Profile

Simon Bell is Senior Research fellow at Edinburgh College of Art and by background a forester and landscape architect with special interest in access to the outdoors, forests and remoter landscapes. His book ‘Design for Outdoor Recreation’ includes aspects of inclusive access to national parks, forests and wilderness and his book on Designing Sustainable Forest Landscapes deals with the large-scale. He has been involved in projects in the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Finland, Latvia and Russia.

Past research includes ‘Local Use of Woodlands in Central Scotland’ for the Forestry Commission, ‘Crossplan’, an EU funded project about participatory landscape planning as a tool for rural development together with partners in Finland, Sweden and Norway, under the EU Northern Periphery Programme and ‘People and Nature in the East Midlands’ for English Nature, ‘Cultural Landscape Values in Rural Latvia’, funded by the British Academy, a research mapping exercise and searchable research database on green space for the Department of Communities and Local Government (formerly the ODPM) and “Access by Deaf Visitors to the Countryside” for Scottish Natural Heritage. The EU integrated project PLUREL, researching into quality of life and land use change is the most recent project underway.

Simon is also Associate Professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences (Eesti Maaülikool) in Tartu, Estonia, department of landscape architecture.

Simon’s other international involvment has included a month in Japan looking at forests and national parks, under a short-term fellowship awarded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2002. He also worked with colleagues around Europe in a COST Action, COST E33 on “Forest recreation and nature tourism” (see weblink on this site), and also COST E39, “Trees, forests and human health and well-being”. In addition he is a member of the executive committee of ECLAS, the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools, and on the steering committee of the Le:Notre networking project on landscape architecture education in Europe. He is also active in IUFRO, the International Union of Forest Research Organisations.

research projects

European network and research activities (pdf file, 664KB)

Universal access in the USA (2) (pdf file, 739KB)

poster

Local open space and social inclusion: case studies of use and abuse in woodlands in central Scotland (pdf file, 1,115 KB)