Catherine Mollett

Cities, like people, vie for popularity and friendship. Current Devolution proposals will lead to Hull being the only city of the North not part of a wider City Region – a form of social isolation at planning scale. This project uses Hull’s physical and social isolation is an opportunity for the city to challenge traditional notions of success. Refusing to play by George Osborne’s rules the city applies to devolve as a City Region of one, and uses these devolved powers to rethink the top-down regeneration strategies normally pushed onto ‘failing cities’.

The new strategies are rolled out across Hull in varying intensities, and the project explores what happens next on two contrasting sites and how these evolving narratives feed back into the strategies – city planning through the messy reality of the human scale. All the narratives are taken from reality but contain a possibility, sometimes absurd, but no more absurd than real life.