BACKGROUND:Evidence on the long-term impact of urban green and blue spaces (UGBS) interventions remains limited. This study is a 15-year evaluation of an urban greenway development in Belfast (United Kingdom), assessing the potential effects of this UGBS intervention on physical activity (PA), mental wellbeing and co-benefits. METHODS:Using natural experimental design, a repeated cross-sectional survey was conducted in 2010 (baseline), 2017 (post-opening) and 2023 (long-term follow-up) with about 1200 adults participated each wave. Outcomes included PA, mental wellbeing, general health, quality of life, social capital and environmental perception. Multilevel mixed-effect regressions were performed to examine within-group changes at long-term follow-up. Difference-in-differences analysis investigated the between-group changes that might be attributed to the greenway. Additional comparative analyses included distance-decay analysis and comparison with population trends in Northern Ireland. RESULTS:At six years after completion, the greenway intervention appears to buffer a decline in duration of PA - mainly from moderate-intensity activity (decline lower by 118.6 min/week, 95%CI: 3.9-232.2) but with no significant impact on the proportion of the population meeting the recommended PA level. The intervention is associated with a smaller decline in self-rated health (4.98 units; 95%CI: 0.62-9.34) relative to control group. Intervention association with mental wellbeing was positive but not significant (p = 0.30). The greenway also showed positive effects on social capital and environmental perceptions, with impacts most evident in improving safety and trust in the local area. CONCLUSION:This study provides evidence to support the public health impact of UGBS and its long-term health and social benefits.

Despite their stated commitment to sustainable economic development, blue economy and blue growth agendas have been criticized for replicating the same unlimited growth paradigm they purport to replace, disempowering local communities. By contrast, diverse economies literature advocates looking to communities' practices to identify alternative, socially and environmentally grounded, economic possibilities. In line with that scholarship, this article calls for a re-envisioning of the blue economy through the eyes of coastal communities and their socioecological relations. We draw on local knowledge acquired from research we have conducted in six coastal communities across Europe - Burgas (Bulgaria); Connemara (Ireland); Tr ae na (Norway); & Aring;land (Finland); Cap de Creus (Spain); and Eastern Limassol (Cyprus). From mobilizing social enterprises and commoning practices to widening the blue economy's goals to comprise environmental care and collective wellbeing, these communities' economic practices focus not only on retaining value at the local level, but also on advancing societal and environmental goals. The article investigates the possibilities and challenges that these experiences suggest for the blue economy, raising questions about the potential of diverse blue economies.

Introduction Urban green and blue space (UGBS) interventions, such as the development of an urban greenway, have the potential to provide public health benefits and multiple co-benefits in the realms of the environment, economy and society. This paper presents the protocol for a 5-year follow-up evaluation of the public health benefits and co-benefits of an urban greenway in Belfast, UK.Methods and analysis The natural experiment evaluation uses a range of systems-oriented and mixed-method approaches. First, using group model building methods, we codeveloped a causal loop diagram with stakeholders to inform the evaluation framework. We will use other systems methods including viable systems modelling and soft systems methodology to understand the context of the system (ie, the intervention) and the stakeholders involved in the development, implementation and maintenance phases. The effectiveness evaluation includes a repeat cross-sectional household survey with a random sample of 1200 local residents (adults aged ≥16 years old) who live within 1 mile of the greenway. The survey is complemented with administrative data from the National Health Service. For the household survey, outcomes include physical activity, mental well-being, quality of life, social capital, perceptions of environment and biodiversity. From the administrative data, outcomes include prescription medications for a range of non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes mellitus, chronic respiratory and mental health conditions. We also investigate changes in infectious disease rates, including COVID-19, and maternal and child health outcomes such as birth weight and gestational diabetes. A range of economic evaluation methods, including a cost-effectiveness analysis and social return on investment (SROI), will be employed. Findings from the household survey and administrative data analysis will be further explored in focus groups with a subsample of those who complete the household survey and the local community to explore possible mechanistic pathways and other impacts beyond those measured. Process evaluation methods include intercept surveys and direct observation of the number and type of greenway visitors using the Systems for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities tool. Finally, we will use methods such as weight of evidence, simulation and group model building, each embedding participatory engagement with stakeholders to help us interpret, triangulate and synthesise the findings.Ethics and dissemination To our knowledge, this is one of the first natural experiments with a 5-year follow-up evaluation of an UGBS intervention. The findings will help inform future policy and practice on UGBS interventions intended to bring a range of public health benefits and co-benefits. Ethics approval was obtained from the Medicine, Health and Life Sciences Research Ethics Committee prior to the commencement of the study. All participants in the household survey and focus group workshops will provide written informed consent before taking part in the study. Findings will be reported to (1) participants and stakeholders; (2) funding bodies supporting the research; (3) local, regional and national governments to inform policy; (4) presented at local, national and international conferences and (5) disseminated by peer-review publications.

The continued prevalence of car dependency is a concern worldwide due to known negative health, social, economic, and environmental impacts. Belfast is a city in the United Kingdom with high levels of car dependency and car use. The most successful interventions to reduce the complex problem of car dependency combine a range of approaches, but how the influencing factors work together and interact to successfully achieve a change in car dependency is poorly understood. This study aimed to better understand the factors that influence the high levels of car dependency in the Belfast Metropolitan Area. We worked with 17 stakeholders to co-design a causal loop diagram to understand the complex system of car dependency in the city. The causal loop diagram reflects a shared understanding of car dependency and highlights the various mechanisms that are important for reducing car dependency. Twenty-three factors under the four themes of policy, infrastructure, economics, and social norms were identified and four key feedback loops between these themes are discussed. It is shown how individual behaviour in relation to travel mode choice is influenced by system-wide factors that, in the Belfast context, make car use the easiest and most convenient choice for the majority.

This paper maps the distribution of post-conflict violence in Belfast and how it has restructured socially, economically and spatially. An end to hostilities and stable transition produces and is produced by a more complex set of distinctly urban assemblages, actors, resources and places. Bringing the ideas of 'ordering' into relation with assemblage theory, the paper suggests that explanations for the survival, volume, type and distribution of violence cannot be understood within exclusively ethnonational frames, identarian politics or military logics. In Belfast, the data reveal a more variegated map of peace and consumption; inner-city alienation and the intensification of division; as well as the emergence of new geographies of displaced violence. The paper concludes by emphasising the need to understand how urban processes and competing ethnic orders create highly differentiated spaces that explain the resilience of violence after hostilities have formally closed.

Blue Growth is gaining momentum, opening up new frontiers for economic development, with potentially negative impacts on coastal communities and seascapes. The impact of Blue Growth projects on communities and seascapes is generally understood through narrow technical or economic approaches that focus on the potential loss of coastal views or the depreciating impacts on property values, ignoring the complex relationships communities have with seascapes. These approaches often dislodge non-quantifiable community-seascape relationships from Blue Growth strategies, leading to community frustration and contestation. Understanding community-seascape relationships is key to developing more locally attuned Blue Growth strategies. We conceptualise seascapes as a triadic space incorporating perceived, conceived and lived dimensions. These dimensions have an impact on how communities experience and respond to contestation. We use a participatory photo-elicitation methodology with two community groups on the west coast of Ireland to understand how contestation occurs in places faced with multiple Blue Growth pressures and the mechanisms communities deploy in response. We find that although communities care deeply about changes taking place at the coast and sea and frame their ‘common’ landscapes as cultural assets that are worthy of defence, community practices remain impotently emotional or focused on ephemeral oppositions to specific Blue Growth developments. Such responses, however, are not strong enough for sufficiently mobilising a sustainable solution to dominant growth models. We suggest that if communities are properly supported to invest in knowledge, skills, networks and assets, they can mobilise more sustainable solutions to dominant growth models that threaten their coastal seascapes and cultural heritage. Finally, we highlight the transformative potential of the lived space of communities, not as a descriptor of a different typology of coastal landscape, but rather as a resource to understand how communities affected by multiple pressures can understand their options, capacity to resist and what their goal might be for the future of the coast.

Postwar cities are often dangerous, poorly functioning, and hurdles for peace. Current research on postwar cities, however, is largely based on a limited number of “paradigmatic” cases, without a shared understanding of the broader population of cases to which these belong. Important insights therefore remain uncontextualized vis-à-vis broader trends and have an unclear scope of generalizability. The purpose of this article is to promote a global comparativist research agenda that enables systematic research across a spectrum of research foci. First, we conceptualize the postwar city as a city which has experienced war, no longer does, but where fully consolidated peace is not yet present. Second, we operationalize and map postwar cities since 1989, identifying 273 such cities in 45 war-affected states. Third, we provided a typology of contestation in postwar cities. We end by highlighting how our approach advances the research agenda by enabling systematic study of postwar cities, capturing postwar cities more equally across the globe, bringing to the fore numerous understudied cases, and providing a stronger foundation for comparative analysis.

Serving as a key delivery mechanism for Queen’s University Belfast’s (UK) strategic commitment to social and civic responsibility and economic prosperity, Queen’s Communities and Place is a research initiative based on engagement and partnership between communities, policy makers and academics. Combining academic expertise and experiential knowledge from the community, Queen’s Communities and Place uses a ‘place-based’ approach to co-create new solutions to address persistent physical, economic and social challenges, as well as to strengthen the engagement between Queen’s University and its surrounding communities. Queen’s Communities and Place launched in November 2021 with our anchor partner in the Market community in inner south Belfast. We are also working collaboratively with projects and communities in the north, west and east of Belfast across a range of sectors and academic disciplines. We have sought to challenge existing frameworks, with evidence-led, data-driven approaches to build interventions and practices together to identify what might work better here for communities to thrive. Capturing three perspectives – academic, community and local government – this co-written reflective article details the experience of establishing a working partnership with our pilot community, and provides some examples of how our approach is working to address the challenges on the ground to date.

Age-friendly cities and communities have emerged as a significant policy, participative and governance response to ageing and its spatial effects. This paper argues that it has important benefits in mobilizing older people, placing age on the urban agenda and building recognition across politicians, policy makers and programme managers. Based on the experience of Belfast (UK), the analysis suggests, however, that it needs to be understood within wider urban restructuring processes, the importance of the property economy and how planning practices favour particular groups and modes of development. Drawing on demographic data, policy documents and in-depth interviews, it evaluates the relationship between age and urban regeneration, research-based advocacy and central-local relations in health and place-based care. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of knowledge in competitive policy arenas and the need to focus on the most excluded and isolated old and where and how they live.

Coastal and marine cultural heritage (CMCH) is at risk due to its location and its often indefinable value. As these risks are likely to intensify in the future, there is an urgent need to build CMCH resilience. We argue that the current CMCH risk management paradigm narrowly focuses on the present and preservation. This tends to exclude debates about the contested nature of resilience and how it may be achieved beyond a strict preservationist approach. There is a need, therefore, to progress a broader and more dynamic framing of CMCH management that recognises the shift away from strict preservationist approaches and incorporates the complexity of heritage's socio-political contexts. Drawing on critical cultural heritage literature, we reconceptualise CMCH management by rethinking the temporality of cultural heritage. We argue that cultural heritage may exist in four socio-temporal manifestations (extant, lost, dormant, and potential) and that CMCH management consists of three broad socio-political steering processes (continuity, discontinuity, and transformation). Our reconceptualisation of CMCH management is a first step in countering the presentness trap in CMCH management. It provides a useful conceptual framing through which to understand processes beyond the preservationist approach and raises questions about the contingent and contested nature of CMCH, ethical questions around loss and transformation, and the democratisation of cultural heritage management.

Natural environments, such as parks, woodlands and lakes, have positive impacts on health and wellbeing. Urban Green and Blue Spaces (UGBS), and the activities that take place in them, can significantly influence the health outcomes of all communities, and reduce health inequalities. Improving access and quality of UGBS needs understanding of the range of systems (e.g. planning, transport, environment, community) in which UGBS are located. UGBS offers an ideal exemplar for testing systems innovations as it reflects place-based and whole society processes, with potential to reduce non-communicable disease (NCD) risk and associated social inequalities in health. UGBS can impact multiple behavioural and environmental aetiological pathways. However, the systems which desire, design, develop, and deliver UGBS are fragmented and siloed, with ineffective mechanisms for data generation, knowledge exchange and mobilisation. Further, UGBS need to be co-designed with and by those whose health could benefit most from them, so they are appropriate, accessible, valued and used well. This paper describes a major new prevention research programme and partnership, GroundsWell, which aims to transform UGBS-related systems by improving how we plan, design, evaluate and manage UGBS so that it benefits all communities, especially those who are in poorest health. We use a broad definition of health to include physical, mental, social wellbeing and quality of life. Our objectives are to transform systems so that UGBS are planned, developed, implemented, maintained and evaluated with our communities and data systems to enhance health and reduce inequalities. GroundsWell will use interdisciplinary, problem-solving approaches to accelerate and optimise community collaborations among citizens, users, implementers, policymakers and researchers to impact research, policy, practice and active citizenship. GroundsWell will be shaped and developed in three pioneer cities (Belfast, Edinburgh, Liverpool) and their regional contexts, with embedded translational mechanisms to ensure that outputs and impact have UK-wide and international application.

To achieve sustained participation, community science projects aim to satisfy the motivations and desired personal outcomes of their volunteers. Evaluating participation is, therefore, crucial, with projects seeking to assess volunteers' motivations for engagement and the complex outcomes that they achieve through their participation. Many assessments have, however, ineffectively examined the relationship between volunteers' motivations and how they relate to the personal outcomes that they wish to pursue. Evaluations of the personal outcomes achieved by volunteers often fail to consider whether these outcomes were desired or if they aligned with volunteers' motivations, and tend to narrowly focus on general outcomes, such as developing scientific or environmental literacy. Failing to link motivations and outcomes can mean that participation becomes unfulfilling for volunteers, as their desires may not be achieved, lessening the likelihood of sustained engagement. If the satisfaction of volunteers is to be accurately understood, assessing the full scope of their motivations in conjunction with their desired outcomes is crucial. We address this research gap by conducting a survey (n = 308) with the participants of 8 marine community science projects in Ireland and the UK, critically assessing volunteers' roles, motivations, outcomes and experiences of participation through an exploratory factor analysis. We find a range of patterns amongst respondents and identify 4 types of volunteer profiles: Activists, Conservationists, Professionals and Hobbyists. We discuss how categorising volunteers in this manner can better reflect the motivations and desires of volunteers and highlight the factors that support or inhibit the realisation of these intentions within specific projects. We conclude by suggesting that projects seeking to better understand participation should broaden their evaluative scope to embrace a wider range of volunteer motivational pathways, discussing how this can improve both a project's management of volunteers and its capacity to realise both project and volunteer outcomes.

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the strategic policy processes, economic structures and tactics within which age and plac e programmes are formed, implemented and evaluated. The research draws on the Multiple Streams Approach to understand the relationship between problem identification, policy processes and politics and how they come together to respond to the needs of older people. Drawing on Belfast (UK) the paper examines the interactions between planning, health and social policies in the creation of an age-friendly city. The data questions the claim to age-friendliness given the way in which older people are increasingly shifted from the asset-rich urban core to the suburban periphery. It highlights the need to understand how structural processes, the property economy and an emphasis on speculative development have favoured policies based on gentrification in general and youthification in particular. The paper reflects on the limitations of the Multiple Streams Approach but also shows that the challenge of ageing and place is not simply one of weak integration or poor governance. The way in which interests, policies and politics shape better outcomes for older people needs to be factored into initiatives to create a more inclusive approach to urban planning.

This chapter critically explores the challenges and opportunities of adopting a mixed methods approach to coastal change. We reflect on our experiences of a study that involved a tourist survey and participant-led, photo-elicitation focus groups with two coastal communities in Ireland. The survey found that tourists display complex perceptions of coastal landscapes that resonate with local representations as narrated by focus group participants. Despite the contrasting epistemological roots underpinning the different methods adopted, the use of mixed methods offered a fruitful way to understand the nature of coastal change. There are, however, significant challenges when undertaking mixed methods research, relating to the complexity of data integration and balancing different methodological strands, that need to be critically evaluated prior to and during any study.

Reducing car dependency requires orchestrated multi-sectoral, multi-policy action in a complex landscape. Thus, development of proposed interventions to reduce car dependency should be informed by systems thinking, complexity science, and socio-technical transition theory. We aim to co-design sustainable systems-oriented intervention approaches to reduce car dependency in Belfast. The study includes seven integrated tasks-1: Map stakeholders and partnerships influencing car dependency using stakeholder network analysis; 2: A review of systematic reviews regarding interventions to reduce car dependency; 3: Map-related policies via analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews; 4: A participatory group model building workshop to co-produce a shared understanding of the complex system perpetuating car dependency and a transition vision; 5: Using Discrete Choice Experiments, survey road users to evaluate the importance of transport infrastructure attributes on car dependency and on alternative modes of travel; 6: Citizen juries will 'sense-check' possible actions; and, 7: Stakeholders will interpret the findings, plan orchestrated multi-sectoral action, and agree on ways to sustain collaborations towards the common vision of reducing car dependency. We expect to attain a systemic view of the car dependency issue, potential intervention approaches to reduce it, and a framework for their integration through the co-ordination of stakeholder actions.

Governments are increasingly adopting Blue Growth strategies as a means of promoting economic development. Although Blue Growth offers development opportunities, from a local perspective it is often concentrated in inaccessible sectors or has negative impacts on coastal communities and landscapes. We argue that to be of use to local communities, tourist experiences of coastal landscapes need to be understood from a community-led, rather than market-led, perspective. Tourist market segmentation can help reveal such experiences but has predominately been used in a narrow, econometric way by the tourism industry, market researchers and policymakers. These approaches often fail to capture the innate experiential nature of coastal tourism and often result in the production of coastal tourism that is unsympathetic to community landscape perspectives and values. To address this gap, this paper adopts an experiential tourist segmentation approach based on community experiences of coastal landscapes. Applied to data collected from a tourist survey on the west coast of Ireland, we identify five landscape experiences: well-being experiences; conscientious travel experiences; nature experiences; coastal change experiences; and cultural experiences. Based on these experiences, four alternative tourist segments were identified, with significant alignment to communities around sustainable, ethical and locally sensitised forms of tourism, as follows: Blue Health Seekers; Nature Escapers; Pristine Seekers; and Heritage Explorers. The paper concludes by arguing that adopting more experiential and dialogical approaches to market segmentation will identify tourist and communities’ perspectives in ways that are compatible and will reveal opportunities for more inclusive and locally accessible forms of Blue Growth.

The review of Social Economics and the Solidarity City (Murtagh 2019) in this collection (not just in this particular book) reveals the plurality of meanings, analytical perspectives, values, evide...