Critical Friend to this Newhaven, Sussex, socially engaged arts & wellbeing organisation, that brings people together using creativity and food to explore what it takes to build safe, connected and sustainable communities.

Critical Friend to this Somerset-based charity, one of the Arts Council Creative People and Places cohort, offering communities new opportunities to create, access and participate in creative arts, heritage and cultural activities.

Placemaking Lead for this University of Sussex an initiative which supports place-based creative, collaborative problem solving between academics, creatives, the local community, local authorities, and key external experts to create and influence local place-based policy. It is building a body of evidence about what works when working with place - both in terms of methodological approaches but also examples of the impact generated through the translation of those methodologies into practice- using creative methods and built in understanding of culture, history and language.

Helping the civic leaders and champions at University of Derby think through their mission, and story of change and action.

‘Placing Placemaking: Exploring what constitutes best practice in UK universities’ paper.

Working with the 2021 Research Excellence Framework submissions with a place purview to think through what these are telling us about higher education and placemaking.

Academic Advisory Group member on East Sussex County Council’s Making it Happen 5-year programme that works alongside people in their neighbourhoods who want to take action to create positive change.

Centre for Cultural Value, hosted at Leeds University, is building a shared understanding of the differences that arts, culture, heritage and screen make to people’s lives and to society. I am involved in its placemaking enquiry as a special advisor.

I am back with the excellent team at Futurecity, working with them on a local authority place narrative consultation – and also acting as mentor to one of its emerging placemaking talents.

Sussex Co-Lab is a creative policy decision-making initiative, based on the collaborative and democratic values of socially engaged art, led by the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) at the University of Sussex. My role is as Placemaking Consultant.

Paper for the National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange Festival of Cultural Knowledge Exchange on Arts Council England’s Cultural Compacts initiative, talking cultural placemaking and place-based pandemic recovery.

Part of the select expert team helping Peabody and We Made That think through Peabody’s placemaking practice and process for its 100-plus homes in the UK.

I worked with Futurecity as a Strategist (2016-18) on the devising to delivery of cultural placemaking masterplans, public art and community development commissions for global private and public developments. Some of the projects I worked on were: Basildon Town Centre / Barangaroo / Barking Riverside / Didcot Garden Town / The Peninsula / Wembley Park.

The Modern Brighton and Hove map is an architectural guide to examples of architecture in Brighton and Hove and its close surrounds built in the last 100 years, including commercial and domestic Brutalist, Modernist, Art Deco and contemporary architecture.

The map launched in 2017 with a programme of talks and guided walks, and I collaborated on this project with Paul Zara, Conran&Partners, placemaker, Richard Wolfstrome, and architectural photographer and founder of MiniClick, Jim Stephenson. It was funded by RIBA Sussex and the Sussex branch of the RSA.

London Festival consultation and events curation with founder, Nick Luscombe, and a collaborative team of advisors, stakeholders and communities. The resulting festival took place over multiple London sites, over the course of many days, and involved musicians, sound artists and practitioners, industry leaders and a participative public. I linked this with my own practice by commissioning an emerging artist sound walk and leading an urban ramble of the festival sites interventions.

Community consultation and engagement for future development of public art in new town sites in Annesley and Hucknall, Nottinghamshire; creation of a public art commissioning brief with communities using a creative placemaking framework. Collaborator Richard Wolfstrome writes wonderfully of this project in more detail.

EDGE Condition was an online broadsheet publication - with live events - from myself and Gem Barton.

The publication celebrated variety in architectural creative working and discourse – those that work in informal or non-traditional architectural practice, those with or without architectural training and who work in the wider built environment sector across creative, educational and constructive roles.

Each issue was thematic and led with a long-read article and featured a number of comment pieces that interrogated the vocation and activity of those positioned on the fringe of the formal architecture sector.

Threshold was an architecture, urban design and arts collective who, through an arts-based programme of events, installations, interventions and collaborative placemaking activity, explored the condition of urban and sub-urban living. The core aim was to encourage local communities and stakeholders to participate in and debate the design of the built environment, and using this information to inform urban design. We did this through built environment education, outreach and cultural learning events and programmes and public realm commissions.

The team was comprised of myself; architect Olli Blair from a:b:i:r architects; architect Paul Nicholson from Chalk Architecture; architect Andy Parsons from Yelo Architects; architectural photographer Jim Stephenson; and placemaker and designer, Richard Wolfstrome.

LookUp is a crowdsourced architecture and photography project with the aim of getting people to ‘look up’ and see what is around them. We do it when we go somewhere as a tourist, but perhaps less so in the place we call home, our gaze down, on our way somewhere, thinking about our everyday things.

The criteria for inclusion is simple: has to be an architectural detail, permanent or temporary, old or new, has to be one storey up or more.

LookUp started in Brighton and Hove, where I posted a different LookUp for each day of 2013 (and more keep coming!) and has also featured in the UK, Belfast, Bradford, Bristol, Canterbury, Cardiff, Croydon, Edinburgh, Exeter, Hastings, Leeds, Lewes, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Margate, Newcastle, Norwich, Peckham, Portsmouth, Saltaire, Sittingbourne, Walthamstow and Woking; and internationally, Chicago, Dublin, Indianapolis, Prague, San Francisco and Toronto, among others.

LookUp has attracted a lot of print and broadcast coverage; has been used in formal and informal education; and a workshop has been developed to use in any place, based on an ‘urban wander’ sourcing of LookUp’s with members of the public to create their own LookUp gallery. If you are interested in hosting a workshop where you live, please do get in touch.

Thanks to everyone that has sent me in their ideas and to add more, either email me here or post to the Facebook page.

I am the founder of Brighton and Hove Urban Ramblers, a group of close to 1000 ramblers that walk the city and urban places close by - though usually in groups of 20 to 30, not all at once...I ran the group for three years and its now run by the community itself.

I still have a walking placemaking practice and I see walking the city as an artistic and immersive practice and curate the walks that I lead along cultural themes spanning architectural, arts, social history and the contemporary.

More information on Brighton and Hove Urban Ramblers, news of its walks and to join, have a look at the MeetUp and and the Facebook page.