Circus City

“When I was a child, the first time I saw the circus arrive, it was like an apparition in the night. Like a giant balloon that had landed without warning -
there it was in front of my house in the morning, as if it had appeared from nowhere…”

Federico Fellini (Fellini: A Director’s Notebook)

Sheffield provides the local stage on which Circus City manifests itself in built form, but its metaphorical threads reach out towards the real and not
so real cinematic cities of Berlin and Warsaw.

The Circus City therefore, is not one complete city, but a constantly moving and fleeting fragment of the city on the move. Acting as an agent for
change, it provides a dynamic system for the production of new urban and cultural space that will seem to disintegrate and connect at the same
time, cultures of the local and global, real and not so real in an instant. The reciprocal relationship between Circus and everyday life becomes
a state where society can negotiate its own future.

Located primarily in evacuated fields found in the three cities the Circus City makes do with what it finds, enveloping and adapting found structures,
resources and technologies to infiltrate, innovate and construct space for community, as well as community itself, in unusual and provisional ways.