Attitudes and access to greenspace

Working with Research Associate Dr Hannah Pitt, Eliza Arkuszewska a second year student in the School of Geography and Planning, has been investigating the experiences of Cardiff’s parks and greenspaces amongst the city’s Eastern European communities.

Hosted by the Sustainable Places Research Institute, the eight week project supported by Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme (CUROP), is designed to give undergraduates experience of research and gain skills from working on a live project.

Chosen as an area with little research and data available, and as a project suitable for an exploratory piece of work, the project focuses on Eastern European communities in Cardiff to begin uncovering their relationships to greenspace. Providing an opportunity to design and carry out research with local stakeholders and communities, and explore interactions with the urban environment.

Speaking about the project Dr Hannah Pitt said “Previous research into how people benefit from green places has found that not everyone visits them or finds them easy to use.  Cardiff has fantastic parks and greenspace right at its heart, a great resource for the wellbeing of the city’s population, however we don’t know how people who recently moved to the UK from Eastern Europe feel about parks, or how they benefit from them.”

The Programme is open to Cardiff University Students about to enter their final year, with participants selected from open recruitment of under-graduates across the university. Now considered to be one of the largest undergraduate research schemes in the UK, more than 500 students have taken part in placements since 2008, working on such diverse projects as historical archival work, searches for new planets and cancer research.

Find out more about CUROP