Why so few ethnic minority women walk outdoors in UK greenspaces

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It is somewhat ironic that my invitation to deliver a social marketing presentation on how to attract mainly non-users to participate in a local urban area development of a prescribed active, leisure zone, represented the catalyst for my awakening to the concept of embodied racial place inequalities. The purpose of this working group was the development of a local greenspace as a community asset to encourage outdoor leisure for everyone regardless of class, colour, or creed. This designated area was being developed to provide a defined leisure space for those in the community who were already physically active as well as to facilitate easy access for more marginalised groups to engage in varied outdoor activities in salubrious surroundings. It was expected that this provision of outdoor greenspace would encourage locals to participate at least in what is considered as the entry level physical activity of walking. Generally, walking is accessible for most able-bodied people as there are no requirements of training or skills to start, or for special equipment, and is a low-impact exercise that may be readily undertaken by varying fitness levels. Walking is largely a low-cost leisure activity, with opportunities for individual or group walks, and has the least barriers to participation than most other leisure activities. As such the development of this activity zone ticked the box of adhering to the values of equity and social justice.

But as I scanned the room during my presentation and observed the demographic profile of the planners and decision-makers who were majority white, male Generation Xers and millennials, I wondered if their good-will would be enough to achieve the goal of widening participation to include people of colour and other racialised groups that statistics clearly indicate are the least represented in participating in outdoor leisure walking across the UK. My consternation deepened even more when even up to the end of my presentation I was not able to even make eye contact with the sole white woman in the room who held a senior management role and a key decision-maker.

While I suppressed my thoughts of the intersectionality of my position as the only female person of colour in attendance, I assumed that being invited as an academic with expertise in place making would perhaps afford me the ‘space’ to participate meaningfully in the project to tackle structural and perceptual barriers that may restrict wider engagement with this activity zone. But despite the commendations I received for the presentation with the promise of further involvement, that was my first and last interaction with the project. It is likely that this full stop on my engagement with this planning group was not due to my assumptions of the incongruity of my positionality as a black female who somehow had some expertise to influence policy at that level. Maybe there were other institutional, personal, or operational entanglements that I was unaware of that hindered me having a role. Whatever the reasons for the discontinuity of my involvement, the project was launched sans my direct contribution.

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Such is the challenge of unsettling top-down planning that seem to inherently operationalise systemic barriers to the widening participation of marginalised community groups. It may start with the lack of presence and representation of minoritized contributors or experts or perhaps someone with the expertise to apply social justice lens to the development process. While I’m only able to reference my lived experience, yet I believe that it is possible that my case may not be unique. Undoubtedly there was the genuine, heartfelt desire and expectation by the planners for this greenspace zone to be enjoyed by all groups and to be inclusive of ethnic minoritised and other racialised groups, yet the overarching approach seem to be in-keeping with the quote associated with the 1989 Field of Dreams movie ‘build it and they will come’. This implies that there is often the assumption that the effort, belief, and goodwill invested in grand projects will determine success. But this positivity bias should not override the hard graft of time, money and positionality required to understand the perspectives and everyday barriers that may prohibit users from minority ethnic groups. While I was not able to conclusively assert that minoritized groups were not consulted in the ongoing development of the project, yet I was grateful for the opportunity from my interaction with it to gain an insight into the embedded, deep rooted challenges underpinning place inequalities. It illustrates the inevitable shift in mindset and power relations that is required to accept that marginalised groups may have a place at the table particularly in the designation of space.

The development of spatial landscapes is socially inscribed and carry values of patrimony, civic and social order that may mask layers of inequality. Hence the term embodied place inequalities which is defined as ways people’s health and wellbeing are impacted by the social, economic, and political inequalities in their environment, that may account for the persistent under-representation of minoritized groups in outdoor walking in urban greenspaces and the countryside. It highlights how race and racism at the interpersonal and structural level may ‘impact mental, emotional and physical health’ https://irrpp.uic.edu/programs/embodied-inequalities/ . The imagining of this greenspace activity zone with the intent to widen participation and access to improve community health, ironically maybe reinforcing spatial disparities and embodied place inequalities. It’s not just only in the countryside where racism alienates minoritized bodies, this wicked problem emerges in pockets of urban and peri-urban greenspaces designated for the common good even within the discourse of public health for all.

In resolving my lack of agency and apparent displacement from this place-making project, I began walking outdoors. Starting with a couple of short rambles in my local village with a friend who was also a woman of colour. As a younger person she was able to recover much more quickly than I could to the ambitious seven mile walk which we embarked on a few weeks later without sufficient information on the distance of the walking trail. As I staggered to the car at the end of the walk, in pain and yet exhilarated that I had done it, I resolved to continue walking but not without guidance and preparation for future walks. The lesson learnt from my walking trek at the peri-urban greenspace is that support may be required to initiate some members from minoritized communities into leisured walking. However, it is important to also steer clear of the deficit discourse of ethnic minoritized people not having the social mores or habitus to explain their under-representation walking outdoors.

My encounter with the place making of a local greenspace activity zone, research on the barriers to ethnic minority participation in outdoor tourism and leisure in the UK and my own walking treks motivated me to engage in a participatory action research project to understand why there was such low levels of participation outdoor working by women of colour. My intent was not just to interview women about the barriers they face, but to also in the process empower them to reflect on the importance of outdoor walking and how collectively we could tackle the barriers and to co-produce an event to share our experiences with the wider community of women in the county. This project was named Women, Walking and Wellbeing to emphasise the relationship between outdoor walking to support the prevention of lifestyle diseases such as hypertension and diabetes that are rampant in our communities. With the support of a local prescribing charity, I employed a walking methodology to engage some 20 women who were members of a faith-based collective comprising of all ethnic groups from the age of 18 upwards to share their views while traversing the outdoors and reflecting on health, wellbeing and walking. These walking sessions were one Saturday a week over nine months and some of them included the same active greenspace zone trail that was near completion by this time. My participatory research included a mixed ethnic group which was different from the more popular walking groups geared to only a specific ethnic or minoritized groups in the UK such as Black Girls Hike or Muslim Walkers. While there was some recorded success of these exclusive groups in widening participation, my query was whether a mixed ethnic group could successfully bridge the racial divide in the outdoor walking as women who shared similar faith and values.

The testimonials of the participants at the dissemination event which was dubbed ‘Step Together No Matter the Weather’ provided potent evidence of the effectiveness of the participatory walking methodology in not only getting information from the participants but also in empowering and transforming lives. Significantly the nature of the participatory engagement with the foregrounding of faith and shared values seems to have elided racial barriers in this research setting. Indeed, the findings of this study on its own is not generalisable to the wider population, but it perhaps presents a new pathway to traversing and even transcending embodied racial place inequalities.