An immersive experience to help small coastal settlements adjust to likely futures in the most positive way
With a global lack of leadership on environmental issues, many people feel they are not ready for what the future may bring and are seeking means to come together to face approaching uncertainties. They might feel that the big issues of our time are not their business, but want to influence what happens round them.
This Coastal Town Reimagined is a 2-hour Live Action Role Play (LARP) workshop devised to help address this gap between the global and the things we can (and would be prepared to) do in coastal towns we care about: to encourage people in a neighbourhood to find each other and devise ways of managing issues that stem from their varied social and ecological interests and concerns.
LARPs are events designed to spark imagination and action through collaboration. Role play, improvisation and critical thinking collide, enabling people to explore the “What ifs” about any situation, from the probable to the very unusual, and “rehearse” the outcomes they would like to see.
To learn more watch this short film by Hydar Dewachi, 2024. (10 minutes)
Initial success has led to a broader ambition: to take the techniques devised and offer them for other contexts, as well as transforming early imaginings into both real-world and fictional visions of thriving eco-social communities in Felixstowe.
These events are devised as part of an ongoing art-action-research loop that builds on years of collaboration between Ann Light and Ruth Catlow, and creative practice and research inspired by communities of experimental artists and designers working with eco-social change. These are some of the papers that study and theorise how and why this experience works.
We gathered feedback as part of developing the LARP, but also encouraged people to take time at the end of each session to reflect on what was learnt and what townsfolk might do (or do differently) in considering their futures and that of those around them and other living things. We give a few of the many comments we received:
It’s important to use our imaginations to create the futures we want
“It just reminds us that we have to bring our creative imaginations to the future that we want. – It’s playful, it’s going to make a lot of people think, it’s going to surprise a lot of people” – Adrian
This experience made it more fun and less worrying to exploring the future
“It brings up serious issues while you are allowed to have a bit of fun with them. But also in a way allowing you to disassociate so your prime self doesn’t have to worry about them, because it’s this future self” – Mark
It’s important to respect ideas and feelings of young people in this town
“It’s great to involve younger people who don’t always get involved in these conversations because we feel a bit disenfranchised, and we feel a little bit pushed out by the older generation sometimes. In Felixstowe, it seems to be an older population…we are trying to get a place for younger people to be collectively together and work with you guys so we can make something we are ALL proud of. It’s just great to have a platform to be able to share ideas and feelings about Felixstowe and have them listened to and respected by everybody.” – Courtney
At heart, this is a live action role-play (LARP) exercise giving the chance for people to leap into the future of their area, speak as different generations and work successfully on issues that concern them. By setting the action in the future, participants reflect on how some of the challenges they predict can be tackled and even solved. Themes emerge through groups of townsfolk meeting together in conversation. This experience has been developed to raise difficult issues supportively and in such a way that people feel stronger and more connected, rather than anxious or powerless. It was devised as “hyperlocal eco-social” place-making: that is to say, people living in the same neighbourhood are understood to share some social and ecological concerns related to their environment and need something around which to gather and move from individual worry to co-created action.
It is also designed to help people recognise how local systems are interdependent, relying on the plants, animals, institutions and places that make up the area, just as the major global systems, such as weather, climate and geography, work together to affect what happens. This understanding is part of supporting readiness, because changes in these relationships are part of what we are all experiencing and have to deal with.
This Coastal Town was created by Ruth Catlow, director of arts organisation Furtherfield, which has been establishing itself in Felixstowe, a town of about 24,000 people, and Ann Light, an academic at the University of Sussex wanting to learn how creative participatory and immersive practices can support people in a locality to be ready for the increasingly uncertain futures ahead. Devised in 3 stages, Ann and Ruth first invited Felixstowe residents and visitors to chat about the futures they wanted in May 2024. In July 2024 they shared what they discovered with three creative practitioners from the region: Mimi Doncaster and Frazer Merrick, and Kirsty Tallent. Together they created an immersive future fiction that formed the basis of This Coastal Town, a public “time-travelling” event to work on the future together. This LARP was first held in Felixstowe in September 2024, then further developed with local youth empowerment consultants Courtney Hessey and Lauren Bruen, for a second Felixstowe iteration in Spring 2025. Ann and Ruth worked on a version that could travel, and events were also held in May 2025, in partnership with First Light Festival’s Battery of Ideas in Lowestoft and Hospitable Environments in Newhaven. These events have supported preparation for the creation of the playbook.
This Coastal Town is made possible by partnership with The University of Sussex, and is part of Reimagine This Coastal Town supported by Level Two Youth Projects, Hamilton MAS, and the Felixstowe Citizen Science Group and with support from Arts Council England and the Suffolk Cultural Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant no AH/Y003330/1.
Furtherfield content is published
