From 8-80 – A City for All – Utopia

FROM 8-80, A CITY FOR ALL >> UTOPIA

Overall project and aim:
-City planning happens elsewhere. Processes are opaque, powerful interests lie with the other. This can lead to people feeling disempowered, and to the ignored needs, dreams and wishes of whole parts of society.
-We want to open the process, turn it on its head and develop a bottom up imaginative vision.
-By inviting people from both ends of the age spectrum together with artists and writers to dream up a fantastical and utopian future for a shared city, to learn from each other and dig deep, and to together create/ write stories and produce fragments of an urban future that is desirable and an environment conducive to wellbeing and sustainability.
-Led by creative writers and artists, a utopian story of shared living and a city truly for all is imagined in a series of workshops with young people and older people.
-The stories will be a starting point for us as architects – in collaboration with other planning, strategic and creative disciplines – to determine strategic steps we need to take to get to this imagined place and develop possible solutions and interventions.

Delivery partners:
Erect Architecture (www.erectarchitecture.co.uk) is organising the event. Delivery 'partners' are: Royal College of Art and the Roche Court Educational Trust (http://rochecourteducationaltrust.co.uk/) and the London Wildlife Trust (www.wildlondon.org.uk) kindly providing the site at Camley Street Natural Park in Kings Cross.

Workshop outline:
Explorative site walkabout & creative session to formulate desires for utopian city 120min
Picnic 30min
Wrapping up and sharing session 60min

Workshop leaders:
The first workshop will be lead by visual artist (Julieann Worrall from Roche Court Educational Trust) and creative writer Jeremy Page (http://www.jeremypage.co.uk).
Erect Architecture will support the running of the event.

To sign up for this workshop, please contact Susanne Tutsch, st@erectarchitecture.co.uk, t.020 7254 6336