Design

NMBU..Place-keeping: Landscape Management in Practice.pptx

Collaborative landscape management

Place-keeping: Landscape Management in Practice, Ongoing

Dissemination of findings from several EU and ESRC funded collaborative partnership projects that explored innovative approaches the long-term management of open spaces.With Dr. Nicola Dempsey, various EU and UK universities, and local authorities.Presentation, Design, Participation, Placeshaping, Mel Burton

689c67b560992.pdf

Urban rooms as a methodology

Urban rooms and the expanded ecology of urban living labs, August 2025

This paper is for a 'Living Labs: Agents for Change' special issue of the Buildings and Cities journal. It draws on a decade of 'live' work developed using the urban room methodology to foster co-production in Castlegate, Sheffield. The ‘urban room’ (UR) is an embryonic spatial typology for diverse actors and citizens to co-create city futures. This paper examines how the situated, hybrid and participatory methods of the URs compare with the 'laboratisation' of the world by the more established methodology of Urban Living Labs. This reveals similarities and differences in building community and civic resilience. URs are positioned as place-based infrastructures and active sites of multiplicity, where diverse communities can transform the city, decentring experts in urban transformations. A UR case study of collaborative civic regeneration in Castlegate, Sheffield, UK, is explored through a situated and diffractive analysis, revealing how the UR provides new tactics that engage diverse actors and give voice to marginalised people. This long-term, situated and additive practice can transform the diversity of engagement, foster a plurality of urban futures and create novel forms of hybrid governance.Urban rooms and the expanded ecology of urban living labs - Buildings and Cities JournalJournal Article, Design, Inclusivity , Participation, Placeshaping, Carolyn Butterworth, Emre Akbil

Knowledge roundtable co-facilitator

Swimmable Cities Summit, 28th May 2025

Swimmable Cities alliance is comprised of signatories that include academics, activists, municipal bodies, research institutes, to mention a few who are interested in the urban waterways and reintegrating them into the everyday life of the citizens.
Swimmable Cities organised their first international round table in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 2025. As part of that summit I participated with other international academics as a co-facilitator in the Knowledge Roundtable to workshop ideas, views and experience on swimming infrastructure as placemaking in cities.Event, Design, History and Theory , Inclusivity , Placeshaping, Naina Gupta

Design research tools

Sheffield DesignLAB, 2025

Welcome to DesignLAB!An interdisciplinary platform for researchers, educators, and practitioners who use design as a way of thinking, making, and collaborating. Based at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, DesignLAB brings together those exploring design as a methodology in research and teaching. It’s a space to share ideas, challenge perspectives, and build connections across the built environment disciplines. Join us in shaping new ways of seeing, questioning, and creating through design! Feel free to explore the design tools in our library, add one of yours or engage with our media content.Website, Design, Participation, Design, Carolyn Butterworth, Dan Jary, Emre Akbil and Leo Care

Castlegate Common Manifesto - reduced.pdf

Castlegate

Castlegate Commons Community Pavilion, February - May 2024

Inspired by the vision developed by students through the Live Project 'Castlegate Commons' in Oct-Nov 2023, Live Works was commissioned by Sheffield City Council to facilitate a co-design process with local stakeholders. This work builds on the last three years of co-production that have developed a clear community-led approach to the development and use of the park and its facilities. Using the 'Castlegate Commons Manifesto' as a foundation, we have worked with local community stakeholders to develop a vision for the design, operation and stewardship of a new pavilion in the Castle park.Throughout each stage, Live Works has aimed to facilitate a transparent, representative and effective co-production process that delivers meaningful engagement with local stakeholders and the public towards the development of the Castle site. We held two workshops and a study trip to London:

Workshop #1 Foundations: Sharing knowledge and aspirations, reaching common understanding, establishing good principles of design, developing an initial brief.
Study Trip: Visiting inspiring community/ecology/cultural venues and meeting the people who run them to understand how the projects were developed and are now used and managed sustainably
Workshop #2 Vision: Considering governance & time-scales, developing an initial spatial brief

Report, EDI, Design, Participation, Placemaking, Case Study, Design, Participatory, Carolyn Butterworth and Leo Care

Perspectives on teaching architecture and urbanism

Urban Design Pedagogies for Staying With a Broken Planet, 2023

The book chapter aims to position the Masters in Urban Design programme of University of Sheffield School of Architecture, within the broken world pedagogies and reflect on the thematic framework that nurtures common tools and methods to endure, encounter, and co-exist with emerging uncertainties facing urban environments on a broken planet. We use ‘Ecologies of Care’ as a reflexive framework that critically repositions urban design pedagogies within three theoretical registers – the planetary as an image of interdependent worlds and source of disruption for the image of the globe as a colonial artefact; radical unknowability as a process-oriented approach to knowledge co-production that embraces incompleteness of urban life with gaps, margins, and interstices as central to knowledge resources; and cosmopolitical localism that reimagines urban ecologies as real-life laboratories for prefiguring just urban transitions that pays attention to shared vulnerabilities through mutual care amongst urban actors.Book, Climate Emergency, EDI, Pedagogy, Placemaking, Design, Emre Akbil

South Yorkshire Housing Association collaboration

SYHA / SSoA Housing Exhibition, June 2021 - ongoing

The exhibition is designed to celebrate two years of student work developed through the School's collaboration with South Yorkshire Housing Association, showcasing design projects, dissertation material and Live Projects.The exhibition is designed to be deployed indoors or externally to reach as wide an audience as possible.The exhibition would expose the excellent work of over 300 students from across the School to the general public, providing an engaging forum for discussion around topical housing issues. It is intended that several students would be involved as key members of the curatorial team.Event, Presentation, EDI, Climate Emergency, Design, Participation, Placemaking, Material Cultures, Building Performance, Carolyn Butterworth and Leo Care

Project archive

SYHAxSSoA Project Stack, 2019 - 2024

Welcome to the SSOAxSHYA Project Stack Archive!The School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield and South Yorkshire Housing Association have been working together on a number of collaborative projects since 2019. We call this the SYHAxSSoA Project Stack. This archive collects and celebrates all the fantastic work created so far from across the School, including the Y2 Housing Project, PG Live Projects, MArch Dissertations and SAS Case Studies.The archive is organised in 3 themes:

New Homes: To meet the housing crisis and to meet demand, SYHA have to build new social housing. Through the project stack, SSOA and SYHA are exploring how Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and other sustainable techniques can be used to deliver fantastic new homes with excellent environmental credentials.
Futureproof Homes: Making our homes ready for the future is a multi-faceted problem, with the two main issues being the climate crisis and an ageing population.
Living Together: Living Together healthily and happily at all scales, from neighborhood level down to communal facilities, is an increasingly important area of study and development.

The work that SYHA and SSOA have done together to asses and design new ways of living together is already having an impact within SYHA, who are now "thinking, more and more about how we can create a sustainable public realm." and are using the tools created by students and researchers to, "influence our our policy and what we do in development going forward"Website, Climate Emergency, EDI, Building Performance , Design, Participation, Placemaking, Carolyn Butterworth and Sam Brown

"At SYHA, we've got over 6,000 homes and we need to make sure that they're going to be fit for the future" [working with SSOA] "challenges us to think in different ways about them and builds on our knowledge...to influence our policy and what we do in development going forward."

South Yorkshire Housing Association

Urban regeneration

Love Wolverton, 2019 - 2022

'Love Wolverton' is a redevelopment of the Agora Centre in Wolverton, Milton Keynes. Within my role at URBED I was responsible for initiating the project. It won the Midscale Framework and Masterplans awards at the National Urban Design Awards 2021.The redevelopment working in collaboration with MOLE, Mikhail Riches and CIVIC Engineers will restore a historic street, Radcliffe Street, which was originally lost forty years ago as part of the Agora Centre’s development. The creation of two new, car-free, “little streets” also echo the historic streets of Wolverton and will connect key parts of the town, providing social and play-friendly spaces for residents, neighbours and their children. The scheme has been designed to be one of the most environmentally ambitious regeneration schemes in the UK with and includes collaboration with Community Energy Wolverton to deliver a community energy network. The project will also house Still Green, an over-50s co-housing community based locally.The development is being brought forward by the developer TOWN who were responsible for delivering the Cohousing Development Marmalade Lane in Cambridge. Jonny Anstead and Neil Murphy, founding directors of TOWN, co-ran our MArch Studio, “Degrowth” last year.Film, Built Project, Design, Placemaking, John Sampson

Participatory design

Little City of Makers, September 2016

‘Little City of Makers’ was a project by Live Works in partnership with Arbourthorne Community Primary School for the Festival of the Mind. Staff, students and graduates from the University of Sheffield School of Architecture helped 60 ten year olds from Arbourthorne Community Primary School to construct a model of the future Sheffield that they would like to see. We worked with the children at their school and at Live Works using a variety of materials to make the buildings, structures, green spaces and transport systems of their future city. The children suggested the themes of Play City, Working City, Animal City, Night City, Nature City and Moving City. As they build their city they have were encouraged to ask: How will the city be made in the future? What will it be made of? Who will make it?Through the Festival of the Mind the city has been exhibited to the public as it grows. The project aimed to provide a valuable experience to the children, giving them the opportunity to learn new skills and introducing possibilities for their future interests and livelihoods. If our cities of the future are to be vibrant, inclusive and sustainable places to live and work we need to include children in their design. This is a chance to develop imaginative ideas for the challenges of the future including climate change, scarcity of resources and changing demographics. Along the way we also hope to inspire the children to become the architects, planners, engineers, policy-makers and engaged citizens of the future.Event, EDI, Design, Participation, Pedagogy, Placemaking, Participatory, Carolyn Butterworth and Leo Care

A Certain Degree of Uncertainty - AAE 2016.pdf

AAE Conference 2016

A Certain Degree Of Uncertainty: Embracing Risk In The Thesis Project Via The ‘creative Survey’, April 2016

A paper presented at the AAE Conference at UCL in 2016.“Over the past 10 years I have developed a pedagogical tool in my design studio, the creative survey. In this paper I suggest that this method can help students cope with, and indeed, welcome uncertainty into the design process and I reflect upon the problems, opportunities and consequences associated with this. Referring to interviews with past and present MArch students from my studio I will describe how this way of working has affected their attitude towards uncertainty within their education and within their ongoing careers in practice.I will describe how, in its development, the creative survey has expanded from a single exercise at the beginning of the design process to become the crystallisation of a broader critical methodology for the production of a thesis project that we believe has wider implications on architectural practice. In the writing of this paper I have found the work of Helga Nowotny around uncertainty in science and social science, culminating in her book The Cunning of Uncertainty (Nowotny 2016), to be very useful and much of this paper’s enquiry is developed through the lens of her theories on the subject.”In Sept 2016 I presented the paper to colleagues in MArch to help frame a discussion on how we might encourage more risk-taking and experimentation in thesis projects.Journal Article, EDI, Design, Pedagogy, Placemaking, Participation, History and Representation, Carolyn Butterworth

European City of Science

Allotment of the Future, 2016

Manchester was the European City of Science 2016 with the aim to bring Manchester alive with science and provide exciting activities for audiences that explore how science connects to our daily lives and to imagine the possibilities for the future. The Science in the City festival (22nd-29th July) ran alongside the conference and engaged the public in all aspects of science. One of the key content strands for Science in the City was food; activities, experiments, tastings, conversations unpicking the science of taste, truth & myths about food and health, and imagining the farms, factories and menus of the future. A key element of Science Feast was an allotment of the future in St Ann’s Square.Co-ordinated by Marketing Manchester, I led a team at URBED to design the allotment. Content partners included Squirrel Nation, the University of Manchester Plant Science department, the University of Salford School of Environment and Life Sciences, Sow the City and Real Food Wythenshawe. Salford based m3industries worked with us to turn the designs into reality.http://urbed.coop/allotment-future-featured-urban-design-journalhttp://urbed.coop/projects/allotment-futureEvent, Design, Placemaking, Participation, John Sampson

'This is not about gentrification’: the pie shop reviving an Anfield street

Participatory design

2 Up 2 Down, 2015 - 2020

Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and International artist Jeanne Van Heesvijk to co-design and develop a community bakery and retrofit local housing with local young people. The project has been widely published and featured in the Observer and The Guardian. Within my role at URBED I was involved in the design and implementation of both the participartory design process and the bakery fit out. More recently I inputted into an exhibition of the work in at the BAK Gallery in Utrecht running from the 14/09/2019 through to 12/01/2020. I used the experience from the project to create a lecture which I have given regularly as part of the Participation in Architecture and Urban Design Module.http://urbed.coop/projects/trainings-not-yet-exhibition-utrechtPress Article, Built Project, Event, EDI, Design, Placemaking, Participation, John Sampson

Participative design

ASRM Festival of Architecture, Frankfurt, 2015

In 2014, URBED were invited to take part in the Architektursommer Rhein-Main ASRM Lab 2014: Region im Fluss, organised in association with the German Architecture Museum (D.A.M) and Kulturfonds Frankfurt Rhein-Main. This was a multi-disciplinary workshop in Frankfurt looking at some of the region's most problematic and neglected urban and semi-rural spaces, and in doing so explore ‘the regional city’. Over the course of 4 days participants visited several sites, discussing the constraints and issues facing each area with local practices and planners, and collaboratively exploring initial ideas and approaches.The subsequent ASRM Expo 2015 Region im Fluss exhibition at the German Architecture Museum (D.A.M) gave URBED an opportunity to present ideas for the region based on our central theme: cities growing together. It also gave us an opportunity to focus the discourse on Offenbach, a vibrant but often neglected part of the Frankfurt conurbation on the southern bank of the River Main.These events culminated in November 2015 in the ARSM Future Pavilion situated in the Goetheplatz in the centre of Frankfurt. The pavilion, codesigned by URBED and Ian Shaw Architekton, formed a public forum for discussion and debate around urban and regional development. URBED took a week-long residency within the pavilion following its inauguration, running a participative public exhibition to highlight the significance of Offenbach as a building-block of the creative city. To stimulate discussion and debate we built a scale model of the Frankfurt conurbation with the public over a number of days, and exhibited the attached drawings of Offenbach and the Northern Quarter in Manchester, the latter having some similarities as a cultural quarter.I utilised links established with DAM to set MArch Studio in Offenbach, Frankfurt. arrivalcity.studioBuilt Project, Event, Design, Placemaking, John Sampson

ReMake Castlegate Culture Consortium.pptx

Castlegate

ReMake Castlegate, September 2014

ReMake Castlegate was a project developed in partnership with Yorkshire Artspace and commissioned artists Simon le Ruez, Anne-Marie Atkinson and Clare McCormak to explore the past, present and future of the Castlegate area of Sheffield. As part of Festival of the Mind 2014 local people were invited to work with a large physical model of Castlegate, to express, record and share memories, opinions and ideas for the area. The project was hosted at Exchange Place Studios, where, over the course of the Festival, we invited local people and businesses to add to and remake parts of a large physical model, capturing what has been lost, what remains, and what could be. Over the week we had 800 visitors and saw Castlegate re-made by many hands, all revealing the area’s diversity and idiosyncrasies. The findings from the project were presented at Urban Design Week and to the Culture Consortium and SCC. The project was the catalyst for years of SSoA working in Castlegate through multiple Live Projects, Live Studios and co-production with SCC and local stakeholders.Presentation, EDI, Design, Participation, Placemaking, Case Study, Participatory, Carolyn Butterworth and Leo Care

Urban regeneration

Trent Basin, 2012 - 2018

Within my role at URBED I was responsible for leading the development of the Trent Basin Masterplan located on the northern bank of the River Trent, 20 minutes’ walk from Nottingham city centre. The scheme developed by Blueprint aims to create a new type of neighbourhood that is neither entirely urban nor entirely suburban. To do this we drew heavily on Dutch precedents for the way that the scheme relates to the water. The design creates a strong 3 and 4 storey waterside terrace punctuated by narrow streets.In many senses the scheme is a reinvention of the suburb rather than a lively urban neighbourhood. The idea is that the blocks, set back from the waterfront, feel calm and relaxed and not dominated by cars. In collaboration with Nottingham-based architects, Marsh Grochowski, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and landscape architects Landscape Projects, we have set out to create a neighbourhood based around cycling, dog walking, jogging, fishing, reading, chatting, exercising and working. Trent Basin won the Urban Design Group Practice Award 2015, see the video hereI was also involved in securing InnovateUK funding for the project to accelerate the adoption of a pioneering Community Energy Storage proposal for the development.I also worked with Nottingham City Council to develop a strategy for the wider Waterside area of the city.Trent Basin is currently being built out - creating a new and unique residential neighbourhood on the edge of Nottingham city centre.Book, Film, Built Project, Climate Emergency, Design, Placemaking, Building Performance, John Sampson

UD132_magazine.pdf

URBAN DESIGN 132 Autumn 2014 | URBAN DESIGN Journal Issue | Urban Design Group

URBAN DESIGN 120 Autumn 2011 | URBAN DESIGN Journal Issue | Urban Design Group

Urban regeneration

Brentford Lock West, 2012

A new sustainable neighbourhood in Brentford for ISIS Waterside Regeneration Ltd.Within my role at URBED I worked in collaboration with Johannes Tovatt Architects, Klas Tham, Tibbalds and Camlins to achieve an outline planning for a 500 home mixed use neighbourhood.The design process was one of collaboration with the local community based on URBED’s ‘design for change’ technique. This started with workshops run over two evenings at the start of the process in a local café. Residents and stakeholders from the area used the first to develop a shared understanding of the area today. The second evening focused on generating a number of different options for the site through ‘collages’ and plasticine models.The project was Awarded the Urban Design Group Practice Award 2012. The project continues to win architectural awards as it is built out.http://urbed.coop/projects/brentford-lock-westPress Article, Built Project, EDI, Design, Placemaking, Participation, John Sampson

20111031_ALPHA FARM Report Web.pdf

Design research

Alpha Farm, 2011

Alpha Farm: A design-led research study commissioned by Manchester International Festival exploring the delivery of a Vertical Farm in Manchester. The project was a collaboration between URBED, Lancaster University, Cambridge University and Biomatrix Water. The team concluded that by taking a comprehensive approach to the integration of nutrient, water and energy flows within the building a vertical farm has the potential to be developed as a resource ‘sensible’ model. By this we mean that the farm has the potential to grow food using less energy than conventional farming based on the input of large numbers of pesticides and fertilisers and the transport of food over large distances.This resulted in a demonstrator growing project called the Biosphere being constructed at Manchester College that integrated fungiculture, aquaculture, hydroponics and vermiculture. The project won a National PACE Award for Environmental Sustainability.Exhibition, Press Article, Built Project, Climate Emergency, Design, Placemaking, Building Performance, John Sampson

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