Birmingham City of Nature – Alliance

The Vision

Working together The City of Nature Alliance aims to support all Birmingham’s green spaces to be the best they can be. That could mean connecting more people with their park, reducing social isolation or providing eco-therapy through social prescribing. It might be a well-loved feature of a park that needs protection or repair or a project that will enhance nature and biodiversity. A local school using it as an outdoor classroom or creating a communal garden or pocket park from a drying area.

Working together with a growing community of passionate Green Champions, the The City of Nature Alliance strives to ensure that all people are able to discover their own personal connections to parks and green spaces as places to meet, play, learn, grow, breathe, and enjoy nature – together. Because they don’t just stand for where Birmingham has been – they inspire us to see how we go forward”

We don’t have a formal City of Nature Alliance yet – but we’re working on it!

We realised early in the project that the things we needed to achieve to even start the 25 year plan for nature and green spaces in Birmingham, was going take a whole lot of people working together bringing all their knowledge, experience, skills, tools, concerns, hopes and belief.

The project was always going to be more than affording the ongoing maintenance of parks, we would look at housing (where we live), health (and our wellbeing), children (and their education) and employment (green jobs and skills) and how those things were connected.

But we soon realised that it isn’t just some things that are connected, everything is connected. We realised that not only do we rely on the natural world for everything we need, we are also part of the natural world. In fact there is no natural and unnatural world, there is only the world, the planet we live on – Earth. No matter what scale we look at it, our home, our street, our neighbourhood, our ward we are still all on one planet, all needing the same things not just to survive but also to thrive. So if understanding nature and protecting it was at the heart of everything, we needed to put nature at the heart of our work and then consider if we could build a city where nature (people and the environment they live in) is at it’s heart – a City of Nature.

So that’s what we are now setting out to do. We thought about what a City of Nature would be: a green city, a fair city, an engaged / involved city, a healthy city, a valued city. From this we started to create the vision. Why and what quickly became how and who, the when was already set – over the next 25 years.

How was going to be about listening, understanding, appreciating, collaborating, delivering and celebrating.

Asking who? led us to the proposition of an alliance of Green Champions, individuals, communities, groups, departments, organisations. From the micro level to the macro and everyone in between.

We are going to pilot the “stronger together” approach of a formal Birmingham City of Nature Alliance through a project that will be delivered in five parks in Bordesley and Highgate Ward. More information about this project will be coming soon.

If you are interested in finding out more please contact us: