A Sense of Place (aka our very own cardboard utopia)

If, in the year 2034, ‘X’ Wiltshire town has a circular tram system, Higher Education establishment, social enterprise hub, a wind farm and wildflower verges, vertical gardens and allotments on every spare square-inch of space, then it sounds like it’ll be a pretty great place to live. Personally I’d quite fancy if the 3 storey, 5-person-wide, slide which exits the community centre also comes into fruition, but I’m not holding out on that one. If I too was made of cardboard, I would put my house on the market and move straight into the box town that was created at our summer forum this week.

On Tuesday evening WfCAP & RSA Wiltshire co-hosted a Creative Gathering. Two similar events had been held by RSAWilts with the attendees coming from across the county’s creative sector. The engagement events centred on Wiltshire’s Community Campus project. We decided to team up and develop the format further to bring together two different sectors: the CAPs plus key partners they work with, along with the creative attendees from the previous events, as a way of brokering new relationships and offering up potential for collaborating on projects. (Inevitably & excitingly, there is of course much overlap already, no one being binary in there interest/role, but people met new people which is always important.)

Focusing on ‘place’ we set-up for the event by filling half of Westbury Leigh Community Hall with empty cardboard boxes which we began to assemble, label and turn into local amenities, so as delegates began to arrive they entered a room reminiscent of a Blue Peter studio. If they stayed (which thankfully – gamble paying off! – they all did) they were asked to join in and help co-create a place we would all wish to live: a cardboard utopia.

So as people arrived, accepted (succumbed to) the format and got stuck in, so housing, work places and a myriad of art centres shot up around the room. Various transport links, from rail lines to canals, weaved between the buildings and in equal measures leisure spaces and car parks were squeezed into the remaining gaps. Then as the town looked in danger of needing green-field planning regs, we pulled everyone together to listen to a variety of scenarios and character descriptions: …. It’s 2034 ….. “I work in IT, commuting daily to Swindon, by chance, I sometimes see people in my street, but in the main I feel disconnected” …. “I am an active 85 year old, I like to walk but have trouble with steps and hills and have no car” …. We also shared facts and figures from the Wiltshire JSAs and other local data relating to climate change, population increase, transport etc. Through the evening we also heard about an arts collaborative: Create Gloucestershire, the Westbury Music & Arts Festival and the Wiltshire Youth Arts Charter lead by WYAP – all of this informed the attendees of stats, opinions, and ideas, problems and opportunities, bringing us back to our constant reference point for the evening: the boxes. So tower blocks were pulled down, enterprise centres were built on car parks, the arts centres merged within one building (box) and communal gardens were developed amongst the improved, low-cost, housing provision.

During the evening people took a walk down the road to listen to a stranger, over conversation they shared the food they had all contributed and again and again they came back to transform the cardboard community to better meet the needs of the people they had learnt from. This activity, these conversations, can and will continue but after just one evening Wiltshire 2034 is looking pretty good. One person flipped the question, asking: “Where have we come from since 20 years ago” – the person replying simply said: “We would not have had an event like this in 1994.”

You can see more of the photos from the event on our WfCAP Facebook page and find out more about CAPs via our WfCAP website or contact me on laura.pictor@wfcap.org