Levelling up: Level heads needed.

It’s been a tough time for optimists, but when an opportunity comes along to embrace positive change you’ve got to grab it with both hands. Sunderland Future Living Expo 2023 engages with some of the most important issues of our time, ones that we at Studio Blackburn find both stimulating and inspiring. 

If the levelling up of the United Kingdom is to happen, it will need to take place in city-centres with the creation of commercial, residential and leisure space. The city centre of Sunderland, with its hollow heart where once beat the rhythm of the industrial revolution, is leading the way with one of this country's most exciting regeneration projects – Riverside Sunderland. 

The Sunderland Future Living Expo 2023 is the brainchild of Sunderland City Council and is designed to demonstrate what the future for city centre living could be like, whilst simultaneously getting on and building it. The Council deserve plaudits for pushing forward with an ambitious and thoroughly well-researched agenda. They are asking the question, “how will we live in the future?” The city is building this future at Riverside Sunderland and the talents of some of the best global experts are being harnessed to create a new urban quarter comprising 1,000 high quality new homes in four stunning new residential neighbourhoods.

World Fairs and Expo’s have tended to be held in global capitals and metropolises, whereas this is a local and regional affair that intends to focus the world’s gaze on where the people actually are.

Having visited Expo’s around the world over the last twenty years, it’s an absolute delight to be able to help deliver one in Sunderland. Not only is the concept of a ‘future living’ Expo timely on a national level, it’s being delivered in an area that is undergoing huge positive change. At the centre of the project is the expo logo, which comprises four “blocky” letterforms. The choice of logo was inspired by the blocks that make up neighbourhoods and are designed to function as a framing device.

The identity we’ve created with them, a kind of window into the future, will hopefully serve as an appropriate vehicle for an event driven by a huge array of talents and stakeholders including architects, planners, regeneration experts, residents, educators, thinkers and ‘doers'. 

Level heads all of them. Onwards and upwards.

www.sunderlandexpo.com