1:1 Event
For our event we decided to hold a workshop for kids to play with special design, scale and rough modelling as well as some diagramming. Through this we would be teaching the kids a little something about space as well as fostering discussion between the participating children’s parents on the area of Hulme.
We were able to get a space to hold our Event from the Hulme Community Garden Centre.
To prepare for the event we had to get a lot of things with the main focus being on adequately advertising the event and acquiring materials. We used a lot of excess materials that weren’t needed by for example the fashion students at the MMU who gave us plenty of fabrics to use. We got a lot of cardboard and also brought as much crafting equipment as we could. We also got a map and pins with paper for the participants to pin notes onto different places is Hulme. When we got an idea of the size of the space we would occupy in the Garden Centre, we got some more materials and made sure we were ready for the day.
Write about the event.
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Around 70% of the people we talked to weren’t from Hulme.
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People from different communities are drawn to Hulme because of the Kim by the Sea café, Visual arts community Centre, Z arts Centre, Royal Northern College of Music, Moss Side Swimming Pool and the Hulme Community Garden Centre.
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From that we understood that the reasons they come to these places is because they can be very Family Friendly places, they are a relaxing escape from their busy day to day lives, they bring you closer to nature, they allow you to connect with your family in a nice environment especially for children, many different kinds of people are welcome such as differently abled individuals and There’s also production of organic products locally.
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The people we interacted with expressed a desire for more green space in Hulme especially for their children to enjoy.
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They were also familiar with each other because most of them go to the events for toddlers the community centre holds regularly. As a result of this they were able to just enjoy themselves while we interacted with the kids and talked to the other parents.
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A few of the older children that attended were friends who also went to the same school in Hulme, they noted that they enjoyed spending time in the garden centre because they felt it was close to nature and they enjoyed being allowed to just play around and build things and generally get involved.
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The children really liked parks as they allow them to be creative and use their imaginations to have fun.
Referring to the cultural agency text, they focused on largely ignored places. They formed a bond of trust with selected local communities who strongly identified with their physical, cultural and green environment. They inspire participation in need for change and people participated because they wanted to be part of initiating that change.
R-Urban is less a practice and more an ongoing collaborative project between various students, scholars’ architects and locals based on shared values. The R stands for various terms that describe what they do with the main ones being Recycle, Repair Re-use Rethink etc. The project they undertook in the reading we looked at involved the Re-use of a space that was then cleaned up and used to hold arises of talks in the local community. The locals were very involved in the process and at the end of it they created a space for themselves to have a discussions on the state of their area and what they could do about it.
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The event was very hands on from the very start. We each had our objectives for the day and different parts of the event to focus on. Felix, Dorota and Rosina were in charge of showing the kids how to make their little spaces and showing them how to work with the scale and directing them while Diana was mainly focused on talking with the parents and talking to them about Hulme in general and getting an idea of the places in Hulme that interest them through our map.
The day had 4 main periods of activity with the very start being fairly busy. The very first participants were less inclined to talk as they were mostly interested in the spaces but as the day went on it got very busy with around 10 kids at a time making structures and us talking to the parents as that went on in addition to directing the kids. During the Middle of the day was when the parents were most interested in talking with us. The map by itself drew some curious onlookers who we then talked to about their thoughts on Hulme and the places they liked and disliked as well as things they would like to see changed within Hulme.One older child around the age of 10 was very focused on making a large animal and it took him quite a while to finish.
The kids aged around 8 were the most interesting most of them lived in Hulme and had a lot to say and were very interested in the modelling task. They veered off the regular spaces once they got the hang of it and made more interesting spaces and were even thinking structurally. The kids aged around 4 focused on the facades of the simple spaces and even talked about some of their favourite places as they worked. Near the end most of the kids were younger and more interested in the diagramming of theoretical spaces with the various materials we had available. Painting their spaces was very popular.
Critical Analysis
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When looking back and analysis our findings after the event, we were somewhat disappointed that more people from Hulme didn’t come as a good portion of people we engaged with were from outside Hulme.
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Learning is something that everyone does and it doesn’t really ever end for a lot of us since there’s always something new for us to learn no matter how knowledgeable we become.
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The primary driver for our practice it to create spaces for people to connect with each other whether it be families of people who want to get to know each other.
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The main community we want to focus on is families because they tend to be more interactive since their children will be getting to know a lot of people as they grow up so parents meet each other through their kids a lot of the time.
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Some people in Hulme don’t get involved in the programs that the community already has available. We want to focus on the people that do get involved as they would participate in these events and families tend to do this because they want their kids to have fun and they are part of the change as they will generally tend to befriend each other.
Archi Mill
