As we gear up for our April Forum later this month, we wanted to give a recap of conversations that have been taking place in March. Here goes!

Our Streets Chorlton –  What Do You Want To Know About Your Community? 

At our March forum we asked what questions people  wanted to ask the community via  our digital engagement platform  in April and May.

We asked forum attendees: 

• What questions are important to ask Chorlton people?
• What local knowledge will help the project understand how to reduce local and short car journeys? 
• How can these questions help us to map the local connections people have with Chorlton, and the things, people and places they value as a community? 

We had a fantastic response. Here are some of the questions residents came up with:

• What makes people happy when they travel in their local area?
• What creates joy on a journey?
• What are currently the best ‘local knowledge’ routes from A to B ?
• What helps you feel safe when travelling around Chorlton?
• What are the current geographical patterns of walking and cycling?
• What are the current hotspots requiring improvements and what does that look like?
• If you didn’t/couldn’t use your car what would you do instead?
• How do you use Chorlton day to day?
• What does Chorlton need to do to be more accessible?

Do you have any questions that you think are important for this project to ask? If so, drop us a line with your thoughts!

Evidence Gathering Grows 

Open Data Manchester, one of the Our Streets Chorlton project partners, spent some time discussing Telraam units and Air Quality Sensors. 

You might be thinking, what is a Telramm unit? Well, this snazzy camera has the ability to track the number of motorised vehicles, bikes and people on foot going past it’s chosen location. 

Many residents across Chorlton have already volunteered to have one of these units placed in their front windows, allowing us to gather more data about types of transport across the area and the frequency of their use. 

If you want to know more about this part of the project , take a look at Open Data Manchester’s blog here. 

Visual Displays and Art in the Community

Chorlton is well known for its thriving, creative community and so as a project, we are looking at creative ways to engage with a wider audience of people. 

The idea of connecting art and technology together to visualise  data and information was mooted at our February forum, where  some topics of discussion  were:

• How do we visually display the data we are collecting? Should we create interactive, continually changing art pieces that display information to the community, in a fun and engaging way?
• How can we get our young people involved?Could we work with our schools to give  children an opportunity to create and display works relating to climate action in their local area. 
• Do we have to stop at one idea? Could we have various art activities that all of the community can get involved in? 
• How can we link in with existing organisations and the annual events, i.e:  Chorlton Arts Festival?

As a result, we’ve  set off on the task of finding a way to enable people to get creative with our data. More information and an artist brief on the way! If you have any ideas or you might be an artist yourself, interested in creating work with our community? Drop us a line hello@ourstreetschorlton.co.uk 

School Champions Network

One big area of focus that’s emerged from previous meetings,  is supporting active travel ideas across our Chorlton schools. There’s consensus was that there’s good work happening across individual local primary and secondary schools – but it is quite difficult to know  what’s happening across the piece, and learn from others.

 So, with the help of some active parents across Chorlton, the Our Streets Chorlton team are helping to facilitate a School Champions Network; a collective of parents & guardians and the wider school community who are keen to share knowledge and work together on improving the opportunity to cycle and walk to and from school. 

The first School Champion Network meeting took place on Tuesday the 13th of April, where we had a fantastic discussion about how parents & guardians can lead the way in making change in thise community. 

 

We’ll have an update blog out soon, so you can read through the specific information we chatted about, but for now, check out our introductory blog about why a School Champion Network is so important. 

 

We had a really great discussion and we hope the forum agrees we’re making progress on the steps to explore climate issues that matter to you. 

 

If you want to attend any of our future forums, follow the link to our newsletter sign up – we’ll keep you up to date! 

Join April’s Forum

Do join next weeks forum, sign up to it here.