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City planners may well design urban green spaces but it’s the local residents – humans, animals, insects, birds and plants – that make them what they are.

OU research project Habitable Cities has found that it’s a so-called “more than human” activity that is the key to understanding what makes our cities and towns attract wildlife. More than this, they found that far from being anti-nature, cities can be greener that their surroundings. Indeed, two of Britain’s rarest creatures, the water vole and black redstart, live in the centre of its second largest city, Birmingham.

Crucially, it finds that planners need the input and enthusiasm of local people to make such areas successful.

“In order to enhance the potential of urban green spaces, organisations need to consider carefully how they work together with city residents,” say the researchers, led by Dr Steve Hinchliffe from the OU’s Geography department and Professor Sarah Whatmore from Oxford University.

The two-year, ESRC-funded project saw the researchers investigate cultivation, conservation and restoration activities in allotments, woods and brownfield sites in Birmingham and Bristol. They interviewed and worked with local residents as well as key figures in local and national policy agencies and NGOs, as well as keeping records of seasonal observations of plants, insects and animals.

The team found there were huge benefits to people and wildlife where people, creatures and plants interacted in activities such as allotment gardening, hedge-laying and landscaping.

In particular, the team found extensive ecological expertise among the local residents – as well as an enthusiasm for ensuring areas maintained their maximum potential as green sites. Local people were found to undertake regular wildlife surveys, clean up local woods and link up with wildlife groups to campaign if they thought the space was threatened, such as by building developments, fly-tipping or neglect from city planners and recreation departments.

The researchers’ report concludes with the recommendation that the knowledge of local residents needs to be given much greater credence by urban planners. “Urban green spaces should not be led by outside expertise,” say the researchers. “It cannot be assumed that values held elsewhere will be shared by those who tend and look after a site.”

The team recommends that green spaces need to develop in line with “vernacular ecologies” – the knowledge, skills and daily practices that develop as city residents make use of and nurture green spaces.

“We were continuously struck by the levels of expertise that existed on site,” said Dr Hinchliffe. “And that expertise is shared in conversations as people walk across sites. People talk about the wildlife, soils, history and current issues on site. Doing so helps to produce a rich sense of place – a vernacular ecology.”

And he underlined the importance of planners tapping into such expertise. “While people can develop these skills and understandings on site, they may also bring new understandings from their experiences elsewhere. Cities are often cosmopolitan in human terms and in terms of their flora and fauna – making expertise a dynamic and multifaceted issue.”