Wastelands – Provocations in Green Spaces

Urban Wilderness CIC Co-Directors Laurel, Isla and Jenny standing outside their 2020 city centre base in Hanley, Stoke on Trent.

Wastelands was a 2020 creative commissioning project by Urban Wilderness CIC, supported by Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund. It invited artists, collectives, and community organisations from Stoke-on-Trent to explore how lockdown had changed their relationships with local green spaces.

The project built on Provocations in Green Spaces — a line of enquiry that questioned how our urban and post-industrial landscapes are used, valued, and experienced. Stoke-on-Trent’s green spaces are deeply intertwined with its industrial past: council parks built on slag heaps, overgrown brownfield sites, and working farmland sitting between settlements. For years, Urban Wilderness has used these spaces as sites of collaborative imagination and co-creative placemaking.

In 2020, lockdown restrictions amplified these questions. What happens to green spaces when they suddenly become our only shared public environments — used for exercise, escape and solitude? How does this shift our sense of belonging, safety and connection?

Through Wastelands, Urban Wilderness commissioned five local artists and collectives to develop new artworks responding to these themes and to real places across the city. Artists were invited to interpret their own “wastelands” — spaces of possibility, neglect, or transformation — through visual art, sound, performance, writing, and community collaboration.

Wastelands asked both artists and audiences to look again at the green spaces around them — to see them not as empty or abandoned, but as fertile ground for imagination, recovery and connection.