Roots & Sky - Opportunities and Challenges for the Rooftop Gardener

Description

The use of rooftop gardens to promote health, wellbeing and quality of life within the university setting: Barriers and facilitators to using rooftop gardens within ‘life-promoting’ campuses. ABSTRACT A rapidly-expanding evidence-base that consistently supports the benefits of nature to improve a diverse range of health, social, functional and academic outcomes. However, this potential has yet to be fully recognised, despite local, national and international policies and legislation drawing increasingly on this evidence to encourage nature-assisted theory and practice in a variety of areas, including public and/or preventative health and social care, community development and settings-based interventions education). For example, natural resources have been found to be an integral feature of healthy and well-designed campuses (Dooris et al, 2010; Hajrasouliha & Ewing, 2016) but are usually under-utilised. A working party (featuring staff and student representatives from a wide range of academic and professional disciplines) was formed in 2016, to explore ways of developing an under-used garden area on the roof of Coventry University’s Student Hub building in order to promote not only health and wellbeing but social and educational outcomes. This presentation will reflect on the progress of the working party so far and present findings from a pilot study to understand how people within the University would most like to see the area being used. Opportunity will be provided for the audience to collaborate in exploring ways to overcome barriers to realising these wishes, and to optimise the oppportunities available in the future.

Period	30 Sep 2017
Event type	Conference
Location	Birmingham, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National