The Ashton Platform

Year | 2017

Location | Ashton-under-Lyne, Tameside, Greater Manchester

Clients | Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council 

The Ashton Platform has woven the voices of the people of Ashton into a creative vision for the future of the town.

Working on behalf of Tameside Metropolitan Council, and collaborating with Placeshakers, we have carried out a number of engagement events in Ashton, collecting stories, opinions and visions for the future. For us, the process of engaging with the public was as fascinating as the results themselves, leading us to test a number of ideas for creative and meaningful participation events. This engagement research process formulated one of our key outcomes – the Platform for Engagement. This is a “how to guide”, a toolkit of recipes for creative engagement, designed to capture the voices of everybody in the town.

Alongside this set of tactics, we used our research and the results of the engagement events to form a sequence of visions for the future of Ashton, involving artists, events and architectural projects. This forms the Platform for Action, an inventive guidance document to allow the council to act on the perceptions and ideas of Ashton’s people.

Both guidance documents are situated under the wider Ashton Platform brand, which aims to give the town a clear identity to attract visitors, businesses and locals back into the town centre. The Ashton Platform magazine and social media networks have re-established Ashton as a destination, whilst also sparking creative conversations concerning the future of Ashton.

We hope the brand, Platform for Engagement and Platform for Action can weave together the stories of the past and the issues of the present into a creative shared vision for Ashton’s future.

Credits

Collaborator:

Placeshakers