Small Grants Scheme

During Summer/Autumn 2015, the Young Urbanists ran a Small Grants Scheme that aimed to support projects that deliver tangible outputs and benefits to the Young Urbanist Network within the subject of urbanism. After a call for submissions and a three-part application process, three inspiring and ambitious projects from YU members were awarded Small Grants to facilitate their innovative thinking. You can follow the Twitter conversation from the Scheme through the #YUgrants hashtag.

“Overall it was a great project and a pleasure to work with the Young Urbanists – it’s one of the most positive commissioned project experiences we’ve ever had.”
Tracey Taylor, Small Grant recipient

Stories and the City
Small Grant recipients: Tracey Taylor and Szu An Yu

Stories and the City explored a way of bringing a human aspect to urban environments through creative writing. The project addressed the importance of human scale and human perspectives in the urban environment. Developing at a large scale and driven by many factors other than human experience of the environment – such as the economics of new construction, building floor space, traffic flow – the urban environments of London’s busy inner city are at risk of becoming impersonal, devoid of active and engaging human qualities and experiences. This project highlighted the value of finding, expressing and sharing human perspectives on these urban environments, and asks how human aspects can be brought into these environments in new ways.

Stories and the City commissioned 5 writers to create pieces about the area around Moorgate station, London, which they then displayed through a poster installation at the station for a week in September 2015. The pieces aimed to offer new perspectives on urban environments through creative writing, and offered commuters a series of new evocative, thought-provoking and surprising perspectives on Moorgate’s urban environment.

They maintained an online blog for the duration of the project, which you can find here.

The output of the Stories and the City project was an incredible digital book, above. The book includes the 5 commissioned pieces, a series of striking photos from the poster installation, reflections on the project, and an article from YU member Raquel Ajates.

You can see the incredible photos from their book on the Academy’s Flickr page here.