It’s Behind You! A stage for community engagement in a south Wales park

The study focuses upon community engagement as a method to involve community within the development process. Community engagement is recognised as a way of dissolving barriers between political epicentres and the peripheral post-industrial landscape. The article argues that top-down government policies during the twentieth century have had a short-term amelioration upon factors of deprivation, due to a lack of intricate policy exacerbated by barriers to participation that exist in post-industrial communities. The study adopts a participatory approach, to map sites of community place attachment within a local park in the South Wales Valleys, a landscape that has seen the complete loss of its former industry. The use of participatory working provides scope for wider community engagement in the region. The study concludes with a focus upon strong political disconnect between government agencies and communities of industrial decline whilst encouraging the eradication of preconceptions to the engagement process.