Urban Rooms Dudley 2024-2025

This documentation shares the ideas, experiments, stories and learning of 22 collaborators who live, work, learn and/or play in Dudley. Between October 2024 and April 2025 they involved over 100 local people and contributed in many and varied ways to explore a collective learning enquiry:

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How might Urban Rooms in Dudley support wider and deeper participation in the shaping of possible futures for our town and neighbourhoods?

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12 creative leads and 6 creative collaborators contributed a programme of 22 Urban Room activities over 4 months, spread across weekdays and weekends, daytimes and evenings, term time and school holidays. Over 130 participation opportunities were taken up (of 350 available), by an estimated 80 local people. In addition 5 collective enquiry sessions took place between late October and late March, and a celebratory event and exhibition of artworks created by local people through Urban Rooms Dudley activities at the end of April was attended by around 40 people.

The report and the documentation galleries below are part of CoLab Dudley’s living archive. They may be added to in the future to support further enquiries, explorations and emerging possibilities. They may also be updated with reflections and learning which evolve over time.

The report, importantly, outlines how we responded to an approach to experiment with Urban Rooms in Dudley. Bringing creative collaborators together around a collective learning enquiry and resourcing their time spend creatively documenting and learning. Locating a request to test Urban Rooms for a few months in a much longer (8+ years) and ongoing commitment by CoLab Dudley to work with local people to imagine and prefigure new futures for Dudley High Street and town centre. And locating this in long time, the Earth Crisis and projected impacts of climate shifts in our urban places. The report also highlights the importance for us to incorporate Urban Rooms testing into wider work creating conditions for a flourishing cultural ecosystem. We invested in local creatives, and paid attention to vital signs that we use which help us identify contributions to cultural flourishing.

“What if we considered that the talent and creativity we need to create and maintain vibrant places already exists locally everywhere; it just needs the conditions to grow and be nurtured?”– Umberto Crenca

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The documentation offers detailed accounts of what we did through Urban Rooms and who the 22 collaborators were.

Urban Rooms Dudley Report

Here you can jump directly to the full sets of information about the people involved, our activities and the places we worked.

Who we are

What we did

The above documentation is included in different sections of the report in various arrangements.

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Here you can see invitations and our Urban Rooms Dudley programme.

Urban Rooms Dudley Invitations and Programme

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If you would like to get in touch in relation to this report please email Lorna Prescott: [email protected]

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