STREETSIGNScucr1994-201420 years

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Welcome to the latest Issue of Street Signs. 2014 sees CUCR reflecting on its past and looking forward to a lively programme of research activities and events.

Since the last issue of Streetsigns we are proud to have hosted the 30th International Visual Sociology Association conference at Goldsmiths. We worked closely with IVSA’s President Doug Harper and CUCR’s Caroline Knowles, to bring this three day international conference to CUCR around the broad but compelling theme of The Public Image. The interest in contributing to the conference was overwhelming (indeed it tested our organisational capacities!) and we very proud to be in the position to help bring together not just a conference with the familiar programme of plenaries, and conference papers, but a sociological festival, which included walks, off-site exhibitions and interactive installations. This is a good place to reiterate the expression of our gratitude: our thanks to all those involved, we hope it was a rewarding experience. It was for us: among the 200 delegates from around the world, our colleagues from CUCR and Goldsmiths played a great part in both the academic and festive atmosphere, and we hope conversations and collaborations were started that will continue to inspire our work in the future. As Streetsigns demonstrates: visual sociology is a constitutive part of the research CUCR endorses and carries out, and its role within public will remain a central issue in years to come. In this issue, the visual theme is strong with Kata Halasz’s review of ‘Visualising Affect’ the exhibition she curated for the IVSA, along side the striking visual projects of Michael Rogers, David Kendall and Christian von Wissel.

The summer of 2013 was also busy due to a collaboration with CREATE London, an organisation working to deliver London’s post Olympic cultural strategy in the ‘growth boroughs’. Reflecting our commitment to develop CUCR’s community of researchers, students from the World Cultures and Urban Life, and the Photography and Urban Cultures MA programmes took part in two days intensive training in critical evaluation with CUCR’s research manager Imogen Slater, Dr Alex Rhys Taylor and Dr Alison Rooke. They subsequently went on to work on short, paid Research Internships focussing on five art projects

commissioned by Create. This was a valuable opportunity for MA students to get experience of the world of contractual research and to understand the complex micro-politics of delivering participatory art and cultural strategy at local partnership level. In this issue see some of the fruits of this partnership in Claire Levy and Harriet Smith’s reflections on their involvement with Marcus Coates’ everyday shamanism project.

This year sees the continuation of the CUCR’s consulting arm as we work in partnerships with a number of organisations developing critical and collaborative approaches to research and evaluation at a local, national and international level. Much of the evaluative research we carry out at CUCR is conducted in tandem with others outside of the academy: This includes cultural institutions, public bodies, local authorities, health trusts, artists ‘participants’ other researchers and ‘stakeholder’s and so is best thought of as being ‘co-constructed’. The research we do does not merely evidence the impact of an intervention ‘as if from the outside’. Our approach to evaluation arises out of the recognition that if research ‘works’ or is successful, it is by virtue of a variety of social actors shaping it and contributing to it on an on-going basis, well before the research can be framed as a ‘product’ or as an ‘outcome’. Our position arises out of a scepticism regarding the instrumental use of evaluative research, being the handmaiden to the cultural establishment, doing the banal housework of cleaning up after the show is over.

Our interest in the critical potential of research and arts intervention will be taken forward this year through two successful applications for awards under the AHRC’s Cultural Value research programme. This research stream has arisen out of dissatisfaction with the arts and culture impact agenda impact agenda and the recognition that the culturally or socially ‘valuable’ cannot always be reduced down to a spreadsheet. In the spring the CUCR organised two ‘expert workshops. The first Curating Community? The Relational and Agonistic Value of

Introduction[Alison Rooke CUCR Co-Director | Monica Sassatelli CUCR Co-Director | Alex Rhys-Taylor CUCR Deputy Director]

Contents[Editors | Emily Nicholls | Claire Levy | Dr Alex Rhys Taylor Front page image by David Kendall Graphic Design by Caroline Fedash www.behance.net/carolinefedash]

INTRODUCTION 1

VISUALISING AFFECT: AN EXHIBITION 3

STUART HALL 4

GENTRIFICATION WITHOUT DISPLACEMENT IN SHOREDITCH 8

IN THE LIGHT OF DAY 11

CARPENTERS ESTATE - STRATFORD 12

THROUGH THE CLOUDS: AN UNSETTLING ENCOUNTER WITH THE CITY. 14

MARCUS COATES’ SCHOOL OF THE IMAGINATION AND SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION(S) 16

ON SWANSCOMBE MARSH 20

ACTUAL IMAGINARIES 22

9UB OR THE ART OF URBAN SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY 26

FAIRYTALE OF NEW ADDINGTON 30

A NECESSARY AWARENESS 35

FRAGMENTS FROM THE ATACAMA DESERT, SOUTH AMERICA 40

IN SEARCH OF EDGELANDS 42

A SENSE OF DEJA VU: 46

A SELECTION OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS FROM THE CUCR 48

CONTRIBUTORS 49

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Participatory Arts in Superdiverse Localities is concerned with curating community. It brought together academics and practitioners from the fields of participatory arts and community development to examine the relational and agonistic dimensions of arts participation, focussing in particular on the context of regeneration. The second workshop focused on the Creative Collisions and Critical Conversations and brings together mental health and social care practitioners, artists, gallery arts education practitioners, funders, theorists, researchers and artists currently working at the interface between the arts and mental health. This ‘creative collision’ aims to identify ways of delivering arts/mental health with energy and creativity in order to develop a shared sense of purpose and the recognition that arts practice not only improves ‘patient management’ but also make a valuable contribution to the education and training of health practitioners.

1994- 2014 – 20 YEARS OF CUCR

2014 also marks CUCR’s 20th anniversary. The centre was established in 1994, with Nikolas Rose as its Director. Subsequently, in the 1990’s with Michael Keith at its helm, , the Centre received funding for the research into several large regeneration projects. This research stream had a specific focus on the impact of regeneration at the level of neighbourhood and the perspective of local communities on the changes taking place on their doorstep. Our anniversary year will be an opportunity to reflect on our roots in researching the politics of regeneration. In April we hosted an event organised with Jess Steele, author of Turning the Tide an Everyday History of Deptford, Ben Gidley (formerly of CUCR) and local organisations and activists from Deptford to reflect on the changes that have taken place locally and to think critically about the changes in regeneration politics on a city wide scale as London goes through rapid, corporate-led regeneration anda major housing crisis, characterised by increasing inequalities. The themes of local democracy, accountability, participation, community involvement and economic transformation which framed much of CUCR’s evaluative research seem as urgent as ever.

These are just some of the highlights of our public events programme. CUCR continues to be a lively research community. We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Michaela Benson and Dr. Anja Kanngieser to the centre alongside Prof Rob Imrie, Dr. Kim Kullman and Dr. Charlotte Bates. Rob’s team are working on an ERC three year research programme, ‘Universalism, universal design and equitable access to the designed environment’ which examines the values and attitudes embedded into the production of the designed environment and how these relate to manifold complexities of the body. This is being explored through the context of disability and design, with the focus on assessing the relevance of the principles and practices of one of the foremost, contemporary, design movements, Universal Design (UD), and how it addresses the problems of/for impaired bodies in interacting with the designed environment.

CUCR’s research community also includes the Goldsmiths research team for Alpha Territories. A major national research project concerned with ‘spatialisation of social class’ and the relationship between social

identities residential location. This project investigates the proposition that in cities such as London we are witnessing an increase in pro-active spatial dis/engagement by the rich; an increasing spatial retreat by the affluent; emerging forms of self-segregation; social insulation from what are perceived to be ‘risky’ urban environments; and a rising physical defensiveness to the homes and neighbourhoods of the very wealthy.

In the last 6 months we have seen many of the CUCR doctoral research students complete their research. Congratulations go to Dr. Francisco Calafate, Dr. Paolo Cardullo, Dr Gerald Koessl, Dr. Steven Hanson and Dr. Rachel Jones.

Alison Rooke, Monica Sassatelli and Alex Rhys Taylor

Can affect be visualised? Isn’t art about the visualisation—and circulation—of affect? Fifteen artists, filmmakers and visual sociologists propelled us into the midst of the always multiple and ambiguous ways of how race, gender and sexuality come to matter. They brought close the affects we bring to these very present references, evoked in mundane and profound examples of human experience, in a kiss, in a wedding, or in diasporic dying. Visualising Affect was an exhibition tense with the terrifying and the fleeting beauty, with the urge for capturing, for holding still a moment of visceral connection across times and borders.

Organised in conjunction with the International Visual Sociology Association Annual Conference 2013 (hosted by the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths) the exhibition brought together poetry and textile installations, video-art, photography, films, talks and written reflections. Lasting only three days but connecting far away countries, Visualising Affect: an Exhibition on Race, Gender, Sexuality and Affect opened up spaces for aesthetic and affective encounters with the issues the works tackled.

Curating the exhibition was a huge but very rewarding task. Alongside invited artists and visual sociologists, emerging new talents came forward through an open call. Nearly one hundred applications were received, from countries as far as South Korea and South Africa. Reviewing each work was a reassuring and worrying experience at the same time: they demonstrated that the theme of the exhibition was highly relevant, but also that the lived experience of it was current, sore and painful.

Creating a space where the works of Sutapa Biswas, Sandra De Berduccy, Nirmal Puwar, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Julio Gonzáles Sánchez, Karin Michalski, Laura Cuch and

Yvonne Füegg would lead viewers on a path that blurred boundaries between sociological and artistic practices and methods was an important curatorial concern , as well as the creation of a safe and calm atmosphere. And slowly, the works started to engage with each other and with a diverse audience made up of academic visitors of the conference, of gallery goers and locals, and of a teenage boy of about 12 or 13 years of age who became a regular visitor.

He came every day, silently wandered around and politely thanked us for the exhibition. He never asked a question about the works or the artists but seemed to be annoyed when I approached him with my own questions about his interests and with my explanations about the show. I soon realised he did not want to know any of it. He just wanted to be left to be alone with his own thoughts and curious discovery.

We will never know if it was him or another visitor who left a hand made card in Yasmin Gunaratnam’s poetry installation, in the breast bowl ‘Think Positive’, which accompanied the poem ‘Blind Date’ about the entanglements between aging, disease and sexual desire.

Visualising Affect: an Exhibition[Kata Halasz: PhD candidate Visual Sociology]

to hold dear

CHERISH

treat with affection

and tenderness

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Listening to Stuart Hall made us see the world differently and he had a gift that enabled us to understand our life anew. He seemed to be talking directly to you, even if it was through the TV screen or through the pages of one of his many influential essays. I think that is why so many people – even students and readers who never met him in person – feel such a deep sense of personal loss at the news of his passing.

Thinking for Stuart was always a process of transformation and of changing himself, making sense out of the senselessness of exploitation, imperialism and racism. If you followed his thought you could not help but be transformed too. It was impossible to ever drink a cup of tea again without being reminded of the imperial traces in the brown leaves and the sugar’s sweet taste.

Stuart Hall had an incredible capacity for intellectual generosity. He could unlock a student trapped by an intellectual conundrum with a single phrase. He was interested in what you had to say and in conversation he would use phases like - “of course you have written about that.” The sense of acknowledgement was incredibly validating, conveying a sense that you were playing a part in a much bigger project of transformation.

Stuart Hall’s life offers us an alternative path to follow in the vocation of thinking and learning. He was committed to intervening publically on key political questions. He never followed a narrow academic path but knew theory was an essential lens for critique. We should honour that by asking, at any given point in a political argument or in an encounter with a student: “what would Stuart Hall do?” Then, having established an answer with our own wits, act accordingly.

Les Back

In the days following Stuart Hall’s death, together with black feminist academics, artists and activists, we put together a collaborative tribute for the Media Diversified, writers of colour digital collective2. The responses showed the enduring value and use of Hall’s relational/conjunctural approach among black feminists. I also noticed something else: many of the stories spoke of a loneliness that Hall alleviated through his pedagogic and personal presence. The filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, one of the co-authors of the 1982 CCCS collection ‘The Empire Strikes Back’3 described how her experiences as the daughter of a sweat shop worker were seen as a hindrance to her research on the topic in a previous academic department. Stuart Hall encouraged her to make connections across theoretical and experiential knowledge “My activist experience and biography became legitimate tools in the formation of my intellectual practice thanks to Stuart.” A Brazilian ‘very’ mature student, Vera Jocelyn, remembered Hall’s attunement to others. In an Open University class Stuart had showed images and asked students to raise their hand if they felt the image represented violence. ‘One of the images showed several small children playing in the tiny balcony of a flat in a council estate. I immediately raised my hand – the only student to do so’ Vera wrote, ‘and Stuart’s comment was: “Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?” How did he know, so early on, that I was someone who regarded poverty as violence?’

I can’t remember the first time that I became aware of Stuart Hall but I do know that his influence has been more than intellectual. His work with black colleagues, students and artists has continued to show me possibilities (and hope) for engaging rigorously and with openness to the shifting paradoxes and poetics of post-coloniality but not at the cost of dissolving the phenomenology of complex experiences. The journalist Suzanne Moore has a story about Hall that captures the searing directness with which he could move between various strata of knowledge and experience ‘To see him debate with a conservative was a joy’ Moore wrote in the Guardian ‘Just a flicker of pity – or was it contempt? “In the back of my head are things that can’t be in the back of your head. That part of me comes from a plantation, when you owned me.” God, that hit home.’4 For all the endless post-structuralist deferrals and contingencies of meaning that Hall prised upon and encouraged us to see, he also had this knack of making tangible, or at least making believable, those back-of-the-head metaphysical truths that are so resistant to reason and language, which is just another way of saying that he has made me feel less lonely too.

Yasmin Gunaratnam

Stuart Hall – academic and activist – died on the 10 February 2014. The tributes and stories that poured in after his death were extraordinary for a British intellectual. Hall was valued in so many fields beyond sociology and cultural studies, but it is no exaggeration to say that his work has been a vital lifeline to us in Sociology at Goldsmiths. His scholarship on topics such as class, race, nationalism and representation are taught on many of our courses and are frequent points of inspiration and reference in our research. Some of us found our sociological feet with Stuart.

As the Preface to the edited collection ‘Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall’1 puts it, ‘Everywhere, universities are beleaguered institutions and their definitions of what counts as scholarly activity are becoming more narrow and restrictive. Stuart’s own record suggests that intellectuals –even academics – can still find important parts to play in cultural climates where the life of the mind is scorned.’

Stuart HallThank you

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Policing the Crisis5 written by Hall and his collaborators at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham was path breaking in many ways. It is most usually known for its analysis of the role of the media in manufacturing a moral panic about ‘mugging’ in the 1970s. Another, less discussed, feature of the analysis converses with a contemporary focus on ‘surplus population’ - an idea that marginalisation or expulsion from the capital-labour relationship can itself be a factor of politicisation. The concluding chapter of Policing the Crisis provides a means to reflect on some of the stakes of thinking the politics of unemployment in light of antagonistic differences that are a part of the production of superfluous populations – in the case of Policing the Crisis, the unemployed black youth which were the target of the moral panic over crime.

Dovetailing with the discussions of the politics of women’s reproductive labour at a time when, approaching the black proletariat in Britain through the angle of superfluous populations promised for Hall and his collaborators a break with narratives of social exclusion and criminality. It introduced the strategic problem, shared with feminist debates over housework, of how to align, as they put it ‘sectoral struggle with a more general class struggle’, in terms of the ‘double structure’ of exploitation at work in both the sexual and racial division within class.

Hall et al.’s stress on the need for political strategies able to confront the ‘discrepancies, the divergences, the non-correspondences between the different levels of the social formation in relation to the black working class – between the economic, political and ideological levels’6 suggests we should be wary of the kind of philosophies of history that assume a unified class reality – be it in the form of propositions of universal wagelessness, precarity, or ‘surplus humanity’. If anything, an analysis of surplus populations attunes us to the potent ways in which capital fragments experiences of class suggesting that it is far more effective in the constant unmaking and decomposition of working classes than in unifying, structuring and organising its own gravediggers.

Alberto Toscano

1. Gilroy,P.,Grossberg,LandMcRobbie,A.(2000)(eds)Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall.London:Verso

2. Ahmed,S.,Bhattacharyya,G.,Gunaratnam,Y.,Jocelyn,V.,Noxolo,P.,Parmar,P.,Phoenix,A.,Puwar,N.,Scafe,S.(2014).Meeting Stuart Hall. MediaDiversified.Retrievedfrom:http://mediadiversified.org/2014/02/14/meeting-stuart-hall/

3. UniversityofBirminghamCentreforContemporaryCulturalStudies,(1982)ed.,Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70’s Britain.Routledge.

4. Moore,S.(2014).Stuart Hall was a Voice for Misfits Everywhere.TheGuardian,12thFebruary2014.Retrievedfrom:www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/stuart-hall-voice-for-misfits-legacy

5. Hall,S.,Critcher,C.,Jefferson,T.,Clarke,JandRoberts,B.(1978).Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order.London:PalgraveMacmillan.

6. Policing the Crisis, p.393

Stuart Hall’s substantive focus closely analysed state practices, their interactions with the media, social, cultural and political movements, as well as diasporic art practices. He is one of the few sociologists (probably the only one) who has both been a President of the British Sociological Association and overseen an arts building and project, as Chair of INIVA, which now holds talks, exhibitions and the Stuart Hall Library. The breadth of his attention, in terms of where he has seen the world move, breathe, oppress and change has been vast. Hence his audiences have also been from diverse disciplines and sectors. His work and way of being a sociologist has influenced such a large and diverse group of students and staff. He relayed a rare kind of pedagogic scholarly style - sharp, warm witted and engaged.

At a conference held on diversity and the arts at the British Library, Hall spoke of the political potential of the arts but he also provoked us to think about the current moment in which the work is being made and consumed. In the context of neo-liberal changes in the university sector where large grants do not necessarily equal new ideas but are part of the cultural capital that secures jobs and promotion, Hall’s words on working with policy and funding imperatives have stayed with me. He understood very well the need to work strategically and tactically. At the same time he warned us that when the words of these institutions, and policy makers, start to come out of our own mouths, we need to worry.

Stuart Hall’s signature image is perhaps the way in which he worked an audience with his accessible and in-depth sharp intellectual analysis, often with vital specks of humour here and there. In a Q & A session after the screening of the film The Stuart Hall Project (directed by John Akomfrah, 2013) at the ICA, speaking from the audience, Hall lit up the room with his voice. Heads turned to the back of the auditorium to see what he had to say. He congratulated the film team. “This film is about the myth of Stuart Hall” he said at one point, “It is not the film I would have made about my life”. Reflexive and challenging to the end.

Nirmal Puwar

While undertaking the second year of my undergraduate degree in 1999, I opted for a 10 week module entitled simply “Gramsci”. Nine weeks of the module consisted of a close reading of excerpts from Prison Notebooks, illustrated with historical notes that related the opaque codified passages to early twentieth century geopolitics. Over the first nine weeks I started to build an understanding of how the radical Sardinian’s nuanced take on Marx, in particular his emphasis on culture, its contradictions and the need for hegemonic consensus, might be better suited to understanding the current conjuncture than the radical politics I was familiar with.

It was not, however, until week 10, when the reading was Stuart Hall’s essay “Gramsci and Us”, that everything fell, remarkably neatly, into place. This text, alongside additional readings that illustrated the CCCS’s use of Gramsci, offered a concise guide to applying Gramscian analysis to the impending millennium’s political landscape. Hall’s application of Gramscian thought became integral to my understanding of the tenuous consensus between neo-liberals and cultural conservatives that would come to reinvigorate the centre right. And it is central to my understanding the devastating inability of progressives to respond with any agility to the wars, recession and austerity that would eventually unfold. Of course, as a researcher involved in the study of culture, identity and multiculture, there are many more obvious ways in which Hall’s thinking influences my own, not least in terms of theorising the relationship between representation and identity. However, for me, Hall’s biggest influence is tying the study of the most everyday aspects of our lives – who we think we are, what we do and how we perceive the world around us – to questions of power, consensus and the shifting terrains of class struggle.

Alex Rhys-Taylor

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First came the Young British Artists. Then it was Banksy and his cohorts. Now, it’s the million-dollar startups of Silicon Roundabout. Shoreditch and its brick-walled, Victorian warehouses, has been branded a cultural quarter since the Young British Artists moved into the hollowed out light-industrial area on the City’s edge in the early ’90s.

But even as the various cultural industries — first the artists, then the “brandals”, now the app-makers — briefly “shine and burn”1, they have proved to be essential tinder for property developers, as Pratt notes in his 2009 survey of the area.

Now Shoreditch is poised on the cusp of a new wave of development that will see the addition of 50-storey residential towers to its skyline for the first time, and an unprecedented amount of new, high-density housing. The new towers will be built on sites left fallow by their owners for decades. So just who is being affected by these developments? Is Shoreditch gentrifying without displacement?

COMING DEVELOPMENTS AND LOCAL RESPONSES

Shoreditch has several large sites that have laid derelict for years. These brownfield sites, which include the former Bishopsgate railway goods yard, are finally being put to use. Developers have won planning approval from Hackney council for almost all the sites on the border of the City and Shoreditch. Sites that haven’t yet been approved, like the goods yard, are undergoing intensive public consultation driven largely by the developers, before planning permission is sought.

Together, these brownfield sites will account for up to 3,051 new residential units. For context, compare this to the Olympics athlete’s village in Stratford, just a few stops east on the Central Line. That complex accommodated 17,000 athletes and officials during the 2012 Games, and it was then converted into a residential complex with 2,800 units, or about 90% of the size of the planned developments in Shoreditch.

The planned increase in residential density is accompanied by millions of square feet of new office

and retail space. One common response from nearby residents is similar to that voiced by Gary Sharkey, who rents in a newbuild near the goods yard site in Tower Hamlets. I interviewed him at a public consultation session of the goods yard set up by the developers’ consultancy in the summer of 2013:

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said, referring to the tent pitched on the goods yard site containing scale models and lined with information boards about the proposed project. “It seems effective at consulting with the public. I look forward to getting more from the site than I do now.”

Residents can hardly be faulted for expecting more from these massive brownfield sites. When a new elevated park and repaved throughways are promised, as in the case of the proposed goods yard plans, a positive response from local residents can only be expected. But this sets up a dichotomy between a mixed-use development aimed at the more affluent, with its attendant public realm improvements, and a wasteland that is left largely closed to the public.

As one local campaigner, the historian and broadcaster Dan Cruickshank, put it at the opening speech of a new pressure group called The East End Preservation Society, the goods yard is simply an example of developers “squatting on” important sites until market conditions suit them. Residents end up supporting developers’ proposals in the absence of more imaginative or inclusive alternatives.

A relative lack of existing residential density — particularly owner-occupied properties — means that there is less organised community action on development and planning issues. This is the sentiment expressed by Johnny Vercoutre, who owns a building on Shoreditch High Street. His home is an homage to the 1930s and

Gentrification without Displacement in Shoreditch[Wong Joon Ian Journalist and graduate of MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice]

the man himself is habitually clad in period dress. He has lived in the area for 20 years. He remarks on the difficulties of local lobbying in the area:

“There are not that many homeowners in Shoreditch,” he says. “We’re on our own.”

THE GENTRIFICATION ARGUMENT

Andy Pratt points out that owners of light industrial spaces within the Shoreditch Triangle were often relieved when they disposed of their property in the area. Unlike the narrative of commercial or industrial gentrification, in this case, the displaced property owners welcomed the move out of the area. Again, this upsets the narrative of wealthier incoming gentrifiers displacing existing residents. In the case of Shoreditch there were no existing residents to displace.

“Thus, the narrative of ‘commercial or industrial gentrification’ may not be one of forcing out, but willing flight,” Pratt writes of the area’s industrial landlords.

Andrew Harris in his 20122 paper studying the links between the YBAs and Hoxton, suggests that gentrification scholars have failed to incorporate cultural landscapes and aesthetic registers in their analyses. He wants to bring the place-branding of Shoreditch into a dialogue with the socio-economic processes of gentrification. This is further

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problematised by the fact that the process of gentrification taking place in Shoreditch does not necessarily create displacement.

But as Harris notes, quoting Hackworth, “the production of urban space for progressively more affluent users” is taking place in Shoreditch. The areas “transformation” shows a kind of “class-based process of neighbourhood change” that takes place without displacement3.

A SHORT HISTORY OF SHOREDITCH

Shoreditch rose to prominence as an artistic hub linked to the Young British Artists in the early 1990s, largely driven by the many parties, festivals and events initiated by the late art impresario Joshua Compston, with an explicit place- branding agenda, as Harris’ work tells us. The artists, many supplied by the East London Line from Goldsmiths in the south, were attracted by hollowed out Victorian light industrial spaces and cheap rent arising from the neighbourhood’s blighted reputation.

But by the 2000’s Shoreditch, and its synonym in the cultural imagination, Hoxton, had descended into self-parody. It was seen as emblematic of New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ and spawned the satirical rag The Shoreditch Twat, which lampooned, among others, the incoming residents it labelled the ‘Marlyebone Tunnellers’, who could always pop back into their more salubrious West London environs as needed.

Perhaps it was fitting that during this period the area provided a canvas, quite literally, to the self-described “brandalist” Banksy, whose spray-painted stencils on the walls of the area critiqued consumer culture by mocking it in various ways. The Bristol vandal kick-started his international career with an ‘exhibition’ in the Rivington Street tunnel, white-washing the walls and then stencilling on them, pulling off the feat dressed as a builder on official business.

Today Shoreditch trades on both the contemporary art blooms of the YBAs and Banksy’s street-level critiques. It remains “on the edge”4, as Pratt has written, but it has been branded part of ‘East London Tech City’, also known colloquially as ‘Silicon Roundabout’, a cluster of technology start-ups that are given state support to promote things such as ‘innovation’.

But the inter-weaving of borough-wide social deprivation with a brand of knowingly provocative artiness has produced a certain pervasive style associated with the area. Style is generated by certain “technologies of glamour”, as Thrift has noted, and Shoreditch itself has become a space “in which every surface communicates something”5.

1. Pratt,A.C.(2009).UrbanRegeneration:FromtheArts`FeelGood’FactortotheCulturalEconomy:ACaseStudyofHoxton,London.Urban Studies46(5-6),p.4.

2. Harris,A.(2012).Artandgentrification:pursuingtheurbanpastoralinHoxton,London.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers37(2),pp.226–241.

3. Ibid.p.10.4. Pratt,A.C.(2009).UrbanRegeneration:

FromtheArts`FeelGood’FactortotheCulturalEconomy:ACaseStudyofHoxton,London.Urban Studies46(5-6),p.8.

5. Thrift,N.(2008).TheMaterialPracticesofGlamour.Journal of Cultural Economy1(1).p.17

My work-in-progress, ‘In the Light of Day’ considers how ocular and auditory landscapes seem to have no distinct presence or absence as modes of public disclosure.

Current work originates from Doha in Qatar. This city is undergoing rapid and expansive economic and structural growth. New urban landscapes create views of the city imposed by specific architectural identities and rigid political structures. Consequently what scenes are revered in the city and what space do they occupy? Highways and roads laden with traffic connect architectural developments in downtown Doha with new office buildings, shopping malls and residential estates in adjacent areas. Therefore the skyline becomes significant in this process locating and orientating all road users. The ‘apparent’ horizon becomes a destination for residents and visitors navigating an evolving infrastructure network. Walking in Doha is a polluted environmental experience, and standing still in dust and exhaust fumes generates social and physical barriers. In the streets of the city the relentless noise of motor vehicles, construction sites and housing that underpin new backdrops in populated areas reveal sensory absences. As one area becomes obsolete another comes into focus. Encouraging provisional sites to emerge as visual pauses, momentary fragments of cohesion punctuating inter-subjective experiences on foot. Nevertheless the cacophony of audio-visual experiences produces ongoing sensory surfaces and impulses, woven between infrastructure in abrasive climatic conditions. Within earshot underexposed moments rise to the surface; punctuating monotonous journeys and auditory sensitisations that condition movement underfoot and encourage new paths in the city.

In the Light of Day[David Kendall Visiting Research Fellow CUCR, Goldsmiths, University of London]

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The Carpenters Estate was built as a council house community in Stratford, East London in the late 1960’s and is situated on the eastern fringe of the London 2012 Olympic Park. It is a self-contained estate that comprises three of the largest tower blocks in the London borough of Newham, along with maisonettes, terraced houses and three green spaces.

Perhaps driven in part by Olympic regeneration, increasing land values and changes in social housing provision, the Carpenters Estate has become a topic of re-development and while there was discussion of regeneration and renewal ten years ago this has more latterly become talk of decanting and demolition. Within the last year, a plan to develop a new University of London campus on the land was signed off by Newham council only to be later scrapped because of funding issues. Walking around the estate, the evidence of this future uncertainty is visible in the boarded up and empty homes, yet inwardly there remains a strong sense of home not least because many of the original residents, some of whom are now in their eighties, still live there.

With the future of the estate unclear, we began a portraiture project in 2013 working in close participation with the estate’s residents. Developing the project has been done slowly and by building trust with the residents which has mainly resulted in us being warmly welcomed. Our approach was to adopt a formal portraiture style which included the interior of the home as an inseparable part of the portrait; the resulting image being a representation of the person as well as their house which has been made a home over many years. The intimacy of the portraits is also in opposition

to the top down viewpoint, much used by planning and development teams, of only seeing the house as a plot on the landscape. After producing the portraits, we recorded a conversation with each of the sitters so that we could learn their views about the estate and this is now a video that acts as a narration for their stories.

Some residents had moved to the estate as tenants from a row of Victorian terraced homes, an original Carpenters Estate that was subsequently knocked down. They recalled the delight of moving into new homes with modern facilities; a bathroom and a downstairs toilet as well as a proper garden space. Others recalled the experiences of living on the estate, having close neighbours who had families and young children of the same age and who shared in community life. In the 1980’s, some residents chose to buy their homes, as Right to Buy tenants, anticipating that with ownership would come greater security of tenure. Others felt that the Right to Buy policy has only led to the fragmentation of the community. During the last twenty years, as more of the owner occupiers left the estate, there has been the rise of the private landlord and what were once family homes have undergone a change in use to become homes of multiple occupation. When social housing residents have passed away, their homes have been boarded up, leaving not only a look of dilapidation but an emptiness that acts

Carpenters Estate - Stratford[Text and photography Anthony Palmer former MA Photography & Urban Cultures Orly Zailer]

as a continual reminder of lost friends and neighbours. Images that frame the estate this way typify the dislike residents feel about the negative portrayal of social housing communities, as it represents a distorted, narrow view of the way these residents have experienced living on the estate. For most residents, the current uncertainty of the estate’s future has created a sense of being in limbo. Some feel powerless to make a move even if they want to and others, not wishing to move away, are unable to move on with even basic things like home improvements, thinking it might be a waste of time and money.

The closeness of the Olympic Park and the implications of Stratford’s regeneration continue to be significant theoretical considerations for this project not least as, from within the estate, it is possible to see where the truncated Carpenters Road remains blocked off at the point that it enters the Park. The road was once the artery that connected many residents of the Carpenters Estate to places of work and criticism of the displacement of this local business community, as was done in 2007 before the construction of the Olympic Park, implies this is consistent with a globalising gentrification that is changing the neighbourhood. If the Carpenters residents are also to have a share in the future of this place, it seems highly relevant to create work like this photography and video project, that complicates the generalising narratives of regeneration and shares viewpoints that are more intimate and personal.

Photoshttp://anthonypalmer.me/projects/carpenters/&http://orly-zailer.com/?portfolio=carpenters-estate

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Curitiba in South Brazil has been known for at least twenty years as a “first world capital-city”. I had heard, read, and talked a lot about the city, before starting fieldwork for my PhD thesis on the city’s informal recyclers (also known as ‘scavengers’, waste-pickers, or catadores). However, I had never been to Brazil before. What follows is an account of my arrival to the research setting, which followed a week in Rio de Janeiro, where I participated in the 2010 UN World Urban Forum and in the counter-event Urban Social Forum.

As I take off from the central airport of Rio de Janeiro, the view is stunning. From the aeroplane window, protected from the city’s unforgiving heat, I can behold Rio’s magnificent geography and bizarre built environment, with bunches of self-built houses, misaligned, protruding shoulder to shoulder from every hill, over the sea, over the lake, over the Guanabara Bay, looking down on the rest of the city, inverting the obvious topographies of spatial social stratification. The setting is illuminated by a bright sunshine tamed by a few cotton clouds, and the view is so sharp that I can almost see the incalculable energy that exhales from the friction of the city.

Less than an hour later, the captain announces that we have started to descend to Curitiba. I peek through the window, with my camera ready to capture the first image of the city. I also have an open notebook on my lap prepared for a written account of my first impressions from above. From the window, all I can see is clouds. The hope of having an aerial glimpse of my research setting evaporates, as we penetrate the white mass of clouds and the windows turn grey. It is as if Curitiba, the city, is corresponding to the adjectives of closed and cold, with which other Brazilians usually associate its residents.

Out by the airport, it is indeed cold and rainy and I reach for my jumper and jacket. A friend of a friend, and her brother-in-law meet me to drive me to her house, where I will be hosted for 7 weeks. My first approach to the city is about to be marked by the story my new friends will tell me on those 40km between S José dos Pinhais and the North of Curitiba.

Here’s the story. One of my host’s neighbours, a girl in her early twenties, was murdered two weeks ago. Through the one-hour drive, accompanied by the sound of the windscreen wipers, as I struggle to imagine the street where I am going to stay, she is filling my imagination with a horrific tale of the girl’s last weeks of deep crack addiction and chaotic life with criminal company, two doors down from us. When the murder happened, on a forest path a few meters away from our street, the English mother of the deceased young girl was in London. She returned, a few days ago, when the body of her daughter had been already identified, subjected to all legal investigations and cremated, thanks to the diligence of my host. Thus life is allowed to go on.

As soon as I put down my bags at my new place, I am taken to another neighbour’s house where a kid’s birthday

Through the Clouds:an unsettling encounter

with the city.[Francisco Calafate-Faria, Research Fellow, CUCR]

party is taking place. I sit down at a table full of wonderful savoury homemade nibbles and cakes, surrounded by 6 or 7 women, who exchange stories of urban crime, whilst the children run around the house. The scene reminds me of Teresa Caldeira’s thoughts on fear of crime: The ‘talk of crime’, performed by communities of neighbours orders the space by imposing symbolic walls, prohibitions, and other geographic regulations. It also fuels and exacerbates urban fear of crime1. The geography of fear is outlined around the street where we are, and in the city centre close to the bus stop at the other end of my commuting routine to be. In my complete inexperience about the area and the city, there appears to be no way to avoid it, no alternative geography in which to navigate.

During the rest of my fieldwork in Curitiba I am often welcomed in the family house of my host’s sister, where she often stays, a few miles away, in a neighbouring borough. Their father had built the house more than ten years ago, too close to a small watercourse where wastewater from houses upstream is discharged. They have been penalised by the fact that the local government changed regulations on minimum distance between the houses and the watercourse, does not treat the sewage, and does not give permission for them to work out a solution themselves. So the market value of the house has dropped to zero, despite having 4 bedrooms, two floors and easily accommodating at least 8 people. This experience shows me a reality that might otherwise have escaped my observation. It is a very intense first revelation of the flip-side of Curitiba’s urban “miracle”2, even amongst middle-class or lower-middle-class families.

My hosts in the first stage of fieldwork repeatedly disprove the idea that Curitibans might be less welcoming or more closed than other Brazilians. Their warmth and generosity

never cease to astound me, especially in the face of their various difficulties. Both their problems and their generous welcome are much more relevant than the influence these impressions may be having on my first thoughts of the city.

At times, the experience feels like an embodied blockage to my initial approaches to street research and incursions into the problematic urban spaces associated with the waste trade and urban poor. At times I feel like other researchers of informal waste collectors in the urban South, who were hesitant to approach people on the streets and decided to keep to institutional settings3. Yet, this early impact with the reality of urban insecurity and the sense that frontiers of safety are by and large symbolic and illusory allows me to develop mechanisms to overcome those limitations.

As a posted ethnographer, who had always lived in the Global North, most of those frontiers were in my own habitus, developed through socialisation in the “abyssal way of thinking”4, which draws lines between Urban North and South. I am convinced that the aim of fieldwork in social sciences – especially in urban settings, is exactly to cross those barriers to a deeper and wider knowledge of other people and other places. Ultimately, fieldwork is also a way to confront, and hopefully overcome, the researcher’s own limitations.

1. Caldeira,T.P.R.(2000).City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo.UniversityOfCaliforniaPress.

2. Moore,S.A.(2007).Alternative Routes To The Sustainable City: Austin, Curitiba, And Frankfurt.LexingtonBooks.Pg.73

3. e.gColetto,D.(2010).The Informal Economy And Employment In Brazil: Latin America, Modernization, And Social Changes.PalgraveMacmillan.

4. SousaSantosB(2010)ParaAlémdoPensamentoAbissal:DasLinhasGeraisaumaEcologiadosSaberesinSantosBdeS.eMenesesM(eds)Epistemologias do Sul Coimbra: Almedina 2010

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“ ...imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another from the political to the psychological; from the examination of a single family to comparative assessment of national budgets of the world... It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two.”

C. WRIGHT MILLS : 1959: THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CLAIRE’S JOURNEY

“I’m sitting with my eyes closed. I can hear Marcus describing how I’m in a room – it’ s a room I know, my parent’s living room. There’s a hole in the floor under a chair. I move the chair and jump down the hole. In order for this journey to work, I must concentrate on my imagination, letting my mind’s eye wander to familiar places. Marcus tells me I’m at a tree. Again I see one I’ve seen before – I’m mining my memory bank for images to create this story. And then he leaves me – I must continue this journey without him – I walk along a mossy bank, next to a stream, I sit in the water and it feels cool – the sun is strong, no need to worry about getting chilly… I meander like this for a while, feeling very relaxed, but it’s not quite like dreaming – then Marcus says I must go back to the tree and he leads me back up through the hole and back into the living room. What follows is a sharing session with my fellow journeyers – we’ve all been sitting in a circle, each reaching into our imaginations for a journey which we try to compare notes on. Marcus leads us through this conversation and is helpful and reassuring. It’s slightly bewildering, like waking up from a massage..”

During the summer of 2013 we embarked on a journey with performance artist Marcus Coates and his team to research and evaluate his new project: The School of the Imagination.

Marcus Coates and Nomad were the 2013 winners of an annual award for a participative art project, commissioned by Create London on behalf of Bank of America. ‘The School of the Imagination’ aimed to draw on Coates’ shamanic techniques, and used the imagination to find new ways of solving problems and answering questions in the material world. As researchers, we were new recruits

to the CUCR, commissioned by Create to evaluate several projects taking place over the summer months.

The CUCR approach to evaluation is – like much of its work – thoughtful, evolving and emphasising a reactivity throughout the process. There is no form filling at the end of a project, rather researchers are implicated from the beginning and work with project organisers to embed the evaluation into the practice. CUCR’s approach comes from a recognition, following Savage et al 2011 1 that research methods have a social life. As such, methods are fully of the world that they are also active in constituting. Taking this proposal seriously allows us to reconsider the ways we go about evaluative research. This is a field which has been heavily criticized historically for its role in instrumentality and governmentality. Rather than being an instrument of governmentality, evaluation can also be can also be a form of criticality and action research. The research we undertake, which is integral to the project ‘delivery’ is shaped by a number social actors contributing to it on an on-going basis, well before the research can be framed as a ‘product’ or as an ‘outcome’.

At our initial meeting, Coates explained that they were drawing on the work of Augusto Boal and his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed,’2 which works along the principles of the audience being allowed to intervene in performance and direct and participate in it. Boal in turn was greatly influenced by Friere’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’3 which emphasises a dialogic learning between teacher and student: the lines of power being horizontal rather than vertical. We were to find that these theories tap directly into the participative nature of Create’s original brief and were manifested throughout the Coate’s project.

Marcus Coates’ School of the Imagination and Sociological Imagination(s)

[Claire Levy: Researcher, CUCR and editor of CUCR Blog. Harriet Smith: PhD Candidate Visual Sociology & freelance researcher CUCR]

The East London theatre group Cardboard Citizens, who work with homeless people, helped to recruit participants. Their approach also draws on Boalian techniques and this had fed into Coates’ early research into the project.

The School of the Imagination consisted of a week of workshop sessions. Participants worked in groups and individually; utilising journeying techniques used by shamans; using subconscious imagining to address external questions and issues. These sessions were facilitated by Marcus and filmed by a crew from production company Nomad. The director of Nomad is Michael Smythe who has worked with Marcus for many years.

The venue for the work was Teesdale Community Centre in Bethnal Green, which is a small hall with a beautiful community garden, surrounded by brick council blocks. The heat of July meant all windows were open in the surrounding flats and sounds echoed through the garden. The journeying vocal call, collectively termed ‘Yoike’ filtered around the garden each day, and sometimes people would hang out of their windows to watch and comment when the group were working in the garden.

The workshops sessions followed a strict time pattern, the importance of the schedule made a potentially destabilizing process easier to cope with, giving the participants parameters for the work and regularity to the rhythm of the week. As well as the regularity of the scheduling, the journeying took on a pattern which offered reassurance and contributed to the sense of authority amongst the participants that emerged later. The structure for the journeys – warm up exercises and precursor activities to the journey itself – was mapped out and stuck on the wall, thus reinforcing the ritual, the intention of the process, the client, and the sense of security within this.

Marcus adapts shamanic practices and ideas into rituals and processes that situate themselves firmly in the now: the urban present of our culture. For example the group made ‘Eye-curtains’ out of sunglasses and Tipp-Ex4; utilizing components of our throw away world that are

around us rather than using traditional materials. Marcus explained that in his view, traditional shamanic tools operate as mystifying objects, and he therefore prefers to use objects relevant to our own culture.

We understood that we needed to become both immersed in the project, and at the same time utilise a methodology to hold our observations together; we therefore saw ourselves not as observer/ experts, but rather as forming a partnership, which was evolutionary and co-operative, allowing us to share back observations and theoretical understandings whilst absorbing what and how events took place.

Part of our integration into the group was to help serve lunch each workshop day, which helped us to find our place, while we also hung around with the group during breaks and joined them when they worked out on the street in Bethnal Green.

We participated in a rehearsal session the previous week, held in part for the film-crew to see the set up and for Marcus to try out some of his techniques. Having experience of shamanic journeying helped us to understand what was going on, and how the participants were feeling. We could relate to what they were going through and comprehend the problems of interpreting the journey messages – reading the meanings both individually and collectively.

We had our research questions, which related to the commissioning body’s concerns. However, the process of participating in the project opened up questions about Frierian practice and how horizontal lines fit into a view of evaluation which involves sharing experiences rather than expertly taking information and judging others. We also reflected upon how shamanic practice can speak to social research and we even wondered whether journeying could become a valid evaluation tool.

Involved in a shamanic journey is the idea of first setting an intention. This is very important, as it is easy to ask the wrong question or not to fully understand what one is asking. Once the group had worked with questions

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from each other, the team endeavoured to introduce external ‘clients’ who had questions or concerns for which they might want an answer. At this stage the group worked with the client to form a clear question: a journey intention, which was then answered through images produced during the imaginary state. There is always more than one answer and these answers are not always conjoined. For a shaman, or a group of shaman, learning how to interpret the journey is skilled and takes experience.

In journeying, getting the intention precise is a skill; in evaluation getting the questions right is also a skill, but one that can shift throughout the process as things become visible : concerns made apparent. Yet, just as the School of the Imagination required a very firm structure (formulated through the film routine, the journey process, and the daily timetable ) in order to evaluate in a participatory way we found we needed to have a clear working structure to enable our observations to be formulated within a meaningful methodological framework. And as researchers we also needed to be able to differentiate between observations as noise and observations as data.

RESEARCH EVALUATORS AS EXPLAINERS?

There were moments when we were struck by our inside/outside position to the project. On the Thursday the group were taken onto the street to do spontaneous ‘mini-journeys’ for passers by. This felt quite exciting as members of the public stopped to ask us what we were doing. But as apparent team members, these questions came to us too. As researchers we found ourselves torn between our participation in the moment (helping the camera crew and finding participants) and being asked directly by passersby what was going on. This had implications for us as well as Marcus and Michael : Should we have stepped up and given an account? Isn’t that what we were there to do after all? But to give account, suddenly on the spot without agreed permission to speak for the group, was not something we felt we had clearance to do. Finding the line then, between participation, ownership, permission, and explanation, in

and outside of sociological practice proved a challenge, perhaps one that shifts on every occasion, or perhaps becomes clearer with experience.

The process had performative qualities that challenge mainstream notions of problem solving, and the dynamics and meaningfulness of community consultancy. This parallels some types of evaluation and could be viewed as playing with critiques of professional community consultation as a performative (PR) production. This type of consultation is sometimes seen as a tick box exercise providing evidence for pre-made ideas decided upon by experts and now it was being turned on its head by a community group answering the questions of professionals. In our own way we were attempting to usurp notions of evaluation as being a tick box ‘add-on’: being performers in the project rather than observers after the event.

The final consultation involved the group visiting Department of Health researchers in City hall: the participants took on the role of experts advising experts. This evidenced a knowledge production practice turned on its head : where experts were put into the role of amateurs, and were given the answers without use of theoretical tools or statistical measurements. The tools now used involved the human imagination, but used in a specifically focussed and participatory collective way.

The work was both funny and serious: people were walking around in Tipp-Ex sunglasses making strange noises. But it also reminded us of the process of clowning where truth is often delivered as humour. It became apparent that people find the idea of this project funny, and yet there are deeply serious issues being addressed. The Department of Health researchers were very interested in the journey information and extended their consultation by over an hour.

Perhaps one of the most important elements to have become apparent is the relationship between self, group, and society. For example, one participant recounted meeting a zebra during one of the journeys, she explained that this was because she tends to see life in very black

The journeying vocal call, collectively termed ‘Yoike’ filtered around the garden each day, and sometimes people would hang out of their windows to watch and comment when the group were working in the garden.

“ “

and white ways, and needs to be more aware of grey areas. However, this was read as both a personal message regarding herself, and also understood in relation to the journey question, which was focused upon the Syrian conflict which at the time was in a stalemate between sides. The group’s individual journeys showed many collectively shared symbols, which suggested an individual and collective imagination working in tandem. We gained an understanding of how subconscious symbols also reflect social ones and within the reach of the project experienced how people came together through this process.

This was a project which succeeded through the coherence of the close-knit group members – who quickly grew to trust each other and indeed us; which we concluded was due in part to experienced and sensitive project management, but also due to the nature of the imaginative journey work. The ability of individual members to ‘attune’ enabled the collectivity of the group sessions to manifest. We aimed as researchers to actively share the experience of the group in order to pick up on the collective ideas, concerns, and symbols. We were able to play with preset notions of evaluation, and pre-thought research questions with their imaginary or expected answers and to just ‘allow what happened’ within a structure of qualitative methodology which seeks to give account with as much accuracy as possible. The project found its strength in the opening up of perceived social hierarchies, listening to all and responding to their experiences. A lesson for us as evaluators and researchers.

Images by Michael Smythe and Claire Levy.

1. CRESCWorkingPaperSeries,Working Paper No. 95,March20112. Freire,P.1996.The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.London.Penguin.3. Boal,A,1979The Theatre of the Oppressed,London,PlutoPress4. Tohelptheshamanicpracticebyexcludingmostvision,leavingjust

enoughforthebodytofinditswayaround.

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Swanscombe Marsh is a peninsula pointing north within a loop of the Thames below Greenhithe. To the south it is bounded by cliffs left after two centuries of chalk quarrying. The flat lands, once marsh grazing and saltings, have been transformed since the beginning of the nineteenth century by the cement and paper industries to the south, by riverside industrial development to the east and by successive waves of landfill including the reclamation of the saltings in the early twentieth century and the dumping of polluting flue ash from the cement works. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link emerges from its river crossing in the centre of the marsh.

Three factors led to the proposal for a project here. First, for several years I had visited the marsh from time to time seeing traces of the past cement industry: a pier, workshop sheds, the floor plates of demolished buildings, stray lengths of railway track, and the several generations of landfill. Vegetation was overgrowing all but one severely contaminated area. In summer 2012 the requirements of an exhibition made my visits more frequent and more purposeful.

A familiar road was barred and I found myself talking to a security man who said this was due to the land now being owned by the cement company, Lafarge. But they and their predecessors had owned it for many years. While we talked a large car full of ‘suits’ came slowly down the track and over the next landfill hillock. Yes, they were Lafarge.

Soon after, the news broke: a theme park based on Paramount block-buster movies was planned. Precise information on the proposal has been scarce, but initial reports indicated a possible 27,000 jobs. The local planning authorities appeared to love it. No surprise in a depressed area. Just one computer-generated image circulated that made it impossible to orientate.

A second factor was a concern about cultural amnesia. For some while before (and since) memory has played a large part in the deliberations of Crossing Lines, the joint forum of CUCR and London Independent Photography, largely playing out in terms of personal biography. But what is at issue in locations such as Swanscombe Marsh is the cultural memory: here the survival of signs that this was once the home of a pioneering cement industry. Such signs as remain are fragmentary and fragile.

At about this time (late 2012) a third factor came into play. Attendance at the 2012 Brighton Photo Biennale debates brought Eugenie Shinkle’s argument that topographic photography can tell little of the ‘abstract processes, economic relationships, and movements of capital that constitute globalisation’. Further, she talked of a strategy of deliberate absences1 but I found this too closely paralleled the ills of globalisation, having too little regard for the specifics of a place. Feeling somewhat wedded to the topographic, I wanted to counter this but found, not too surprisingly, that photography is indeed unable to show directly the digital workings of commercial power. What it can show is the effects on a locality.

With these factors in mind a project was proposed: a number of photographers should work on the marsh over a protracted period, each in their own way according to their own priorities, showing that here was a place sufficiently rich to respond to a variety of concerns and methods. While we could show the present state of things, the operations of capital would have to be implied by a documentary account of the history of the marsh and the proposals for its future. In the event, after a presentation to Crossing Lines, sixteen photographers signed up.

ON SWANSCOMBE MARSH[Peter Luck Crossing Lines]

Often in such places there is a rhetoric of ‘mere wasteland’, a zone full of detritus. A walk on the marsh shows that this is a misapprehension, applicable only to parts of the industrial perimeter. The interior is a varied landscape of low land-fill hills, scraped fill, surviving grazing and surprisingly beautiful tracts, particularly the reed beds and around a small lake. Near the point of the peninsula is the Broadness Moorings, an isolated and deeply scruffy collection of boats and sheds. Random survivals from industry have an enigmatic presence. Such marginal lands become semi-wild places, quiet zones, escape zones.

They have a value of their own which just may be beginning to enter the mainstream.2

Early in 2013, the group determined that it should have some interaction with the local people. So we followed a precedent offered by Mike Seaborne who had exhibited photos of the Isle of Dogs at the Asda store there. The store at Greenhithe, close to the marsh, was willing to give us the small space it could, so a four-panel show went into the cafe for a fortnight in late January 2014.

With the aid of invited selectors, Tony Othen and Krystina Stimakovits, work from eight of the participants was included along with brief illustrated texts on the history of the marsh and the futures proposed since the closing of the cement industry. This included the sole visual image of the theme park so far published. Recently, a scoping application has been made to the two authorities having a part of the site and it is now possible to trace its limits on the ground and see an approximate distribution of elements. The drawing of this was too complex to be shown small in the show but we gave a reference to where people could find it on the web and had a hard copy available to discuss with anyone interested.

Many people passed straight by, but a satisfying number did not. Conversations showed a great variation in knowledge of the marsh from newcomers who had been getting to know it and following local history, to those who had lived locally all their lives and had never entered the marsh.

There was often curiosity (anxiety? scepticism?) about the theme park: did we know if it was going ahead? Some knew the marsh well, loved it and told us more about it… Local knowledge and pride survives.

A second, larger exhibition us now planned for April in the New Academic Building Atrium at Goldsmiths where we will show work from all the participants along with more developed accounts of the history and futures. One photographer, Sabes Sugunasabesan has independently shown a selection of his marsh work. Contributions to history archives are possible. Beyond April, the possibility of a third, local show and various linkages both local and academic are mooted. An article on the project will appear in Urban Design quarterly; articles by me and Sabes have already appeared in fLIP, the magazine of London Independent Photography. Several photographers have decided they will continue documenting the changes on and around the marsh.

The photographers are: Lesley Brew, Chris Burke, Trevor Crone, Keith Ellis, Denis Galvin, Simon Head and Nick Scammell, John Levett, Peter Luck, Alex McIlhiney, Ingrid Newton, Anthony Palmer, Jennifer Roberts, Mike Seaborne, Sabes Sugunasabesan, John Whitfield.

In this story the concerns of a heterogeneous group of photographers encounter the processes of redevelopment at the urban periphery.

1. Shinkle,E.(2012).Visible Economies, Invisible Topographies in Visible Economies,UniversityofBrighton/photoworks

2. Theliteratureisgrowingfast:seeforinstanceMabey,R.(2010,firstpublished1973).The Unofficial Countryside.LittleToller;Farley,P.&Roberts,M.S.(2010).Edgelands.Vintage;Orton,J.&Worpole,K.:The New English Landscape.FieldStation.

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Actual Imaginaries[Michael Rodgers Crossing Lines]

The Actual Imaginaries series grew from an interest in extending the dynamic potential of my relationship with photography. I felt that the print too often signals the end of the photographic process and, even after shooting, it can be more about selection and calibration rather than any direct form of response or interaction. How could an artist maintain a dialogue with photography? How can this dialogue develop its subject?

I chose street imagery as my subject, initially because that was the arena with which I was most familiar. However, I was rarely interested in photographing people before this project, and my focus on figures in the urban environment arose from research around the imagination of the city, how it is experienced, and most importantly how it can be experienced. I sensed a correlation between the ‘finality’ of the photographic print and the ‘given’ nature of the urban fabric. Both are potential sites of agency and overlooked connections. The dynamic relationship I initiated with my photography fed back into my perceptions of the city and its inhabitants. The resulting works serve as models for approaching the city and the photograph together as malleable, contingent structures.

Each Actual Imaginary is presented clipped to a hand-cut board, which is held off the gallery wall to emphasise the immediacy of both image and material to the viewer. Each work is suspended in a manner that reflects the simultaneous weight of its material reality and the weightlessness of its imagination.

Actual Imaginaries was developed during my studies on the MA Photography Course at London College of Communication. The catalogue entry for the project included the following text:

The ongoing series Actual Imaginaries explores urban space and photographic space as parallel sites of the imagination. Michael’s approach combines etching and colouring* techniques with photography in a creative dialogue that extends beyond the surface of the print and into the image. Such careful applications aim to activate the photograph and render forms that are as ‘real’ as the scene depicted. In correspondence, the process opens up relationships between people, objects and architecture as spaces for engagement and imaginative projection. As photography and the urban increasingly embody our image of society, Actual Imaginaries is a reminder that neither the city’s fabric nor the photograph are fixed, and that it is vital to grasp the potential of both spaces present before us.

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Strange: cruel suffering and yet – through the episode of the Photographs – the sensation that the real mourning is beginning.ROLAND BARTHES, MOURNING DIARY, JUNE 15, 1978

[David Jackson: MA Photoraphy & Urban Cultures]

My mother died four years ago in Malta and my father has kept some of her things. One of her most treasured objects was a Singer sewing machine, still perched on a small black desk under a window in the hallway. My mother was always making stuff and every room in the house bears witness to the curtains, tablecloths, bedcovers and lampshades she made–all in her favourite colours, mint and peach. Last summer I visited my father and one morning, out of curiosity, I opened the sewing drawers. Inside were all the tools she used to make these things, just as she left them: thimbles, scissors, sewing boxes, tape measure, hexagonal glasses, and so on. Each specifically gendered object summoned the absence of the person who used them and acted as a powerful emotional and affective trigger to my memory. My mother persists beyond her death as a lingering presence through what is left and it is precisely this recognition of the ability to feel a past human presence through looking at objects that interests me here.

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Nine Urban Biotopes – negotiating the future of urban living (9UB) is an international art project concerned with the research and exchange on urban social sustainability in cities in South Africa and the European Union (Johannesburg, Soweto, Durban, Cape Town, London, Paris, Turin and Berlin). 9UB is a network project combining a series of local, socially engaged art interventions with a framework and web platform that fosters trans-local dialogue.

Within this framework, 9UB brings together urban activists’ initiatives and social institutions addressing urban issues including health and housing, youth and the elderly, migration, mobility and economical subsistence. Invited artists from Africa coming to Europe, and vice versa, will engage with residents, issues and social contexts of each of these ‘biotopes’ through site-specific, artistic interventions.

Integrated reporters to the project document these creative research processes and feed this up into 9UB’s shared website with weekly insights at www.urban-biotopes.net. This provides the link between the actual art interventions, the trans-local dialogue partners and an interested public. From January 2014 to September 2014, the nine art-residencies that together form 9UB will run in three consecutive ‘operation blocks’ of three simultaneously running local research encounters and trans-local ‘trialogues’. The overarching aim of this seemingly complex structure is to identify and learn from locally crafted paths to urban social sustainability by generating, sustaining and passing on a live (alive and real-time)1 dialogue that reaches across geo-cultural, content-related and institutional divides.

With the beginning of 2014, Antje Schiffers started the first trialogue with an apprenticeship project and intimate dialogue with spoken word artist Zipho Hlobo on everyday life in Cape Town. She was joined by Athi-Patra Ruge exploring migration identities with members of Moabit Youth Theatre in Berlin, as well as by Marjetica Potrc and students from Hamburg University of the Arts transforming public spaces together with residents in Soweto.

The second trialogue in early summer comprises Taswald Pillay engaging with a Roma community on the outskirts of Paris (residency host: Quatorze), Armin Linke exploring travel routes and patterns of Durban street traders (host: dala) and Dan Halter coming together with migrant gardeners on Turin’s old Fiat factory plant (host: Istituto Wesen).

The third and last trialogue through into early Autumn includes Terry Kurgan exploring co-housing cultures in residency at ID22 in Berlin, Anthony Schrag collaborating with neighbourhoods in inner-city Johannesburg (host: Drama for Life) and Ra Hlasane sharing his radical pedagogy with young people in Peckham during his residency at South London Gallery.

Reviewing 9UB’s aims and strategies, three questions jump to the fore: What is social urban sustainability in the first place? What does art ‘do’ – or not do – as research practice and as the facilitator for an exchange of knowledge? And how will 9UB’s network structure enable the dialogue and mutual learning that is central to the project?

This is where CUCR comes into the picture. Since the very beginning in 2011 we have been accompanying 9UB in its unfolding network and research activities, encouraging dialogue among partners, evaluating the steps taken and providing academic support to the project. In the following, we would like to outline some first reflections regarding two of the three questions raised above: What does the social, and what does art do in and for urban futures? (The third question, that of dialogue, will be addressed at a conference in Durban later this year).

9UB or the art of urban social sustainability[Dr Alison Rooke: Co-director CUCR | Mathieu Hilgers: Visiting Fellow, CUCR; Associate Professor LAMC Free University of Brussels | Christian Von Wissel: PhD Candidate Visual Sociology]

URBAN SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

A decisive question of our time is whether urbanization is a durable solution or a threat to the perpetuation of our species and, more broadly, of the planet. We are routinely given statistics, through the media, which remind us of the scale of urbanisation on a global scale and the urgency of finding sustainable solutions for the challenges and impact of urbanisation. Cities occupy only 3% of earth’s land surface but host about 50% of the world population. This high density might be a source of advantages. On the other hand, the high concentration of human activities in the urban environment engenders multiple problems. To guarantee that cities become a solution to ecological challenges, the quality of urban life must improve and must at least “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 2

Urban social sustainability is regarded to be “the continuing ability of a city to function as a long-term, viable setting for human interaction, communication and cultural development.” 3 Purposefully, this definition describes a relatively malleable notion of the concept. It would be a mistake (and probably impossible) to impose a single and uni-linear definition as every social configuration has its own specificity and its own tensions.

Beyond the plurality of such definition, it is nevertheless pertinent to distinguish three main interpretations of the notion of social sustainability that constitute complementary aspects. 4 These are: basic social sustainability referring to the provision, accessibility and guarantee of basic needs, social capital, justice and equity; sustainable behaviour concerning the social change and concrete human action needed to reach an environmental sustainability; and cultural sustainability which is related to the importance of diversity, to the awareness of social-cultural characteristics and specificities of each situation where social sustainability is at stake.

From a rigorous scientific point of view the truly “context-dependant concept” 5 of urban social sustainability appears often blurred or too vast. From an activist’s point of view this flexibility can open a large space for diverse and multiple initiatives which concern the common good. The ambition to reach and develop urban social sustainability constitutes indeed a real opportunity for innovative urban futures.

What is social urban sustainability in the first place? What does art ‘do’ – or not do – as research practice and as the facilitator for an exchange of knowledge? And how will 9UB’s network structure enable the dialogue and mutual learning that is central to the project?

“ “

28 29

SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART PRACTICE

The nine artist’s residencies are central to 9UB. All of these artists use what has become known as socially engaged art practice. Since the 1960’s the art world has witnessed the emergence of disparate practices – happenings, interventions, performances, workshops and actions of all kinds – that challenged the traditional notion of ‘art’ by turning it’s matter and sensations into concepts and actions. In the wake of this development, art came to increasingly blur the boundaries between art and life and to direct its focus on political and ecological issues.6 Since then, different theoretical frameworks have tried to grasp, systematize and distinguish the characteristics and potentials of the multiple branches of these expanded notions of art. ‘Dialogical art’, for instance, focuses on the communicative aspect of art, 7 whereas ‘relational art’ focus on the creation of micro-utopias of social interaction. 8 The broader term ‘socially engaged art practice’, for its part, places the process of production at the centre and suggests understanding the result to be a collaborative piece of artistic intervention. 9

The motivation behind socially engaged art practice is, without doubt, also a political one.10 Artists seek to create meaningful relationships with the public by exploring different types of sociability and engaging locally with pressing social and political concerns. ‘Community art’ has claimed to achieve ‘cultural democracy’ while ‘art activism’ has argued to use “aesthetic tropes of play and creativity” to pose political questions.11 When operating within urban constellations, socially engaged art projects frequently also claim to address Lefebvre’s notion of a Right to the City.

Given these claims, socially engaged art practices also entail a series of problematic grounds that have to be carefully assessed from case to case. While art critics disagree whether to evaluate these practices according to aesthetic judgements or on the basis of their ethical concerns, in the social and political sphere, they risk instrumentalising artists as ‘aesthetic social workers’. This casts doubt on art’s autonomy of production and can place both artists and participants in situations for which neither of the two have received the adequate training to enable them to manage possible negative effects (short-term engagement leading to misunderstood social contexts, disappointed expectations, economic and legal disputes concerning funding, image rights and possible future sales of the artwork, hurried opportunist commissions, malevolence of third parties, etc…).

Socially engaged art practices are commonly associated with the political left and with projects that aim to resist deprivation and marginalisation. However, they

are increasingly employed by a variety of agents in the context of urban renewal and change in order to decorate commercial interests in the colours of social sustainability. In many of these cases, popular concepts like ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘change’ are at

danger of being employed discursively without realising the opportunities for critical reflection they offer. 12 At the root of the idea of sustainable development was the idea that the economy should be re-regulated in order to align it with the needs and interests of the biosphere. However, critics of the discourse of sustainability 13 argue that sustainable development is a once radical discourse which has been thoroughly appropriated by neoliberalism. Today discourses of urban sustainability opportunistically and systematically deploy the notion of ‘ecological reason’ but, in a perverse twist, advocate the continuation of the current global economy as the very means of that securing that future. There are similarities here with that other urban buzzword, ‘resilience’, which sustainability is regularly paired. Therefore we need to think carefully about what is achieved in the deployment of the concept of sustainability and socially engaged cultural interventions on a global scale.

“YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY”

9UB allows us to consider the possibilities and limitations of converting the promising yet troublesome ideal of sustainability into a possible and concrete utopia. It provides the rare possibility to put in operation and, at the same time, challenge the contested grounds of socially engaged art practices. While the art residencies take on the local nuances of urban social sustainability: what it might look like, what it entails, on whose terms is an intervention sustainable, the trans-local dialogue allows interrogating both the specific meanings of social sustainability and the site-specific methods of their artistic analysis.

Talking about her art, Marjetica Potrc, working in Soweto within the 9UB framework, describes what could well be a statement for the project’s overall aims, method and subject:

“Working together with residents, artists can create a project… a ‘relational object’… I often get asked: “How do you define your role as an artist?” That’s easy: I’m a mediator… The word ‘sustainability’ has been overused to the point that its meaning is nearly lost. But even so, sustainability is crucial for the survival of our cities, so we need to rediscover what it means... I’m a hands-on person. You have to get your hands dirty. You don’t change much if you just talk. Doing things brings change. This is where the relational object comes in: it is this something that people engage with, that produces social change.” 14

With the first of 9UB’s trialogues in action, the time has come to ‘get dirty’ and talk. CUCR will be right there, on the ground, trans-locally yet also with a critical eye on the possibilities and underlying assumptions of dialogue and ‘learning from’. We hope you will be there, too.

1. cf.Back,L.,andPuwar,N.,eds.(2013)Live Methods.TheSociologicalReviewMonographs.Wiley-Blackwell.

2. UnitedNations(1987).Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. GeneralAssemblyResolution.NewYork.

3. Yiftachel,O.,andHedgcock(1993).“Urban Social Sustainability: The Planning of an Australian City”no.10.pp139–157.

4. cf.Vallance,S.,Perkins,H.andDixon,J.(2011).“WhatIsSocialSustainability?AClarificationofConcepts.”Geoforumno.42.pp342–348.AndGhahramanpouri,andSedaghatnia.“UrbanSocialSustainabilityTrendsinResearchLiterature.”Asian Social Science 9,no.4(2013):185–193.

5. Maloutas,T.(2003).“Promoting Social Sustainability. The Case of Athens.” City 7,no.2.pp167–181.

6. Lippard,LucyR.(1973).Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.UniversityofCaliforniaPress.

7. Kester,GrantH.(2004).Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress.

8. Bourriaud,Nicolas.RelationalAesthetics.Frenchfirst:1997.Dijon:LesPressesduréel,2002.

9. Lacy,S.(1995)Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle,Wash.:BayPress.

10.seee.g.Kwon,M.(2002).One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.CambridgeMass.:MITPress,2002.AndKester,G.(2011)TheOneandtheMany:ContemporaryCollaborativeArtinaGlobalContext.DurhamNC:DukeUniversityPress.

11. Kelly,O.(1984).Community, Art, and the State: Storming the Citadels. London;NewYork:ComediaPublishingGroup,1984.AndBangLarsen,L.(2010)“TheJuryStaysout:Art,ActivismandArt’sNewNormativity.”InConcept Store: Art, Activism and Recuperation, 26–33.3.Bristol:Arnolfini.

12.cf.Deutsche,R.(1992)“ArtandPublicSpace:QuestionsofDemocracy.”SocialTextno.33(January1).Pp.34–53.AndDeutsche,R.(1996).Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Chicago;CambridgeMass.:GrahamFoundationforAdvancedStudiesintheFineArts;MITPress.

13.Reid,J.(2013).“InterrogatingtheNeoliberalBiopoliticsoftheSustainableDevelopment-ResilienceNexus”InternationalPoliticalSociology.AccessedFebruary10,2014.

14.Lepik,Andres,andMarjeticaPotrč.“CitiesinTransition.”InArchitektonika (exhibitionCatalogue),editedbyGabrieleKnapsteinandMatildaFelix,155–163.Berlin:VerlagfürModerneKunst;Nationalgalerie,StaatlicheMuseenzuBerlin,2012.

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Alex Hopkinson has worked as a bus driver in south London for ten years. I visited him early in 2014 to talk about his father Derek’s Christmas lights. The Hopkinson’s family home on the corner of Homestead Way, New Addington is fabled for its electric Technicolor decorations – each December from the eighties the house was lit up like a giant beacon of festivity.

Derek Hopkinson grew up in Hoxton, East London and as a boy worked in the East London markets. Derek picked up the patter and brogue associated with that world. Alex, now in his thirties, explained: “My father was a real showman… Everyone that met him loved ‘im… he was like a magnet… he never turned anyone away.”

In 1997 the London Weekend Tonight TV show ran a festive competition for the best decorated London home. It was the second time they had run the competition and a neighbour nominated the Hopkinsons. They won and when the film crew visited with the good news and when Derek was asked why he did it he told the reporter - “It’s just pleasure, just pleasure”. The prize included a trip to Lapland but here was a small hitch, as Alex explained: “the conditions were it was Mum and Dad and two kids under the age of 16. I was already at college and my brother is six years older than me. So of course my Dad done his charm and rang them up and said ‘Oh we can’t afford to do it can you still let everyone go’ and they said ‘yeah’. That was one of the first times we had been on a plane, ski mobiles, skiing reindeer rides – it was great fun.”

I asked Alex whether he thought there was something unique about working-class men of his Dad’s generation. “There is yeah…” Alex replied. The larger than life local characters that ran Sunday football team and had a love of

life. “Oh yeah, enjoying themselves. It’s all lost now people are too busy now, doing their own stuff now - not caring about no-one else”. The family moved to New Addington in 1984. New Addington is home to 20,000 residents, many of them from working-class families that were allocated a council property here on the edge of London in the sixties and seventies. Seven miles from central Croydon it has always felt a bit remote. Early residents referred to it as ‘Little Siberia’ signaling that sense of cold isolation. John Grindrod documents how building estates like ‘Addo’ were actually part of a noble scheme of post war reconstruction that aimed to offer working people a healthier and better environment to live in.1

After a few years the Hopkinsons started to externally decorate their home at Christmas. Alex Hopkinson explains tells me it was his father Derek’s idea: “My mum’s birthday is the 3rd December. As a single parent in the 1960’s my nan always tried to make sure that mum had as much as the other children and worked every hour to make sure this happened...this included Xmas decorations up by her birthday. Dad just carried this tradition on but in an even bigger way!!”

The Hopkinson’s were not the only family to celebrate Christmas in this way. By the nineties there were numerous homes on the estate decorated in lavish colour,

with glowing snowmen and Father Christmases shining out of the pitch darkness at night. Sukdev Sandhu writes that houses that stick out from timid suburban conformity appear both “heroic and lonely”2. Christmas kitsch in ‘Addo‘ has that kind of exceptional boldness. Driving around this year there are fewer illuminated houses than in previous Decembers. Austerity is biting like the cold North Downs’ wind.

When I left home over thirty years ago almost no-one outside Croydon had heard of New Addington. Tia Sharp’s tragic murder, Emma West’s racist tram rant, the riots of 2011 and the episode of Secret Millionaire featuring computer mogul Bobby Dudani undercover on the estate changed all that.3 To outsiders New Addington became a short hand tag for the work-shy underclass, benefit scroungers and cultureless ‘Chavs’. In November 2013 The Croydon Advertiser published ‘well being scores’ for the borough and the New Addington and Fieldway estates came bottom: the worst places to live in Croydon.4

The estate was a place of improvement for many working people offering them a first real stable home, an escape from slum clearance and post-war austerity. During the seventies home ownership was very low, confined mainly to the oldest part of the estate built in the thirties named after Charles Boot who envisioned Addington as a ‘garden village’. Thatcherism changed this and the level of home ownership during the eighties increased rapidly, as residents took up the ‘right to buy’ their homes. Families like my own and the Hopkinson’s bought their council homes.

The estate is much more socially variegated than outsiders would have it. Home ownership on the estate is 38% in Fieldway known locally as the ‘New Estate’ and 55% for the older ‘red brick houses’ in New Addington ward. This is relative low when compared with 69% for Croydon as a whole.5 The homes decorated extravagantly at Christmas are often – although not exclusively – the red-brick ones. The festive illumination of these homes does not simply reflect their economic status or spending power, rather the Christmas lights are a seasonal gift to the estate as a whole.

Derek Hopkinson died in St Christopher’s hospice, Sydenham in 2004. Alex put up the Christmas lights that year and decided to “leave it at that”. They sold some of the ‘blow mould’ decorations that Derek had imported at considerable expense from the United States. In 2013 Alex wanted to rekindle the tradition in his Dad’s memory to mark the tenth anniversary of his passing.

I asked Alex what it takes to put on a show like this. “It’s tiring but worth it for the people’s faces. We started back in October.” The roof was first thing to tackle with the help of a couple of mates. Alex continued: “When we started doing it people came up to us and said ‘oh we remember when we brought our kids around.”

On Sunday 1st December the Hopkinson’s Christmas lights were ‘turned on’ and it was a truly extraordinary spectacle full of excitement and festive anticipation. A picture of Derek Hopkinson was mounted on the front of the house decorated by 10,000 lights, luminous reindeer, choirboys and of course Father Christmas himself. Four

Fairytale of New Addington[Les Back Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College]

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hundred people assembled in front of the house in expectation, news had spread through word of mouth and Facebook. A local grandmother asked via Facebook if her grandaughter - Ellie - could switch them on. When Ellie flicked the switch at 7 pm the Hopkinson’s treated their neighbours to a firework show launched from their back garden. One of Alex’s friends played Father Christmas and handed out 170 bags of sweets to children over the course of nearly two hours. They served teas and coffees from an urn in front of the house raising over £500 for charity on the night. Kids and parents from all over the estate came to witness the gloaming spectacle on a cold night.

I asked him if people think he is mad to invest so much. “It was something I thought he Derek would have wanted. Dad liked it so much, it was sort of like part of him. Next year it won’t cost me half the amount.” It has cost him £1,500 so far, not an inconsiderable amount for a man supporting a family on a bus driver’s salary. Then there will be the extra £150 on top of their winter electricity bill. “I done it for the local people,” explains Alex. He carries more of his father in him than he realizes.

It has been a tough time I say to Alex. “Yes, Tia Sharp and the riots of 2011 I think it just needed another cause to start to enjoy themselves again. That’s why I put up the ‘Wishing Tree.’” In front of the house is a tree with tags and a Sharpie pen. It is smothered with scribbled messages to lost loved ones and messages to Father Christmas from kids.”

Hard times have hit and unemployment is rising and local house prices are soaring. People cannot any longer afford to buy their council homes. In 2012 Croydon Council received 119 expressions of interest in ‘right to buy’ but the initiative resulted in just two sales.6 Elderly residents – many of whom are widowed - are being forced to remortgage their homes to private companies in order to avoid sliding into poverty. ‘Right to buy’ brought affordable council housing to an end and the risk now for low-income families is a return to the impoverishment of pre-war slums.7

“You can do a class analysis of London with Christmas lights,” writes China Miéville astutely.8 In December class distinction can be discerned through peering through the window of most London homes. In poorer homes “the season is celebrated with chromatic surplus”; while the rich and middle-class “strive to distinguish themselves with White-lit Christmas trees”.9

Driving to New Addington seems to support Miéville thesis. In affluent Beckenham homes are bathed in subtle white light sometimes with a luminous electric stag grazing on the lawn. “Ah good taste, as Picasso may or may not have said, what a dreadful thing,” writes Miéville. I am sure he would approve of New Addington where entire houses are illuminated with multi-coloured electric excess.

I put this to Alex and ask him if there is a relationship between social class and Christmas decorations. He nods knowingly: “I think it’s people who have never had nothin’ who like to give back to people. You always find people

who are poor always give and people that are rich don’t… and that’s the reason they stay rich for.” We laugh as he continues. “When you think about it a lot of the rich people they sort of don’t give to people and that is the reason why they’ve got money.” Is that why they’ve got their classy white lights, I ask? “Exactly” he concludes.

The money raised from the collection box in front of their house will be donated to St Christopher’s Hospice. “Up here obviously a lot of people go there either with cancer or other illness. They were fantastic and allowed my mum to sleep in the next bed during his last few days so that they could be together. The money we raise will be given to them to help enable their work to go on,” says Alex.

At the heart of this story is an ordinary miracle. In contrast to the glitzy consumerism of the supermarkets and shopping centres that profit from Christmas, this is a spectacle of community - a gift given for free in hard times by a family to the estate. You can see it reflected in the faces of the children as they laugh excitedly and come to admire the glowing colours of the Christmas lights. There is no better tribute to Derek’s memory, one of New Addington’s best-loved characters.

As a child Kirsty MacColl lived close to New Addington.10 In her famous collaboration with the Pogues, Fairy Tale of New York – the greatest Christmas song of all time – she sings with Shane MacGowan “And the bells are ringing out. For Christmas Day.” Somehow the Hopkinson’s festive decorations are reminiscent of that stirring refrain. Long may their electrified lights shine chromatically on the corner of Homestead Way at Christmas time.

At the heart of this story is an ordinary miracle. In contrast to the glitzy consumerism of the supermarkets and shopping centres that profit from Christmas, this is a spectacle of community - a gift given for free in hard times by a family to the estate.

“ “

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In the 18th century, the steam engine set loose far-reaching transformations in the relationship between man and nature. The Industrial Revolution changed everything from the way we build to the way we move to the way we think our cities. Yet what started out as a project of liberation from physical labour now binds us to systemic growth. Our hunger for energy has made us reshape the planet and – as we are beginning to see – is putting our own survival at risk in the course of such reworking: “Nature is over,” the Earth is made by man: Welcome to the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. 1

During a seminar in history and theory of architecture, we, a group of architecture students from Munich University of Technology, explored the implications of man’s wholesale reworking right where we live. Power plants, highway canyons and plastic gardens, glasshouses, rivers and derelict train stations all materialise the Anthropocene in the cityscape of Munich. In the buildings and landscapes presented in the following human time, biological time and Earth time converge and the city and its inhabitants become visible as a collective geological force.

A JOURNEY INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE:

“Is Nature over?” While writing this question, I take a look above my desk and my eyes meet the splendid maple tree, peacefully covering my garden. I come back to my computer screen. Is Nature Over? Once entering the wide world of the Anthropocene, once starting philosophical, scientific, architectural… but also political and poetical reflections about the environment and its meaning to us, once letting our mind float in the big bath that is our world, or actively swim through it, from one buoy to another, from one question to another, this concern cannot get out of our heads anymore.

“Is Nature Over?” could be a conclusion as well as an introduction. Will you get an answer? I still don’t know. I could ask: “who am I, what is life?” I could ask: “where are we from, where are we going?” I could ask: “what being is meaning?” or simply the question “why?”

“Is Nature over?” opens up an imaginary travel into the questions of our time, this particular conjunction of Earth and Humankind where, and when, Nature meets Culture to give birth to new inquiries about our identity, as humans, but also as integrated parts of an ‘all’, an ‘all’ we are just starting to take consciousness of. (LC)

A necessary awarenessA journey to Munich’s Architecture of the Anthropocene[Texts & poetry by Diane Chalumeau | Lorène Chiron | Bebhinn Egan | Heba Elkhalifa | Catarina Queirós (architecture students erasmus at TUM) & Christian Von Wissel PhD Candidate in Visual Sociology and teaching assistant at Munich Technological University (TUM) Photos by Isabel Mühlhaus]

1. JohnGrindrodConcretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain(OldStreetPublishing,2013)seepp.432-433,2. SukhdevSandhuNight Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night(Verso&Artangel,2007)p.22.3. SeeChannel4Secret Millionairehttp://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-secret-millionaire/4od#33771034. DataBlog:Where is the best place to live in Croydon,CroydonAdvertiser,

http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/DATA-BLOG-best-place-live-Croydon/story-20164938-detail/story.html5. SeeStrategicPartnershipCroydon Fieldway Ward Profile(StrategicPartnership,2009)http://www.croydonobservatory.org/

docs/877820/877871andStrategicPartnershipCroydon New Addington Ward Profile (StrategicPartnership,2009)http://www.croydonobservatory.org/ docs/877820/877880

6. RhiannonBury‘Righttobuyfallsflat’,Inside Housing,21stSeptember,2012http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/tenancies/right-to-buy-falls-flat/6523826.article

7. SeeJamesMeek‘WherewillweLive’, London Review of Books,9thJanuary,2014.8. ChinaMiévilleLondon’s Overthrow(TheWestbournePress,2012)p.299. Ibid.p.3010.seeLesBack‘FlameImmunetoWind:TheSongsofKirstyMacColl’,City,7(1),2003pp.107-11

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STATE MUSEUM OF EGYPTIAN ART:

I’m attracted by the majestic concrete mass displaying the stratum of its living proof. I go down this contemporary grave; the light abates. I still feel in the now but travel forth down this timeline into the past.

I can feel the bond with the bygone era through the image I see. Every piece of art stands in all its beauty and pride. In this barren space, I almost feel the aridity of the desert and the light, dazzling, is softened and filtered by concrete trees.

I feel overwhelmed by history but the sun shining beside the obelisk reminds me of everyday life. I remember the light catching my eyes, it says: “All art has been contemporary”.

Are the architects the new Pharaohs, masters of construction? As for Egyptians conserving the body was essential for continuing their existence in the after life I do now understand the building and its message: Each architecture is the sediment of its time and every architect a God whose name is engraved in Earth’s epochs with ‘anthropocenic rock’. 2 (DC)

RAILWAY TRACK COVER AT THERESIENHÖHE:

Tired little bird

dandelions near plastic grass

train below breathing

A blackbird lands on a plastic park: a psychedelic pasture where wooden ‘horses” graze amongst sand dunes and astro-turf. It is an ‘anthropocenic’ gesture: manufactured nature – a floating garden unconnected to the ground below.

Children climb the grassy mounds. They play in sand and run through boxes which echo the shapes of the trains below. There is a pine grove to the north. Its trees growing a new ring each year beside the rubber goals, the grainy gravel and heavy concrete, man’s stone.

This grass is not freckled by daisies (who close their petals when the sun goes down). Every stem has been planned, constructed, engineered by man.

Those who arrive here might be too distracted to notice the railway tracks below where passing trains exhale XXX and passengers drink luke-warm tea in stuffy carriages. Beyond the windows, they see weeds and rail tracks—without inclination to the plastic island that floats above. (BE)

“NUCLEAR EGG” RESEARCH REACTOR IN GARCHING:

On March 11, 2011,

an earthquake of nine point zero Richter,

tsunamis of more than 20 meters height and

three simultaneous meltdowns at

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant

made energy infrastructure

stop

being the specialised interest of scientists

and engineers only.

Since Columbus, the meaning of the egg

lies in the difference

between

doing and could have done. (CW)

ARCHITECTURE’S NEW NATURE (SWISS RE BUILDING):

A new kind of architecture is emerging – one that faces the Anthropocene, the new age of man. The outmoded lament for virgin nature, untouched and separate to humankind, has been replaced by a new vision of connectedness between the created and the natural environment. The old sense of separation is becoming blurred. The false dichotomy between the natural and the man-made is being replaced by a hybrid form where each quietly intertwine.

The very idea of nature is a complex one, not without apparent inbuilt contradictions: Arthur Lovejoy notes no fewer than 66 meanings of the words “nature” and “natural.” This makes it very challenging to define these terms in a wholly satisfactory manner.

The common, Holocenic understanding of nature as defined by John Passmore is “that part of our world which has not been made by human beings, but comes into existence and vanishes, changes and remains constant in virtue of itself”. This definition is particularly interesting because of the emphasis it places on the autonomy of nature and its disconnectedness from man. As Sasa Zivkovic says: “Nature is the good, green, happy counterpart to our obscene dangerous grey and destructive society.”

However, in the Anthropocene, humans and cities are not external to ecosystems. Nature, as we know it, is dead. This is, as David Harvey asserts: “There is nothing unnatural about New York City.”3 (BE)

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PERFECT WAVE OF THE “EISBACH” STREAM:

The Eisbach is a tributary of the Isar river flowing through Englischer Garten landscape park. It runs in a manmade channel, which at one point counts with an artificial, one-meter high wave used for surfing.

River and wave are made perfectly. Nothing seems to interrupt their peaceful ‘nature-ness’ except for the passer-bys and fans supporting the surfers with their cheerful excitement.

The wave is for experienced riders only. Competitions have been held here and international surfers have visited Munich just to ride this famous wave. Thus I wonder whether the Eisbach wave is competing with natural waves? Man creates the nature he needs, the way he wants it and wherever he decides to do so. The whole Earth is like a wave made by man and which we are now riding over and over… (HE)

HIGHWAY CANYON TEGERNSEER LANDSTRASSE:

Homerun to destruction,

sedimentation of lines,

this is the way we go:

straight on,

over and over,

from city to city

as the city is “nowhere now/here”.

“May the force be with us”,

May the force

be us. (CW)

1. Crutzen,P.J.(2002).‘GeologyofMankind’.Nature415(6867):23–23.andWalsh,B.(2012).‘NatureIsOver’.Time Magazine,March12.RetrievedApril11,2013(http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2108014,00.html).

2. Dibley,B.(2012).‘“TheShapeofThingstoCome”:SevenThesesontheAnthropoceneandAttachment’.Australian Humanities Review Online(52).RetrievedJanuary14,2013(http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2012/dibley.html).P.1.andZalasiewicz,J.,Williams,M..Steffen,W.,andCrutzen.P.(2010).‘TheNewWorldoftheAnthropocene’.Environmental Science & Technology44(7):2228–31.P.2230.

3. Lovejoy,A.(1935).A History of PrimitivismLondon:Barkers.p.133.andPassmore,J.(1975).Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions,London:GeraldDuckworth&Co.p.32.andHarvey,D.(1982)The Limits to Capital,Oxford:BasilBlackwell.p.373.

RESPONSIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE:

Starting out from what we considered to be the beginning, the Industrial Revolution, we travelled through scale, force, time, size and history of the Anthropocene until reaching its ultimate now. We drew on Boullée’s and Ledoux’s utopian-visionary architecture and revisited Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. More recent examples like social community actions in the form of guerrilla gardening, Cornwall’s Eden Project ecology amusement park, eco-enclaves like Masdar City and open pit coal mines turned into lakes, all demonstrate how we are remodelling planet Earth.

These examples, we didn’t mean to be ‘solutions’. Rather, we considered, that the implication for architects is that they have to be conscious about this new geological epoch. Architects, scientists, engineers, botanists and designers should embrace it with a responsive attitude: because everything is being re-designed now, from details of daily objects to cities, from landscapes to DNA. (CQ)

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These brief snapshots of the Atacama Desert are part of my ongoing PhD project in Visual Sociology. The main goal of my project is to construct an audiovisual map of this territory. Each of the presented sections highlights one of the episodes that will compose my film: I. The Ritual Festivities, II. The Mining Industry, and III. The Native Communities..

Fragments from the Atacama Desert, South America

[Felipe Palma: PhD candidate Visual Sociology]

The ChyoChyo had bitter defeats. He enjoyed light but his darkness followed the same proportion. His anger was as big as his sympathy. Loved and hated with equal intensity. And along this transit arose beauty, like a desperate attempt to hold on to the cliff. Here is laid the ethics: the only necessary challenge is to mediate between the opposites. Or to put it in a more festive way: nothing good comes without some evilness. Which also could be: there is no possible synthesis but rather procession between extremes. And Pachacamac climbs up the hill and throws the four cardinal points to attempt give some order to the world.

The nitrate industry is dying quickly, exhausted; it is no longer able to continue feeding fiscal voracity. All efforts made by the government to extend the old regime are only serving to precipitate the last gasps of the victim.1

Thethreepicturesshownaboveweretakenduringacollectiveethnographydonein2010.Credits:Picture1/PabloIriarte;Picture2/FelipePalma;Picture3/IgnacioLlana.1.Zig-ZagMagazine(1933).Editorial,20thOctober2.CarmeloMiranda(2013).PresidentofAsociacionEspirituAncestralLickanAntai

“As you might have read in the quotes above, that is just a sample of the thought they have over us. Explorers and scientists wrote some of those words, which make us wonder: For what is this science then? To treat us like animals? To oppress us? To despise us? We believe the answer is yes. For years - and even today, we have been their “object of study”, we have been exhibited in zoos, our bones in museums, and we are now exhibited in books and magazines. “The Indians still have no soul” therefore no rights. But we’re not objects, we are not guinea pigs for absurd theories that only serve to fill someone’s ego.” 2

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Untitled (July 3rd): objects found in my mother’s sewing drawers four years after her death

610 x 610mm digital inkjet prints mounted on aluminium, 201As part of this year’s Urban PhotoFest in October, a group of nine photographers and I walked south-eastwards along the Greenway – a raised footpath that covers the Northern Outfall sewer – from Stratford to the Thames. Well, that was the plan. In fact, to get anywhere near the Thames in the three hours we had (officially) it was necessary to turn off the Greenway about two-thirds of the way to its end and follow the Capital Ring path to Beckton Park, London City Airport and the Royal Albert Dock. Two of the group did exactly that, as, after a few hours, the end of the Greenway didn’t seem anywhere in sight, while time was passing and feet were getting tired. One of the group turned back at Plaistow, as she’d left her car at Stratford station in a cripplingly expensive car park, and also wanted to enjoy the pleasure of going back over the walk from the opposite direction, with new insights into what she’d already seen (or missed). Two others decided to catch a bus back to Stratford when their Achilles tendons started to complain. Meanwhile, four of us decided to trudge doggedly on the last couple of miles in search of the eastern end of the Greenway, and what the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts aptly named ‘Edgelands’.

I’ve walked along the Greenway from the Abbey Mills Pumping Station – not far from Stratford High Street (or indeed West Ham tube) – many times, usually past the Olympic site and as far as the Lee Navigation canal, before following the canal to Hackney Wick, or more recently, to enter the Olympic site itself. In that direction, it’s an interesting, surprising and varied walk, with views over East London’s skyline, before dipping into the almost rural tranquillity of the canal. But the walk east from Stratford High Street is different.

The first couple of miles are fascinating, the jewel perhaps being the old Abbey Mills Pumping Station itself. Like several other buildings designed by an engineer – this one by Joseph Bazalgette – it seems to be the creation of a ‘nobody’ trying to rise above the crowd by leaving behind a wonder-of-the-Earth monument – like Simon Rodia’s 30-metre high Watts Towers in Los Angeles, made out of junk, glass, coke bottle tops and chipped pottery; or the Palais idéal of postman, Ferdinand Cheval (le Facteur Cheval) in the Drôme region of France. Bazalgette’s pumping station is more like a Byzantine church than a waterworks, with its bell tower, ornate brickwork and columns. Before the Olympic development of 2012 it was possible to get quite close to the building and even walk around its perimeter along unofficial paths made by kids and dog walkers. But no longer. Spirals of razor wire cap

15-foot high mesh fences around the site, making it look like a nuclear power station, rather than a complex of Victorian hydraulic machinery to pump Londoners’ poo. Indeed, these fences and razor wire have become part of the signature of the Olympic site and its legacy. So much for inclusion.

This part of the Greenway is riddled with tributaries and creeks off the Lea river, like Abbey Creek, which was at low tide as we passed over the bridge. A few wading birds poked around in mud the colour of elephant hide, pocked with supermarket trolleys and rubber tyres. Walking southeast, the footpath offers fine far-off views of the glass and concrete of Canary Wharf and Bankertown. And in the foreground, unusual rooftop views over a disappearing part of East London. A Victorian school, workers’ houses from the time when there were still factories (and work) here. On the right, we looked down over the East London Cemetery, and the Memorial Recreation Ground. A muscle-bound young man did pull-ups from the crossbar of a rugby goalpost to impress his equally fit-looking girlfriend, while the Voice of God bellowed through loudspeakers as an evangelical priest addressed an increasingly fervent congregation in what looked like the sports pavilion.

In search of EdgelandsUrban PhotoFest walk[Peter Coles: Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Urban and Community Research]

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Just after Newham Hospital the two fellow walkers who had decided to take the Capital Ring path peeled off. The Greenway by now had become rather boring, at least close up. It was straight, manicured and featureless, rather like a Dutch tramway. Or at least the features hadn’t changed much for an hour or so, even if the middle ground and foreground still looked interesting. But you needed a telephoto lens to capture anything interesting. Even so, four of us decided to carry on, spurred by an iPhone map that promised a sewage works, gasometers and the Thames, not far away.

Indeed, a big change came as soon as we crossed under Newham Way and picked up the last leg of the Greenway on the other side of a vast traffic interchange. For the first time in three hours we had to wait for a green light to cross a road. The previously monotonous gravelled path took on the character of a narrow country lane, with high brambles on either side. To the right, the surreal Beckton Alps ski slopes. And then, coming towards us at a lick, was a pony and trap with two young men perched on a low-slung bench behind the horse. An instant change of pace. The skyline became more industrial, with new boxlike factories next to the defunct ironmongery of far-off gasworks. Giant hogweed mimicked the skeletal industrial towers.

Finally, we reached the end of the Greenway. But it wasn’t the end I’d anticipated – a theme park of sewage works and gas storage tanks next to the Thames. Instead, the path just petered out, with two main filaments – one going left towards a superstore and the other, right, beside a soft drinks bottling plant. Straight ahead, a dingy litter-strewn track through the scrub under the motorway, that led nowhere.

We backtracked, past a bench festooned with hamburger cartons and coke cans, looking for a way above ground to cross the dual carriageway. As electricity pylons strode overhead we finally came out onto the road. There, in the distance, was the sewage works and a few bits of industrial architecture, but still too far for tired legs to reach now. And no sign of the river. We crossed back and into the undergrowth. A bit further on, a cycle path led off to Beckton housing estate and what promised to be the quick way home, while a disused spiral footpath suggested another way out. We decided to take the long, uncertain route, and not be cheated of the river view at least. But the path led only to an abandoned bridge, flanked with Soviet-style street lighting. It seemed to go nowhere, yet an occasional car careered around a hidden corner, as if we were on a Frankenheimer film set. From this one-sided bridge, we could see a scrap of salt marsh meadow, the Gallions Reach Docklands Light Railway station and glimpses of City Airport running beside the monotonous remnant of the once glorious Royal Albert Docks.

This wasn’t the romantic, derelict industrial scene I’d imagined. But it was, nonetheless an Edgeland: “…where the city’s dirty secrets are laid bare, and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh.”

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“Yes there are boutiques but there are also Starbucks, Boots and Holland and Barrett, phone shops, builders, charity shops, dirt on the pavement. It’s not as hyper-clean and posh and it’s not always sunny, of course.

Plus there are buses, there are older people and mothers/au pairs with children and pushing prams, and there are many more foreigners than the show allows for. Most of what I hear spoken around me is not English.

People with tattoos walking around, skinheads, not just typical Sloanes.

Boarded up shop on the corner of Smith Street and Kings Road.

Net.a.porter.com van. Same day fashion delivery.

Busy road, buses, fire engines and police as well as posh cars, white vans, range rovers, white cabs.

Some very smartly dressed people and many more normal people as well, tourists and workers, a lot of construction workers and builders and delivery people around (and the sandwich shops to cater for them, as well as the posh restaurants).”

Chelsea, and the King’s Road, was my field-site, and these were the notes I took on my very first day. What is remarkable here are two things: one, I was immediately, instinctively reading the space through the images of a media product, the reality TV show Made in Chelsea, which I had previously watched, and comparing it with it, mainly being disappointed with the ‘real’ thing vis a vi the hyper-beautiful, on screen version of Chelsea. Secondly, this realization gave me a profound sense of deja vu: I had been there before, only in a different place.

A Sense of deja vu: from Peckham to the King’s Road.

[Luna Glucksberg: Researcher, CUCR]

My previous field site was Peckham and its council estates. Living and working there meant I was well acquainted with the ways in which essentializing works in ‘quasi’ realistic documentaries and reality TV shows, as well as in fiction. It is all in the cuts, the careful editing out of anything green or pleasant or even human – the landscapes are almost always empty of anyone a part from “scary” youths or (too) young mothers pushing (too many) prams. The cameras linger on dirty staircases and dingy shops, carefully portrayed in the worst possible light. This is how inner-city estates come to symbolize and stand for all that is wrong with society, repositories of the nasty poor, the degenerate, defective and incurable.

As a social scientist, I am only too aware of how those media representations have played a crucial role in the demolition, regeneration and gentrification of this - and I suspect many more - area, shrouding these processes in narratives of recycling and improvement while effectively displacing thousands of poor inner city dwellers. And yet, sitting in a café on a little side street, what I was witnessing in Chelsea was exactly the same sort of the extreme editing and intense glamorizing and essentializing that places like Peckham usually receive, only in reverse. It was obvious that the King’s Road in real life did not look anything like the one shown in MIC, just as real life housing estates don’t look anything like their media representations.

What is happening in the centre of London at the moment is an incredibly intense process of exclusion of all but the most affluent inhabitants, those who can command economic and financial resources way above the average, or even the well paid, Londoner. Areas where media executives, lawyers and doctors feel “excluded” and priced out. We obviously need to think about different terms – from displacement, for example – because in these cases individuals often mourn their area but find themselves with a few million pounds to spend to rehome themselves somewhere else, and this is simply not the same as a council tenant being moved out of the city without any say in it.

However, this process is gathering momentum, and one of its side effects is how it is increasingly hard for councils to hold on to their housing stock in the centre of London, as the trend is for “Section 106” money to be spent to build social housing “elsewhere”. Out of sight, away from the centre, which is simply too valuable to be inhabited by anyone but the very rich. Incidentally, the narrative and rethoric of mixed communities being inherently “good” does not seem to apply in these areas.

We know, from robust literature, that the more people’s lives are spatially segregated, the more they live with people who are only like them, the more likely they are to believe in negative media stereotypes of other social groups because they have no meaningful interactions with them. Cities, and most certainly London, have always been about people from different backgrounds mixing together, against segregation by income and origin. What we are witnessing today is the polar opposite, and this is being fought at many different levels, not just that of housing prices and market forces.

David Graeber 1 argues that the most important battles are fought at the level of imagination, specifically when what is at stake is what value is, and what is valuable, even more than the subsequent fights about the acquisition of said value. If spaces like Chelsea, through media imagery, are being created and reproduced as even more segregated than they already are, the battle to stake a claim for a city that belongs to us all becomes much harder. Just as the estates become “naturally” the receptacles of all our worse fears, Chelsea becomes the natural playground of only the rich and famous.

As the connections between those at the top and those at the bottom become ever more strained, the entitlement of those who own most of the resources – economic but also educational, social and symbolic, of course – becomes naturalized, just as the abomination and essential unworthiness of the dysfunctional poor is. Connecting these two spheres and highlighting their interdependence and their mutually constitutive relations is not easy, of course, but it is essential. And it is all but impossible to do if we don’t look up, as well as down.

1. Graeber,D.(2001).Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. NewYork:PalgraveMacmillan.

LES BACK: DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE

FRANCISCO CALAFATE-FARIA: RESEARCH FELLOW, CUCR

DIANE CHALUMEAU: ARCHITECTURE STUDENT/ERASMUS AT TUM

LORÈNE CHIRON: ARCHITECTURE STUDENT/ERASMUS AT TUM

PETER COLES: VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW IN THE CENTRE FOR URBAN AND COMMUNITY RESEARCH

BEBHINN EGAN: ARCHITECTURE STUDENT/ERASMUS AT TUM

HEBA ELKHALIFA: ARCHITECTURE STUDENT/ERASMUS AT TUM

LUNA GLUCKSBERG: RESEARCHER, CUCR

DR YASMIN GUNARATNAM: SENIOR LECTURER IN SOCIOLOGY

KATA HALASZ: PHD CANDIDATE VISUAL SOCIOLOGY

MATHIEU HILGERS: VISITING FELLOW, CUCR; ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR LAMC FREE UNIVERSITY OF BRUSSELS

JOON IAN WONG: JOURNALIST AND GRADUATE OF MA INTERACTIVE MEDIA: CRITICAL THEORY & PRACTICE

DAVID JACKSON: MA PHOTOGRAPHY & URBAN CULTURES

DAVID KENDALL: VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW, CUCR, GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

CLAIRE LEVY: RESEARCHER, CUCR & EDITOR OF CUCR BLOG.

PETER LUCK: CROSSING LINES

EMILY NICHOLLS: PHD CANDIDATE IN VISUAL SOCIOLOGY

FELIPE PALMA: PHD CANDIDATE VISUAL SOCIOLOGY

ANTHONY PALMER: FORMER MA PHOTOGRAPHY & URBAN CULTURES

CATARINA QUEIRÓS: ARCHITECTURE STUDENT/ERASMUS AT TUM

DR ALEX RHYS-TAYLOR: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CUCR

MICHAEL RODGERS: CROSSING LINES

DR ALISON ROOKE: CO-DIRECTOR CUCR

HARRIET SMITH: PHD CANDIDATE VISUAL SOCIOLOGY & FREELANCE RESEARCHER CUCR

CHRISTIAN VON WISSEL: PHD CANDIDATE VISUAL SOCIOLOGY & TEACHING ASSISTANT AT MUNICH TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY’ (TUM)

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Contributors

Photo:PeterColes

A selection of recent publications from the CUCR

To see expanded articles and images from this Streetsigns edition and other articles by CUCR members go to the CUCR blog : https://cucrblog.wordpress.com

ISSN 2043-0124

Bates, C. (eds) (2014). Video Methods: Social Science Research in Motion. Routledge, New York.

Back, L. & Sinha, S. (2013). You’ve Got A Text from UKBA: Technologies of Control and Connection, Discover Society, 2 , 12th October http://www.discoversociety.org/stop-press-youve-got-a-text-from-ukba-technologies-of-control-and-connection-2/

Back, L. (2014). “Police and Thieves as a Political Proverb: Junior Murvin’s Gift”, Theory, Culture and Society, 17th January http://theoryculturesociety.org/les-back-on-junior-murvin/

Benson, M. (2014, Online First) ‘Trajectories of middle-class belonging: the dynamics of place attachment and classed identities’, UrbanStudies.

Borda-González, A, Kendall, D, Nokhasteh, A, Traoré, M. (2014). 'Paris 19: Mobility, Memory and Migration' in Bloom, T., Nair, P. Migration across Boundaries: Why Migration Research Needs an Interdisciplinary Approach. London: Ashgate.

Halasz, K. (eds) (2014). The Future of Art is Urban. Catalogue. London.

Jackson, E. and Benson, M. (2014). ‘Neither ‘Deepest, Darkest Peckham’, nor ‘Run of the Mill’ East Dulwich: the middle class and their ‘others’ in an inner London neighbourhood’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38, no. 4, pp 1195–1210,

Kendall, D. (2014). 'Always Let the Road Decide' in Architecture, Photography and the Contemporary Past, Göteborg, Sweden: Ernst Cassirer-sällskapet.

Knowles, C. (2014). 'Dancing with bulldozers: Migrant life on Beijing's periphery' In City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action vol 18, no. 1, pp. 52-68.

Knowles, C. (2014). Flip-flop. A Journey through Globalisation's Backroads. London: Pluto Press.

Rhys-Taylor, A. (2014). “Intersemiotic Fruit: Mangoes, Multiculture and the City.” In Jones, H. and Jackson, E. (eds) Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location, Routledge.

Rhys-Taylor, A. (2014). “Urban Sensations: A Retrospective of Multisensory Drift.” In Howes, D. (eds) A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000. London, New York: Bloomsbury.

Sassatelli, M. (2014). ‘The Biennalization of the art world: the culture of cultural events’, in L. Hanquinet, L. and Savage, M. (eds) Handbook of The Sociology of Art and Culture, Routledge.

Sassatelli, M. (2014). ‘European festivals and the creation of a cultural public sphere’ in Maughan, C. and Bianchini, F. (eds) Festivals in Focus. Collected works in honour of Dragan Klaic, Central European University Press.