Well, speaking at conferences to be precise…….but we are glad to see that this months’round of speaking engagements is less lecture and more conversation

You can catch members of the We Make Places team at one, or all of these lovely events in June:

Monday June 6th
Steve Threlfall will be taking part in Connecting Communities through Urban Design, the first in a series of events organized by Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam in collaboration with Architectuurcentrum Amsterdam and the European Cultural Foundation

The event will focus on the ways public spaces connect the physical and social layers of the city. We will discuss the role of urban design in connecting the physical neighborhoods in the city and social interventions that connect communities. Examples from European cities will be presented.

Steve will be talking about our Urban Workbench project which is about to start beneath The Flyover

Thursday 9th June
Kate Stewart will be part of a panel at Folken event Give Us Your Money which will explore our relationship with financing projects.

Does where you get your money from affect how you see it? Are we too dependent on grants? Public funding is reducing, with ramifications for cultural organisations as well as social and development programmes.

Business, too, has long relied on grants to fund a step in innovation. But is this public funding in business holding us back? Do we need to be more creative with sourcing funding if we’re to make a big leap forward? Is it harder to find funding up North, do we need to think a little bit more creatively? Where do you get advice? Are local authority or business support programmes useful for this?

Friday 24th June
We Make Places will be hosting The Maverick City

Speakers include:

Ale Gonzales (Spain) – an architect, programmer and digital artist interested in issues regarding the self-management and technological sovereignty of communities, the creative and empowering possibilities of technology and the defence and extension of the commons sphere. He works in wwb, formerly known as hackitectura.net, an Andalusian cooperative that works with free software, free hardware and open standards, offering technological and communication services in the fields of art, architecture and social movements.

Julia Heslop (UK) – an artist working in Albania and UK, Julia has been working with communities to explore alternative housing solutions. Her current project Protohome is a partnership with Crisis in the North East

Kate Stewart (UK) – co-founder of We Make Places, Kate has just returned from creating a commissioned public provocation piece in Rio and will share with us some of the insights from this project as well as the impact that artists engaging with communities in the favelas of Rio have been making recently

MORE SPEAKERS TO BE ANNOUNCED IN NEXT 2 WEEKS