Environmental Values 28 (2019): 135–140. © 2019 The White Horse Press. doi: 10.3197/096327119X15515267418494 Focusing on Relational Matters to Overcome Duality I am writing this editorial from a neighbourhood in the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, where bird song and car engines intermittently can be heard competing for attention. While my preference is for ‘living in the sticks’, rather than a city, I nevertheless like Birmingham for its generally down to earth, friendly people, and its multicultural, innovative, collaborative spirit. Still, I struggle with the urban car obsession, and polluted air. Towns and cities in the English West Midlands are largely known for their manufacturing past, their factories and warehouses, road and canal networks. Birmingham has the infamous ‘original spaghetti junction’, an intertwined road interchange in the Gravelly Hill area that connects the M6 motorway with various main and local roads. Between 2002 and 2015, Birmingham had the second fastest growing UK city centre population and more growth is forecast for the city over the coming years. Like all cities there is a schizophrenic range of policies and ac- tions trying to achieve economic prosperity – constantly seeking investment and economic growth that adds concrete, bricks and tarmac – while claiming to be ‘green’. It has struggled to ‘green’ new developments, maintain com- munal spaces and provide active transport infrastructure across the city such as traffc-free cycle networks and footpaths. Since 2015 it has been marketing itself as a ‘biophilic’ city 1 and declaring its intent to be the UK’s frst ‘natural capital city’. These different ‘traits’ could also be expressed as a dichotomy between development and nature or, more generally, between humans and nature. Economic development is largely driven and funded by those who see nature and environmental benefts as separate from, or an add-on to, their primary objectives. They do not see environmental concerns as a fundamental and in- timately connected way of thinking about place-making and relating to nature. A few months ago, a colleague from Birmingham City University, Professor Kathryn Moore, added an interesting proposal to the regional development discourse: a West Midlands National Park encompassing Birmingham and the Black Country. Here the attention shifts from a landscape dominated by in- dustrial heritage and manufacturing to the West Midland plateau’s waterways, parks and open landscapes. This vision has been created and impressively cap- tured by Moore in her colour-markings of maps. Instead of highlighting roads, trainlines and built-up areas, the lines of natural features such as rivers and areas of heathland and forests are accentuated and elevated viewpoints marked and envisioned as nature observatories. In her own words: When we think of a National Park our natural inclination is to look at rural areas but there are swathes of natural beauty right here in the heart of a metropolitan region. For a long time the West Midlands has been viewed as a concrete jungle 1. See http://biophiliccities.org/partner-cities/birmingham-uk/