How We Got Here and Where We are Going Next
By David Skinner 11/11/24
As a Sense of Place enters a new phase it is useful to reflect on our project’s genesis, the slow and serendipitous way in which it evolved, and the direction we are heading.
Pre-history
The beginnings of the project connect to my academic and personal history. I am a sociologist based at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) who specialises in studying the social and political dimensions of science and technology. My primary interest has for many years been in the changing politics of ‘race’ and science, particularly in relation to the new life sciences. I have published on genetics and identity, police use of forensic DNA, and the practical, ethical, and legal challenges of managing genetic data. I have taught numerous cohorts of undergraduate and postgraduate sociology students about the novelty and significance of new life science.
I have lived and worked in Cambridge for over thirty years. Given my academic interests, it increasingly felt obtuse not to acknowledge that I was rooted in one of key sites of global life science. I began to cultivate an interest in science in place. How was the growth of the life sciences changing the social, economic, and material fabric of Cambridge and its surrounding areas? What specifically was it about this location that made it a global centre for these new forms of science and their associated forms of capitalism?
A Chilly Walk With Students Early 2020
My home is a short bicycle ride from the biomedical campus. In 2018 I began to take groups of students around the campus, using it as an illustration of the significance of life science in general. In 2019 the Chair of a local community forum asked me to co-lead a campus walk for their members. Showing up for the start of this walk on a sunny Sunday morning I was shocked that it had attracted over fifty participants. On this walk discussion of science blurred into discussion of the locality – neuroscience and traffic congestion, pharmacogenetics and house prices, venture capitalism and the chalk stream, and so on.
My initial approach to walking the campus was didactic; I saw myself as the all-knowing tour guide sharing their wisdom with a grateful audience. I like to think my approach became subtler and more reflective through experience and thanks to exposure to the rich body of social science that uses walking methodologies. In 2019 I participated in Thinking on the Move: The Possibilities and Problems of Walking Sociologically, an inspiring event co-organised by the Sociological Review Foundation and the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, London. From this point on I understood my work on the campus as an exploration of the possibilities of on-the-move methods.
The Start of the 2019 Community Walk [Credit: Chris Rand]
In 2020 I experienced the campus as a patient. I was admitted to Addenbrookes Hospital following a series of heart attacks and then transferred to Royal Papworth Hospital for by-pass surgery. Under the circumstances I was probably too excited to be moved between hospitals via a tunnel that had previously only been the stuff of campus rumour and legend. I spent ten days waiting for surgery alone in a room with a prime view of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the on-going construction of Astra Zeneca’s headquarters. My recovery began in a room with a less inspiring view of a new carpark.
I continued to walk the campus alone and with others, but my ill-health and the pandemic meant that while my interest was percolating but it did not turn into anything more concrete. In 2021 I was contacted by Sam, the chair of the community forum who had recently been elected as independent city councillor. As we walked around our neighbourhood Sam rehearsed a series of concerns about the expansion of the campus and what she saw as a lack of curiosity from the public and other local politicians about its implications. Sam encouraged me to think about how I might contribute to local discussion about the campus growth. A seed was planted. My eventual response was slower and different from the one she had envisaged but when I did eventually develop an idea for engaging locals with the campus Sam and her forum colleagues were very supportive.
My 2020 View of the Campus from Royal Papworth Hospital
2022-2023: Learning on the Move
Despite this long autobiographical preamble, it is important to note that A Sense of Place only gained momentum (or indeed a name) when I became we. In 2022 I reconnected with Will Brown, a former student who had gone on the study a Masters in urban sociology at the University of Amsterdam and was in the final stages on completing a PhD in the Engineering Department at Loughborough University about smart cities that used Cambridge as a case study. Will’s background and interests complemented mine and he was the perfect candidate to work as a researcher on a project about the campus.
With Will in mind, I applied for seed corn funding from ARU’s Safe & Inclusive Communities research and innovation theme. This funding stream supported projects with immediate and sustainable impact; I proposed a series of activities and outputs aimed at promoted awareness and discussion of the campus among local people. ARU provided seven thousand pounds of funding that supported initial research and allowed me to employ Will part-time. His contribution and commitment were beyond what one could expect from a temporary research assistant and the project grew into a partnership. Having completed his doctorate Will now works at Cambridge University as a research associate in urban systems and carbon management, whilst continuing as co-leader of A Sense of Place.
What we would now deem phase one of the project began in February 2023 and culminated in a period of intense outward facing activity in June and July 2023. The campus was changing before our eyes during this period. The long-delayed opening of AstraZeneca’s Discovery Centre was in sight and a series of associated development and landscaping sprung up around the building. Another signature development 1000 Discovery Drive, the first example of speculative development on campus, built to house smaller life science businesses was also taking shape. Plans for the new Cancer Research Hospital advanced. Early work began on Cambridge South Station designed to serve the site. In and around the city there was a discussion about a new Local Plan and associated proposals to expand the campus further using land currently in the Green Belt.
Our funding supported the use of on-the-move methods as a means of engaging the public with the campus. I had envisaged a few preparatory interviews with key informants as background research, but interviews became a far more important element of the project. Where possible we conducted interviews on or near to the campus. Ideally, we sought the opportunity of walking with our interviewees through the campus or, in one case, around the old Papworth Hospital site. Weather permitting, walking conversations were particularly effective at prompting people about the detail of place and allowed a more organic exchange than a conventional Q&A.
Interviews aside, our focus was designing, delivering, and documenting a series of group guided themed walks for local people. This entailed considerable background research into the campus and other examples of guided walks, as well as a period of planning and delivering pilot walks to various test audiences. Ultimately, we produced three guided walks (digital PDF versions available here):
· Why Here, Why Now? considered the significance attached to the new life sciences and how this was reflected in the expansion of the campus. Why was the campus in Cambridge? Why locate scientific research next to hospitals?
· A Short History of the Future of the Biomedical Campus considered the past, present and proposed future of the campus. It examined the visions for the site produced at various points in its development. Authors of previous visions had framed them as responses to the growing health needs of the local area, but the campus was now envisioned as a globally significant centre of scientific progress and wealth creation.
· The Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter connected and compared the campus with developments in the life sciences taking place at the other end of the Cambridge to London trainline.
The campus walks last around 90 minutes and we have delivered them multiple times. We took a different approach to the Kings Cross tour; this was a longer one-off event where we took a small group of co-investigators around the area, at points stopping to conduct prearranged visits and discussions with local experts with the results later added to a digital PDF self-guided version of the tour.
By July 2023 we had conducted 15 interviews in various formats and contexts. 92 people had participated in our pilot or finalised guided walks. There were also self-guided versions of the walks downloadable from our website, although so far, we have no way of knowing if and how they have been used. Our experiences confirmed the value of on-the-move methods not only as a means of engaging people with the campus development but also as a form of data collection.
Walking the campus offered a multi-sensory experience of space – an understanding of presence from which to view the past and future. As researchers we benefitted from repeated visits which allowed us to appreciate how the campus experience shifted at various times of day and days of the week and to note significant changes that were taking place over the six month timescale of the initial project. Repetition enriched our understanding and, in some cases, appreciation of features of the campus which we initially ignored or dismissed whilst the guided walks allowed us to witness the reactions of others as they came to it fresh. The practicalities of guiding groups through the site highlighted the ways in which (particularly in less than perfect weather) it could be inhospitable and hard to navigate. Similarly walking raised questions about public and private space, the difference between the ‘hospital’ part of the campus and the ‘biomedical campus’ part, and being on the inside and the outside of developments: these related not just the formal policing of space but where people felt comfortable staying and moving through.
During the fieldwork, our understanding of the tours changed from the notion of walk as performance or teaching to walks as interaction or exchange. The walks were not only a means of discovering participants’ opinions and feelings about the development of the campus; they were ways of mining their often-detailed knowledge about elements of the site. As with the interviews, our notion of who counted as a key informant or ‘expert’ on the campus blurred: so many knew so much about the campus through their varied and multiple experiences as former or current workers, students, carers, patients, dog walkers, bird watchers, and so on.
Through the process of interviewing, background research, and design and delivery of the walks our thinking about the campus coalesced around several issues. The campus was a manifestation of a wider phenomenon: the massive economic, political, and emotional investment in life science futures. Cambridge was expanding rapidly, driven by a powerful rhetoric about its unique potential as a centre of new life science that could not only revolutionise health can but lead the economic renewal of the UK. This rhetoric set great store by location and proximity, the benefits of achieving an ‘innovation ecosystem’ through critical mass of researchers and the importance of ‘co-locating’ academics and medics, the public and private sectors. As some fellow walkers remarked, however, this common sense about the importance of proximity - which in Cambridge was typically expressed in terms of scientists needing to be within walking or cycling distance from each other - deserved unpacking: precisely why was it important and how close was close enough?
The campus is the largest of several key life science locations in and around Cambridge but is a unique combination of actors and activities. Its USP is the co-location of academic and commercial science with hospitals on one (using a term used by promotors of expansion) ‘symbiotic’ site. This is often celebrated as a happy story of ‘lab bench to hospital bed’ i.e. of local patients being the first to directly benefit from the research and innovation taking place on the campus. But the symbiosis is most significant in terms ‘bed to bench’: walking the site reminds us of the importance patients as the objects of life science. Patients are a vital resource for both training and research; they are the subjects for trials of new treatments, they are data points in statistical studies, they donate their bodily materials, and additionally can act as champions of science, highlighting the importance of research funding and smoothing out ethical concerns about new developments.
The neatness of visions of a symbiotic site contrast with its messy realities. Co-location and proximity results in some uncomfortable disjunctions, not least between the new shiny facilities of commercial life science and the frayed and over-stretched Addenbrookes Hospital. It was not always clear to our fellow walkers how and why the various elements sat together: what made the campus a cohesive entity rather than a collection of institutions and buildings? The scale, complexity and continual development of the site made it hard to grasp its detail fully: we sometimes stumbled to answer the deceptively simple question ‘what happens in that building?’ but came to feel less inadequate as guides as we realised that people who worked on site were often similarly defeated. This complexity extended to basic questions of ownership and accountability; there is an entity called Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC) Ltd that attempts to coordinate or represent various actors on the campus but could hardly be said to be fully in control of it. As plans to expand the site further progressed the complexities were placed into sharp relief – the patterns of land ownership, the site developers, and the processes of planning and associated public consultations could often seem opaque.
We want to avoid homogenizing the varied perspectives and concerns of the people who joined our walks. Never-the-less some themes recurred in our discussions on-the-move. While our fellow walkers wanted to know more about the development of the campus, they also had multiple current and historical connections with the site as workers, patients, carers, and/or neighbours. They associate the hospitals located there with key moments in their life: the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, their struggles with chemotherapy and so on. These past connections help explain the investment that many felt in the development of the campus. The expansion of the campus is driven by multiple visions of the future – of the transformation of healthcare, of the economic potentials of commercialised life science, of the growth of the region and its infrastructure – people’s attitude to the campus today and tomorrow is influenced by whether they can see themselves in these futures.
The on-going development of the campus raised questions for walkers about place that are both about the consequences for the locality immediately surrounding the site and about changes to the city of Cambridge as a whole. Some of these related to the negative impacts of growth i.e. disruption, congestion and pressure on services and infrastructure (most strikingly the shortage of water). There are also concerns about the ways that further expansion would encroach on spaces and views on the outskirts of the city which were ascribed particular significance in the history and identity of Cambridge: Nine Wells; Hobsons Conduit and Gog Magog hill. Expansion will entail building on agricultural land currently in the green belt: for some this encroachment was a matter of great significance while others were enthusiastic about the prospect that it would be compensated for with the construction of additional managed natural space for public use.
As this suggests, mundane concerns about locality often bled into wider questions about the distinctiveness and boundedness of the city. Was the campus part of the city or outside of it? This issue was further complicated as the proposed footprint of the city grew including in-filling of gaps between the urban centre and outlying settlements. If the campus was part of the wider growth of a greater Cambridge, then how did it integrate into the wider area? Was it a distinct zone of activity or a new city ‘quarter’? This related to more concrete issues around nascent attempts to improve the facilities and social infrastructure on campus. Who was this for, exclusively the people who worked on site or the wider local community? The campus boosters traded on the notion that Cambridge was a special, unique place, both as a site of knowledge production and as a place to live. Some walkers viewed expansion as a threat to that specialness. This could be expressed in terms of the aesthetics of the campus; a few walkers memorably complained that the campus was ugly or ‘did not look like Cambridge.’
Our walks could be seen as a form of guerrilla science communication that met untapped demand for more knowledge and understanding of what was happening on the campus. This is not to suggest, however that no other community engagement was taking place. During this first phase of fieldwork, we observed seven engagement activities and there were others that we could have attended if we had the time. Participation in these events brought us into contact with a range of people delivering public engagement. These included engagement professionals, such as press officers, science education and study recruitment consultants, and institutional archivists. There were also people who worked on campus who took on public engagement activities in addition to their core work role e.g., scientists who participated in outreach activities.
Engagement activities had a variety of formats and objectives. Some were attempts at campus community building that also attempted to include people from the wider locality. Others were educational events that sought to raise public understanding of the science taking place on the campus. Last but by no means we witnessed early, sometimes stumbling attempts to inform and consult with locals about the plans to expand the campus. These activities could be impressive but researching and delivering our walk in Kings Cross showed how they might be taken to another level. The Francis Crick Institute and other organisations in the Kings Cross knowledge quarter had a long-term, coordinated commitment supporting their local community and educating local schoolchildren. The ambition, sustained financial investment, and tightly focused approach had no equivalent on the campus.
2024: Update and Consolidation
Phase One was funded as a community engagement project and achieved its primary goal of immediate impact whilst delivering worthwhile methodological insights. The exciting flurry of activity in spring and summer 2023 left us keen to continue to study the campus and develop academic outputs arising from our fieldwork. Both of us had other commitments but at the start of 2024 we successfully applied for more support from ARU that allowed us to update and consolidate our previous work.
The bulk of the funding was for secondary research to realise the academic potentials of the project. Aided by a research assistant (Gianluca Palombo) we conducted a comparative literature review to contextualise the growth of the campus and the wider expansion of Cambridge. We were struck by the way that the importance of the life sciences was used as a key justification for plans to dramatically develop Cambridge and its surrounding areas. We focused our review on the ways which globally science and technology is used as a driver of urban regeneration and economic growth and looked at existing research on the social changes that accompany this kind of development.
Some of the ARU funding supported further community impact work. We conducted seven more interviews on or near the campus and we observed five further examples of public engagement. We delivered five additional guided walks to approximately fifty people, two of these walks were to the local community and three to groups of students and academics. The theme of the two community walks was what has happened on the campus in the past year. Given the pace and variety changes taking place the effort required to keep up with all that was happening and proposed to happen was considerable. Paradoxically, however, as we became more confident in our knowledge of the campus, our approach to guiding the walks became more relaxed as we allowed our walkers’ questions and interests to guide both the discussion and route.
In our application for impact funding, we set store by improving the digital elements of the project. We relaunched an improved website that hosted self-guided versions of our walks. Our aspirations have yet to be fully achieved, and we continue to explore how best to cultivate a digital presence.
Next Steps: How can We Help?
During the second phase of the project, we had the opportunity to present and discuss our work at conferences and in other academic fora. This convinced us of the wider relevance of our approach and subject matter. But the experience of explaining why, how, and what we are doing also encouraged us to reflect that the organic and piecemeal development of the project so far, while it had allowed high degree of flexibility and responsiveness, also meant that we had never had to define fully our aims, methods, and lines of accountability. We want to be more explicit about these as we enter the final phase of our fieldwork.
Alongside the production of a series of academic outputs, we plan to continue our activities until the end of 2025. We have thought about this final phase. Our underlying commitment is to sustain and deepen the connections we have made on and around the campus. Our aim continues to be to improve understanding of the significance of the developments on the site in dialogue with local communities, users of the campus, and people who work on it. In 2025 we will actively seek out distinct categories of people who may have been underserved by previous project activities and other forms of public engagement. To maximise the impact and sustainability of the project we want our future work to be in partnership with other groups, organisations, and academics.
The coming year will see more discussion about a new local plan and associated proposals to expand the campus further. This will entail public consultation but given the complexities, there are concerns about how to build the required networks and capacity for an effective community response. We want to make a positive contribution, not by adopting a stance on the plans but by supporting meaningful deliberation about them. We hope to offer local planners, developers, employers, and politicians a richer understanding of community perceptions and experiences of the campus development. Alongside this, we will explore how best to facilitate meaningful discourse among that local community.
Our experience suggests that an important basic step to enhancing local discussion is greater clarity about the upcoming consultation(s) about campus expansion. When are they happening? What are their parameters? How will public views be collected and responded to? In the coming months we will be attempting to first collate and then feedback answers to these questions. We also want to encourage reflection about the different constructions of public and stakeholders in play and about how best to acknowledge and support the labour of engagement. Last but by no means least we also want to galvanise the various forms of relevant expertise within the community (which we term lay expertise). More concretely our planned activities are:
1) We will carry on talking and walking with people on tours of the campus. The guided walks underpin all our other activities: not only are they a key engagement tool but also the questions our fellow walkers ask us continue to refine our research agenda. Rather than advertise tours and see who attends, however, we want to move to a model where we offer walks in collaboration with or tailored to the interests of particular demographics or groups.
2) We will contextualise the campus development by looking at other life science sites in and around Cambridge. We want to find academics and residents willing to walk us around their equivalents of the biomedical campus.
3) We will produce a timeline and explanation of the various planning and consultation processes relevant to the future of the campus and a mapping of relevant community stakeholders and lay experts.
4) We will organise workshops with community members, academics, and local experts to discuss the campus’s future.
5) Aided by new tools and content, we will explore how the digital can extend the reach of the project in terms of the number and range of people involved and ensure a legacy beyond the period of fieldwork.