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Planting Seeds for Sharing Place

Posted on 5 February 2025

Written by:

Sophia de Sousa

Our upcoming in-person events that form part of our 2024/25 WEdesign series, Sharing Place, are spaces for people to get creative, but also to work with others around shared values and things that are important to them. The themes of these events have struck a particular chord with me, and I think have become unexpectedly poignant given recent natural disasters and the current political rhetoric happening around the globe. 

Our series theme of Sharing Place emerged, very naturally, as a continuation of the 2023/24 WEdesign series, People, Place, Planet. Throughout that series, there was a constant reference to the importance of living in harmony with our natural environment, with the many creatures and critters that inhabit it and with each other. The notion of sharing was at the heart of most of the ideas and propositions co-designed by our event participants. So it was natural to us to bring more focus on sharing in this year’s event programme.

Working with our higher education partners, we were keen to explore different aspects of Sharing Place through these events and to create safe spaces for people to think aspirationally and to imagine the conditions for more equitable places that in turn encourage us to share ideas, experiences, skills and resources with each other. Here, I’d like to plant some seed for discussion with some of my personal thoughts on these themes.   

The first of our in-person events, in Sheffield (on 27 February) will bring people together to explore Common Ground. Common is a very loaded word. Wikipedia defines The Commons as “the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth.” Interestingly, it does not hold a definition for common ground. A good old-fashioned dictionary will give you a definition such as “an area of shared interests or opinions held by two or more people or groups.” In my view, these two concepts are inextricably bound and together, make up my notion of common ground, of exploring what binds us to each other, what we share, and how our places reflect this. 

Our next event in Glasgow, Living in Agreement (on 5 March), challenges me to think about the two sides of the idiom’s meaning, of people having the same opinion and/or approving something together. In the context of placemaking, living in agreement surely moves beyond shared opinions to shared values. How can we create the conditions for people to safely air diverse views, but to come to an agreement about what is important to all of us and how to share our limited resources as equitably as possible?   

In London, we’ll be exploring The Healthy City (on 18 March). We’ll consider not only our urban environments as ecosystems that live and breathe, and that are vulnerable in their own way to blight, but also the impact that an urban environment has on those who inhabit it. What are the conditions that together help places, people and other critters thrive? 

And finally, in Newcastle, we’ll be considering Communities of Care (on 24 March). Again, care is a very loaded word. Its definition as a noun, “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something”, somehow feels quite different from that of the verb, “to feel concern or interest, attach importance to something or to look after and provide for the needs of.” There is something about how the different aspects of the verb takes us beyond the rather utilitarian nation of the provision of services described by the noun. To care brings with it a sense of feelings, personal investment and of nurture. So how can this translate into our communities and how we  shape our places together? 

Every person who steps into the room to take part in our in-person WEdesign events will bring with them their own interpretation of these themes, their own values and experiences and their own ideas. The exciting thing will be sharing these with each other and working together to imagine the “what ifs” in more collaborative and equitable placemaking. 

We do hope those of you in, and within easy reach of Sheffield, Glasgow, Newcastle and London will join us for these hands-on and creative events, which are co-designed and co-facilitated with tutors and students from University of Sheffield, Glasgow School of Art, UCL Bartlett and Newcastle University. For those of you who cannot attend in person, we will be sharing key points of discussion, and the propositions for change that our participants design together, on our blog. 

We hope you’ll also take these themes away and have a little think of your own. What do these terms mean to you, and what could they mean in the context of placemaking?