Edelman, J., 2025.

The Project and its Goals

This chapter sets out the context of the Project on European Theatre Systems (STEP) research group and how we developed the research design for the City Project. What we are presenting here is the process through which we developed that model, more so than the model itself. We did this through a process of trial, analysis, discussion and refinement, one that continued throughout the considerable length of the City Project and is still proceeding to this day. This was a form of slow research, rather than work designed to deliver outputs at a rapid pace. Slow research was an appropriate model for us, as we were (and are) not a research project accountable for external funding or clearly applicable results, but rather, as we have described in the introduction, a learning community of researchers aiming to develop our understanding of the workings of theatre as a social system.