Volume 9.0: Habit(at) A field-day exploring City Lives, Lost and Found: A Fashion Perspective

Field Days are a means to explore new ideas that are in incubation within the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) with colleagues and collaborators, connected through the foregrounding of social and ecological considerations in design work. Part formed, part fluid, field days are for listening, talking, making and watching what can be of value to society through research, education and business practice. Each member of CSF contributes to the day creating a diverse range of nascent and more fully fledged pieces of work for display, discussion and discovery.

Habit(AT) is an emerging multi-dimensional project being formed around humanity’s habits of living relating us to each other and to nature. It looks at emergent properties of life through fashion and city locations. This field day starts ‘where we are’ in London, to begin to explore a larger world megatrend of migration to City Lives. In just over one century, we have moved from predominantly rural lives (only 10% of the population lived in cities in 1900) we now tip the balance with just over 50% of us now city residents. By 2050, it is expected that nearly 80% of humanity will reside in an urban location. Cities, like fashion, exemplify the best and the worst of human ingenuity and offer us a canvas for the creation of relationships, principles, practices and artifacts that can shape how we might live well in our world.