Festival of Place: Social Impact is this week

 

Dr. Isabelle Anguelovski will be sharing her research on green gentrification and what policies and practices you need to ensure climate resilience and net zero includes all citizens. Anguelovski studies how environmental injustice is materialised and contested, including the social and racial manifestations and impacts of green gentrification for historically marginalised residents and urban planning for health and wellbeing, with a focus on land use, health equity and justice

 

Maria Adebowale-Schwarte, CEO of the Foundation for Future London, will share her insights on capacity building in communities to ensure they gain from urban regeneration. The foundation is a charity set up in 2015 to connect the communities of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest with the new East Bank and its globally renowned arts, innovation and cultural partners. The Foundation for Future London fundraises to expand grant-making and creative placemaking opportunities.

 

Professor Nick Tyler, Director of the Centre for Transport Studies at UCL, will share his latest research on how urban parks affect the human brain and behaviour, as learned through experiments in the UCL urban environments laboratory, PEARL. Tyler works in a transdisciplinary way, researching how humans respond to urban environments physically through their senses, and how we can design the city to be encourage sociality.

 

 

Filip Mesko is an architect and academic researching the divide between the town and country, from the design of the original garden cities, to the emergence of the suburbs, to BIG’s latest proposals for eco-developments. Mesko will discuss the merging of countryside, ‘wildness’ and urban as we see future town-planning paradigms for the survival of life in a world remade by climate change.

 

Olaide Oboh is a Director at Socius Developments, a developer committed to making a positive social and environmental impact. Oboh will share their key approaches to delivering a place-based social impact for the communities in which they work.

 

Steven Taylor will be sharing his knowledge of the failure of innovation clusters and developments to ’trickle down’ social impact and leading an audience break-out conversation about the challenges and blockers to social impact.

 

Andrew van Doorn is Chief Executive of HACT, which helps the housing sector drive value for residents and communities by supporting the measurement of social value and connections to the NHS and other like-minded organisations.

 

Romy Rawlings is a landscape architect and Commercial Director of sustainable street-furnituremaker Vestre. Rawlings is the author of Healing Gardens. She believes in the value that the external environment offers to everyone who engages with it and is consistently focused on the creation of high-quality landscapes of every character and scale.

 

Social Impact is only the first of three events hosted by Festival of Place this year.

Festival of Place: The Pineapples, featuring the 40+ case studies shortlisted for the annual awards and live judging is a two-week online event broadcasting in May.

The in-person annual Festival of Place is taking place on 6 July at Boxpark Wembley – a new venue for the Festival, which in addition to multiple stages, will host walking tours of the surrounding build-to-let development, Wembley Park. The Pineapples awards will be presented at a party at the close of the Festival of Place, promising a traditional “knees-up” as well as the trophy prize-giving of golden pineapples.

 

In November, Festival of Place: Climate Resilience will bring together a community of professionals committed to biodiversity, water and energy resilience to hear fresh voices and share case studies.

 

The Festival of Place is selling tickets to the individual events, but also membership passes for individuals and organisations who wish to attend all events for the year.

 

For information on tickets, passes and all events, please visit www.festivalofplace.co.uk