What is Town Anywhere, Tooting?

Town Anywhere Tooting is a large-scale, participatory, community visioning experience – bringing together people from across Tooting to ‘rehearse the future’ of our vibrant community. 

Monday 21st October, Patidar Samaj Hall, 26B Tooting High Street 

9.30 for 10.00 am prompt start – finishing 4.00pm.

“Town Anywhere is an extraordinary exercise. It invites us to step into the future, to reimagine and rebuild the world, and then inhabit it. One of the most magical things I’ve ever been a part of. ” Rob Hopkins, Transition Network.  

Who is it for?

Anyone who lives, works or has an interest in Tooting’s wellbeing and future. 

What will happen?

Town Anywhere Tooting will take you on a journey to imagine and build a thriving ‘Town Anywhere’. The Town Anywhere experience will be a day of reflecting, thinking, creativity, visioning, and sharing. It will be a space to explore what we want the future to be. It will enable us to connect together to help us envisage pathways through to the future we want.

You will explore a Town called Anywhere in 2040 at individual, neighbour and street levels. Then we will work in small groups to develop actions and ventures for the whole town across a range of areas, including ; goods and services, food, economy and finance, livelihoods and exchange, climate and ecology, governance,  infrastructure, civic and cultural networks and communications, learning, celebrating, art and design, biodiversity, public space, health and wellbeing, 

Using immersive future scenarios, large-scale model-making and timed challenges, the Town Anywhere process helps participants to play and practice community visioning, ideation and storytelling in a virtual, but tangible, environment.

By the end of the workshop, as residents of the new Town Anywhere, you will have created a physical representation of the thriving town we are all longing to live in. Collectively shaping and inhabiting this potential fair and sustainable future can strengthen our enthusiasm and resolve to go on and make it real.

The Process: The Town Anywhere process safely, constructively and playfully opens up inspirational and holistic thinking in communities and participants about possible fair, resilient and sustainable futures following these key phases:

• Time Travel to the future
• Creating home, meeting your neighbour, sharing stories
• Exploring what we can do together at street and neighbourhood levels
• Going to Town and leaving requests for community developers
• Identifying our role in Town Anywhere, and who we can work with
• Designing and making initiatives in 3D with cardboard, string, sticks, tape and imagination
• Filling in the Town Anywhere Charter
• Official Town opening celebration
• Walkabout – Exchanging, connecting, pledging
• Reflection, harvest and grounding

Town Anywhere is a process in which everyone is welcome and where everyone can learn and have fun.

Why we are doing this? 

If we can’t imagine the future we want, then we can’t set a course to achieve it

It is often hard to imagine beyond what we are dealing with now, the systems we have, the barriers we face. A crisis of civic imagination is blocking many of us from envisioning the future we want to strive for. At a community level we need to build the capacity of our collective imagination, so that we can imagine a better future and design it together. By the end of the workshop, we, the new residents of Town Anywhere 2040 will have created a physical representation of the sort of thriving inclusive town that we long to live in. Collectively shaping and inhabiting this potential future, strengthens our enthusiasm and resolve to go on and make it happen.

What will happen afterwards? 

We are exploring how we can imagine the future we want and then start working towards it together. This will link into your work, projects, passions and how you may have imagined it working differently. We want to maintain the connection we build in the Town Anywhere so this is not a one off event. What we co-create together will become the focus of action for change. So we want to keep in touch with you (if you choose) to harness the creativity and energy that we know will be inspired on the day. We want to build on connectedness across the city to support how we bring the ideas you develop to a reality and doing this in collaboration.

This inspiring hands on process (coming to Tooting for the first time) has enabled previous participants to  

• Gain greater capacity and confidence to imagine and explore low-carbon futures and initiate more transformative projects locally 
• Learn how to work more collectively, gaining new practical, analytical and collaborative skills 
• feel better resourced to voice fears, hopes and visions for the future, understanding individual and collaborative creative expression is inherent to a flourishing life
• Feel a greater sense of belonging to their neighbourhoods; more connected to their past and present and able to play a role in their futures 
• Be more able to co-design creative projects where people live or work to better prepare for social and environmental challenges.  

Town Anywhere will be led by artists Ruth Ben-Tovim, and Lucy Neal who created the Town Anywhere process that was initially commissioned by Transition Town Network. They specialise in designing and delivering participatory arts projects, interventions and processes in civic, community, ecological , education and placemaking contexts. These participatory interventions inspire people to unearth their own imaginative and instinctive power to shift how they see the world and their place within it.

Following a successful Town Anywhere in Hull in November 2023 attended by over 200 people, Town Anywhere Tooting is part of a wider network of ‘Town Anywheres’ taking place around the UK including in Bristol, Derbyshire and Merseyside. Town Anywhere Tooting leads the way in Greater London. 

For more information – and to attend the event – contact us on transitiontowntooting@gmail.com

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“Can we learn anything from visiting the future? How we see the world is often rigid and complicated by our present day circumstances. Clearly there’s an urgent need to rethink how we might co-exist if we’re going to occupy the planet and, certainly in Hull Minster, there was a real interest in what a positive future might look like. … There’s no reason why, with the right people in the room, we can’t put ourselves on a corrective course.” Dave Windass (Hull 2023 participant)

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Funding for the project was received from The National Lottery Community Fund, distributed by Transition. Thanks to National Lottery players for making this possible.  Look for more information about Transition Together at https://transitiontogether.org.uk/