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

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.

Participants will explore their town in 2040 at street and neighbourhood levels. Then they 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.

*If you are unable to bring a packed lunch and would like one to be provided, please indicate on booking form.

Afterwards:

This project is funded as part of The Ideas Fund Infrastructure programme in Hull, which seeks to build relationships between communities, partners, and the university to focus on how we identify and tackle issues by sharing knowledge and experiences.

We will be exploring how we can imagine the future we want and then start working towards it together. This will link into your work, projects, passions and how you may have imagined it working differently. We want to maintain the connection we build in the Town Anywhere so this is not a one off event. What we co-create together will become the focus of action for change. So we want to keep in touch with you (if you choose) to harness the creativity and energy that we know will be inspired on the day. We want to build on connectedness across the city to support how we bring the ideas you develop to a reality and doing this in collaboration...

Town Anywhere: A large-scale participatory community visioning experience