This one almost slipped through the net.  Last week we were invited over to Kidderminster by Ken Harrison, head of their regen team, to discuss the possibility of doing some RG work with them.  Steph came along too, in her role as our official 'handler' and to represent MADE.  Having enjoyed a free lunch in the town hall and been introduced to Matt Barker (his right hand man), Karen Alexander (arts and play officer) and Amanda Hall (conservation), we rather appropriately went out for a walk.

Kiddie seemed to have three main issues.  The closure of many of the large carpet factories located in the town centre seemed to have allowed for relatively low density retail developments to take their place.  As a result, some of the central areas resembled out of town shopping developments, with lots of ground level car parks and no real sense of place.  The second issue appeared to be the inner ring road, which not only acts as a classic concrete collar around the central area, but has broken many of the most attractive historical roads in two.  Perhaps the most distressing example of this is the separation of the beautiful church from the central area.  Finally, Kiddie seems to be a place with something of an identity crisis, with unenviable listings in two recent publications - Chav Towns and Crap Towns - compounding a general sense of malaise. 

Having said that, Ken highlighted a number of opportunities.  The town has a number of rivers running through it that could be opened up.  It also has a very attractive skyline, with the towers associated with the carpet factories slightly reminiscent of Florence and rolling countryside visible all around. Some of the areas in need of regeneration have quite unique histories, and one of these, known as the Horsefair, may be perfect for a rescue geography follow up project.  Traditionally populated by traveller communities, the area is now characterised by high levels of socio-economic deprivation and the familiar set of problems that generally accompany this. 

Plans for the area are only just being considered, and Ken emphasised the need to get the local community involved and enhance the unique heritage of the area... he put it nicely when he said there was a need to reconnect people with the space.  In terms of developing the RG methodology as an applied planning consultation tool, the Horsefair regen could be ideal.  Ken and his team also seemed very keen to collaborate, which means that we could get unprecedented access to actors at all stages of the planning process.  If RG is going to have an impact upon the development process this kind of upstream access is priceless.

We decided in principle that we would use Kiddie as the focus for our son / daughter of RG research proposal to the ESRC.  By that time it was drinks-o-clock, so we went and enjoyed a few bevvies in Ye Olde Seven Stars.

Last Thursday we met to discuss how exactly we were going to analyse the walking interview data that Jane has managed to gather over the last 8 months.  Lots of ideas have been buzzing around, mostly from the odd chat here and there, but nothing concrete had been decided.  So we decided to brainstorm it, thinking of every possible thing we could analyse, and then work through them to try and discover what would actually be possible and / or desirable to do.  Here's what we came up with...

Things we are attempting for the analysis

1)      Time spent talking by interviewee and interviewer as against silence in walking vs. seated interviews (word count as proxy measure)

2)      Scatter plot of general weather (Edgbaston weather data) as against length of interview

3)      Map pauses in movement / rate of movement and pauses in speech

4)      Interactions with third persons – how many, who, where, how long

5)      Time and distance of interview against: gender, age, proxy for familiarity with area, lay vs. expert

6)      Time and distance of interview in noisy environments

7)      Sensory typology against which to measure time / distance

a.       Primary distributor road, secondary distributor road, tertiary road

b.      paths

c.       canals

8)      List environmental prompts

9)      Text analysis of how much the environment acts as a prompt to discuss building or how much interviewer prompt or how much general conversation

10)  Map analysis of extent to which we are

a.       at

b.      en route to (close)

c.       en route from (close)

d.      en route to (far)

e.       en route from (far) … the building/phenomenon being discussed

11)  Can we map this against arbitrarily defined vistas/viewpoints

12)  Place discourse – speech acts revealing: preference (vs) evaluation, scale, hierarchies, informal toponymy

13)  Identification of cognitive clusters across transcripts (intertextual analysis)

Looks simple enough, but there is quite a lot of work in some of these tasks.  We split the work between spatial analysis (anything involving the GIS), which Phil is checking out, and the textual, which I'm working on.

When I started going through the first walking interview transcript two main difficulties became apparent. Firstly, in terms of people mentioning places or buildings, there are some issues with what counts.  So for example, people may mention a factory by name, and then say in passing that there were three others on such and such street.  Technically they are making a spatial reference, but in such a general way that there is little practical worth in counting it.  It is a grey area.

The second issue is how best to organise the analysis.  So, for example, we are starting with an excel spreadsheet that lists each 'place' mentioned in the transcript and then recording various characteristics about how, why and where the place is mentioned.  But boiling down these things into analytical categories is difficult, because it is hard to know how much detail to go into.  For example, is it enough to break places referred to down into buildings, environmental features and roads, or are more categories required? 

As you go along grappling with these questions the actual categories also change, as it become apparent that some of the things we thought would be important aren't, or that one category actually subsumes another.  The thing I have to keep reminding myself of is that this exploratory process of trial and error is exactly what a pilot project like RG is all about - it will take a while to figure out the best way to do things!  Anyway, my first job tomorrow it to plough through the first transcript...