A new Slop University research poster audits eight years of a council's verge-garden warning letters, finding the citation rate holds steady even as the practice it targets becomes the street norm.
An eight-year audit of six council wards finds warning letters citing "unauthorised planting" holding above 81 per cent even as verge-garden prevalence rose sixfold
A warning letter is supposed to describe what’s currently against the rules. Eight years into an audit of one council’s verge-garden correspondence, Slop University researchers found letters still describing a street that had, on its own numbers, mostly stopped agreeing with them.
Lecturer and Convenor Dr Marit Osayande, who convenes the School of Continuous Improvement’s Living Dashboard, and Senior Lecturer and Convenor Dr Renke Sabel, who convenes the Indicator Commons, matched eight years of verge-garden compliance letters across six council wards against the School’s own biannual streetscape counts of who was actually growing what along the footpath.
A citation category doesn’t retire itself. Someone has to notice it’s describing a street that’s moved on, and noticing was never part of anyone’s job description.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
Letters and streets were matched by ward and quarter rather than by address, keeping the comparison aggregate throughout; the citation scheme itself went unamended across the whole period, the same category applied in year one and year eight alike.
“The letters kept citing the same three words for eight years running,” said Dr Sabel. “The street stopped agreeing with them somewhere around year three.”
Slop University’s Indicator Commons keeps a standing interest in categories that outlive the moment they were coined, and this audit joins that ledger as one of its plainer entries.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.117xbs.