Friends of the Valley

Friends of the Valley, a collective of SSoA students and local residents of the Gleadless Valley, Sheffield. By tapping into grassroots systems of power and alternative economies – we challenged the existing top-down models of civic development by embedding ourselves within informal networks. 

We established a two stranded approach, to work simultaneously on creating the mobile commons, by facilitating a skills sharing network as well as a series of designs for a community centre on the Hemsworth site. The mobile commons travelled around the Gleadless Valley collecting oral narratives, but ultimately demonstrated the power of the informal network. It worked to create an interface with a master-planning event we set up outside, and by handing out badges we started to expand the friends of the valley network, encouraging people to engage with the early stages of our spatial and organisational propositions. by the community, for the community.