What’s the idea?

ParkLife aims to better understand the value of parks for people and nature by gathering data using a variety of digital sensors. We are co-designing this data collection and a prototype dashboard for displaying results with the City of Edinburgh Council and Friends groups associated with four large parks in Edinburgh.

Who is working on the project?

We are a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the City of Edinburgh Council. The University provides technical and design expertise and is conducting in-depth user research and analysis. Council staff participate in design, logistics and manage community engagement with Friends groups.

Background

There is a large body of evidence pointing to the benefits of urban parks and greenspaces for people’s health and emotional wellbeing, as they provide a place to exercise, relax, play and appreciate nature. Parks also provide environmental benefits, such as reducing pollution, regulating temperatures and providing habitat for mammals and insects. However, there are concerns that these spaces are in decline as local authorities have less money to allocate to them from their shrinking budgets. By gathering more dynamic and cost-effective data on how parks are being used – by wildlife or people - the project aims to help inform the management of these parks for the collective benefit and engaging those who use them.

What’s happened so far?

To begin our project we visited our four pilot parks, spoke with the park officers, and scoped existing technologies and existing data sources. Next, we engaged park users and the wider communities around our four pilot parks, listened to their ideas and discussed the role technology might play. You can read more about the workshop we conducted with Leith Links Community Council.

Based on these ideas, we generated a list of prototypes that we are currently developing and installing in each park. These include digital noticeboards, chatbots and sensors to detect the presence of bats, smartphone tracking, and people and bicycle counters. We are supplementing the numbers we get from these sensors with qualitative insights from a survey.

The next steps will involve working with park managers, stakeholders and users, to create a digital dashboard and data toolkit that displays live data about their parks and helps them design local solutions.

How will other parks learn from your work?

Our data toolkit will be freely shared. The toolkit will run on open-source software and include a workbench for data analysis and a dashboard that will display new data collected by sensors and other data sources. Instructional documents will be prepared to help others install their own instances of the toolkit. The data we collect will be shared on the City of Edinburgh’s existing Open Data portal and their park information website Edinburgh Outdoors. At the end of the project, we will publish a peer-reviewed account of our project.

ParkLife is one of five projects we are working with to test and develop ideas that could support parks to attract resources and develop more sustainable operating models. Nearly £500,000 in National Lottery funding and other support has been allocated to the five projects as part of Rethinking Parks, a partnership between Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund and Nesta.