Sussex Co-Lab

Sussex Co-Lab is a collaborative programme designed to improve local communities by addressing challenges and making policies more effective.

Bringing together universities, local governments and health partners with businesses, artists, researchers and residents, we use creative and participatory methods to enable more inclusive decision-making. We aim to improve outcomes for local people by testing new ways of working that can help everyone to flourish.

Based at the University of Sussex, we encourage people to share their knowledge and experiences while helping communities and organisations to connect with our research.

Introducing the Sussex Co-Lab

Video transcript

Video clip of University of Sussex campus from the air with Brighton in the distance.

Video clip of a busy urban street.

Voiceover of Professor Debbie Keeling with video clips of towns, villages, countryside and coastal scenes in Sussex.

Debbie Keeling: The world is a complex and difficult to comprehend place and it's changing more rapidly than ever.

Climate change questions our very existence and the gap between those that have and those that don't is accelerating, and some communities are feeling very left behind.

We need to find new ways of connecting people to the place where they live and they work and to make our communities a starting point for finding innovative solutions to imagining a different future.

Sussex Co-Lab is a programme of work designed to improve local communities in Sussex by building collaboration between universities, local governments, health partners, businesses, artists, researchers and community members.

It focuses on addressing community challenges and making local policies more effective using creative and participatory methods that enable true, inclusive decision-making.

It aims to improve outcomes for the people of Sussex and beyond by testing new ways of working that help all people to flourish and to understand and evidence the impact of this.

This knowledge base will help policymakers, planners and the commissioners of services understand the value and the importance of making people the starting point for change.

Sussex Co-Lab operates as a virtual lab that invites and welcomes in a wide range of contributors to share their knowledge and experience and to get involved in the work of the lab.

It recognises that we're all experts in the place where we live, that we all bring something valuable into the process of understanding people and the conditions that we all need to live full and happy lives.

Video clip of Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters.

End card of the University of Sussex logo.

Working with place

Communities across our region face a range of social challenges such as poverty, inequality, and limited employment opportunities, along with housing, food and fuel insecurity - all against the backdrop of a natural environment under threat.

While traditional policymaking often neglects the insights of local residents, at Sussex Co-Lab, we encourage a more inclusive approach to solving local problems.

Working as a virtual lab, we emphasise the importance of social engagement and community input from the very beginning of our initiatives, welcoming a range of diverse insights to shape effective work.

We consider how creative and participatory approaches can:

resolve community tensions
address power imbalances
improve the design and management of people, place and nature.

We explore methods and models that build resilience and create communities where everyone can thrive – helping commissioners, policymakers and decision-makers to understand the impact of working in innovative ways.

Get involved

If you’re interested in learning more about the work of Sussex Co-Lab, or if you’d like to get involved in our work, please get in touch. We’re particularly interested in connecting with:

local authorities
creative practitioners
community groups in and around our local area
health organisations
businesses
organisations outside the local area who are interested in what we’re trying to achieve.

If you'd like to find out more please e-mail publicaffairs@sussex.ac.uk .

The Co-Lab in action

Co-Lab residencies - Urban Fabric

Urban Fabric was formed by two organisations based in Brighton’s Open Market: textiles studio, Sew Fabulous, and creative charity, Quiet Down There. Together, they collaborated with local people to develop a fabric that could represent feelings about the changing face of London Road.

Having co-created over 60 textile artworks. Sew Fabulous digitally arranged a design that offered a visual representation of community experiences across London Road and the wider city. The resulting fabric was then used to make aprons modelled by traders across the marketplace.

By generating a composite design, the fabric offered a visual response to a difficult set of questions around changing spaces and cultures, and represents the creativity of participants who responded to questions about their environment for the first time.

By taking the aprons into the market, the project started to locate those creative instincts in our public space. The final artworks are powerful visuals which support the consideration of people’s thoughts, feelings and creativity in the public realm.” Lucy Jeffries and Susie Deadman
Co-Lab residencies - Xr-H

Working in collaboration with the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton, digital artist Judith Ricketts developed Xr-H: a first-stage, augmented reality (AR) app designed to uncover both the real and imagined threads of Brighton’s hidden past.

As a first-generation Afro-Caribbean born in the UK, Judith grew up in a space that denied her Britishness associated with her Blackness.

This residency aimed to develop a sustainable approach to creative placemaking influenced by both her personal experiences and the absence of records detailing Black contributions to the local Sussex region – a region which flourished with the Atlantic Slave Trade at its heart during the Georgian period.

These hidden histories of people and place should be considered in the process of planning to prevent further erasure.” Judith RICKETTS
Co-Lab residencies - Hospitable environment

Community arts organisation Hospitable Environment worked with local people in Newhaven to reimagine their town through a residency that focused on live design projects that could feed into the local planning process for Lewes District Council.

Using their ‘soup and social’ model of shared meals and community conversations, participants were invited into a process that enabled them to explore and map their favourite places in the area.

After imagining what their town might look like in future, 3D junk modelling was used to bring their visions to life.

Through this residency, we’ve evidenced how working as an established and trusted community group can feed into and inform the planning and placemaking process. We’ve facilitated genuinely place-based research through socially-engaged community forums and events” Lizzie lower and Eleanor Johnson Bullock

How the Sussex Co-Lab started

Sussex Co-Lab was founded in 2023 as a pilot project funded through an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account. As a first step, we commissioned three residencies for artists using creative practice to frame conversations around sustainability.

Since then, we’ve been working with our partners to build a vision for the future that includes:

trialling different methods and models to understand how we can best work with people and place
co-designing evaluation approaches to better understand impact
sharing our collective knowledge about what works with others to enhance collaborative placemaking and policy development both in and beyond our region.

A digital workbook has been created to guide creative placemaking: Sussex Co-Lab Workbook [PDF 5.54MB].