Town Anywhere – Tooting – Transition Town Tooting

Transition Tooting is thrilled to have secured funding from The National Lottery Community Fund to host Town Anywhere – a large-scale community visioning experience in Tooting in Autumn 2024. This free participatory event will bring together over 200 people from across Tooting to explore the future of our vibrant community together.

Town Anywhere is an extraordinary exercise. It invites us to step into the future, to reimagine and rebuild the world, and then to inhabit it. One of the most magical things I’ve ever been part of. Give your imagination a treat.
Rob Hopkins, Transition Network

Full details below – and for a taste of what the event might look and feel like – check out the fantastic short film below of Town Anywhere in Hull in late 2023.

‘Town Anywhere’ brings a wide cross section of c200 people together in person for one day to imagine, build and then inhabit a positive vision of how the place they share could develop in the future. First seeded and developed by artists Ruth Ben-Tovim and Lucy Neal at Transition Town Conferences over 10 years ago, the ‘Town Anywhere’ process has now been staged in towns and cities in the UK, worldwide online; in Europe and most recently in Hull Minster with 240 people.

‘Town Anywhere’ brings the future to life through time travel, visioning, actual making and co-creating then coming back ‘home’ to harvest the learning. Outcomes include a tenant’s charter, a town centre ‘opening’ and a celebratory shared meal. The process safely, constructively and playfully opens up inspirational thinking in communities about positive futures.

This free, accessible and enjoyable visioning process has been proven to generate ideas and principles for developing not only a Town’s Governance and Community Decision Making Processes but also practical ideas for Community Finance; Health and Wellbeing; Food; Communications; Celebrations and Culture; Streets; Open Spaces; Goods and Services.

A short ‘day after’ event is held to gather key attendees; local policy makers and community players to capture the energy of what has been collectively imagined, to build on real possibilities for partnerships and shared initiatives.

Can we learn anything from visiting the future? How we see the world is often rigid and complicated by our present day circumstances. Clearly there’s an urgent need to rethink how we might co-exist if we’re going to occupy the planet and, certainly in Hull Minster, there was a real interest in what a positive future might look like. … There’s no reason why, with the right people in the room, we can’t put ourselves on a corrective course.
Dave Windass (Hull 2023 participant)

Interested in getting involved in our Tooting Town Anywhere? We’d love to hear from you!

Funding for the project was received from The National Lottery Community Fund, distributed by Transition. Thanks to National Lottery players for making this possible. Look for more information about Transition Together at https://transitiontogether.org.uk/

Twitter: @TransitionTog & @TNLComFund

Facebook: @TransitionTog & @TNLCommunityFund

Instagram: @transition_together & @TNLCommunityFund