City Moodboard

This activity will help those unfamiliar with your city to get a true sense of your historic urban area by creating a moodboard that engages all the senses, capturing an honest view of your ‘now’ and how you got there.

This activity will be useful for:

• Engaging and listening to a diversity of local stakeholders
• Helping you see your historic urban area through different perspectives
• Defining collectively a ‘current landscape’ reference point to build ideas on top of
• Informing place branding activities

The moodboard(s) can be part of the final deliverable of the Stage 1 – Understand the state of play.

This activity is called ‘Painting a picture of the now’.

Format:

• You can run this activity one or several times with groups of 3 to 10 people.
• This activity can take place in person (for instance after a visit of your historic urban area) or remotely.
• Activity total duration: 1 to 1,5 hours (including briefing and debriefing).
• Material needed: post-its, pens for in-person sessions (+ as options: camera/printer, sound recorder / pick-up mics / microphone or printed pictures of your historic urban area) or an online whiteboard tool (e.g. Miro or Mural) for remote sessions.

Activity steps:

Use one colour of post-it for each of the following steps.

1. Map your impressions: When you’re walking through your historic urban area. What do you see / hear / touch / smell / taste / learn? (green post-its + pictures / sketches)
2. Think about how you could creatively capture what you’ve mapped to share with others: How could you capture and share these observations and stories with those not able to be in your historic urban area? (blue post-its + sketches)
3. Consider whose perspectives are important to add on this moodboard: Whose perspectives are important to capture? Who could help to ‘paint your picture of the now’? (orange post-its)

This is an iterative process. This last step will help you to define with whom you could run this activity again to complete your moodboard little by little.

Following steps:

• Engaging with your community and stakeholders
• Incorporating their observations
• Marking challenges and opportunities against what has been mapped
• Building ideas for ‘what you’d like to see’ on top of the map to eventually create a single moodboard of your historic urban area as a visual summary of the now
• Create eventually a final or series of pictures / collages / stories / poetry as a visual summary of your historic urban area’s identity

Example of city mood-board eventually produced as a visual collage of the ‘now’

Example of a city mood-board collaboratively created in Slovenska Bistrica

• Zoom in and zoom out. Think about the micro (tiny details) as well as the macro (wider observations)
• Look at both positive and negative aspects of your historic urban area
• Tap into your imagination: be creative and try to engage as many senses as you can
• Look at the Survey Design page as a complementary activity to this one