Imagine project Rotherham: Revisiting the modernist dream at the Park Hill flats in Sheffield 2014-2017

This data set comprises of interview transcripts, which relate to interviews conducted as part of a project called 'Revisiting the modernist dream: Park Hill revisited', which was part of the cultural work package (WP3) of the Imagine Project Rotherham. This project was concerned with how the new residents of the regenerated Park Hill flats in Sheffield felt about their environment, and the experience of living in Park Hill. The interviews explore the experience of living in a modernist building, with a strong history of social housing. They include accounts of furnishings and describe people’s attitudes to light, space, decoration and minimalism. The spread of interviewees includes a couple of social housing tenants, the rest are owner occupiers.Our research looked at how communities connect people, both today and in the past. These connections take many forms, but often include people coming together to seek change and pursue a different future. We were interested in the role imagination plays in how such futures are conceived and pursued. The history of people's involvement in community initiatives includes both successful innovation and frustration and disappointment, in the UK and elsewhere. Our project learns from both scenarios. We studied community connections in different types of community (some present, some past). Using our new knowledge, together we have begun to imagine how communities might be different and to experiment with different forms of community building. Communities are made up of people who share some things in common, but also have differences. In the light of this, we asked four main questions: 1) What are the best ways of conceptualising, researching and promoting connected communities so that they have the potential to accommodate and benefit from social, cultural and economic differences and diverse opinions and practices? 2) What does the history of civic engagement tell us about how and why the social, historical, cultural and democratic context matters to community-building? 3) What role can imagining better futures play in capturing and sustaining enthusiasm and momentum for change? 4) Is community research being transformed by developments in research methodologies, particularly the development of creative and collaborative methods? Our approach to these questions challenges ideas of community that focus on what is lacking, highlighting instead the role that harnessing imagination plays in shaping community futures. The project brought together researchers from a range of disciplines across the social sciences and arts and humanities interested in community relationships together with partner organisations dedicated to community development in a range of locations. The projects employed a range of approaches to research, but with collaborative and participatory methods (community partners and universities working together) being central. Several projects involved going back to sites of previous research to explore what can be learned that is of relevance to today's debates about community. We returned to sites of the Community Development Projects of the 1970s, where research included analysis of background statistics, documentary records, interviews, oral history, community arts and other community-based activities, tracing that history and its legacies down to the present. We revisited culture and arts projects, and projects working with disadvantaged groups, all of which have sought to promote community resilience. Reflections on the lessons of these experiences fed into interventions with members of 'disadvantaged' communities to fire imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change. The motivating context of this project was a strong impetus globally towards people looking for new ways to participate in decision-making about issues that affect their lives, and to participate in research that involves them - the so-called 'democratisation of social research'. The various strands of research were held together by the team's shared interests in how people envisage co-operating and how these ideas get put into practice in diverse communities. Answering these questions required collaborative effort to look at a range of different cases, both past and present, and to draw appropriate conclusions to inform current debates and visions of the future.