Free Range - Liverpool

Free Range is a celebration of joyful meandering through places known and unknown, regarding them as spaces or adventures yet to be defined. It is not a guided tour

As part of Ignite Liverpool’s theme – Who owns the land and how did they get it? We're delighted to be participating in Liverpool Makefest.

Like its sibling event Joy Diversion, Free Range’s underlying theme is one of ownership: how we as citizens have rights to and ownership of public space, but also how we have ownership of our own experiences. Our cities have become transactional affairs where we pass through them to get from one place to another, where our presence is legitimised by work or consumption. Yet this functional concept of the city leads to a certain sterility and soullessness, where those who don't wish to spend are unwelcome.

Free Range challenges this commodification of urban space. It encourages participants to make their own adventures and provides tools—such as explorer backpacks—to make that happen. Liverpool's streets, waterfront, hidden corners and public spaces are much more than buildings, roads and paths. They are places where fun can be had and where we can find joy, if we give ourselves the chance to look.

Join us this July as we bring this tradition of playful urban exploration and communal rediscovery to Liverpool, exploring questions of land ownership through wandering, wondering, and reclaiming our right to roam.

Joy Diversion and Free Range have evolved out of "Who Owns the Land?" events that ODM ran with Guy Shrubsole (author of "Who Owns England", "The Lost Rainforests of Britain") and Morag Rose (founder of the Loiterers' Resistance Movement), as well as our work examining how data technologies within the urban built environment capture space and the people within them, and how people's rights—both in the physical and data worlds—change depending on the kind of space they occupy.