Written by:
Guest Author
by Adrian Sinclair
Sharing Place: Think Pieces invite external contributors to explore the theme of sharing place from diverse perspectives, and offering a broad range of reflections, ideas and provocations.
In this edition, Adrian Sinclair reflects on his experience of working with communities to shape shared spaces, and the complex local narratives that weave through all our places.
Sharing Place
We share places all the time…often sharing with different people in different communities. In some ways we might even have different identities for our various intersecting communities. I want to write about my experience of working alongside two very different communities and creating two very different forms of shared spaces.
Of course there are times for heroic new buildings, but often what we need is to re-design and even re-frame spaces that we have been sharing anyway. Takes me back to living in a street of back-to-back and terraced houses in Leeds. Where some people in the neighbourhood got together to re-think how to use our shared spaces…the space between the houses, the streets themselves.
This was a bottom-up, co-designed kind of thing. And as such it was complex. Even in a neighbourhood of 294 houses there were a range of intertwined sub-communities. And, looking back on it, our first attempts as “Methleys Neighbourhood Action” to create a neighbourhood working together to achieve positive change went through all the stages that M. Scott Peck talks about (see https://www.onecommunityglobal.org/stages-of-community-building/ ): a pseudo-community followed by a certain amount of chaos, emptiness, and finally a community that accepted difference and got things done!
So how do you share the streets in an equitable way? Not some dream of equal access for all, but where everyone has some kind of ‘fair and just’ access. And everyone includes the pedestrians and the cyclists, the car drivers and the delivery drivers, the kids and the older people, the people in the posh houses at the bottom of the street, the renters and the house owners, the dogs, cats and chickens, the ‘local’ people and the comers-in.
The original call for this article included the starting point that “we cannot change the past, but we can shape the future”. But to shape equitably shared spaces we need to understand the past, all the intertwined narratives, the conflicts and opportunities, the spoken and unspoken histories. With that deep understanding we can see where we might enhance a particular narrative with the spaces that we design, or indeed where we might be trying to change a narrative.
We must listen, and ask questions, and listen, and suggest, and listen. And not just to the people who want to talk to us! In the Methleys, the adults wanted to create some play areas for the children. And the children, the older ones, suggested parts of the streets to use for a play area, and others that maybe we could share use of the school playground outside of school hours. But when we asked the little kids, and I mean the two- and three-year-olds, they suggested two things: either “outside my house” or “in all the streets”. And the architect we were talking to listened and smiled and said that sounded like something in the Netherlands they call woonerfen—living streets. And we looked and listened and even visited places in the Netherlands and ended up changing government policy and creating the first home zone in the country.
It took the best part of a decade but, you know, to create something truly shared with real community ownership needs to take time. As one of the permaculture principles states, “use small and slow solutions”.
From a neighbourhood of 294 houses to an area of about 150,000 people. East Leeds is a part of Leeds with a range of intersecting narratives. Lying to the east of a northern city means it is one of the poorer parts of the city. I can tell you that because I can see the statistics of health, employment, education…but also because the prevailing winds are from the west so, historically, people with more money preferred to live in the west, upwind of the smelly, polluting industrial areas.
Younger children growing up in East Leeds will tell you how much they love the places they live in…it’s home. And older people in the area can be stoically positive. Even comers-in may talk glowingly of the reasons they have moved there. But talk to the teenagers and a different story emerges. I remember a conversation with one teenager who had started FE college in the city centre and how he deliberately hid telling the other young people which part of the city he came from “because I know what they would think”.
Images left and right by Martine Hamilton Knight
The space we created with those young people by repurposing a derelict Methodist Chapel is both beautiful and special. There is nothing like it in the rest of Leeds. And interestingly Chapel FM Arts Centre was the first-ever cultural venue in the whole of East Leeds, the cultural inequity of the city perfectly mirrored the social one. Now, apart from having a functional space that is owned and constantly in use by a whole range of local people of all ages, the teenagers have somewhere that they bring young people from other parts of the city too, because it’s special and they are proud of it. And that may just help to change a narrative.
Two examples of different types of creating and enhancing shared space. I often get asked about what my job is, working between different communities and professionals, both an outsider and sometimes an insider, an interpreter of stories and of dreams. A musician friend nailed it, talking about the role of the accompanist. In the music world, it’s not a high-status job like a soloist, but a good accompanist may sit alongside a community of singers or dancers and can both lead and follow, at times completely seamlessly. And they always listen!
So there you have it. I am an accompanist. My job now is to train more people in the art of accompanying a community. How do you teach that? Well, that’s another story of accompaniment!
Two examples of different types of creating and enhancing shared space. I often get asked about what my job is, working between different communities and professionals, both an outsider and sometimes an insider, an interpreter of stories and of dreams. A musician friend nailed it, talking about the role of the accompanist. In the music world, it’s not a high-status job like a soloist, but a good accompanist may sit alongside a community of singers or dancers and can both lead and follow, at times completely seamlessly. And they always listen!
So there you have it. I am an accompanist. My job now is to train more people in the art of accompanying a community. How do you teach that? Well, that’s another story of accompaniment!
About the Author
Adrian Sinclair has been involved with social change movements since the 1980s. Initially working as an activist, he founded Leeds-based community arts organisation Heads Together Productions back in 1986. He has overseen a broad range of place-based work under the theme Creativity with Purpose, from community theatre to collaborative documentaries, to laying 800 square metres of turf on a residential street for a weekend (an intervention that led to the change of government policy and the creation of £60 million investment in home zones across England).
Having overseen the creation of the first-ever arts venue in the estates of East Leeds in the last few years, Chapel FM Arts Centre, Adrian’s focus is now on developing training pathways for people within the sector, specifically developing UNION: The Northern School for Creativity and Activism.
About the WEdesign 2024/25 Series: Sharing Place
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Sharing Place brings people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and book a place at one of our WEdesign Sharing Place events here.
Visit our WEdesign page to find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
