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Dr Lesley Murray, Associate Professor in Sociology at the university, is looking for people who were born between 1930 and 1949 and lived or spent time in Brighton in the 1950s and 1960s and people born between 1990 and 2005 who have lived or spent time in Brighton in the 21st century.

Volunteers from each age group (an older and younger person) will be paired up to embark on a walk around Brighton, talking about their memories of and feelings towards the city as they do so.

Small video cameras will be attached to participants’ clothing as they walk and talk, and interviews will be conducted afterwards to enable Lesley to assess each individual’s experience.

The project aims to produce new understandings of the changes in people’s relationships to their environment, with participants encouraged to choose a walk route that has particular significance to them.

The end goal is to build a portrait of the differing ways people from two generations perceive Brighton.

Dr Lesley Murrary

Brighton - old and new

Half of the sought participants will be artists, so Lesley is particularly interested in recruiting visual artists, musicians, performers and craftspeople.

Lesley explained the logic behind using two participants from contrasting age brackets: “We can understand how different generations experience urban spaces in different ways, but more importantly perhaps, we can understand how experiences becomes determined by this shared walk.

“We are interested in how both parties see, hear, smell, touch and taste their environment in new and shared ways.”

Technology plays an important role in the project, with Lesley seeking to explore how devices such as mobile phones have changed our interactions with the world around us.

“It is assumed that mobile digital technologies have transformed our relationship with urban space – for example, mobile phones are used to navigate space, to communicate on the move and to entertain. In doing so, they produce new ways of sensing space.”

Lesley added that members of each generation could inform the other about life with and without technology.

She said: “Those born in the 1930s and 1940s lived their early years without digital technologies and can offer their memories of particular spaces and also their experience of the changing landscape of mobile technologies.

“Those born from the 1990s onwards have lived all of their lives with mobile technologies and have different experiences.”

The project is funded by the European Research Council and is led by Professor Helmi Järviluoma, University of Eastern Finland. The research will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Turku, Finland as well as Brighton, and it is scheduled to take five years. Details on how to take part can be found on the website.