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Children are spending significantly less time in nature than ever before. The decline in nature-based play has been precipitated by many factors, including: increased risk aversion and fear amongst parents, poor play opportunities for children and the rapid embrace of digital technology as recreation by young people. These factors all contribute to a collective and individual loss of childhood experience with nature. At the same time, young people are increasingly aware of the unprecedented level of climate change, pollution, habitat destruction and species extinction and the effect it could have on their futures. Thus, there is an urgent need for new approaches to environmental learning that celebrates children’s agency, supporting them to directly contribute to ecological systems and global sustainability across communities. This paper explores the potential of creative nature-based play to contribute to children’s identity and understanding of the natural world through a practice-led research project, Running Wild (2016). Running Wild was conducted with Polyglot Theatre in collaboration with Year 6 students from Mahogany Rise Primary School (Frankston North) and the Royal Botanic Gardens (Cranbourne). The aim of the project was to introduce the students to their natural reserve (‘The Pines’) through participatory art-making in collaboration with local artists, scientists and Indigenous elders. This included the opportunity for children to build their own habitats or ‘cubbies’, make animal costumes and plant native seedlings at The Pines, resulting in an outdoor performance for their families and friends. Running Wild not only demonstrated increased nature-connection amongst the students, but also the importance of creative nature-based play in improving learning capacities and wellbeing, as well as promoting opportunities for environmental leadership.

Encounter is a central feature of urban life (Fincher & Iveson, 2008) and the 'throwntogetherness' (Massey, 2005) of people in the tight quarters of the city is credited with many social goods, from reducing bigoted views of 'the other' (Allport, 1985; Mayblin, Valentine, Kossak, & Schneider, 2015) to activating local places and their economies (Knack & Keefer, 1997) to creating more positive impressions of safety and security (Jacobs, 1992; Zelinka & Brennan, 2001). Arguably, it is the core business of planners to be understanding, facilitating and improving of the contact people have with each other in cities and neighbourhoods. There are, however, identities that are 'unspeakable' (Grant-Smith & Osborne, 2016) and that challenge even the boldest advice regarding encounter as a building block to community cohesion, place making and the development of social capital. Among those identities are people who inject drugs, particularly when they inject drugs in the public realm. The illicit nature of drug taking as well as the visceral aspects of injecting drug use combined with the common intersectionality of drug taking identities (with, for example, homelessness and mental illness) render people who inject drugs as "deviant, odd, strange, or criminal" and the encounter with them as "abhorrent, embarrassing, disgusting, unwelcome" (Grant-Smith & Osborne, 2016, p. 46). This ensures that these sorts of encounters between strangers are "encaged within discourses of 'contamination', 'criminality' and 'public danger' to the desired 'order of things'" (Yiftachel, 2009, p. 89). These narratives about injecting drug use mean that encounters between people who inject drugs and those who do not are often uncomfortable and tense. While the non-users feel at risk of violence and struggle with the sometimes chaotic social cues of people using drugs publicly, encounter also ensures that the very disadvantaged in society "are reminded of their deprivation on a daily basis" (Dikeç, 2017, p. 4). This contribution engages with these tensions of encounter involving 'unspeakable' identities in our cities, using the experiences of an applied research case study in Melbourne, Australia. The article focuses on ways in which storytelling might act as an initial 'proxy' encounter in such challenging meetings. Instead of policing these encounters (ineffectively), can planning respond with approaches to public space use and encounter that help citizens question the "stereotyped expectancies about what stigmatized people are like" (Miller, 2006, p. 21)? Can the tales we tell about each other shift through hearing the tales we share of ourselves? Encounters in Victoria Street, North Richmond The tensions described above are contemporary tensions in the Victoria Street precinct of inner-city Melbourne, Australia. The neighbourhood is marked by hyper-diverse socioeconomic and ethno-CONTACT Andrea Cook

Diffraction Enhanced Imaging (DEI) is an x-ray phase contrast technique, which is showing great promise for a number of medical imaging problems. For a source it relies on a highly collimated flux of monochromatic x-rays, which is currently only available at synchrotron radiation facilities. Phase shifts occurring as the wave passes through the object are made visible using Bragg diffraction from a post-sample analyser optic. In early 2004 the DEI system on the bending-magnet beam line 7.6 of the Daresbury SRS was used for the first time to image a number of small medical specimens. This paper will report on the performance of the system and the results of these initial studies. A new DEI instrument is currently in the design phase. This facility will be integrated on wiggler station 9.4 on the SRS allowing access to shorter x-ray wavelengths and greater flux. A progress report on the design features and implementation of this system will be given.

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