Kiera Chapman

My research explores the relationship between the urban and the natural from 1800 to the present. Within this, I am particularly interested in the way that shifting aesthetic ideas of natural beauty have changed the relationship between green and grey spaces in cities.

I trace these ideas into the present day, which gives my work a strong activist-research component. Using methods drawn from both the arts and humanities and the spatial social sciences, I track the ways that current and emerging policy to preserve biodiversity is reshaping the places where we live, to the exclusion of alternative visions of nature. I am currently working with a range of community groups who are trying to oppose the development of ecologically sensitive sites for housing, seeking to understand how their ways of viewing and narrating ‘everyday nature’ are getting lost within an increasingly technocratic and quantitative approach to biodiversity loss.

I am Co-Investigator on an interdisciplinary £1m ESRC-funded bid, which explores both the scientific, social, and aesthetic impacts of new planning policy. I am also a creative writer: my coauthored book 'Nature's Calendar: the British Year in 72 Seasons', published by Granta, brings together science, social science and arts and humanities to reenchant familiar species. I am part of a team producing an exhibition on this theme at the Bodleian in 2026.