Eyes will be to the skies in Birmingham on 7th and 12th as the last three Trailblazer walks are undertaken. Following heroic tales told of St. George’s Steps, Birmingham City Council commissioned us to make a project with young people about their aspirations and their city. Our response is Trailblazers: In A Visible City.

Twenty schools from across the city have each nominated six Year 10 students to work with us. These small groups have each planned a walking adventure, the first half of which takes place around their school (their territory) and the second half, linked by public transport, takes them to somewhere in the city they don’t know so well.

The walks take a full day and contain a photography challenge along with a series of reflective questions. These photographs and questions are then followed up in a series of interviews back in school on a third day.

The results of all this thinking and walking and talking and photographing will be released on 5th February at The Council House when all the Trailblazer participants are reunited as the city’s future council. We will be publishing an new A0 map of the city, plus an online version of the map including animations and audio recordings, plus a flickr account detailing all the Trailblazer photographs.

We’ve been fantastically lucky with the weather during the walks so far conducted, let’s hope it holds for the final few.

NB: The image at the top of this post is courtesy of Pete Ashton, he tried an experiment using the GPS tags from the photographs taken in the first few walks to place the photographs onto Google Maps (I think).