‘Every act of measurement [is] an act marked by the play of power relations.’1 However benign the original intent, through their acts of demarcation and simplification, administrative boundaries function to rationalise and impose an artificial order on the organic, ever-evolving communities they seek to define. In the UK, the Boundary Commission for England is sponsored by the UK government’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. It is an ‘arms-length’ public body and outside direct ministerial control,2 positioned as ‘independent and impartial’;3 nevertheless, its boundary-making and boundary-shifting decisions have a direct impact on the lives of those it maps.

It is this real-world impact on people’s lives and the strategic use of these independent and impartial administrative boundaries to achieve policy aims that this article seeks to make visible. To that end, it discusses the example of a small, community-led charity in the UK, Ardagh Community Trust (ACT), through which the lived impact of the use of administrative boundaries for policy-planning purposes can be seen. It provides broader context for the subsequent discussion of ACT by briefly taking into account the type of administrative boundaries in operation in England and their application in practice. It describes what ACT is and does, the site it operates and how that site’s location within a community that sits across multiple administrative areas presents particular challenges for the democratic structures intended to ensure community representation in decision-making. Furthermore, it describes a specific political initiative – Bristol City Council’s (BCC) Parks and Green Space Strategy (PGSS) – and, through discussion of the Friends of Horfield Common (FoHC) and ACT’s work in response to it, demonstrates the impact of the PGSS’s reliance on administrative boundaries as unquestioned foundational, building-block concepts. It describes the political and economic risks attendant on ignoring the issues presented by boundary-straddling communities – specifically, the negative impact on achieving policy aims and the associated waste of state resources.

Horfield Common is a public park and urban green space located in the north of Bristol, the largest city in South West England in the UK (see Figure 1). Bristol is approximately 190 km west of London. The city is approximately 110 km² in area, has an estimated population of 472,4004 and is divided into 34 wards.5

The Ardagh is a former local-authority sports-and-leisure facility built in the 1920s, located in the centre of Horfield Common (see Figure 2). ACT is a small charity that manages the Ardagh through a community asset transfer lease from BCC, secured by the charity in 2019. In the UK, a community asset transfer is a process that allows a community organisation to take over the management of publicly owned land or buildings in a way that recognises the public benefits that the transfer will bring: ‘The ultimate aim of Community Asset Transfer is community empowerment – that is, to ensure that land and buildings are retained or transformed then operated for public benefit through community asset ownership and management.’6

The Ardagh site consists of a 14,000 m² sports-and-leisure facility, which includes 11 ‘tennis and multi-sports courts, a recently [partially] refurbished pavilion building with café and public toilets, public gardens, and [ACT provides] employment and volunteering opportunities’.7 ACT’s ‘charitable objects’ focus explicitly on working to ‘improve the conditions of life’ and ‘benefit the people who live and work in the Horfield Common area’,8 although it is important to note that the boundaries of this ‘area’ are not geographically defined.

This section focuses on how administrative boundaries were employed to structure and define BCC’s proposed PGSS and the accompanying statutory public consultation. Ward boundaries were employed as if they were synonymous with the lived experience of residents and communities, and were not problematised in any way.

BCC’s 2008 PGSS proposed that in ‘order to make necessary improvements to green spaces across the city [they would] sell off a small amount of low value green space’45 in Bristol.46 When the final details were published in 2010, this ‘small amount’ equated to over 60 public parks and green spaces47 – or 80 hectares (200 acres) of land48 – potentially being sold by the local authority for development.49 These green spaces were presented as having been identified using a ‘quantity standard’, one that detailed ‘how much green space of different types there should be’50 in the city and that stipulated both ‘citywide and locality components’51 in metre square per capita, with ‘localities’ being made up of two or three wards.52

At the same time that the PGSS proposal was published, neighbourhood partnerships (NPs) were established.53 Each neighbourhood partnership area (NPA) combined multiple wards (which corresponded with the PGSS ‘localities’) and NPs were intended to function as mini, local, devolved decision-making fora, on which local councillors sat alongside ‘local residents, community groups, and representatives from public services’54 to decide on local priorities and to address local issues. In 2010, these responsibilities included making decisions about local resources and sites for inclusion in the citywide proposed ‘sell-off’55 of parks and green spaces. Horfield Common sat across three NPAs: Horfield and Lockleaze NPA; Henleaze, Stoke Bishop and Westbury-on-Trym NPA; and Bishopston, Cotham and Redland NPA. Despite objections being raised by local community organisations that NPAs did ‘not represent people’s actual use of different [parks and green] spaces’,56 these administrative areas nevertheless remained as the defining factors for decision-making.

While NPAs could in theory make decisions that pushed back against cascaded policy aims and assumptions, there was no clear mechanism through which this could be done. There was no formal route through which community views could be communicated back up the decision-making chain in order to instigate meaningful change or the reconsideration of policy or key principles. This absence rendered these devolved decision-making structures effectively impotent in relation to influencing the outcomes of the PGSS. In addition, far from adhering to the PGSS’s localities, when expedient, these boundaries were ignored. A noteworthy example of this was in 2010 when the Ardagh was relocated to the Horfield and Lockleaze NPA from the Bishopston, Cotham and Redland NPA with minimal comment.57 Whereas the Bishopston, Cotham and Redland NPA, even with the inclusion of the Ardagh, did not meet the minimum standards of green space per head of the population, Horfield and Lockleaze NPA had a perceived surfeit. By moving the Ardagh into this NPA, it then sat within a structure that defined the site as ‘surplus’.58

Following the change of ward boundaries for Horfield and Bishopston in 2008, Wellington Hill Playing Field (part of Horfield Common) was proposed for sale, despite Bishopston Ward not meeting the minimum space standards for green space per head of the population.59 This is because moving the ward boundary from the east to the west edge of the playing field meant that it was included in Horfield – which was allied with Lockleaze, where it was considered that there was a surplus of green space. It is worthy of note that for the five BCC wards identified as not meeting the minimum standards detailed within the PGSS (including Bishopston Ward),60 there were no proposals forthcoming to increase provision.

In their PGSS proposal document, BCC claimed to have ‘carried out a large-scale public consultation on [the] strategy’61 in advance of its being published, with a total of 1,540 people62 participating in the research. While this may in principle have constituted a statistically significant sample of the population of Bristol at the time,63 the data presented was problematic: for example, nowhere, in either the full or summary reports of that research, were the number of research respondents per ward or per NPA disaggregated; findings were only presented in terms of percentages, thus obfuscating the depth and breadth of local opinion being represented. Once the consultation process was situated within the public domain, and its processes and findings to date subjected to public scrutiny, it became apparent that the preliminary consultation and development up until that point had been limited, with parks campaigners from around the city reporting that ‘people were not properly consulted and the sites [identified for disposal] were chosen based on flawed information’.64

It is important that the administrative and political processes detailed above are not omitted from this account of the impact of administrative boundaries. BCC used ward boundaries in the PGSS as if they were fixed, neutral and apolitical entities, rather than subject to ongoing review and change, and yet in the formal consultation documents it was evident that decision-makers responsible for developing the policy proposals had chosen to ignore such boundaries when expedient. Political decisions with real-world ramifications were presented throughout the PGSS consultation as rational and apolitical; ward boundaries were arguably employed as a form of ‘depoliticizing sleight-of-hand’,65 being adhered to when useful and quietly ignored when not. To the communities affected, this ‘usefulness’ appeared to have little to do with the strategy’s stated aims of achieving citywide equitable access to green spaces and everything to do with presenting a seemingly neutral and objective case for the sale of the spaces identified. To those communities effected, the plan’s principal function appeared to be to identify areas with too much green space so that it could be sold.66 Furthermore, what is revealed is that the use of, and selective adherence to, ward boundaries as a means of delimiting responsibility for decision-making and planning is an illustration of James C. Scott’s ‘vast and deceptive “antipolitics machine” designed to turn legitimate political questions into neutral, objective administrative exercises.’67

In addition to attending all relevant BCC meetings, FoHC volunteers hosted open meetings72 to discuss the potential impact of the council’s proposals for the whole of Horfield Common and worked to engage in genuine consultation with the local community across administrative boundaries. Without these volunteer-instigated and volunteer-run fora, there would have been no co-ordinated response from the people living and working in the area, as this was neither being facilitated nor sought as part of the formal consultation process.73 Findings from these meetings were developed by volunteers into a community response that was formally submitted to the council as part of the PGSS consultation process.

BCC’s PGSS proposals received ‘literally thousands of responses to [the] consultation exercise’74 – including statements,75 petitions76 and individual objections – constituting ‘one of the biggest city-wide outcries for years’.77 This resulted in the PGSS proposals effectively being abandoned, as it was clear that Bristol residents would not accept public parks and green spaces being sold for development in this way. The then administration were voted out at the next election78 and the PGSS condemned as ‘a waste of time and money’.79

Councillors from opposition parties variously described the consultation process as a ‘sorry saga’ and a ‘fiasco’ while drawing attention to the results, which appeared ‘to be a mish-mash of accepting officer recommendations on some sites, while giving others protections for apparently political reasons, [thus undermining] any confidence that this was an impartial consultation and assessment of the sites’.80 This latter point compounded earlier allegations that many councillors in the majority party were ‘hypocrites’ when, despite having told their constituents that they would ‘help them fight to save their [green] spaces’,81 they blocked attempts by a coalition of councillors from other parties to scrap the AGSP’s land-sale proposals. This led one opposition party leader to assert that those majority councillors were willing to support selling off green spaces, ‘any green spaces, provided it’s not in their ward’.82

Administrative boundaries are ubiquitous; however, these boundaries do not necessarily correspond with living communities. What this study illustrates is that those communities that do not sit neatly within administrative boundaries are currently at risk of being, at best, disadvantaged by and, at worst, excluded from statutory processes that rely upon such boundaries for their formulation. The use of ward boundaries as unproblematised components of the PGSS’s development and decision-making structures was arguably a contributing factor to its failure; its ward-based processes effectively attempted to erase boundary-transgressing communities and assets and, in so doing, highlighted the PGSS’s disconnect from the lived experiences of those who inhabit the city. Such a disconnect comes at a high economic and political cost; over five years were spent on the PGSS – drafting it, engaging in preliminary research and then opening it up to public consultation. With the PGSS eventually being effectively abandoned, the public resources that this process consumed were essentially wasted. Furthermore, the lack of meaningful feedback mechanisms through which organisational learning can occur means that other policy proposals are at risk of repeating this flawed and wasteful process.

Organisations, institutions and/or policymakers who wish to engage in meaningful and economically efficient public consultations must acknowledge the limitations of using administrative boundaries in their thinking and recognise them as mutable elements within de facto heuristic processes rather than fixed, neutral entities. In addition, they must recognise the existence of administrative-boundary-transgressing communities (and assets) and work to ensure that their opinions are actively sought, and their concerns heard. Such organisations should not wait until engaging in a public consultation process to involve communities. The inclusion of community-group representatives as co-creators at the policy-design stage would forestall many of the issues that might otherwise only come to light during the public consultation stage. At the very least, transparent procedures for organisational learning need to be included whereby proposed strategies can adapt and change in response to the feedback received and which ensure that flawed processes are not repeated ad infinitum. Communities and community-led organisations want their localities and communities to thrive and including them in the collaborative co-creation of policies is one way in which policymakers might achieve improved outcomes in such consultations.