Live Works has been an agent of 'Liveness' in architectural education, research and practice since our formation in 2014. We have striven and advocated for ways of working which entangle architectural production with the daily lives of Sheffield's citizens and communities, democratising processes of place-shaping and involving those who would otherwise be excluded.

Together with a huge network of local community partners, students, academics and the wider public, this process has built up an alternative vision of Sheffield: one where buildings, streets, public spaces and landscapes are re-imagined to support fairer, more inclusive and more sustainable urban lives. 

Until now, this vision has existed across and between many different projects, executed by many different people, across various sites, scales and types of work in the city. The projects which underpin it include built interventions, speculative designs, written theses, and more - and transgress boundaries between art, architecture, design, activism and other fields. 

Live City is an attempt at bringing together and re-presenting this work as a dream-like vision for an alternative Sheffield, assembling projects on the basis of their proposed relationship to the particular conditions of the city as understood and experienced by their authors over the past twelve years. The result is a collection which is ordered through situation, and the incidental spatial relationalities between situations, rather than by linear chronology or scale. Boundaries between different 'types' of work, 'real' and 'imagined' architecture are done away with in favour of the unifying, messy and transversal power of collective speculation. 

What emerges are common threads of inclusivity, engagement, and participation; modes of knowledge production which are situated and contingent; material and formal qualities of aggregation, assemblage, and contradiction; and conditions of iteration, pluralism and multiplicity. 

Live City is an ongoing creative collaboration between Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape (University of Sheffield), architect and teacher Carolyn Butterworth and designer Charlie Young. It features the work of various students and external collaborators of the School over the past twelve years, re-presented amongst new voices in a collection of bespoke works.