We work with our partners and members of the public to jointly define and co-create diverse routes to different future places.
The Future Places Centre is undertaking numerous activities. each of these relates to its themes of the natural environment, the built environment and healthy living, and each is addressed in ways that combine the ambitions of the centre with its partners (such as Eden North) with communities that are interested. The Centre is always keen to welcome new collaborators as well as develop new activities under the auspices of its themes.
Find out more about the Food Futures collaborative project, Closing Loops
The Closing Loops project is cultivating a regenerative food economy by building a composting academy, gleaning network, citizen journalist movement and co-creating North Lancashire recipes.
It will create and cultivate an ecosystem of people from all walks of life taking responsibility and working together to reconnect people, place, community and nature.
Recent activities
Recent activities Accordion accordion
This online event sought to explore how changes in the Bay Area might be judged, the focus of such changes and the human networks required to achieve them. Read the blog on our website.
The Centre commissioned a ‘Call to Action’ video, which summarises some of the points of view relevant to change in the Bay, and how these might be addressed.
The Centre is currently supporting a programme of ‘Cartographic Interventions’.
These are a series of creative explorations of maps about the Bay and its inhabitants. The Interventions will be reporting their activities from May 14th.
Dr Karen Lloyd is the FPC's writer-in-residence. Her research and writing engage with both local and international environmental issues and with social and environmental justice. To read more about Karen's work, please visit our Writer in Residence page.
The Centre is delighted to announce the launch of The Future Places Environmental Essay and Poetry Prize, in partnership with Eden North, Iceland, Kendal Mountain Literature Festival and Saraband publishers.
A series of workshops on Innovations in Social Housing and Care Homes are being planned. These will explore how data and other digitally enabled tools can help enrich the experience of living in the domestic space.
The FPC is hosting a series of Pop-UP Common Rooms for researchers to meet and exchange their ambitions and findings. For invitations to these Pop Ups, please contact fpc@lancaster.ac.uk. To find out more about the breadth of research going on across the Bay read our briefing from the first pop up.
The FPC has created a 'Map of Who?' and a 'Map of Where?' with the aim of capturing the rich diversity of research being carried out across the Bay and shared in our 'Pop up Common Rooms'.
We're hosting a series of interactive walking trails around the Bay. These trails combine visiting physical places with digital content to explore our connection to place, environment and people. Our first trail 'Lancaster's Food Growing Hope Spots' is based in Lancaster City Centre and explores how different urban spaces could be used for food growing.
A Future Places Centre Conference at Lancaster University 7th – 8th July 2022
The Reimagining Landscape conference is called to help us reconfigure our relationships with the natural world. At this time of unprecedented change, our keynote speakers and panel discussions will open dialogue towards new ways in which literature and the arts can disseminate environmental issues and foster engagement amongst the wider community.
Building on world-leading research into the role of pervasive displays in addressing challenges from memory augmentation to aspects of social connectedness in a world that is rapidly shifting towards new models of remote working. The Future Places Centre is enabling new opportunities to investigate the design and utility of pervasive technologies in the delivery of healthcare through collaborations with partners across the North-West of England.
Exploring social and environmental concerns of life in and around Morecambe Bay through new media art, technology and creative writing.
The Once And Future Land
When the United Kingdom left the European Union it also left its Common Agricultural Policy that has subsidised food production; transforming landscapes over 45 years. Farming is a devolved issue and each of the four nations are trying to establish what comes next. England’s new Environmental Land Management Scheme or ELMs is being designed in Westminster; testing how farmers can instead be paid to restore nature. The atmosphere is heating and the web of life is dying. Land lies beneath these emergencies. This moment is said to be a historic opportunity. Some are optimistic. Others are deeply sceptical. Context and traditions matter. Values clash. The Lake District National Park holds UNESCO World Heritage Site status as ‘an unrivalled example of a northern European upland agro-pastoral system’. This is a system that is now being called on to change. A multiplicity of voices needs to be heard. The transition has begun.
Inside the Rockpool Shrimp there is a Dying Star
Written in the fragmented form this literary essay explores the growth of microplastics in marine and freshwater ecosystems in Morecambe Bay and beyond. Research for the essay began with a day out collecting samples with freshwater ecologists from Lancaster’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology on Morecambe Bay and the river Leven, who were investigating the presence of microplastics in small marine organisms. The essay aims to disseminate amongst a wide (and international) readership the extent of microplastics in the oceans, rivers and in the Bay. With the intention to allow readers to understand the impacts of some of the choices we make, and to effect change in some of our behaviours around the use of single use plastics.
White On Black: The Ongoing Problematic Narrative of *****'s Grave
The Future Places Centre approaches the subject of the continuance of white narratives superimposed on Black histories on Morecambe Bay, through the grave of a (possible) slave buried at Sunderland Point in the 1700s. It confronts the continued use of the term ‘Sambo’ to describe the black male believed to be buried in the grave together with more recent developments at the site.
This work looks to raise awareness in the wider community of Lancaster’s involvement in the slave trade, but also to confront more recent developments at the site and to lead to the cessation of the term ‘Sambo’ and instead to formally adopt the term ‘Grave of the Unknown African.
Environmental Literature Prize
In 2021 the inaugural Future Places Prize called for essays and poems that are an imaginative force for helping us to see the natural world – and our place in it – differently. This was to be much less nature and nature writing as a vehicle for personal recovery, and much more about the essay and poetry as restorative acts in the field of literature. The aim was to reward writing that communicated how both environmental and human change is not only possible, but happening, even now in the heart of the Anthropocene.
In July 2022, the Reimagining Landscapes conference brought together a diverse community of environmental and humanities academics along with visual artists, writers, poets, sound artists and musicians to establish networks and undertake thinking towards the formulation of a Centre for Environmental Communication at Lancaster University.
The Centre is delighted to announce the launch of the The Future Places Environmental Essay and Poetry Prize, in partnership with Eden North, Iceland, Kendal Mountain Literature Festival and Saraband publishers.
Future Place's Karen Lloyd gave a guest lecture at Sheffield Hallam University, on the 22nd February 2023
Karen Lloyd is the author of Abundance: Nature in Recovery, longlisted for the 2022 Wainwright Prize, and is the writer in residence with Lancaster University's Future Places Centre.
Karen explored how she built her writing career, beginning with The Gathering Tide, written as part of her MA in Creative Writing at Stirling University, through to her latest publication, North Country: An Anthropology of Landscape and Nature, which is in part a response to the need for greater diversity in the burgeoning field of nature and place writing. She also discussed her work in translating science and ecology into the literary essay form.
Author Karen Lloyd discussed the process of writing her book 'Abundance' and explores the approaches of several other writers. The session will include short writing prompts to enable attendees to begin applying some of the ideas under discussion straight away.
'Lancaster Future Places Environment Season continues with a stellar line up of writers, artists and activists. We welcomed renowned essayist and poet Kathleen Jamie. The current Scots Makar and described by John Berger as 'a sorceress of the essay form,' Kathleen will be in conversation with FPC writer in residence Karen Lloyd.
The Future Places Environmental Essay and Poetry Prize
The Centre is delighted to announce the launch of the The Future Places Environmental Essay and Poetry Prize, in partnership with Eden North, Iceland, Kendal Mountain Literature Festival and Saraband publishers.
Join us for an explanation of what makes Morecambe Bay such a special place for nature and wildlife.
Upcoming Activities accordion
Upcoming Activities
Illuminate - Festival of Ideas 8-23 February 2025
Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria
5 Themes
Spaces and Places, Being Human, Science and Technology, Philosophy and Religion, The Creative Response
Illuminate -Festival of Ideas will spark conversations, examine important topics and consider how we can imagine a future that might differ from what's gone before but that could still be full of wonder.
