Town Anywhere - Arts and Culture

​​TOWN ANYWHERE - YOU ARE INVITED

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

Open your imagination for a creative, caring, thriving town

“What might be the role of the arts and cultural activity in a society where wellbeing is increasingly decoupled from a model of economic growth, and where human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption? … What is …the role of culture and the arts, not just in communicating sustainability but also as an inherent component of that sort of society. “ ()

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. See film link here for previous Town Anywhere held in Hull in November 2024 which give a flavour of the process and participants’ experience of it.

Over the last few months we have been on a journey with Town Anywhere exploring the process through different entry framings. This time we are bringing arts and culture to the foreground and will be sharing the gleanings from the day with the team working on creating the new five-year Culture Strategy for Hull.

JOIN US TO EXPLORE

• Arts and Culture at the heart of our town
• Mental Wellbeing and sustainable living for everyone
• A thriving tomorrow for people, place and planet
• Co-creating solutions together

Our intention is to bring people together for the day to increase our field of vision beyond our day-to-day work and everyday lives, to enable us to imagine, build and then inhabit a vision of thriving communities in 2040.

Town Anywhere Hull will take you on a journey, to imagine and build a thriving ‘Town Anywhere’. The Town Anywhere experience will be a day of reflecting, thinking, creativity, visioning, and sharing. It will be a space to explore what we want the future to be. It will enable us to connect together to help us envisage pathways through to the future we want.

You will explore a Town called Anywhere in 2040 at individual, neighbour and street levels. Then with the vision of a thriving Town of wellbeing, creativity and sustainable living we will work in small groups to develop actions and ventures for the whole town across a range of areas, including ; celebrations, art and design, economy and finance, livelihoods and exchange, goods and services, food, climate and ecology, governance, infrastructure, civic and cultural networks and communications, learning, public space, health and wellbeing,

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 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.

Why we are doing this: It is often hard to imagine beyond what we are dealing with now, the systems we have, the barriers we face. A crisis of civic imagination is blocking many of us from envisioning the future we want to strive for. At a community level we need to build the capacity of our collective imagination, so that we can imagine a better future and design it together. By the end of the workshop, we, the new residents of Town Anywhere 2040 will have created a physical representation of the sort of thriving inclusive town that we long to live in. Collectively shaping and inhabiting this potential future, strengthens our enthusiasm and resolve to go on and make it happen.

Afterwards: We are exploring how we can imagine the future we want and then start working towards it together. This will link into individual and collective work within the city. This will be the third Town Anywhere experience in Hull which is creating layers of perspective through different entry points to the workshop and seeing how this contributes to understanding what a future could look like which has a focus on flourishing lives lived within planetary boundaries.

This inspiring hands on process has enabled previous participants to

• Gain greater capacity and confidence to imagine and explore low-carbon, sustainable futures and initiate more transformative projects locally;
• Learn how to work more collectively, gaining new practical, analytical and collaborative skills;
• feel better resourced to voice fears, hopes and visions for the future, understanding individual and collaborative creative expression is inherent to a flourishing life;
• Feel a greater sense of belonging; more connected to their past and present and able to play a role in their futures;
• Be more able to co-design creative projects in their neighbourhoods to better prepare for social and environmental challenges.

Town Anywhere is led by artists Ruth Ben-Tovim, and Lucy Neal who created the Town Anywhere process that was initially commissioned by Transition Town Network. They specialise in designing and delivering participatory arts projects, interventions and processes in civic, community, ecological , education and placemaking 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.

Following a hugely successful Town Anywhere in Hull in November 2023 attended by over 200 people, the Ideas Fund commissioned Ruth Ben-Tovim to run a Town Anywhere Apprenticeship programme in Hull so that this unique process can remain in Hull and be used to in a number of different contexts. The Apprenticeship team will be facilitating this Town Anywhere event on the 10th July.

Host or Publisher The Ideas Fund - Hull