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Seminar Series 13: Lecture 3 - Tessy Britton

17 Jan 2017

Wheatley Academy, 150 Ingram Street, Glasgow, G1 1DW, United Kingdom

Seminar

City Neighbourhoods made by everyone for everyone

We all believe that people doing more things together will make our own and each other’s lives better. However, participation in neighbourhood projects is low. Wide spread participation in neighbourhoods is difficult to achieve and remains small and fragmented.  While we stay attached to the notion of top down and bottom up we won’t be able to change the situation. Unless we redesign how participation works and invest in it properly we won’t be able to fully realise its potential as a key building block for building sustainable cities of the future. Realising the vision we have of vibrant places, made by everyone, for everyone, will require fundamentally changing the structures through which we work together. 

In this talk Tessy Britton described the work of Participatory City.  She shared the research and analysis which has led to the development of a large scale Demonstration Neighbourhood in London. Participatory City is creating new structures designed to scale up practical participation, building collaborative activity into the fabric of everyday life and changing how we work together to achieve a more equal society.

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About the speaker

Tessy Britton, Founder, Participatory City, London

Tessy is founder of Participatory City and has been developing the Participatory City practice for 6 years, researching and prototyping new ways to support widespread practical participation. Tessy is Editor in Chief for Community Lover’s Guide — a crowdsourced project, gathering 100s of case studies of participatory culture projects from across the world. The project has published 12 City Collections, as well as the original book which started the series ‘Hand Made: Portraits of emergent new community culture’. Tessy works on a number of international projects, including supporting Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge, judging the New Radicals 2016 with Nesta and The Observer, and is a British Council Fellow for the Hammamet Conference in Tunisia. Tessy is a guest lecturer at: Saïd Business School (Oxford), LabGov at LUISS University (Rome); Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University; Rhode Island School of Design (Providence. USA). Tessy led a new education MA module at Chichester University on teaching metacognition and wellbeing in schools and was a member of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society during that time. Tessy is a designer and a communication and emotional intelligence specialist, with a particular interest in cross cultural learning and relationship building. Click here for a link to the Participatory Cities Illustrated Guide.

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