This month we were honored to attend the Building Awards where Open to the Public?, a documentary about public space Lily made with Paper Tiger TV, was a finalist in the Regeneration Film Festival category. The jury is still out on who will win the Golden Brick award — the finalists are all so stunning it would be a shame to choose just one we suspect!

But the outcome of the evening was far more rewarding than an oddly shaped trophy might have been. Our table, # 9, fostered a flurry of political debate and was a seedbed for future collaborations between filmmakers, architects, environmental psychologists, and regenerators. We learned about The Brick Box’s amazing transformation of The A13 Green and Nathan Hughes’s psycho-geographic investigation of the Bristol Enterprise Zone, Scratching the Surface.  MAKE, the makers of the clever pop-up igloo cinema where the films were screened at EcoBuild,  and Igloo Regeneration Fund rounded out the group.

Freed from the constraints of Oscars-esque competition, Table 9 pooled our energies in brainstorming how to incentivize more collaborative and communal-serving work in the built environment — running the gamut from the occupy movement, to the psychology of cohesive housing communities, to the tensions between regeneration and gentrification. It was an inspiring debate into the function of regeneration and the role psychology and the arts can play in it, which we look forward to continuing in future Table 9 collaborations!

For the previous blog post, click here.