How Do the ’Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel? Public Space and Personal Wellbeing in City Centre Sheffield

Abstract

This paper reports on a pilot project to examine the concept of wellbeing as expressed locally by public reaction to the Peace Gardens refurbishment in the city centre of Sheffield completed in 1999. It was immediately popular with the public, but the aim was to find out what benefit people felt they derived from using the space. The study was conducted via a questionnaire delivered on site to pedestrian traffic over three weeks one summer. Over a thousand users of the space were asked one very simple question: How do the Peace Gardens make you feel? The authors' interpretation of the responses indicates a very high level of approval. Users of the space reported high satisfaction across four themes: wellbeing, safety, community and respite. While these findings largely accord with the literature, further planned city-centre development threatens the success of the Peace Gardens. The paper considers whether the planning of such spaces is designed to empower users to meet others on their own terms, or whether planners recognize that social needs require to be more controlled in busy urban environments.

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to a number of individuals whose contributions were of great assistance to us in the process of publication and they need to be acknowledged here. Thanks therefore go to: the reviewers whose comments helped shape the final product and to the editor(s) who gave us space for publication; to the Sheffield Health & Social Research Consortium who funded the project; to Dr Alice Mathers and Dr Anna Jorgensen, of the University of Sheffield for comments and advice; to Dianne, Ezra, Penny, Claire, Steven, Jacci, Jackie and Dawn who braved the hot weather to administer the questionnaire; to the city centre ambassadors who put up with our presence; to the staff in the Winter Gardens who helped out on that one day when it rained; to Lizzie Orford who assisted with the data input; to Lesley Lockwood of NHS Sheffield for input to the planning stages, and finally and most importantly to all those nice people, mostly from Sheffield, who gave us their time and opinions when we asked them how the Peace Gardens made them feel.