Future Cities and The Power of Imagination: Create your own farming city

In March 2020, CRIN joined the Digital Maker Collective at the Tate Modern’s Tate Exchange event Uni To Unicorns, to explore the intersection between art schools, technology and social good.

Photograph of a mother and two children drawing at a table

CRIN previously took part at Tate Exchange last year with Beta Utopia which pictured how a rights-respecting future might look like. For this year’s event, we developed a series of workshops, including Build Your Own FARMING-CITY! in collaboration with the Chicago-based architects Design With Company and London’s innovation lab GreenLab.

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Build Your Own FARMING-CITY! stems from Design with Company’s original project Hedge HUG, a fictional exploration of rural urbanism, where the city is brought into and around the farm. Hedge-HUG challenged visitors to think about how spaces can be changed and used to grow food in places near where consumers live. This time around at the Tate Exchange in March 2020, the workshop gave the public the opportunity to create beautiful cities, mixing urban, farming and tech elements using custom-designed stencils, stickers and coloured pens. Children and adults alike got together in using one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal to shape how we might live differently: our imaginations.

Our process

The idea came about last last year at Beta Utopia, for which we had wanted to create a workshop - in an already packed programme - imagining what future cities might look like, as a response to the climate crisis and the need for greater sustainability.So this year, we decided to push these concepts.

We collaborated with design duo Stuart Hicks and Allison Hickmeyer from the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-founders of Design With Company. The process was entirely remote through phone calls, Skype calls and Google Docs to remain as sustainable as possible. We avoided having to fly the duo into London as the carbon footprint would have been massive. Our aim was to develop a creative way to tackle issues around the climate change crisis by rethinking our lifestyles and without using the usual NGO and rights lingo to avoid alienating the general public, especially children. In order to adapt the project as a workshop, both teams came up with questions to provoke visitors to rethink things. What could farming cities of the future look like? How might we change our relationship with nature to protect the planet, and continue the fight for human rights?

Stuart and Allison then designed the sticker and stencils and sent them via post. However as the project went on, Design With Company wished to ground their project in a way that the cities would include real-life elements which could truly be applied today, such as renewable energy, bee hives and wormeries, but both they and CRIN lacked the expertise. So we reached out to GreenLab which provided their expertise in urban farming and sustainability techniques, along with a set of terrariums in small globes called The Constellation of Microcosms. After three months of collaborating online, CRIN facilitated the delivery of the week-long workshop at Tate Exchange. It was evident from the feedback we received that children and adults alike were hungry for these kinds of discussions - and to use their creativity to think of new ways of living that would respect people and the planet.

This is not the first time CRIN has merged the arts and children’s rights to explore ideas and new thinking. Our Rights Gallery brings together past projects and exhibitions.

But rather than leave the Build Your Own FARMING-CITY! workshop behind, we have made it available online as a downloadable PDF for people to print and use at home. This was done in light of how the Covid-19 pandemic is keeping many children and adults at home, so to help combat boredom and keep people thinking critically, we included it as part of our Stuck-at-Home Imagination Kits. We invite you all to share your outcomes by tagging us on Twitter (@CRINwire) or Instagram @crinstagram or sending us an email at info@crin.org. And we’re working on a way to make it more digitally interactive so watch this space!

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