Paula Sharratt, Open City Design

• Background / About

  Paula is a long time community activist and proud working class resident of West Bridgford, Nottingham. Paula is actively involved in a patient participation group in her local area in which she challenges the way bureaucracy misrepresents people and the subsequent ways in which they are “treated”.

Skyline of Nottingham, Paula’s home city

CONTEXT

Following the crash of outsourcing firm Carillion, Paula set about understanding how supply chains, people and culture of the local area interacted.

Paula’s investigations have centred around how data tools are used to surveil, prejudice, misrepresent and depersonalise people in neighbourhoods. With an explicit focus on the widely used Experian Mosaic she sees how data generalises and stereotypes, creates social and economic exclusion, and misrepresents, enabling the ignoring and normalising the experience of harm. Different databases within the health service have recorded ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality in myriad and differing ways, making it hard to extract inequality data and hard to find out how many patients use services regularly. This fragmentation means that it becomes harder and harder for people to communicate their lived experiences and how their lives - and health services/outcomes - are being influenced by unjust systems rooted in exploitation and extraction.

ACTIVITIES

Paula’s work centred around producing a community health impact assessment of the impact of the routine use of quantitative data that isolates, divides, and abstracts communities and the neighbourhoods they live in. She was exploring the role of data in institutional activities.

• The intention of the work was to have the lives of social housing residents acknowledged and documented in a meaningful way. This was in contradiction to how local media increasingly focus on market driven segmentation, a financially driven way of making people visible/invisible/amplifying/silencing resulting in structures where social housing householders don’t see themselves well represented in local, regional or national media.

Using a grant provided by Centric Lab, Paula: 

• began relationship building with various stakeholders, such the local MP and the local council, 

• Began working with local patient groups and householders to understand the complexity of how they live and how they feel they are treated day to day. 

• Talked with householders and wrote stories of work, life and health and related it to the history and area, built on understanding within the housing association, and the GP practice and the wider community.

OUTCOME

As a result of her field building around supply chains and health, Paula has been asked to organise an event in the Future Health series for Rushcliffe in 2026 where one of the themes will be how a more visual culture can enable representation and participation. Paula is focusing on using the event as a means to increase social capital in the community by the connections individual neighbours and householders make around how their health is influenced by the systems around them and how they can contribute to shaping them.

• Paula noted back to us that following the various interviews with local residents they felt a sense of agency and freedom to contribute on matters about the supply chains that overrule their lives.

• From some of the research emerged the issue of low level racism in the neighbourhood being unaddressed by poor governance. It centred on the experiences of a Nigerian housing manager receiving racist abuse and other persons in their position leaving their job roles at the same time, resulting in inaction from employers and other systems.