Town Anywhere Hull will take you on a journey into the future, to imagine and build a thriving ‘Town Anywhere’. The Town Anywhere experience will be a day of creativity, visioning, and sharing. It will be a space to explore what we want the future to be. It will connect us to each other and help us envisage pathways through to the future we want.
Using immersive future scenarios, large-scale model-making and timed challenges, the Town Anywhere process helps participants to play and practice community visioning, ideation and storytelling in a virtual, but tangible, environment. The event takes place on Monday 27 November from 9:30am till 4pm.
Participants will explore their town in 2040 at street and neighbourhood levels. They then work in small groups to develop actions and ventures across a range of areas, including goods and services, food, governance, finance, infrastructure, civic networks, learning, celebrating, public space, health and wellbeing.
By the end of the workshop, the new residents of their Town Anywhere will have created a physical representation of the thriving town we are all longing to live in. Collectively shaping and inhabiting this potential fair and sustainable future can strengthen our enthusiasm and resolve to go on and make it real.
The Process: The Town Anywhere process safely, constructively and playfully opens up inspirational and holistic thinking in communities and participants about possible fair and sustainable futures following these key phases:
· Time travel to the future
· Creating home, meeting your neighbour, sharing stories
· Exploring what we can do together at street and neighbourhood levels
· Going to Town and leaving requests for community developers
· Identifying our role in Town Anywhere, and who we can work with
· Designing and making initiatives in 3D with cardboard, string, sticks, tape and imagination
· Filling in the Town Anywhere Charter
· Official Town opening celebration
· Walkabout – Exchanging, connecting, pledging
· Reflection, harvest and grounding
Town Anywhere is a process in which everyone is welcome and where everyone can learn and have fun.
Town Anywhere will be led by artists Ruth Ben-Tovim, and Lucy Neal who co-created the town Anywhere process that was initially commissioned by Transition Town Network. They specialise in designing and delivering tailor made participatory arts projects and processes in community, environmental, education and regeneration contexts. These participatory interventions inspire people to unearth their own imaginative and instinctive power to shift how they see the world and their place within it.
“Town Anywhere is an extraordinary exercise. It invites us to step into the future, to reimagine and rebuild the world, and to then inhabit it. One of the most magical things I’ve ever been part of. Give your imagination a treat!” Rob Hopkins, Transition Network