Alternative City Hall was a week-long art project that transformed conversations about the city into a collective civic performance. Developed with Re:Claim, an international collective of artists and architects from the UK, Poland and Denmark, the project explored how play, imagination and humour can open up new conversations about urban life. 

We invited residents and visitors to record their lived experience of Exeter and imagine alternative urban futures. The questions were deliberately surrealist. People were invited to register people, places and ideas the city had lost or gained, report city errors and dreams and create protest placards for our library. Built from reclaimed materials, the colourful staging of our mobile City Hall lent an inviting air of playful bureaucracy to the proceedings. 

For three days, we roamed the streets of Exeter, trawling the city for dreams and ideas. Each evening, the material was brought back to Old St Leonard’s Hall to be reviewed and added to a growing civic archive. 

The project culminated in a public takeover of Old St Leonard's Hall, where Exeter's newly elected Rat Mayor invited the heads of department to report on the week's discoveries. The hall became a temporary civic forum: part exhibition, part symposium, part neighbourhood gathering. 

For Citizen Architects, the project was an opportunity to test a different model of engagement. We wanted to explore participation outside the constraints of a rigorous accountability and create a space where imagination, humour and lived experience could invite more open-ended conversations about our cities. Alternative City Hall asked what might happen if civic participation felt less like filling in a questionnaire and more like joining a street festival. 

It suggested that public space can be reclaimed not only for protest, but also for curiosity, creativity and collective joy. When people are given permission to play as well as comment, they engage with the city in richer, more generous and more meaningful ways.