by Laura Dobie

This week is Love Parks Week (25^th July-3^rd August), an annual campaign to raise the profile of local parks and green spaces. The initiative, managed by Keep Britain Tidy and Love Where You Live, began in 2006 with the aim to encourage people to visit and take a pride in their local parks and highlight their vital contribution to healthy, happy and strong communities.

The campaign has been growing year on year, and last year there were 1,100 events across the country, with approximately 1.4 million participants. The quality of green spaces is an important concern for the campaign, and its Park Health Check questionnaire invites people to rate the quality of their local green spaces and contribute to a report assessing the health of the nation’s parks. With listings for a variety of events across the UK, and promotional materials available to help people to promote events in green spaces in their communities, it is clear that Love Parks Week is raising awareness of parks and green spaces and making the case for continued investment in these places in the face of funding constraints.

At The Knowledge Exchange, we’re aware of the vital role that green spaces play in local communities and the benefits that they provide. Our research briefing, The importance of green infrastructure, provides an introduction to the concept of green infrastructure, highlighting beneficial impacts in areas such as tourism spend, the environment and employment. It also reviews policy in this area across the different regions of the UK, and presents a range of case studies, research resources, guides and toolkits on green infrastructure.

For a more detailed discussion of recent green infrastructure projects in Glasgow, see our earlier blog post on Architecture and Design Scotland’s This Friday Presents… Integrating Green and Grey talk.