What makes our streets and neighbourhoods great to live in?

Everything people told us in the workshops is organised into six themes and the factors within them.

Themes: are the big areas of life that make streets and neighbourhoods thrive, from Living with Nature to Freedom to Move.

Factors: are what give dimension to the themes. Under Living with Nature, for example, sit green streets and spaces, biodiversity, water and climate resilience, and ecological stewardship. The factors reflect the different parts of the theme that we heard during workshops.

Equity: and safety are cross-cutting themes that intersect the wheel. We see them as lenses, asking who each experience is true for, and who it isn’t.

The indicators: were derived from the themes and factors. In the workshops, the goal was to imagine the stories of change we’d notice if several of the themes and factors were a reality. So each indicator draws on several factors, which are the conditions that make it possible. In this way, the Oxfordshire indicators closely reflect the ways people want to experience their places.

The themes and factors came entirely from what people said. We didn’t start with a framework and sort their words into it.

After Workshop 1, a large language model helped sort hundreds of comments into early clusters. The team then checked every grouping by hand against what people had actually said.

Workshop 2’s focus was on envisaging thriving streets that work for everyone. This gave us new language for what people really longed for in their streets. So we refined the themes to reflect it. “Mobility and Transport” became “Freedom to Move”, “Social Cohesion” became “Social Connection and Belonging”, and “Nature and Environment” became “Living with Nature”. It turned the wheel into a direction of travel.

Each theme carries a lot of nuance and a large volume of data. The factors are the sub-dimensions within each theme. The factor summaries then distil that workshop material into a few lines, staying as close as possible to people’s own words and intent. That way, the richness of what people told us carries through to the indicators.