For the last five years, the Small Society Lab has brought together Dundee academics, creatives and members of the public around various topics affecting the small city of the future. It was born of a feeling that small cities and large towns don’t get the attention they deserve, despite a large chunk of the UK population living in them. This year we did something slightly different: teamed up with a sister event in Mexico City, another UNESCO City of Design, to run an entire weekend linking the two cities.
Beforehand, both sides of the Atlantic crowdsourced content about their city’s culture, which both events remixed to take a new look at local life. I’m not sure how well we managed to link up the two sides in a meaningful way, but we did create a series of unique ideas, I had some fun playing around with the scales of the cities (projecting maps and discovering the entire of Dundee fits neatly inside Mexico City’s innermost ring road) and we learned a lot about the perils of live-linking across timezones.
Most importantly, we sent a huge “we are here” to a city on the other side of the world that dwarfs Dundee in size—and I think we even managed to impress them.
You can read a lot more about the event on the Creative Dundee website, but I’ll sign off with the highlight of the weekend: an antidote to bland promotional videos, crafted in secret from crowdsourced footage and unveiled simultaneously in both countries.
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