The Way We Live Now

Reimaging the city of Plymouth
The Way We Live film still by Jill Craigie
Title: The Way We Live Now
Funding body: AHRC Impact Acceleration Account Award
Location: Plymouth, UK
Project partners: University of Plymouth, The Box
University of Plymouth staff: Dr Angela Piccini , Joanne Dorothea-Smith , Sefryn Penrose
The Way We Live Now is an ambitious multi-layered community engagement project exploring collaborative efforts to envision and build a future city through the lens of historical and contemporary challenges.
The University of Plymouth researchers and colleagues from The Box delivered a workshop and screened the film The Way We Live (directed by Jill Craigie, 1946). The film is a docu-drama about Abercrombie and Watson's plan for the rebuilding of Plymouth and features 3,000 non-professional actors and a large-scale public procession. Professor Lizzie Thynne (Sussex University) is a Jill Craigie expert and introduced the film along with Plymouth Arts Cinema Director, Anna Navas . The film served as a jumping-off point for discussions and future collaborative work between local stakeholders. Attendees included members of Plymouth’s community and charity sectors, its art and theatre scene, academics, members of the Council, and other social organisations.
Jill Craigie’s film was presented within the context of 'radical rebuilding' and imagining a future city through the intersection of post-Brexit Britain, the cost-of-living crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, social imbalance and the climate emergency. Attendees had the opportunity to work with a range of people, including city residents, artists, architects, social planners and policymakers, to experiment and think radically through cultural experiences, the reuse of buildings, and developing contemporary, low-energy, affordable architecture and social housing for a net-zero city.
Participants drew parallels with, challenged and questioned The Plymouth Plan 2014–2034 and aligned The Way We Live to the physical work taking place across the city today.

Project workshop

Using the film’s themes expansively, attendees were invited to think about Plymouth's future(s). Exercises undertaken during the workshop included:
Dance Card: participants were given a dance card with 10 spaces. They were invited to look at A4 stills from the film distributed around the foyer and to open discussions of themes that the films conjured for them with other participants. Stills included images of the bomb-damaged cities, dancing on the Hoe, the reconstruction animation, refugee labour, and new and old buildings. Having introduced themselves to other participants, they were invited to record names and themes on the dance card.
Lunch activity: over lunch, participants were invited to further their discussions in groups and consider how the themes identified in the morning sessions related to their own work.
A presentation by Imperfect Cinema was designed to show the possibilities of collective working through film. Imperfect Cinema's projects engage local communities in co-designing and co-producing projects and outputs. The session was designed to offer participants ways to imagine collaborative projects linked to the film's themes.
Bluesky Workshop Projects: working in groups, participants explored community-oriented projects using the film's themes; these included:
  • Using civic space for large-scale engagement
  • Looking at change
  • Archival work
  • Working with partners
 

The Way We Live Now was followed up with the Get Involved Award project titled The Way We Live: Community Centres

This research investigated what 'centres' a community – is it a building, a place, a memory, or a culture? Through a series of community-based sharing sessions and archive film screenings in the city, Community Centres invited people to uncover and share amateur home videos within private collections, to explore stories and memories connected to things that no longer exist or have undergone major change. The project engaged in the creative remixing of both private and archival collections to develop new visions for a shared future.
Working closely with Media Archivist Stacey Anderson and with Adam Milford and Tony Davey, the project team went out to four different communities in Plymouth to develop an understanding of the archive and its role in participatory planning. That project culminated in International Home Movie Day in October 2023. Angela Piccini and The Box continue to explore the potential for a participatory exhibition to celebrate Craigie's work in Plymouth and the relationships between film, video and urban space.
 

The Way We Live (1946), directed by Jill Craigie

The film centres around the city's choice: to rebuild or to build anew. To construct a city in the footprint of what was destroyed and to reinstate what was lost but to the same pattern – geographically, economically – that existed before the bombings of the Second World War; or to reconceptualise the whole city based on an understanding of what was needed now.
The film clearly expresses the city's division over whether a modernist rebuild is desired and/or necessary.
Jill Craigie (1911–1999) was the writer, director and producer of The Way We Live, a pioneering feminist and socialist writer and filmmaker.
The way we live

SHAPE disciplines address global challenges associated with marine, health and sustainability through the lens of place

Through five place-based research themes, we investigate the intricate relationships between communities, the natural world, and technology.
Locally, we co-create sustainable solutions to complex problems in order to build resilient and thriving neighbourhoods, cities, and regions. This work transcends geographical, social and political boundaries to become applicable on a global level.
place-based research
SHAPE – Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Economy