About

Inspired by the concept of the civic imaginary, this four-year project brings together communities, policy makers, researchers and artists to ask what being civic means in the United Kingdom right now, and playfully considers how people collectively reimagine and reinvent their places. 

About the
Civic Imaginary
Partnerships Project

Place-based approaches to solving multiple crises such as reducing inequality, boosting trust in democracy, and promoting climate change adaptation have revealed the need for more effective methods to meaningfully understand community aspirations and ideas. As political and techno-authoritarians impose emotional and cultural distance, building new forms of community capacity, such as collective imagination and connection is vital. Place-based policies often claim to do this, but the outcomes are difficult to evidence by traditional metrics and need critical investigation.

Civic imaginaries are the ways that people think, feel and dream about the futures of their places. Theories and approaches to civic imagining have been successfully incorporated into local policy practices internationally, but the concept is unfamiliar in the UK. Researching civic imaginaries creates a vocabulary and a geographically specific process to ‘work out’ and make tangible the relational and felt forces of place.

This project will advance and test civic imaginary theory, practice and policy by fostering new Civic Imaginary Partnerships in Chester, Frome, Glasgow, Hull and Southampton. The research team will live alongside participants, co-creating activities with arts practitioners and communities to understand local challenges and civic cultures from their points of view. We hope to develop new evidence about community participation and connection and attempt new forms of knowledge brokerage. We want to be useful at the intersections of community-led planning and community development, and to advocate for arts-based ways to understand the relational drivers of political and cultural behaviours.

Our People

A photograph of Michael Howcroft

Michael Howcroft

Michael leads the Civic Imaginary Partnerships research project and is Research Fellow in Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow. He completed his PhD at the University of Hull, and has held research posts at the Universities of Glasgow, Southampton and Sheffield working with communities, policy makers and place-based organisations to understand what motivates and sustains participation in place. He is particularly interested in emotion and place, and how civic feelings or feelings about being ‘civic’ or ‘civil’ are mobilised, ignored or manipulated by different groups. Michael had an earlier career as an actor and director and his research experiments with creative ethnographic methods, often in collaboration with poets, visual artists, playwrights, musicians, community-based artists and film makers.
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A photograph of Ellen Bishop

Ellen Bishop

Ellen Bishop is a Research Associate on the Civic Imaginary Partnerships project, based in Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow. She has previously worked at University of Wolverhampton on a research project about school meals and University of Leicester on projects about digital skills and migrant healthcare. Ellen was awarded her PhD in 2022 from University of Leicester, where she researched the school experiences of children whose first language is not English. Ellen also previously worked in an art gallery and is interested in making research more accessible and inclusive through arts-based methods. She is experienced in working with young people and in using creative research methods, for example encouraging children to draw what they imagine school meals to look like in 2050!
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Jay Levontine

Jay Levontine is an artist and Doctoral Researcher with the Civic Imaginary Partnerships project at the University of Glasgow. Previously a professional treeplanter, environmental educator and firekeeper, a master’s scholarship at Cambridge University enabled Jay to establish a research practice in cultural geography, with fieldwork in the Fens of East Anglia exploring collective imagination on local futures through folk craft. Subsequently they have been an invited speaker in mainland UK universities and cultural centres in Venice and the Outer Hebrides. Jay’s post-qualitative orientation to creating research involves cobbling together methods from arts, social sciences and acoustic ecology into immersive participatory engagements with artists and their communities. Their work explores animist civic imagination in Glasgow's river rights movement, more-than-human musical practice, and the political possibilities of community ritual. 

Ellie Conway

Ellie is a Research Assistant on the Civic Imaginary Partnerships project, based in Urban Studies and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow. Her PhD examined domestic abuse policy in Scotland and how it affected migrant women living in Glasgow. She has been a qualitative researcher on a range of projects, including how relocation affects the health of social housing tenants in urban regeneration schemes, how GPs and the police can better work together to improve domestic abuse support, and various aspects of participation in cancer screening programmes. Her research interests include improving access to public services; poverty and inequality; and how social problems are framed in policy making. Before going to university as a mature student, Ellie trained as a journalist and worked in the NHS and as a playgroup leader.

Academic Advisors

Prof. Harriet Thomson

Prof. Nicola McEwen

Prof. Rebecca Madgin

Our Partners

Top row: Hull City Council logo, Cheshire West and Cheshire Council logo, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government logo, Edventure logo Bottom row: Southampton City Council logo, Frome Town Council logo, Testlands Wellbeing Hubs logo, The Freedom Centre logo, Green and Healthy Future for Frome logo