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Narrative Therapy offers thinking and practices which can support the development of narratives of desistance and recovery. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the two ways in which collective narrative practice has been used in a Low Secure Forensic Recovery Service: The Tree of Life and the Knowledge Group, including the evaluation of the Knowledge Group.

The therapeutic approach taken was collective narrative practice. The evaluation design for the Knowledge Group was service user led, resulting in a qualitative approach: a focus group that was thematically analysed.

Collective narrative practice offered service users the opportunity to enhance their narratives of strength and desistance, and to contribute socially by sharing this with others. This encouraged the development of identities beyond the “patient” and “offender” identities. It gave service users the opportunity to take a position of expertise and power where they were listened to and respected.

There is a wide range of possibility for the creative use of these strategies in forensic settings. They are a useful addition to the forensic practitioner’s toolkit.

There is a wide range of possibility for the creative use of these strategies in forensic settings. They are a useful addition to the forensic practitioner’s toolkit.

Collective narrative practice positions service users as taking social action, for example sharing their experiences with other services users, in educational contexts and for wider social understanding.

The therapeutic interventions described offer a promising approach which has not yet been fully exploited for use in forensic mental health services, including a novel approach to collective narrative practice.

Mapping the intrinsic value of the art of architecture and the art of nature within the context of Kakunodate and the preservation of its samurai manors and Sakura heritage trees, this paper proposes that from the perception of tourists, the preservation of both items is important. Extending the psychology of pricing that is subject to consumers’ preference and expectation to the context of valuation of cultural heritage assets, the purpose of this paper is to suggest that including the art of nature and the aesthetic of Sakura to the art of architecture (Samurai manors) will add more value to the cultural heritage of Kakunodate than when only the art of architecture is mentioned.

This paper uses Contingency Valuation Method to solicit tourists willingness-to-pay to preserve the architecture and the nature in Kakunodate. The survey uses a double bounded dichotomous choice model to elicit the various levels of tourists preference in various scenarios. Response from more than 1,000 tourists in three scenarios were collected. Through a maximum likelihood method and a subsequent truncated calculation, results are reported.

The results support the conceptual argument that the art of nature adds value to the art of architecture only. Tourists are found to be willing to pay more to support both the architecture (samurai houses) and nature (cherry trees) than the samurai houses alone.

The research findings add to the inventory of research on prior works in heritage trees, conservation of trees and heritage tourism, and cultural heritage assets in general. The empirical findings support prior theoretical works that examined the relationship of nature and art, art and architecture, and architecture as visual consumption.

The findings have managerial implications for policy makers relative to a possible increase of revenue by adding accompanying-nature component to focal architectural assets when soliciting funding support.

The originality and this piece stems from extending trees as an art form in nature and its added value to architecture within the context of cultural heritage assets. The empirical findings add to the much discussed relationships among art, nature, and architecture.

Narrative therapy uses psychological thinking to help people reconnect with important aspects of their lives that have become subjugated by a dominant problem story. Collective narrative practices (CNPs) such as the tree of life (ToL) metaphor apply these principles to communities. Limited research suggests that ToL groups benefit service users and staff in inpatient settings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of a pilot ToL group, run in an inpatient treatment ward.

Nine participants attended a seven-week ToL group. Eight service users and two facilitators contributed to the evaluation. Qualitative data were derived from interviews and questionnaires and analysed from a social constructionist perspective using inductive thematic analysis.

Three themes were generated: first, a sense of community – service user and staff relationships developed both inside and outside of the group, through sharing personal experiences. Second, rediscovering identity – participants reconnected with important aspects of their lives, which helped them to plan their recovery. Third, usefulness of the metaphor – service users and staff reflected on useful aspects of the ToL metaphor and how groups could be improved in the future. Data collection methods were key limitations of the study. Further groups should be conducted, whilst considering means of developing CNPs and their evaluation in this setting.

Few evaluations of ToL groups have been conducted in inpatient settings. This research outlines considerations for setting up and evaluating ToL groups and highlights their value for service users and staff.

The non-material benefits which people derive from ecosystems, cultural ecosystem services (CES), can be difficult to measure and quantify. This study aims to demonstrate the usefulness of social media analysis.

The widespread use of social media applications has provided a novel methodology for obtaining crowd-sourced data, which can reveal patterns in how social media users interact with urban greenspace and participate in place-making activities. This study explores how urban trees are represented in images tagged with the city of Bolzano, Italy, and uploaded over the course of a year to the image-sharing application Instagram.

A third of all the images contained some elements of green nature, with 3.1% of the images portraying urban trees as the main subject and 11% with urban trees as background features. Seasonal preferences for winter and summer scenes emerged. Accompanying text, in the form of hashtags and image descriptions, was mostly positive and showed how enthusiastically people describe urban nature. An assessment of the images in terms of CES revealed that beyond aesthetic factors and the inspiration to take photographs of nature, a wide range of CES are represented, reflecting the recognition of the benefits of urban trees by Instagrammers. The collection of images provided a unique snapshot of the city of Bolzano.

This reinforces the importance of urban trees within planning policy for providing sense of place, recreation and stress relief for residents and tourists.

The study builds on recent advances in social media research, focussing on the important field of urban CES.

Outlines the laws which protect historic buildings and describes legal responsibilities that may arise from tree ownership. Examines both how ancient buildings and trees are protected, citing legislation and Preservation Orders. Explores the value of trees, and provides an extensive appendix of information from the Arboricultural Association in the form of a formula for assessing the amenity value of trees in monetary terms. Details the harm that trees can cause, and the legal responsibilities for damage caused by overhanging branches, trees adjacent to the highway, outgrowing roots, trees in parks and gardens and by poisonous trees.

Green intentional communities are easily dismissed as irrelevant to wider academic and political debates. In the first instance, they comprise small vanguards, fringes or minority groups. Surely then they interest only the readers of rarefied anthropological journals or viewers of voyeuristic television shows?¹ Secondly, they are part of the green movement, itself often cast (derogatorily,² positively,³ or otherwise⁴ as ‘utopian’). Are they not excessively idealist and romantic: wishful day-dreamers? Drawing on the literal meaning of the word utopia, which combines eu (good), ou (non) and topos (place), this chapter explores the idea that green intentional communities are indeed utopias, whereas challenging two common interpretations of that term. The first views it negatively (as unrealistic, unrealisable, excessively wishful thinking) and can be found on the pages of English Dictionaries and in colloquial parlance. The second views utopias as perfectionist: seeking to provide perfect blueprints that map the road to the good life. I shall explore some of the key ways in which these groups perform key utopian functions, suggesting that they are indeed utopian but that their utopianism is deeply imperfect and pragmatic, rooted in the real concerns and material limitations of the now.

The purpose of this study is to consider how a local government authority may present a tree asset register of street trees for the decision-making of the authority's stakeholders.

Using the tenets of population density theory, urban form theory and social stratification theory, the approach of the study is to develop a tree asset register in a local government authority's setting that could be modelled using many different attributes to derive important information for decision-making purposes.

Tree asset registers represent a critical tool in managing street trees across local government authorities.

Although the efficacy of an asset tree register may be curtailed by lack of internal audit or yearly updates, the practical consequence of an asset tree register is that local administrators may use the register to gather summarised, organised and parsimonious measures of a wide range of environmental, historical, cultural, aesthetic and scientific values of street trees.

Tree asset registers affords ratepayers, developers, tree managers and valuers a technology to plan, coordinate and manage street trees to support ecosystem services.

Asset tree registers offer planners a means to bring about sustainable change management.

The originality of the study rests in introducing tree registers as a means to meet diverse strategies for street tree management by interested stakeholders.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.