Northampton’s Active Quarter Partnership & The Uni Partner with Place Informatics to manage parks

Established in 2022, Northampton’s Active Quarter Partnership is a collective of co-located landowners and managers in Northampton. Each partner manages different greenspace assets to help support physical activity, health, and wellbeing in Northampton by bringing together outdoor spaces into a recognisable local area. Through this project, they hope to improve opportunities for health, active travel, economic growth, education, and pride in Northamptonshire.

Equitable access to greenspace has been recognised as a high-priority policy at local, national, and international levels. However, how many people visit Northampton’s greenspaces was difficult to establish so by partnering with the University of Northampton, the Active Quarter Partnership was able to secure funding through the UK Higher Education Innovation Funding programme to access Place Informatics advanced visitor insights platform to monitor 19 local green spaces over 2 years.

The platform allows the partnership to understand how green spaces such as parks and footpaths, are being utilised with data-driven insights showing footfall numbers which can identify hotspots, popular access points, most used footpaths and many other details for green spaces of any size.

Since 2015, Place Informatics has been at the vanguard of foot traffic data, answering business-critical questions about people’s interactions with various spaces such as town centres, retail outlets, tourist attractions, heritage sites, green spaces, events, and car parks. By harnessing the power of cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning, the ‘big data’ solutions are helping to revolutionise the industry.

Associate Professor Declan Ryan of The University, commented, “This partnership with Place Informatics has given us key insights into how our green spaces are being utilised helping the Active Quarter Partnership to manage these important local assets.

These insights will allow the partnership to make evidence-informed decisions to improve the accessibility of green spaces for the local community.”

Clive Hall, CEO of Place Informatics, commented, “We are delighted to be working with the University and Active Quarter Partnership teams to help them understand how the green spaces being managed are being used by the local communities.

Our green space data offers organisations detailed insights to show how town residents, commuters, and visitors from further afield are using these spaces on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis and also provide reporting to assess their performance.”