Reviewed research reveals a lack of young people's voices articulating if and how urban nature supports their mental health and wellbeing. This paper presents qualitative research with young multi-ethnic urban residents living in a northern UK city and offers an important counter-narrative to the pervasive notion of childhood nature-deficit disorder. Using interviews and creative arts workshops, we explored the value of urban nature for the mental health and wellbeing of 24 young people aged 17-27 years, 9 of whom had lived experience of mental health difficulties. Trees, water, open spaces and views were frequently experienced nature typologies offering benefits. Deteriorating landscapes, young people's shifting identities and perceived time pressures disrupted support. Young people expressed how urban nature encounters were experienced as accepting and relational, offering a: stronger sense of self; feelings of escape; connection and care with the human and non-human world.

Museum designers, curators and educators have traditionally emphasised children as a group of learners but children are also experiencers and players. Exploring frameworks of understanding, based on packaging and person matter intra-actions of new materialism, leads me to propose the development of an imaginative alternative to the learning rhetoric. An alternative lies in thinking collectively about children’s and adult’s museum experiences, offering: a rarely considered presentation of adults and young children as alike and a much-needed unpackaging of the adult–child binary. In proposing a challenge to the generalisability of children’s museum experience, an emphasis is placed on ambiguity and openness of experience. I suggest that matter is acknowledged as agential for children, as for adults and children may more freely be understood as humans entangled with the nonhuman and with each other.

Spatial designers, who engage children in their design process, most often frame children in this context as experts in their own lives. Findings from a study based at the University of Sheffield, point to new understandings of this participatory role, in which children move towards the role of designer. Drawing on interviews including visual methods with 16 spatial designers and guided by phenemonography, the paper seeks to represent the designers’ perspectives on the under-explored area of child–designer interactions. Findings suggest that the designers understand these interactions to comprise a reciprocal and co-created space – a sphere of behaviours, actions and ways of being which together becomes an enabler of change. It is proposed that what Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) refers to as a ‘Third Space’ in which the ‘dominant culture might be temporarily subverted and its structural systems of power and control renegotiated’ can be re-imagined in this co-design context. The paper weaves together theoretical discourse and empirical illustrations of perceived creativity, play and transgression, which – at their intersection – support a potential transformation of understandings of children as co-designers and of the design process itself.

This article reports some of the findings of a recent comprehensive review of the education provision of The Wildlife Trusts UK, one of the UK's leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with nature conservation. These findings are set within the context of current thinking on responsibility for education for sustainability. It examines some theoretical perspectives on the nature and role of NGOs, and highlights the critical importance of such organisations making appropriate linkages both within themselves and also with the wider systems and structures within which they operate. Such NGOs have a key role to play in influencing policy and decision-making at the highest level nationally and internationally. This role would be very greatly strengthened if well-co-ordinated strategy and policy emanates from partnerships and collaboration among providers of education. In order to shift systems, organisations of this kind need to be strategically well placed and recognised as mutually supportive and effective parts of those systems.

This paper explores ways in which first generation migrants living in a UK city engage with urban nature. Through understanding mundane connections with local nature (plants, animals and seasons), we attend to two questions ‘what can narratives of urban nature tell us about experiences of migration’, and inversely ‘what can diverse migrant voices tell us about experiences of urban nature’? We draw on interview data with 23 participants, all born overseas, with a diverse mix in terms of age (young adults to older retired people), gender, country of origin and length of time resident in the United Kingdom. The analysis focuses on three areas: multisensory engagements with weather, care for nature and how transnational identities surface through the relational dimensions of nature narratives. We conclude by highlighting the potential of embodied nature engagement to support a sense of wellbeing and transnational identity across the life‐course, with potential to more broadly reflect pluralist understandings of the urban environment.