What If...

Week One

In our group, the common themes within our photograph collections were industry, urban and journeys. After our initial brainstorming sessions, we found ourselves looking at the over crowding of Leeds city centre. For our initial research we went into the centre and took photographed it. The main things that came to our attention, were the empty outdoor seating areas, the lack of indoor seating areas, and the amount of unused buildings, most likely due to the recession. The weather in Leeds, especially during winter, is rarely suitable for sitting outside. Our research into parks and other free public spaces in the centre of Leeds showed that there are in fact not that many green spaces right in the middle, and that there are barely any free public seating areas, let alone under cover. This lead into looking into utilizing the empty spaces and creating indoor seating areas.

We researched into what other cities have done that is similar, and what has been done in Leeds previously. We didn't find anything remotely similar, other than Leeds' 'Art in Unusual Spaces' coming up later on in the year, in which art is displayed in unused shop and industrial spaces. We looked into the idea that our spaces could in fact hold art as well, to help promote up and coming artists.

We submitted a survey asking people whether they felt there were enough free public spaces in Leeds, and if there were more, whether they would use them. We wanted the survey to be short and sharp, simply to ask for a second of their time, mainly because of the amount of page long surveys that were going round at the time. We felt that people would be less reluctant to participate in ours.

In the presentation we plan to propose the idea of utilizing unused shop spaces as indoor public seating areas, where you would be able to sit down and shelter from the rain in you lunch break or in between shops.