Rescue Geography started as a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, run by Phil Jones and James Evans. We employed Jane Ricketts Hein to do the interviews to allow us to get on with our day jobs, working as lecturers at the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester respectively. The funding for the project ran September 2007 to August 2008.
Essentially the idea of Rescue Geography is to 'rescue' local people's understandings of an area before it is redeveloped, just as rescue archaeologists go into an area to record archaeological traces which are threatened by new building. We're hoping that the techniques we've developed will help planners and developers use local knowledge to inform regeneration activity in an area. Our technique is to use walking interviews, where you actually get people to give you a guided tour of the area, rather than just sitting in a room somewhere asking people what they like about the area. We believe this technique produces rich insights into how people value particular places.
We've piloted these techniques in the Digbeth/Deritend area of Birmingham, part of which has been rebranded 'Eastside' as part of a major ongoing redevelopment project.
In 2004 Michael Burawoy, President of the American Sociological Association, called for a more critical and engaged ‘public sociology’. The debate Burawoy started has moved beyond the boundaries of sociology and geographers have been keen to engage with these ideas. Public geographers seek to produce accessibly written work in a variety of non-traditional media, with efforts focused on collaborative/participatory forms of research with non-academics and the co-construction of knowledge. While these ideas have stimulated considerable debate, relatively little work has been undertaken in exploring the methodological issues raised by public geographies – in essence, how does one do public geography? Rescue Geography brings together a series of research methods and assesses their effectiveness for achieving some of the goals of public geography. Drawing on the research interests of the investigators, issues surrounding the regeneration of an urban area has been explored. The process draws inspiration from rescue archaeology, creating a ‘rescue geography’ which attempts to record local, non-academic knowledges about an area prior to its being transformed beyond recognition by a development process. In the Eastside district of Birmingham construction work is just beginning on a long-term project which will change the face of the area, making it an excellent case study for piloting these ideas. The primary research technique assessed was that of the walked interview. Prior to this project, little work had been undertaken evaluating the effectiveness of being ‘in’ a particular place with an informant to stimulate their discussion of that area. The informants are divided into three groups: the first participates solely in a walked interview; the second solely in a traditional (stationary) interview; and the third group is interviewed twice in both a traditional and walked context. Content analysis of interview transcripts examines how different themes emerge from the stationary and walked interviews. Analysing the interviews from the third group will exposes how themes develop through the two different interview forms.
The use GPS (‘sat nav’) technologies during the interviews allows us to record the extent to which comments about particular spaces/buildings are made in/adjacent to them. Combining these tracks with ‘contour’ maps of ambient noise allowed us to investigate whether certain areas are explored in less detail because of the noise from traffic and other sources interfering with the interview process. This precise matching of qualitative data and spatial context is highly innovative and allows researchers to give a ‘voice’ to the otherwise impersonal traces left by GPS tracking.
The methodological assessment and development of these techniques has clear usefulness to academics seeking to advance the debate on public geographies. The pilot study itself also gave a voice to a community which is being radically affected by the re-visioning of Birmingham’s Eastside district and its subsequent redevelopment. This accessing and validating of non-academic knowledges of an area is at the heart of the public geographies agenda.