The Street Matters
2021 - Present

The Street Matters is a project in partnership with Caredig, EYST, YMCA and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, which aims to bring significant cultural and community investment into St Helens Road to develop a community vision. This will see the development of a creative, collaborative, citizen-led urban design programme with the potential to culminate in a sustainable neighbourhood plan for St Helens Road.

The Street Matters will work with our partners, local business owners, residents and the community to explore how to use a cultural project to devise and co-author a plan to influence the present & future of the area. We want to re-imagine this street as a community designed space. At the foundation of this project are the ideas of justice - climate, racial, social and spatial.  Our approach to this work is in direct response to the agendas perused by local authorities and developers, centring an arts led community partnership and residents approach alongside radical engagement and community empowerment; to reengineer the power dynamics around how communities can articulate and explore their needs and dreams for their environment.

 

We will be holding workshops, talks, events and will be on the street working with groups to rethink our relationship to the street and listen to people's stories, gathering information together to create a co-authored vision for the street.

“We are based on St Helens Rd and therefore ideally placed to be a core partner in The Street Matters. We are excited at the potential for the project to promote understanding and inclusion and strengthen community identity.”

Rocio Cifuentes

CEO EYST

The Street Matters programme will be intersectional - issues of climate, social, cultural and racial justice will interact with planning, regeneration and sense of place.

“St Helen’s Road is one of the most important, diverse and community based streets in the city. A cultural, spiritual and economic hub in the heart of Swansea, where independent businesses thrive and community projects serving local people are rooted. The Street Matters is not about gentrifying the street in any way - it's an advocacy project, devised to explore how we can use culture to propose a neighbourhood plan celebrating this amazing street and its community.”

Owen Griffiths

Ways of Working

Follow the project on Instagram here.

Previous
Previous

Dryslwyn Community Shop

Next
Next

New Futures