CCI has run a series of community workshops called Talking Cities, which explore people's relationships with their built environment. CCI artists have worked with diverse community groups in Cambridge – including an Asian Women's Sewing Network, a Disability Consultation panel and schoolchildren.
Here is an example of some of the activities:
Tippexpurgation
- a quick exercise that invited participants to improve Cambridge city centre by Tippexing out areas they dislike or feel are not useful; using the same starting map to create individual versions, the aim was to create some space in our mental image of the city.
the mind at 3 mph
- participants walked as slowly as they could around a section of the playing field where they usually ate their lunchtime sandwiches; the only restriction was that they could not stop. This exercise was followed by a discussion about how this altered participants’ feelings about that place.
rearranging cambridge
- CCI artists produced a series of objects – from a spinning top to a pepper mill – and asked the group to decide which Cambridge landmark each object represented. Participants were asked to locate the objects/landmarks on a conceptual grid to create a new map of Cambridge and were then asked to describe a walk around this new city.