandem with planners and their science and art can only be fruitful: the product of metaphorical photogenesis, of Geddes’s leaves.

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Project Essay

Led by artist and poet Gerry Loose, and planner Roland Bean, this project focused on the process and implications of Restructuring Forests, making them more diverse, wildlife–friendly, and attractive. To some extent it also examined the different language (or jargon) used by foresters and planners.

The lead planner and FCS staff met with the artist for one day of development and planning of the group workshops, capturing the themes to be explored, some of the points to bring out and some of the challenges that might be identified and how to capture them in a creative and engaging way.

The context was that Scotland’s forests and woodlands are a precious natural asset. They need to be protected and enhanced to everyone’s benefit… as set out in the FCS Corporate Plan 2012/13. This project involved exploring the wider landscape challenges of forest restructuring and the competing land demands that need to be considered through the eyes of built environment professionals and FCS staff.

Restructuring is the term used to describe the conversion of even–aged plantations (usually conifer monocultures) to woodlands that are better–suited to today’s multi–purpose objectives. Restructuring by felling provides the opportunity to change the even–aged woodland structure and enhance the landscape and woodland environment.

FCS requires that such woodlands will have a range of different age classes of trees, a proportion of mature/veteran trees and some deadwood, with some permanent open areas in the wood.

There should be established regeneration of young native trees in areas where it would be expected to occur, e.g. gaps and woodland edges near mature trees. Restructured woods should have a light level of grazing and browsing sufficient to allow regeneration of a characteristic range of trees and shrubs and a well developed field layer i.e. flowering plants at ground level.

In woods there should also be an appropriate proportion of native tree and shrub species characteristic of the site and locality, and introduced non–native species should be absent or contained at low levels. Woodland managers should avoid or minimise the area being affected by natural or non–natural threats and/or damage e.g. invasive non–native pest plant species.

Very often restructuring is put into effect by limited small–scale felling, and opening up woodlands along water courses.

Project Summary

FCS has an ambitious target to achieve 25% forest cover by 2050. How will this be achieved in view of current demand for land?

Art depicting landscape is one of the most commercially popular forms of artistic expression and most people have grown up with reproduced landscape paintings in their homes. But how often do we look at the landscape and reflect on its future? Through art and the artist’s eye issues of diversity in landscape, inclusivity and heritage were presented to enable reflection on partnerships with nature and linking people and communities with the forest restructuring process in relation to the social, environmental and economic benefits and demands.

There was one basic outcome (apart from process, which took on the examination of various jargons and unclear – to the lay person – uses of English, including the language of planners; together with an examination of Geddes’s ideas and FCS plans). The outcome was of a distillation of language into 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 word poems relating to place especially, but also to work and folk. Given the plethora of conflicting interests at ‘our’ place – Glentress Forest – it was decided that these should form the basis for (inappropriate but arresting) sign–poems placed within the Glentress forest. The poetry would be made into text to fit within the (Geddesian) triangle of a standard road sign and erected at various points.

A constraint was that FCS indicated there should be no permanent public artworks on site, so the signs were recorded in place on camera for exhibition / publication before being removed.

Gerry’s own individual work followed this significant pattern of minimalism, with signs again placed within woodland. These signs however point back toward original mythological inhabitants of woodlands/forest as a means of both imparting a sense of wonder as well as amusement and thoughtfulness – all the hallmarks of poetry.

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The changes:

‘Clash of arms – Cademuir, “ iron age fort “ “the great fight”

Horses, tramp of hooves,

Clearance of woodland from lower ground – axes

Hardy cattle (kye) on the barren uplands. stunted bushes

(Scrogs)

Sheep on the hill, Deer forest, poachers.

Stone walls,

The plough, Fertile meadows Gowans, water.

Shelter planting, cloud shapes on the hillside, Sycamore, Oak,

agricultural improvements, pasture. Meadow pipit, cuckoo

Forest planting – spades

Dark, gloomy (Dowy) silence.

Chain saws, big machines,

Fleeting sunshine, views, new woodland, machines, – chiffchaff,

cycle starts again with different trees.

Cycles – screech of brakes, rumbling tyres, click of gears.

Grass mowing, chatter of children’

The watchers through time:

‘The wren – Widespread & adaptable, Found across the UK in a

wide range of habitats – woodland, farmland, heath, moorland

and coast. Likely to have been present at all stages.

The burn

The Peel – (silent) Watch towers and refuge “poor man’s castle”

The outcome of the project was a series of brief word poems relating to Place especially, but also to Work and Folk. They were used as inappropriate, but interesting, road signs, temporarily placed within Glentress Forest. The text fitted within the (Geddesian) triangle of a standard road sign.

Gerry’s own work followed the significant pattern of minimalism, with signs again placed within woodland. The signs point back towards the original mythological inhabitants of woodland.

Each person had written poems based on their previous trip to Glentress. They were discussed and the poems were shared. It was interesting to hear how each poem was different creatively.

Different Paths

How some people choose to stay on the same path in life whilst others change pathsand aspire to do different things.

‘The paths we choose need careful thought. Who knows where

they may lead.

Sometimes that path will be the same throughout our lives

others will change and adapt with our experience and journey

through life.

Flexibility to listen and respond to life can put pressure on our

natural and built environment. There is certainty in that some of

our actions will succeed while others will fail. But it is how we

recycle and learn from it that is most important.

People must be towers of vision. Outward looking and

foreseeing all the possibilities before taking that plunge on the

ride called life.’

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From the poems there evolved an idea for the final outcome of the project – words on road signs placed inside the forest. They refer back to one of Geddes’s triangulations: place. Poetry pared down into words to create immediate impact

– inappropriate or appropriate on many levels. They would be placed at points of conflict or specific areas to draw alienation from the forest.

The sign posts were intended to be public, but not permanent. The final day was taken up placing the signs in the forest, photographing them and taking them down.

The signs are subtle, poetic reminders of what is there: of scents / sights / and sounds, in and of themselves, startling to some (it’s not usual to see signs in the forest like that, even if they were placed there only for a photograph and as an example of what may be done in other areas / places), and making folk slow down and wonder a little.

Outcomes:

The planners have:

• Explored and defined the challenges and opportunities related to forest restructuring.

• Identified new ways of relaying the challenges and reflected on the future of the forest landscape.

• Produced new tools for engagement with the public and wider stakeholders.

Quotes from Participants

• Has taken me out of my comfort zone.

• Very stimulating to work with Gerry.

• Interesting to observe the different approaches to tackling the subject between the Planners and myself... and Gerry’s approach which was much looser, with fewer hang–ups about abandoning earlier ideas.

• It helped confirm that I can be creative!

Unpeeled: Transitions

Below The Peel,

buds unpeel

defences down

repeal of winter.

Eyes peeled;

appeal of bluebells.

F o r e s t w a r d ,

Grassland to woodland

woodland to forest

birch to spruce

leaf to needle

track to path

burn to lochan.

R e – c r e a t i o n ,

Bike unchained

back, pedalling

bells…tinkle

Go Ape–al.

The poems will be read in different ways by different people; in terms of the iron age or phrases like ‘trap of hooves’.

wren bird

peel

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Renewable Energy and the Natural Landscape, Drawing

Loch Lomond and thE trossachs nationaL Park

Participants

David Faithfull (Artist), Derek Wilson (Lead Planner), Gail Mackenzie, Sue Laverge, Kirsty Gray, Martin Adaji, Chloe Campbell, and Jan Mosebach

About the Artist & their Practice

David Faithfull is an artist, printmaker and curator. He lectures at the University of Dundee and has studio bases in both Edinburgh at WASPS, Patriothall and on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland.

He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and after graduating spent 8 years working as an artist and illustrator in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Fundamental to his work is his intrinsic relationship with the landscape. Through adopting a palindromic form of visual dichotomy, he subjects the geological and historical palimpsest of the physical landscape, to creative enquiry. These investigations have included extensive studies on the Scottish Hebrides, particularly on Mull and Jura.

He works with Artists Collective 6°W on Mull, and recent projects include a residency on the Isle of Inch Kenneth, the family house of the notorious Mitford family. His resulting ‘Leviathan’ series, explores the island’s topography, memories and anthropomorphic form. This was exhibited at St Oran’s on Iona in 2011, at An Tobar and the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2012, and An Lanntair in Stornoway in 2013.

In 2008 he collaborated with the TS Elliot poetry prize winner John Burnside and the Scottish Book Trust on the Isle of Jura. Reflecting the ‘process’ of collaboration, they created an Artists Book, interpreting the island’s landscape and place names, using traditional oak gall ink sourced from local oak trees. These drawings were additionally published in Polygon’s ‘The Spirt of Jura’ in 2009.

He has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally and has work in collections including the V&A, Tate Britain, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Hunterian, the Bank of Scotland, Baillie Gifford and the SAIC Chicago. David Faithfull is currently on the board of Edinburgh Printmakers.

Project Summary

The Scottish landscape is a diversity of natural elements and forms, a palimpsest of cultural runes and geological rifts, a barometer of ecology, community and economy.

The contradictions of ‘landscape’ and the preservation of what we see as natural, are issues that grow ever more pressing, especially in Scotland. As Geddes states, we cannot stand still, our ‘primary human needs’ necessitate our engagement in

‘constructive and conservative surgery’, in relation to urban and rural planning. In today’s current environmental climate, our relationship with landscape and the uses we have historically put it through are as complex as ever, particularly in relation to ongoing developments for wind, hydro, bio and nuclear energy.

With these pressing and often conflicting objectives, all stakeholders in the planning debate can benefit from utilising the expertise and help of Planning Aid Scotland.

As an artist David works with and within the Scottish landscape. He saw the project and its engagement with both the Forestry Commission and PAS as an opportunity to broaden his understanding of the energy debate and suggested that sharing his own creative practice and methodology would be enriching for the planners involved.

David first investigated Loch Lomond for a National Park Artist’s Commission based around Drymen in 2005. He explored physically and conceptually the Highland Boundary Fault that stretches across Scotland through Connich Hill and Loch Lomond, over Inchcailloch and to the west.

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For his project ‘Earth, Wind and Fission’ David was already investigating power sources in Scotland, particularly in East Lothian – coal at Cockenzie, wind at Aikengall and nuclear at Torness. He stressed that whatever his own views on any of these, he was engaging in an objective review, leaving the viewer to make their own conclusions. For this project he envisaged further researching the Scottish Government’s Renewable Energy Policy, particularly in relation to developing hydro and wind power on national forest land and investigating the wood and fuel bio energy sector and its relevance to the Forestry Commission in Scotland.

The project methodology he envisaged would take the form of a series of walks and workshops involving drawing activities and conceptual reflections, both as an individual and as a group. These ‘palindromic’ and ‘panoramic’ drawing exercises would, over the specified period, culminate in each participant creating a number of individual sketchbooks and subsequent collaborative artists’ book. The process would involve visiting and rendering the coal burning Cockenzie power station using carbon based charcoal and chalk drawing materials. This was later complemented by depicting the rural landscape of the Trossachs, using ink and reed pens harvested by the group near Loch Lomond.

David had already developed the concept of the ‘Palindromic’ Book, to explore the dichotomy between the objective and subjective views of a landscape. This involved a series of walking and drawing exercises; considering the emotional and functional, economic and aesthetic dualities of the physical landscape. These were then translated into various experimental codex forms, exploiting the physical structure of the book through unfolding text and image considerations.

The associated ‘Panoramic’ Book idea involved the participants engaging in a group landscape drawing, rendered in a series of concertina books. This fostered collaboration and encouraged engagement with the universal and the personal. At the end of this workshop each participant would have their own artist’s book, comprising collaborative responses to individual segments of a 360 degrees view of the landscape.

The aim of both of these activities was to create a fertile ground for creative exploration and engender discussion on issues of planning developments within the landscape.

The final stage and outcome of the project was to produce an artists’ book incorporating a large print created at Edinburgh Printmakers. This involved each planner engaging in the hands–on printing process, and then seeing their own individual and collaborative drawings being arranged and composed in a coherent visual and conceptual book form.

The final day also involved an additional trip to the artist’s studio to discuss and consider the project’s development, outcomes and the potential impacts on both the planners’ and the artists’ relationship to the landscapes and the land uses in question.

Project Essay – Renewable Energy

David Faithfull led this project, together with planner Derek Wilson. This focused on the use of a panoramic drawing technique, developed by the artist, to analyse the context for renewable energy developments and their possible implications for siting within a National Park designated landscape. This was compared and contrasted with conventional power generation in a lowland coastal setting.

The variety of drawing techniques and materials was complemented by an introduction to screen printing at Edinburgh Printmakers. The planners were also encouraged to add drawings and written

notes to their sketchbooks, leading to an assessment of the planners’ and artists’ relationship to the landscapes and the land use in question.

The context was that FCS has been considering how to finalise arrangements with its appointed wind energy developers to enable site–specific investigations to proceed. It also aimed to facilitate communities in considering their participation in wind and hydro joint ventures or self development. These activities will support the 2020 target of attaining 2GW of installed electrical power capacity on the national forest estate.

This project explored the need for alternative sources of energy production and the FCS commitment to enabling wind farms to be developed on hillsides throughout Scotland balanced against the need to ensure that the natural environment is not compromised and that all partners and stakeholders are engaged in the process.

The artist was asked to engage planners and FCS staff, if available, in exercises that explored the aesthetic, environmental and historic characteristics of an area balanced with consumer driven demand and the Scottish Government’s NPF3 targets. They would examine what, in an ideal world, the balance would look like, and how they could achieve better engagement with all stakeholders, including the wider public.

The location of the project would potentially be the site of a wind farm or a proposed wind farm, but the coordinates, name or any distinguishing landmarks would not be included in the outcomes of the project to ensure that the focus of the work was on the topic, not a specific area. It was intended to use sites in Argyll or within the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, courtesy of the Park Authority.

As with the other projects, the lead planner and FCS staff met with the artist for one day of development and planning of the group workshops, capturing the themes to be explored, some of the points to bring out and some of the challenges that might be identified and how to capture them in a creative and engaging way.

Outcomes:

The planners have :

• Explored the impacts and opportunities that renewable energy can bring to an area.

• Developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of each other’s professional opinion and role within the development and planning of renewable energy sources.

• Dreated new ways of relating the opportunities and challenges of renewable energy developments to a wider audience.

Quotes from Participants

The project:

• Was an enriching, thought provoking experience.

• Generally mind broadening and a good learning experience – something different, exciting and thought provoking which has got me using my sketch book more.

• Was a very inspired and exciting new concept working with artists.

• Included panorama drawing (which) was a terrific experience… was organised perfectly.

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West Coast – Biodiversity and Coastal Challenges, Visual Art

oBan and WEst cEntraL GLasGoW

Participants

Michelle Letowska (Artist), Stewart McNally (Lead Planner), Jennifer Horn, Elaine Fotheringham, Hannah Garrow and Hamish Neilson.

About the Artist & their Practice

Michelle Letowska lives and works in the Outer Hebrides. In her work she reflects on the way values, aspirations and choices operate within wider society and in particular, in relation to the natural world and socially constructed spaces we inhabit. Strongly rooted in drawing, she often employs objects and images to create a space for encounter, engagement and reflection.

In recent years, Michelle has worked with planners and urban studies professionals, academics and local residents on various projects which aim to reconnect and open up channels of communication and participation in the processes and questions which affect our daily lives: how do we meet (and why to we fall short of meeting) our human needs? What is necessary for a sustainable future, environmentally and socially?

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Project Summary

Scottish Natural Heritage has identified numerous threats to the delicate situation of the coasts of Scotland, from erosion, pollution, and sea level rise.

Artist Michelle Letowska worked with lead planner Stewart McNally to devise a project for a group of participant planners to explore issues affecting West Coast biodiversity. The group employed drawing as a tool for engagement in subjective and intuitive responses to the locations visited. Participants were guided through various exercises employing intuition, observation and reflections on the participants own relationship to Geddesian concepts. Many of the exercises were designed to reflect on Geddes’s categories of folk, work and place, their interconnectedness and interdependence and a consideration of how the environment shapes people and how people shape their environment through work.

Patrick Geddes’s concept of the ‘Ideas Midden’ was employed as a visual aid for thinking through the complex issues that the trips raised. The wall hanging ‘Ideas Midden’ was created by Michelle in response to the contact time with the planners. It functions as a visual tool for analysing the various drawings produced in situ on the West Coast and provides a framework for reflection on what should be done to address the threats to biodiversity.

Michelle also produced a hand made unisex neck tie, a visual reference to the Geddesian tree of life. Bumblebees found on the roadside in the west of Scotland (most likely killed when hit by road vehicles) are attached to the tie as memento mori. The Biodiversi–tie is designed to be worn by the planning professional in the work place.

Project Essay: West Coast – Biodiversity and Coastal Challenges

A starting point for this project was Michelle’s belief that the trajectory of daily life moves swiftly, leaving us little time to consider the elements of what constitute our human needs or how we might nurture the essential components of healthy functioning ecosystems. In this haste, decisions are often made which have irreparable consequences.

By engaging with the spirit of Geddes’s environmental education and his analysis that ‘by leaves we live’, Michelle aimed to use this project to redress this balance, creating space and time for the participating planners to connect with their environment in a deeper way. By this she proposed to reflect on the fundamental role of nature in our complex lives and to reconsider the competing demands on our natural and our own selves.

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As its starting point, the Ideas Midden requires the use of intuition and observation, both highly valued by Geddes. Participants were asked to engage their head, heart, hands and feet, taking a walk around the site, guided by their intuition. They were asked to complete a series of hand drawings, recording elements of the environment that they felt were significant to biodiversity. By drawing, rather than photographing, they were asked to engage with their location on a deeper level, and to select more thoughtfully from the plethora of stimuli. They also collected items found on their journey.

The drawings and found objects were brought back for group discussion and categorisation of the visual evidence. The Ideas Midden, in the spirit of Geddes, encourages personal engagement with the issue and planning both individual and social action – what is to be done to increase biodiversity?

The second artwork produced by Michelle is the ‘Biodiversi–tie’, a hand–made unisex necktie inspired by Geddes’s tree of life, adorned with bumblebees. The bees were some of many found on roadsides in the West of Scotland during the project and were most likely killed by road vehicles. The tie is designed as a momento mori to be worn by the planning professional in the workplace.

Quotes from Participants

The project:–

• Was interesting, enlightening, challenging, sometimes confusing.

• Gave me a new–found love of drawing.

• It was a planning adventure!

• From a cultural policy point of view it was good to see an organisation like PAS trying to look at other disciplines for new ways of looking at planning – it’s amazing how getting a different perspective can make you see things differently

As an artist and facilitator Michelle specialises in drawing as an experiential practice, an aid to deepening our experience of and connection with the world around us. Over the four contact days with the planners, working on location at coastal sites, the project invited participants to learn new and refresh existing drawing skills.

Drawing as a way of creating visual information was an important tool for Geddes. In keeping with his idea that ‘by creating we think, by living we learn,’ this project employed drawing as a valuable temporal methodology – a way of being in a place over time in order to come to know it better.

Traditionally, artworks considering the Scottish coast are often romantic, selecting and neglecting industrial features to create a constructed vista. In contrast to this, working on a scale appropriate to close observation, Michelle’s aim was to create visual material which leads to a better understanding of the coastal landscape, that goes beyond mimesis and begins to interrogate its underlying biodiversity, challenges to this biodiversity and its intrinsic importance for the survival of life, locally and beyond. The project was guided by Geddes’s categories of Folk, Work, Place as participants considered how the environment shapes the people and the people shape the environment through work. The categories raised questions for exploration by the group:

Folk – Who are we? What knowledge do we bring and what other folk do we encounter?

Work – What work is made visible by and in the coastal landscape? What work do we do within and outwith our professional lives?

Place – What are the current and future conditions: climate, geological processes, industrial and economic development, biodiversity?

In keeping with Geddes’s idea of ‘conservative surgery’ (minimum intervention), Michelle and Stewart designed low environmental impact trips to the project’s coastal locations – using public transport was a key tenet, allowing the group time to work on their project collectively in transit, and also allowing them to reflect on the reality of rural experiences in relation to planning issues.

A fundamental part of the project was to consider how the various collected drawings could exist as points of departure for discussion, learning and understanding – how they could be employed as part of Geddes’s process of survey, analysis and plan.

The artworks produced by Michelle after working with the planners are designed to invite engagement with and response from audiences.

Patrick Geddes’s Ideas Middens were visual tools – diagrams – to aid thinking through complex issues. The Ideas Midden fabricated by Michelle is a hand appliqued and embroidered wall hanging which provides a framework for analysis and categorisation of the planners’ drawings, for encouraging participation in surveying, analysing and planning for biodiversity in the west coast of Scotland.

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City of Edinburgh, Patrick Geddes, Writing

EdinBurGh

Participants

Andrew Sclater (Artist), Prof. Cliff Hague (Lead Planner), Irene Beautyman, Oonagh Baxter, Angus Cowie, Elaine Dee Thomas, Jennifer Thomson and Hamish Neilson.

About the Artist & their Practice

Andrew Sclater’s published writing includes The National Botanic Garden of Wales (HarperCollins, 2000) – on the national garden he co–founded for the New Millennium, contributions to The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press, ongoing), and poetry in magazines. In 2010, Andrew was shortlisted for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize. In 2013, two of his poems were commended in the Basil Bunting Poetry Award. He has received new writer’s awards from New Writing North and the Scottish Book Trust. Before taking up the Geddes residency as part of Planning Aid for Scotland’s 2013 By Leaves We Live, Andrew held a residency at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank Cottage. Andrew brings to his writing practice several decades of working closely with the cultural and biological dimensions of place. His career has included periods as a horticulturist, a biologist, a historic landscape consultant, a historian of natural history, and a drystane dyker.

Andrew considered response to land as a poet and landscape historian. He argues that people’s attachments to local place are so complex that that they defy conventional description. They are as complex as feelings for a loved one, and just as difficult to express. But, taking a cue from certain techniques in modern poetry, Andrew and his group have organised felt responses into strings of words that reflect how people feel for their place.

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Project Essay

This project started with a walking tour of Geddes sites in Edinburgh’s Old Town, followed by 5-minute writing on significant aspects of the tour and group selection of key words and phrases.

Next the group worked on site at Hunter’s Bog, Arthur’s Seat. The instructions were:

Look down Hunter’s Bog for 5 minutes in silence. Then on index cards each person notes; on one side the positive attributes of the site and on the other side negative attributes.

After closing their eyes, by writing on numbered cards each person responds through feeling to each prompt read out.

The group shared their responses to the Hunter’s Bog site, writing them down on a long roll of paper. The responses were varied and provoked considerable discussion about their meanings and the patterns that emerged. Discussion focused on issues like whether we enjoy or feel threatened by a ‘wild’ site; how significant distant viewpoints / people using the site / wildlife / history / sounds and smells etc. are in our appreciation of a landscape. Discussion included consideration of ‘absent terms’.

All members of the group submitted a short piece of writing. This was to encapsulate something of the author’s feeling for, and engagement with, Hunter’s Bog. Each participant’s piece was to be included in the final work. There was no specified length, but small is beautiful unless it had to be longer.

So, what is the value of OPOW? First, it is fascinating to discover how the single words of individuals become parts of a larger collective response, simply by playing with word order. Part of this interest comes from understanding that our feelings for place are as difficult to put into words as our feelings for people we care strongly about. So, using a method to find a new and unique language for place allows us to say things we otherwise might not be able to say. More importantly, this ‘non–grammatical’ use of word re–ordering alone allows us to express uncertainties and impressions with similar weight as for aspects we are more certain about.

Any new use of OPOW by communities will demonstrate that there are alternative ways of experiencing place to those currently used by the survey and planning professions. The surveys of planners and professionals are not good at representing the lived dimensions of local place that communities feel and know. Instead, they work with a complex set of measurable data wherever they can. But life in a local place is about more than that. OPOW, and the People’s Placebook Surveys OPOW enables, will help local people strengthen their connections with their own place, using only their own words.

This is both a guidebook to OPOW and a People’s Placebook Survey for Hunter’s Bog.

Project Summary

This was a new sort of survey –a simple and intuitive activity that let people express how they relate to a local place. The activity involved no more than rearranging words, to find word–orders that capture or reflect something about the experience of the place itself. Because the activity is designed for people to express their own feelings about their own locality, it is called Our Place In Our Words.

The essence of the project was that the participants recorded their feelings for a familiar place: the shallow glen called Hunter’s Bog, beside Arthur’s Seat above Edinburgh. The project had three stages:

First, the group’s feelings of like and dislike for aspects of Hunter’s Bog and its surroundings were written down in the simplest of terms.

Secondly, group members recorded their responses to named features, qualities, and incidents associated with the site. Each response was limited to one word or short phrases.

Thirdly, the group explored ways in which to present the words in mosaics, plans, and word–strings, searching for presentations that reflected their collective experience of their place.

The project document provides a model for communities anywhere to record their connections with their own place. If being and feeling at home is a fundamental and formative human need, the process explored in the project will allow people to present their connections in a new sort of document – a simple one built chiefly from single words noted on small pieces of paper.

The aim was to open up a new way for people to describe how they connect to their local place. Participants in a local Our Place In Our Words survey will discover how rich and various the experience of place can be. And the work should be of significance to planners and developers too. Over the last few decades, the assessment of landscape character and the acceptability of proposed development has

been the province of professionals using ever more complex techniques. But these techniques have no means of measuring individual connections with place, although these are often as important to people as their relationships with family. Instead, the modern ‘scientific’ landscape assessment focuses principally on the visual. Locality though, as a component of home, is much more than a question of looks.

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Landscapes and Economic Development

Landscapes are an integral part of rural areas. They are often interwoven with the history and culture of a place and the communities who live there. There is always the risk that landscape conservation is seen as the opposite to economic development. However, a capacity to explore a landscape and one’s own feelings about it is an important part of being in a place. This is not just true in spectacular places – even ordinary landscapes carry deep meanings, if you know where to look for them. They tell us stories about the place and about our own relation to that place. Perhaps it might be possible to apply some of the ideas and methods of the

‘Our Place in Our Words’ project to other places...

Quotes from Participants

The project:

• Provided a rare chance to reflect on how the landscape is represented in cultural and planning terms, and what it means to different people.

• Gives scope to roll out a user–friendly methodology to help non–professionals discuss their feelings about a landscape.

• Very unusual project which struck a good balance between the experimental side of using language and poetry and applying this to planning practice and community consultation. I enjoyed meeting and working with the other planners and gaining insight to Geddes.

• It was stimulating and thought–provoking and built my confidence to do creative writing.

A Participant’s journey:

The question is… how do you evaluate a landscape? It is a question that lies at the heart of decision–making on controversial developments in the countryside, such as wind farms or new highways. Since the 1970s landscape evaluation has become a very technocratic process, much to the frustration of many non–professionals who may care deeply about a place, but feel their views count for little.

This project, to try to create new ways of looking at places, was fun and productive. The group took a site called Hunter’s Bog, a ‘U–shaped’ valley beneath the highest hill in Edinburgh. On a cold, wet and windy May morning we went up there, and hunched down overlooking the site. Andrew invited us to clear our minds for a few moments, then to each write short notes on a postcard about what we liked about the site and what we didn’t like.

He followed this by giving us a series of prompts, to which we had to write down the first word or two that came in our minds. It was a bit like being on a psychiatrist’s sofa, but we were on the side of a hill. Prompts included things like ‘The sounds you hear’, ‘The animals you can’t see’, but also specific parts of the site, such as an abandoned quarry.

We then assembled all our separate words into a long list. This was more challenging than you might think, as some of the responses were quite personal. Andrew had done a good job in building up a sense of trust amongst the group. What emerged were some quite contrasting responses to the same landscape.

At a later session we went over this list, and discussed how we might create maps using these words. The aim was to find a way of communicating our feelings about this landscape. We did this in groups of two, so three different approaches were explored. I think we have found a way that ordinary people can work together to share their feelings about a landscape, and then agree on a presentation of shared sentiments through a simple map.

Feelings versus ‘Science’

What emerged very clearly was that a landscape can evoke deep feelings and long–buried memories from people. The argument we are making is that these ‘soft’ responses to a place are valid, and should not be ignored.

In contrast, in the late 1960s and 1970s there was a big push amongst professionals and researchers to make landscape assessment a more ‘objective’ process. Techniques were developed to quantify the qualities of a landscape.

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East Coast – Biodiversity and Coastal Challenges, Sculpture

taysidE and GramPian

Participants

Mary Bourne (Artist), Paul Lewis (Lead Planner), Joanne Dang, Joel Williams, Kirsty Murray, Iram Mohammed, Akinnumnni Omololo Srinmade and Claire McArthur

About the Artist & their Practice

After gaining a Post Graduate Diploma in sculpture, Mary Bourne carried out commissions in the UK and abroad, ranging widely from schools, hospitals, theatres, memorials, to hills, museums, business parks and new towns. She has exhibited her work in a number of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions in widely scattered locations worldwide. She has also taken part in several symposia and residencies.

Mary has been involved in a number of consultancies, teaching engagements, workshops and voluntary projects, from project conception, to development and delivery. She has extensive experience of work with committees, and a number of professional memberships. Her work features in several published works and collections. It has received a number of awards.

Mary’s work explores humankind’s relationship with nature and is primarily in stone, the very stuff of the earth. Physicality and sensation combine with idea and image to create pieces that are experienced on many levels – with the head, hand and heart, to borrow Ruskin’s famous words.

Understanding how people relate to places is fundamental to Mary’s practice. Several places where she has worked have been deeply influenced by Geddes (Irvine New Town, Scottish Poetry Library, and her own work at Ellon Academy) and she has worked with design professionals, environmental professionals, educators and communities in diverse contexts, including on projects where art has been used to interpret the natural world.

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In the project planning process, Mary used several Geddesian or related ideas to shape the project. In addition to ‘by leaves we live’ – the poetic expression of scientific concepts of ecosystems/biodiversity; she used ‘heart, hand and head’ – the necessity of engaging the emotions as a motivating force in learning and understanding; ‘by living we learn’ – the necessity of direct experience as part of learning experience (as opposed to theoretical learning); and ‘by creating we think’ – taking what has been learned and using it creatively to progress in a positive direction

So it was decided:

• To choose locations which demonstrate biodiverse ecosystems at work (Fowlsheugh RSPB seabird colony and St Cyrus SNH Nature Reserve).

• To engage emotions both by tapping into personal experiences (childhood/family) and by visiting inspiring places.

• To engage as many of our faculties as possible – 5 senses, intellect, emotions, physical being.

• To carry out the entire project (as far as possible) outside on the coast with experts helping us to understand and interpret what we are seeing.

• To create something to take away with us – a tangible reminder of our experiences to carry forward with us.

What the project partners brought to the project:

• An exciting, well thought out project idea without strictly defined outcomes/ with room for experiment.

• Logistical planning, which was very time consuming, tiresome but essential.

• Expertise, invaluable input from SNH at strategic and local levels to demonstrate how coastal policy is formed and then implemented on the ground.

• Engagement: willingness to enter into dialogue with participants.

• What the group of volunteers brought to the project:

• International understanding: volunteers from Canada, Australia, Nigeria as well as Scotland.

• Diverse relevant areas of expertise: private practice (sole trader, member of large company), local authority, SNH, architecture, soil science / organic farming.

• High level of motivation, enthusiasm, energy and intellectual engagement.

Project Summary

The relationship between humankind and the natural world is at the heart of Mary’s work she sees it as a place to share our common humanity. Engaging collectively with the place we live through the philosophical / poetical / sensual qualities of the arts can be fascinating and moving. It is also of immense value in visualizing a future shape for a place. The potential for achieving this through the planning system, influencing real change, is very exciting.

Mary made her submission based on her understanding of the complex issues affecting biodiversity along this coast and beyond. She proposed a sensory exploration of the coast and its ecosystem, leading to a consideration of what is precious, what is valuable, and why. From the image of a leaf, Geddes extrapolates the interdependency of all things living: from personal response Mary proposed to extrapolate a shared understanding of why we so love and need the natural world.

Preparatory research involved a walk with the lead planner at the coast: also exploring ideas, and then considering how to utilize locations, and structure the group sessions. With the group field visits were made to ‘developed’ locations followed by visits to inspiring ‘wild’ locations.” Thereafter, the process involved reflection, development of shared understanding, and then creation of artwork; she sees it as a place to share our common humanity.

Project Essay

Mary’s intention was for two days to be spent outside, using techniques she uses to respond directly to a place: notes, sketches and photographs, capturing transient thoughts, images, sensations. Each person would focus on what s/he considers precious here, bringing his/her own knowledge, memories and emotions to the place. Thus each response would be unique. During these field days she wished to visit both developed and wild locations.

There would follow a session sharing responses, enabling each person to cast perhaps unexpected lights on the places, before trying to distil a shared understanding of what is of value and how it might be expressed visually.

Finally the group would produce more developed artwork, expressing what about these places is unique, precious and essential – in both senses of the word. Mary did not want to be prescriptive about this, but the process would use the physicality of material to express the physical world. Participants were each given a small piece of soft stone the right size to hold comfortably in a hand, and were invited through the meditative process of shaping it, to imbue it with a sense of the wild places visited. This piece of stone could then be taken away, carried in a pocket or placed on a desk as a reminder of the wind–scouring, sunburning time spent in the places visited during the project.

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Each participating person focused on what s/he considered precious at the location, bringing his/her own knowledge, memories and emotions to the place. Thus each response was unique. Mary based these days in the suburban sprawl south of Aberdeen and the small, flood–prone town of Stonehaven, followed by the RSPB seabird reserve at Fowlsheugh and St Cyrus SNH Nature Reserve. Then followed a session sharing responses, enabling each person to cast perhaps unexpected lights on the places, before trying to distil a shared understanding of what is of value and how it might be expressed visually.

Finally the group produced more developed artwork, expressing what about theseplaces is unique, precious and essential – in both senses of the word.

What the participants got out of the project:Volunteers:

• Privileged opportunities to experience inspiring wild places and through these visits gain deeper understanding and insight into issues around planning in a way that assisted discussions about how to promote healthy biodiversity.

• An opportunity to reflect on how personal and professional experiences might affect each other.

• A chance to reflect on their motivations for becoming planners and how their current practice compares with their ideals.

• An opportunity to experience the meditative discipline of stonecarving.

Project partners:

• Interesting and focused discussion and debate with a diverse, well informed group of people.

• A chance to help deepen and improve planners’ understanding of the issues around biodiversity.

• Help to shape a new way of delivering training.

Artist:

• Fascinating opportunity to understand the processes of planning for biodiversity and to help to find ways of promoting them.

• Opportunity to have impact in the ‘real world’.

• Enriching discussion/ideas exchange.

• Opportunity to make a piece of work in response to this inspiring experience.

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Artist’s Research and Development

Mary evolved a sensory exploration of the coast and its ecosystem, leading to a consideration of what is precious, what is valuable, and why. From the image of a leaf, Geddes extrapolates the interdependency of all things living: from personal response she wanted to extrapolate a shared understanding of why we so love and need the natural world.

From what she learned, Mary decided to make several small pieces in stone, designed to be held. Techniques involved carving and abrasion, again mimicking forces that shape the landscape. Her own research of artwork involved two days spent outside, using techniques to respond directly to a place: notes, sketches and photographs, capturing transient thoughts, images, and sensations.

Quotes from Participants

The project:

• involved rediscovery of what led me into planning in the first place

• led me to ask if PAS volunteers could use art to engage other people in looking at the environment and planning

• allowed planners to get in touch with their ‘feelings’ on a place, which can sometimes be lost when assessing/negotiating conflicting land uses

• entailed seeing through an artist and naturalist’s perspective and knowledge

• encourages creative thinking in utilizing the benefit of nature rather than dismissing its potential. Nature is a benefit not a hindrance

• involved taking a step back from the ‘everyday’ and looking at the situation through a very different pair of eyes.

ProjectLegacy

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the findings to establish opportunities to take time out to reclaim a voice for the felt aspects and evocations of the environment and to draw together poetry and planning to explore how people really feel about where they live and work.

Thanks to all who made it happen

The project was conceived by Lynn Wilson of Planning Aid for Scotland, who worked with partners new to PAS to plan and execute a project that would engage planners with other professions and involve working with artists in various media. This process entailed stepping outside the traditional ‘comfort zone’ of planners, as much for the PAS staff as for the others. Our thanks go to David Taylor, Portfolio Manager and Scott Donaldson, Portfolio Manager with Creative Scotland.

The inter-professional nature of the project has brought new skills and ways of thinking to staff from each agency. In particular, James McDougall, Communications and Events Manager, Forestry Commission Scotland was involved in sketching out possible project areas consistent with FCS themes, such as Forest Restructuring, Urban Forestry, and Renewable Energy.

A crucial part of the funding was provided by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and thanks must go to Louisa Hooper for her assistance.

Other partners have participated in this national project celebrating The Year of Natural Scotland 2013, and we had a valuable input from Sue Evans, Head of Development at the Central Scotland Green Network. There was also positive support from Scottish Natural Heritage.

RSPB, though not a formal project partner, supported the East Coast – Biodiversity and Coastal Challenges team through discussion of issues and a guided tour.

Lastly, and by no means least, the help given by Craig McLaren, Director of the Royal Town Planning Institute in Scotland is gratefully acknowledged.

The partners have reflected on how they engage with the arts in general and considered further ways to develop relationships with artists to achieve their organisational aims.

Project Legacy

Following the completion of the ‘By Leaves We Live’ programme during 2013, the results have been assessed. PAS has concluded that the six projects demonstrated considerable scope for effective deployment in real–life situations where individuals and communities are seeking more effective and relevant ways to engage with proposed developments and plans in their areas.

• Photography and sketching with the use of overlays

• Panoramic/Palindromic sketching of landscapes.

• The Ideas Midden; the use of sketching, objects and images to create a space for encounter, engagement and reflection

• Use of Poetry and photo imagery in the aesthetic design of forests.

• Understanding biodiversity value and ts expressionthrough sculpture.

• Facilitating people to express their own feelings about their own locality, through the technique called Our Place In Our Words.

PAS also concluded that the experience of participating in the project had brought the individual volunteers considerable benefit.

The feedback from volunteers includes:

• As planners we need to be objective but it was a gift to be able to be subjective and to rediscover the passion that took me into planning.

• I think it was a great way to bring planners together to network, exchange ideas and to allow planners to experience some areas of planning they are not familiar with. I also think this kind of project is great as a morale booster for planners as the daily grind can sometimes forget why we became planners in the first place (usually to make our communities a better place). The event reminds us of why we choose this profession

• I think a benefit for PAS is having the opportunity to learn from planners who were given an opportunity to consider and approach planning from a totally unconventional and unusual mind–frame (through art!).

• I think PAS can realise that its volunteers are prepared to look at things afresh and can be innovative and imaginative. Perhaps there’s an untapped source of new ideas and initiative and the commitment to see them through.

With these and similar comments in mind PAS has concluded that as a legacy to this pilot it wishes to provide professionals from the built environment sector with more opportunities to refresh and re–energise themselves on a regular basis. Too often there is pressure on delivery rather than reflection. We would like to build on

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The Contribution from Project Partners

Forestry Commission ScotlandAmong perceived benefits to Forestry Commission Scotland, it was suggested that the national, inter–professional and multi–partner nature of this project ensures many opportunities for promoting the project, sharing the outcomes and developing a dialogue throughout Scotland. The inter–professional nature of the project would bring new skills and ways of thinking to planning professionals and forestry experts.

Forestry Commission Scotland would benefit from the publicity element through publications/ websites and platforms, as well as other project partners’ websites and newsletters.

It was intended that the projects would be showcased as appropriate. There would be the potential through a separate funding stream to deliver an event in an area of interest to Forestry Commission Scotland where it was important to encourage active engagement and support from those less likely to engage with forests.

The project outcome was an artist–led and finished product that can be used for future discussion, presentation and/or publicity by Forestry Commission Scotland.

In supporting this work Forestry Commission Scotland engaged in a project thatwholly engaged the spirit of forest and woodlands and demonstrated FCS’s commitment to celebrating Year of Natural Scotland: 2013.

The project reached out to a national audience through publicity and demonstrated that Forestry Commission Scotland is fully committed to balancing economic development whilst considering sustainability of the natural environments throughout Scotland.

The By Leaves We Live project relates to previous FCS projects and practices. FCS has a strong and large portfolio of arts–based programmes that have been successful and so demonstrate a positive connection to the value of engaging the arts as an excellent tool to communicate important messages relating to our natural woodlands and forests.

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation The Foundation funded PAS to commission professional artists to work with groups of town planners in locations across Scotland to reflect on issues of planning and sustainability and to develop new approaches for public discussions on the future of Scotland’s natural environment.

The application was approved as it satisfied the requirements of the Foundation’s Environment – Valuing Nature strategic aim .

Project Aim: To commission professional artists to work with groups of town planners in locations across Scotland to reflect on issues of planning and sustainability and to develop new approaches for public discussions on the future of Scotland’s natural environment.

Agreed outputs:

PAS organises an artist and planner briefing day at Creative Scotland.• It commissions six professional artists to design and deliver workshops with

small groups of volunteer planning and environment professionals in six locations in Scotland, exploring the natural environment and interpreting the challenges in sustaining it from the perspective of their professional knowledge and experience.

• Artists develop their own response to the brief and complete for presentation any work produced by the planners and environment professionals.

• The outputs are disseminated through a publication and exhibition and used as catalysts for discussion at a series of public events, facilitated by planners and artists.

• The project is showcased at a national Creative Scotland conference in September 2013.

Intended Outcomes:

• Exploration of a new model for public engagement on planning.

• Increased awareness of the relationship between planning decision–making and sustaining natural spaces.

• Promote understanding of the value of the natural world to mainstream influencers and to the general public.

Creative Scotland PAS developed a dialogue with Creative Scotland and they agreed that in order to deliver the project on time and to a quality artistic standard there should be six artists and generous budget and time allocated to each artist. The full proposal was environmentally themed relating to our partners rather than location specific. The themes were agreed and discussed with our partners Forestry Commission Scotland with support from Scottish Natural Heritage. PAS allocated one project solely to reflect and celebrate the philosophies of Patrick Geddes and the relevance of his teachings and work.

The project began with a call out for artists in December 2012 and projects commenced in March 2013. This was PAS’s 20th Anniversary and articles were written for relevant publications.

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August 2013, Imagining Scotland ConferencePAS gave an overview of the Project and presented some of the artistic outcomes. The audience was art and environmental practitioners from all over Scotland.

October 2013 – Event in EasterhouseThe Urban Forestry project team’s work was exhibited at the Bridge Centre.

Planning Aid for Scotland AGM‘By Leaves We Live’ artworks were exhibited at the Annual General Meeting and 20th Anniversary Celebration held at the City Chambers, Edinburgh on 17th October 2013.

FilmOver the summer and autumn of 2013, Summerhall Films made a short film about one of the By leaves We Live projects. You can view it on the Planning Aid Scotland website.

Workshop for PAS volunteersOn 2 October 2013, to commemorate the date of Patrick Geddes’ birth, at Riddle’s Court in Edinburgh, Andrew Sclater led a successful and well attended workshop for PAS volunteers on the ‘Our Place in Our Words’ technique.

Publication credits:

Photography: Becky Duncan, Andy McGregor, Morven Gregor (Gerry Loose’s images) and PAS volunteers involved in the project.

Design: Andy McGregor (www.andymcgregor.com). Printed by Empress Lith0 Cover graphic based on a 1999 diagram of Geddes’ valley regions by Professor Volker M. Welter.

www.planningaidscotland.org.uk