“Positive parochialism”, local belonging and ecological concerns: Revisiting Common Ground's Parish Maps project

Abstract

Scepticism about the value of parochialism and local belonging has been a persistent feature of geographical scholarship, which has advocated a relational account of place and a cosmopolitan worldview. This paper revisits the Parish Maps project that was instigated in 1987 by UK arts and environment charity Common Ground, which led to the creation of thousands of maps across the UK and beyond, and was appraised in 1996 by Crouch and Matless in this journal. Drawing on archival materials and in‐depth interviews, we examine the legacy of the project. We argue that Common Ground's vision for Parish Maps represents a “positive parochialism” that confidently asserts the validity of the parish without retreating towards insularity. We complicate this by revealing diverse ways that communities took up Common Ground's vision. We conclude by arguing that the view of parochialism manifest by Parish Maps offers a foundation for ecological concern that remains relevant today, with places offering the potential for solidarities that bring together local and incomer. This “positive parochialism” disturbs assumptions that local attachments are necessarily exclusive and indicates the unresolved challenge of finding ways to realise the value of affect and creative environmental engagement in wider policy and land‐use planning.

The ‘Urban Village’ versus the ‘City for Profit’: Querying NIMBY through a comparative analysis of touristification in Lisbon and Madrid

“…Hence, arguing 'unequivocally for open spaces and open places may leave the less powerful places and groups (the space of the domestic, the places of indigenous culture) open to indiscriminate invasion and disruption' (Massey, 1996, p. 123), as has often been the case with many neighbourhoods and communities in different cities around the world. At the same time, it is important to consider the complex set of alliances between old and new local actors sharing diverse cultural, social and relational capitals (Hubbard, 2009), sometimes engaging in common actions to defend territories under the threat of global urban neoliberalism, and 'positive parochialism' has been proposed as a potential alternative to parochialism and a global sense of place (Devine-Wright et al, 2019).…”

“…In the first section of the paper, we address some of the tensions experienced in recent years on a local scale in Southern European cities, through the increase in urban changes that set the stage for more acute urban changes brought by global urban tourism and the 'visitor economy'. By paying attention to 'belonging narratives' and to the potential benefits and perils of the creation of strong local or parochial attachment to places (Tomaney, 2013;Devine-Wright, Smith & Batel, 2019) as opposed to 'global senses of place' (Massey, 1994(Massey, , 2009, we explore how local tensions might be productive of and produced by broader socio-political processes on a global scale.…”

A Critical Framework to Develop Human-Centric Positive Energy Districts: Towards Justice, Inclusion, and Well-Being

“…As already mentioned, PEDs might displace those who cannot afford a low-carbon settlement from not only a given house or apartment as a building made of bricks, but also from their home, neighbourhood and community, with all their emotional and symbolic meanings and relations as well as associated psycho-social impacts (Manzo and Devine-Wright, 2013). By adopting a more critical approach which argues for a non-static, non-essentialist view of places and groups, PEDs can include the voices of under-represented groups and promote their local, indigenous knowledge, experiences and relations, instead of prescribing top-down, non-contextual and commodified interventions that reproduce exclusions and stigmatised representations of places and of certain groups (Devine-Wright et al, 2019;Ropert and Di Masso, 2021).…”

“…by openly co-creating them with citizens. Attention must be paid to their concerns and values, and from a collective, local to global perspective, being considerate of social and ecological systems alike (Williams et al, 2014;Devine-Wright et al, 2019). This move from public participation to co-creation of PEDs not only requires the reexamination of mainstream knowledge, i.e., the decolonisation of energy (Lennon, 2017), but also the valuation of the lay public's energy conceptions through the reappraisal of indigenous and informal energy knowledge and practises (Normann, 2021).…”

Community versus local energy in a context of climate emergency

“…While most definitions of CE implicitly assume that such initiatives are small in scale, in strong forms of CE, the size and scope of projects arise from the diverse characteristics of the places and communities in which they are situated -whether that is a small island, a rural village or an urban area -rather than being fixed beforehand from a standardised model (7). CE initiatives work outwards from the place not inwards from the system -what might be described, without prejudice, as an outlook that is parochial but not insular (9).…”