Ella O’Neill is a doctoral researcher with BCNUEJ at ICTA-UAB, where she studies the impacts of urban greening initiatives particularly on mental health. She explores the potential of resistance and agency for local residents in conflicts over green space with the municipality, as well as the importance of including coproduction in urban greening projects to achieve more just and equitable outcomes for marginalised populations. We asked her how she was drawn to this topic, what she loves most about her work as a researcher and what she feels is missing in academia.
How did you become interested in urban and environmental justice and end up at ICTA-UAB?
I studied the Masters in Interdisciplinary Sustainability at ICTA-UAB and as part of the course we had some amazing classes given by members of BCNUEJ. The topics brought together perfectly the different aspects of my interests in one succinct focus, which I hadn’t really been able to do before. It was such a nice little taster into these topics with such a strong emphasis on justice, I wanted to explore further. So, I carried out my Master’s thesis with supervision from the lab, followed by an internship and now a PhD!
Did your upbringing somehow influence your path?
I grew up in Cornwall in the UK, in one of the most beautiful places! It has many protected landscapes and areas classified as outstanding natural beauty. My mum lives in a hamlet of a handful of houses. When I moved to London, I felt so stressed and overwhelmed all the time by the city so I kept searching for spaces where I felt I could breathe, particularly blue spaces as I grew up by the sea. I think this influenced my obsession with finding pockets of nature within cities but still feeling that they sometimes were so weird and merely a band-aid for what I was actually craving. Now my research is all about understanding these spaces, how and why they were constructed and other people’s experiences of them.
Tell us a bit about your current investigation and where you want to go with it.
I am looking at urban greening projects and how they impact health, in terms of who has access to them and who they have been created for. I have just rounded off my second paper looking at a municipal project Parks for Health in London that was centred around cocreation and participatory methods but was still inhibited in reaching its aims addressing health issues equitably by a number of structural limitations.
I am now exploring an EU-funded project taking place in a community garden in Amsterdam called NatureLab, where residents have not been included in the process. I am seeking to address this gap and in light of some of the limitations presented in the previous paper, explore methods in which to overcome some of these barriers. I hope to use storytelling by residents to understand how they use the garden and what they want to see implemented.
What do you most love about your work?
I love that such a huge part of the work is talking to and meeting so many different people and just trying to understand how people feel and relate to their worlds.
What are the most common difficulties you come across as a researcher?
The thing I find the most difficult is navigating my privilege when academia is already such a privileged space to have access to. It’s difficult to feel like you deserve to be in that space and sometimes I feel guilty for having this chance. On the flip side, I really feel the weight of responsibility to understand this positionality and account for it in my research.
What are the most significant or surprising insights you’ve gathered through your research at BCNUEJ?
I think one of the things I was most surprised about was how honest some of my interviewees were about each other. Although I had encouraged them to be honest and guaranteed anonymity, I was still shocked at how they completely threw each other under the bus considering they’d been working as a team for 3+ years!
In what ways do you feel that academia should improve?
Science and academia needs to spend more time breaking down the points of access into this space. We need focus on encouraging people that generally feel less entitled to education and make it a welcoming space for them. They need to be supported throughout the learning process from Bachelor’s to Master’s to further, encouraging them to have confidence to pursue a career in research if that’s what they want, rather than feeling that this might not be the path for them as they do not know anyone else who has followed this trajectory.
How much of an impact do you feel that your work, and that of other researchers, has on the ground?
If we’re doing it the right way, hopefully we do have an impact. I think it starts with thinking about your research in more of a connected way, rather than just shooting into the dark with something you are interested in. Of course the two can overlap but I think it starts with asking what is needed here? What gap can you fill as a researcher? How can you use your access to this privileged space? I’m still really figuring out how to do this and I’m trying to be humble about it. It’s very easy to get really excited about something but maybe it’s only exciting to you and not necessarily the best use of people’s time.
