Who Owns My Neighbourhood?

When you look around at the land near where you live, who owns what isn’t obvious. Buildings and land don’t have plaques with ownership information. The empty spaces don’t tell their own story. Do the council own the ‘rec’ at the bottom of the road? Who owns that dilapidated mill across the river? Much of this information is known through council data but is typically only available in a piecemeal fashion, available on request at the local town or city hall.

Who Owns My Neighbourhood? opens this data up, allowing people to easily see what the council owns (and potentially what others own too), where they live.

Why would you want to know land ownership information? The most obvious need is for people wanting to know about about a specific piece of land or building, either to see if they could develop or re-use it or to see if it is under threat of development. There are existing ways to get this data, by going to the local council and requesting information on council owned land, or by checking with the land registry, which charges for the information. However, there are more subtle issues this idea addresses which concern stimulating civic engagement in place, to foster better communities.

Allowing people to easily see who owns what allows people to think about the possibilities for the land or the building. For example people wanting to make a playground, get land cleared of dangerous objects, or save a building for becoming derelict: enabling people to improve where they live. To do this they need to see who owns what, and also who to contact.

The Idea

Andrew Wilson from Thumbprint Co-operative and Diane Sims from Kirklees Council came together with a shared desire to allow local citizens to see who owns council land in their area. Both knew each other prior to this project through advising at a Social Media Surgery in Huddersfield and Diane had been active in the local community for some time in particular trying to save Newsome Mill, a local heritage site near Huddersfield.  

From the outset the desire was to foster pro-active views of place and to get people engaged in their local area, from development and planning to taking ownership and responsibility for the maintenance of certain sites.
The project team undertook research with local residents in Huddersfield to understand how they identified with where they lived, and how well known land ownership was. One of the issues that was raised was that uncertainty about land ownership leads to anxiety about potential development:

"It’s the second time in two years that I’ve seen people standing there gesticulating and talking, as though they’re discussing what’s going on there… we were told that they couldn’t build on that."
Kirklees resident

Diane talks about this uncertainty as an important barrier to civic activism:
"We saw evidence that uncertainty over ownership is sometimes what prevents people from taking positive local action. A retired lady who lives opposite an overgrown green space said she has “itchy fingers” about getting out there and tackling it, but she asked: “would we be trespassing – would we get into trouble?”"
Diane Sims

The research phase led to developing a core set of user needs based on postcode look-up and a simple overlay of data on a map. The key additions were for people to add their memories of a place and local names (which are so important to a sense of place).

Additionally, the abilities for people to add themselves as a contact for the land, and also to add organisations that may also have some involvement with the land (such as an an existing community action group) were added to the core requirements.

The Beta

The beta release of Who Owns My Neighbourhood? is now live.

Given any postcode in the Huddersfield area, the service provides a map of the area, with an overlay of council ownership. Council owned land is highlighted and by selecting one of these spaces you get specific land ownership details:

Acting on this information can take a few different forms. You can say “I want to be a point of contact for this piece of land”. If other people are interested in this piece of land you can share your interest and contact one another; facilitating group action.

Other, possible actions include noting down local names or historical information.

"They (residents) know the things that you can’t see by looking, such as where a Post Office once stood, where they built bonfires as children, and what local people’s aspirations are for the future."
Diane Sims

So comments like, “would make a great playground”, “this used to be the old rec [...] I used to play here when I was little”, “dangerous after dark, as lots of younger people use it as a place to score drugs” - could be useful for others in the local area and helps drive civic engagement.

Next steps

The proof of concept service trialed with a sample council owned land data. Other council land data (such as allotments) will be added in the next stage. People will also be able to add details of private land by putting in land registry reference information.

As part of the project the Kirklees data is available for re-use via www.data.gov.uk

Project website: www.whoownsmyneighbourhood.org.uk

Project Leads:

http://www.kirklees.gov.uk

http://thumbprint.coop