MArch student groups work with a range of clients including community groups, charities, arts organisations and local authorities. Live Projects include design/build, design visions, feasibility studies, sustainability strategies, online resources and participation toolkits.  In every case, the project is real, happening in real time with real people. Live Projects provide valuable tools, ideas and built designs to community clients that would otherwise be unable to obtain them.

At the Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape we believe that architecture education should have engaged learning at its heart... we call this Liveness! Through Liveness, our students gain experience in engagement, co-production and collaboration with community and civic partners in Sheffield and beyond. Our Liveness Charter is an advocacy tool to share the ethos of Liveness with everyone in the School community, and with our external partners, so that they have an understanding of the activities, values and aims of the Liveness approach. 

Live Works is the first permanent university-funded Urban Room in the UK and a founding member of the Urban Rooms Network. An Urban Room is a space where people can come together to help create a future for their local area. URN members are drawn from the arts, planning, architecture, education, heritage, community and local government. The Urban Rooms Network shares best practice via the Urban Rooms Toolkit, gathered from innovators in the field, with the aim of promoting the inclusive and creative engagement of local communities in placemaking through Urban Rooms. 

Since 2014, students, graduates and academics from the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield have been engaged in a process of Co-Production of design work and participatory research with community groups, local independent businesses, public-sector institutions, Sheffield City Council and colleagues from the City, Culture and Public Engagement office and the Departments of Archaeology and Computer Science; developing an ambitious shared vision for the future development of Castlegate. 

The School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield and the South Yorkshire Housing Association have been working together on a number of collaborative projects since 2019. These projects are strategically coordinated across our yeargroups and modules so that various types and levels of study benefit from engaged learning, and our partners at SYHA reap a variety of rewards. 

We call this initiative the SYHA x SSoA Project Stack. The archive below collects and celebrates all the fantastic work created so far.

"Working with the School of Architecture challenges us to think in different ways and builds our knowledge. It will really influence our policy and what we do in development going forward" SYHA