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It’s easy to forget sometimes, working in the relative self-containment of a local authority, that placemaking is an economy that flows from here to there, carrying value, knowledge and resources with it. One of the key places where this arises is university departments, where planners, architects, urban designers and conservation specialists prepare to go out into the world, and from where many will find their way into local authorities.

Over the academic year 2023-24, one of Cumberland Council’s planning teams partnered with Manchester School of Architecture’s Infrastructure Space Atelier. Nick Hayhurst, Head of Planning and Place, Chris Harrison, Principle Planning Officer, and I, were very pleased to be approached by Richard Morton, Dawn Parke and Sam Higgins at the School to see if we’d like to be involved.

West Cumbria is an ideal source of inspiration for the 95 young architecture and landscape architecture students of the Infrastructure Space Atelier, with its geographical and economic complexities. The atelier, which specialises in data mapping, was perfectly placed to explore it.

The initial session was conducted in October 2023 in Whitehaven. Nick, Chris and I joined a group designated as “stakeholders”, over a dozen people from relevant organisations and local businesses whose job was to conduct tutorials, provide feedback, introduce local knowledge the students might not have been aware of, and generally act as a sounding board for their developing ideas. At this stage, the students had been developing initial responses, but had already produced an impressive amount of work. Back-to-back round-table tutorials with six or eight students at a time for several hours certainly was an invigorating way to wake up our brains!

The second meeting was held in Manchester in late November, and consisted of tutorials with the students to respond to their emerging responses to the sites and projects selected. The Infrastructure Space Atelier consists of four different cohorts, so there was a huge amount of variation from one tutorial to the next, with some of the projects being grounded in reality and others being more speculative. At the end of the day, and somewhat mentally tenderised from several more hours of stimulating conversation, we were treated to a very impressive exhibition of interactive games and experiences created by the students as a way of ludically and interactively exploring their themes of interest.

Student games exhibition, November 2023, Manchester (Photo Sammy Woodford)

Student games exhibition, November 2023, Manchester (Photo Christopher Harrison)

By the time of the third meeting, also at the School’s base in Manchester, things were getting more serious. This took place in March 2024. Again, the breadth of work to look at, think on and talk about was stunning, with everything from grounded proposals for the re-use of the former flax mill at Cleator in Cumberland, to wild mass transit proposals, to complex landscape mappings.

Finally, the year ended with the school show and a smaller exhibition of work held in the Foyer of the Energus building close to Whitehaven, where we’d started out. Nick, Chris and I attended this alongside other guests, and were hugely impressed with the quality of the work on show, which critically engaged with West Cumbria’s unique challenges. Although they were impressive, what wasn’t on the posters was if anything even more so, with projects backed up by some two-hundred pages of documentation and research.

We made connections this year that will persist, and provide a starting place for any conversations we want to have about research, or which MSA want to have about live projects. As a way of pushing us to think about the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of our work, and make contact with talented students and staff, this partnership is well worth nurturing.

My colleagues and I benefitted greatly from getting out of the office and into the classroom, from being exposed to so much strange and divergent thinking, talking about everything from abstract ideas to the technicalities of drawing, and hopefully were able to bring some realism and pragmatism from our real-world roles helping manage development. We are thankful to Richard, Dawn, Sam and their colleagues at Manchester School of Architecture for taking their class outside the classroom, and inviting us in. Collaboration between professionals, students and academics is crucial to ensuring the future of placemaking.

We’ll be continuing this work throughout the 2024-25 academic year, and look forward to getting stuck in.

Energus Exhibition, August 2024 (Photo Sammy Woodford)

Sammy Woodford, Conservation and Design Officer, Cumberland Council