Jenny worked as part of the Here+Now team with Leith Creative on project People and Places: Make Leith Better. By ‘going to where people are’ we lowered barriers to participation, engaging local people in curated conversations about Leith by taking our spinning ‘Place Standard’ wheel to the streets and local cultural hubs. These conservations helped build up a communal snapshot of how people felt about Leith as a place.
As part of visually documenting the project, Jenny photographed the community engagement process and also created a short film summarising the project:
As part of the People and Places: Make Leith Better project, Here+Now collaborated with Leith Creative to curate pop-up events and conversations. Featuring creative mapping and a mobile ‘Place Standard’ wheel tour, the project invited locals to share their views on Leith, creating a visual representation of the community’s perspectives on themes like identity, safety, and streets and spaces.
The project also linked in with Leith Late ‘17 and Architecture Fringe ‘17. The events included creative mapping which identified creative hubs in Leith and North Edinburgh. These included St Margaret’s House, which hosted their interactive exhibition and was the base point for the mobile ‘Place Standard’ wheel tour.
As part of the project, Here+Now offered an open invitation for people to join them and their giant mobile ‘Place Standard’ wheel on tour around Leith. Literally rolling through the streets and pausing at strategic locations along the way. The spinning wheel offers a live invitation of input using chalk from passers-by to slowly build up a visual picture of what people think about Leith, according to 14 themes. These include themes such as 'identity and belonging', 'feeling safe', and 'streets and spaces', as developed by The Scottish Government. Together these start to build a visual picture, similar to a spider-diagram, about how both 'Leithers' and non-Leithers feel about Leith as a place.
