SHU_Architecture
Embeddedness, Relations + Collaborations
Researching (in) the city
The AHRA PhD Symposium 2021, hosted by Sheffield Hallam University School of Architecture, seeks to ask how architectural research might be embedded within different organisations, places and networks in multiple ways, thus beginning to redefine the role of such research and its relationship to the city. While embedded and ethnographic methods have become more widespread, we see potential in further exploring the particular approaches, relations, networks and collaborations that emerge from socio-spatial studies within or between urban organisations, agencies, municipalities and groups. The symposium is delivered through collaboration with 4 organisations from Sheffield and Leeds with whom we have a relation, with each ‘hosting’ one of the 4 themes of the symposium. Each strand will host a workshops for participants on day 2 in which a digital zine will be collectively produced. The zines will be collated after the event, along with student papers, and released as a publication through AHRA channels.
AHRA ZINE
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The AHRA PhD Symposium 2021, was hosted by Sheffield Hallam University School of Architecture, and sought to ask how architectural research might be embedded within different organisations, places and networks in multiple ways, thus beginning to redefine the role of such research and its relationship to the city. While embedded and ethnographic methods have become more widespread, we see potential in further exploring the particular approaches, relations, networks and collaborations that emerge from socio-spatial studies within or between urban organisations, agencies, municipalities and groups.
The symposium was delivered through collaboration with four community and cultural organisations from Sheffield and Leeds with whom we have a relation, with each ‘hosting’ one of the themes of the symposium. Each host helped us to develop the framings for the strands to ensure their relevance to their context and for those with whom they work. The first day of the symposium was an opportunity to hear from each of our delegates presenting their papers, and to support discussion. Day two focused on the co-production of this zine, as a way to draw our ideas, themes and concerns that overlapped, or tensions or questions that emerged. What follows is a gathering of these conversations and questions, along with important references and responses to the discussion. The zine publication offered space to explore the contributions in depth, and to develop ideas in a collaborative and mutually supportive manner. This signals our feminist and pluralist approach to research and teaching, valuing knowledges from inside and outside the academy, and recognising the asymmetries inherent in knowledge production, and the need for claims to be situated and contestable. This conference offered a fantastic opportunity to invite an incredible set of delegates together with staff and students from Sheffield Hallam, and community partners and friends. Our ambition over the next few years is to expand our emerging embedded PhD programme, partnering with cultural organisations, and collectives that are carrying out activist and arts led research and practice.
Our school is a pioneer in the field of environmental architecture and technology, with a deep ethical base and societal purpose. Our teaching and research is informed by the great challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. We are an inclusive and diverse community producing some of the most forward-thinking architectural work in the UK today. Our M.Arch programme is structured around three core ideas, which inform the approach to design, technology and history and theory elements of the course. These are: Design for Many Worlds, The Praxis of Architecture and Ecologies of Architecture and the City. From first year undergraduate, through postgraduate to PhD, we aim to work at the frontier of architectural thinking and practice, with a supportive and vocational approach to education. We want to end by thanking those who joined us for their rich and stimulating contributions, we do hope that you keep in touch, with us and with one another. We also hope you enjoy the fragments of the event, as we have collectively documented them in the following pages, including extracts from the engaging and thought-provoking keynotes from Professor Suzanne Hall and Professor Tatjana Schneider. Julia Udall, Sheffield Hallam University
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The AHRA PhD Symposium 2021 “Researching (in) the City: Embeddedness, Relations, and Collaborations” hosted by the School of Architecture at Sheffield Hallam University was really exemplary and in many ways exceptional, and it demonstrated the clear identity, ethos, and approach of the school. The quality of the papers was very good, and on subject. The sessions and strands were very coherent, well curated, and open enough for interpretation and sometimes even dreaming. Their set up with two co- chairs made for a good discussion, and overall, the two days were very conversational. The organisers managed to make the Zoom conference format more than just a presentation of work but a secure and open environment for the exchange of ideas. This is what AHRA aims to achieve for all PhD students in their symposium. The two keynotes by Tatjana Schneider and Suzanne M Hall were both really excellent. They engaged the audience and left ample time for long discussions with the participants. In Rob J Cotterell from Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA) the symposium also seemed to have a third keynote. In our struggles for a future that has a future, Tatjana Schneider was taking us through critical spatial practice in face of the climate emergency, thinking with Arturo Escobar and designs and politics for the pluriverse. Maybe the biggest compliment for out fantastic keynote by Suzanne M Hall was by Rob J Cotterell. He commented on her talk: “This is politics that people on the ground can understand.” He wanted the people on the street to see their power and to organise. The overall structure of the symposium, with the collective Zine making workshops on the Miro online whiteboards, each led by a representative of the Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association
(SADACCA), Foodhall, East Street Arts, and Regather on the second day, was fabulous. They offered a space to connect and deeply engage with the community partner organisations, to reconnect with and to debrief the content of all the conference papers from the first day, and further exchange of ideas, reflections, and practices. The making of the Zines in each workshop offered a great forum for collaboration, and a concrete target and output of the conference. The conference seemed to have a good, very engaged, and participating audience; from the keynotes to the paper sessions, and to the workshops, and it seemed that different people engaged with different parts of the conference. We are sure that everyone would have made real connections on the day and that they took something away from all these encounters as well. We just wanted to take the opportunity and thank the organiser, Sam Vardy, Julia Udall, Cristina Cerulli, Jonathan Orlek, and Goran Vodicka for all their work and extra efforts in organising the AHRA PhD Symposium 2021 in the very difficult current circumstances, which surely will have put lots of pressure on their workloads. The symposium was a very memorable event for AHRA, and hopefully for the participants as well. We look forward to seeing the collaborations grow and flourish, and to be transformative. The next AHRA PhD Symposium 2022 will be organised by Kate Jordan and Maja Jović at the University of Westminster. And we very much hope to welcome you again next year.
Tilo Amhoff Chair of AHRA
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Invited Speakers Dr Suzanne Hall (LSE) Prof. Tatjana Schneider (TU Braunschweig)
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Dr Suzanne Hall is an interdisciplinary urban scholar, based at the London School of Economics, where she is an Associate Professor in Sociology, and Director of the Cities Programme in the Department of Sociology. Her work explores the asymmetries of global migration and urban marginalisation and the spatial formations of precarious livelihoods and citizenship. In 2021 she has published ‘The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and Marginal Citizenship in Britain’ with University of Minnesota Press. This powerful book, which documents a six-year investigation, examines the brutal contradictions of sovereignty and capitalism in the formation of street livelihoods in the urban margins. She discusses the combined impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, austerity governance, punitive immigration laws and the Brexit Referendum, and processes of state-sanctioned regeneration. What follows is an excerpt from her keynote, which she gave as part of the AHRA PhD Symposium at Sheffield Hallam School of Architecture this year. Over the past 10 years, I've been researching in different collaborations that explore life and livelihoods on streets across the UK. We focused on places that are under-resourced and over- policed, where jobs are hard to come by where the property market is pushing up rentals, and the regeneration plans don't see the street in its own terms as part of the renewal process. We've worked across streets in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London and Manchester. And we've been compelled really by how global migration overlaps with the urban peripheries, and what kinds of diverse economies emerge in these multi scalar crossings. The last 10 years, I think, for all of us, but particularly for those who live on the peripheries understand that it's been a tumultuous decade, marked by the intersection of human residualization and rip racialization that has played out in the everyday life of the streets. Part of our exploration over this time, is to understand what it means to make street life and livelihood in meaningful ways. This extends how to shape our collaborations to recognize these meanings, while pushing against the everyday violence of displacement and dispossession. Today, I'm going to try and bring these questions together by thinking about how language is core to the struggle. And I want to begin with collaboration. Because of course, there's no better way to begin. But also because this AHRA symposium was crafted around bringing in the collaborative work of SADACCA, East Street Arts, Regather and Foodhall. I have been browsing these websites to see what words you will use to articulate making work together. Your words are full of commitment and energy; words like voice, anchor, influence, train, insight, secure, harmonized, support, plan.
But there are also other words there too that hint at the messy emotional and experimental nature of collaboration. Words like redress, review, mistakes, postpone, shift, risk, and emergency. This hints at collaboration working both outside of and inside of the violence of our past and presence. Reflecting on the past 10 years of street research, I'd like to unpack three core practices of collaboration. The first is making work together in order to wind in different orientations, different sensations, disciplines and geographies. We might call this resonance, or the varied vibrations that come from being in concert with people objects, surfaces, sounds, and so on. resonance in academic speak is about interdisciplinary practice, but extends much more generously to what Catherine McKittrick evokes as
Reflecting on the past 10 years of street research, I'd like to unpack three core practices of collaboration. The first is making work together in order to wind in different orientations, different sensations, disciplines and geographies. We might call this resonance, or the varied vibrations that come from being in concert with people objects, surfaces, sounds, and so on. resonance in academic speak is about interdisciplinary practice, but extends much more generously to what Catherine McKittrick evokes as interdisciplinary worlds. And she's just made a new book about this called dear science that looks like a real beauty I recommend it. In street speak, resonance is about grounded awareness and different ways of listening, talking, moving, seeing and making. The second is about contestation and how we assemble the resonance, how we wind in the frequencies and the variations together to challenge injustice and to move against the grain. Contestation is about the day to day routines, textures, and structures of assemblage, but also about acute moments of action. Collective contestations can be sustained in various forms, as your collaborative work shows. And it can include practices of song performance, growing produce in careful ways and even drawing. I'm going to talk quite a lot about ways of making drawing as contestation today.The third is about translation, and how we interpret what we learn in our processes of working together for a wider range of audiences. Translation is about the kinds of precision, precision, but also guesswork required to know an audience and about the choices we make to target what we have to say, and how we speak in any given context. Translation is also about imprecision and about how we carry a fuller range of meanings, subtleties and inferences across space. We could think of translating as collaborating strategically, so that we might be better heard. But this of course, assumes that there is a space to be heard. And it also assumes that those in power hierarchies are willing to listen. So in moving to language, here, I'm thinking about collaborations in our street research and our own muddling through practices of resonance contestation and translation in trying to intersect To the fluid meaning makings on the street into the more brittle processes of planned regeneration. I'm going to take you through the trials and tribulations of our research practices, and how we explored different vocabularies and languages to try and recognize and translate the street. Dr Suzanne Hall (LSE)
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Photographer: Sebastian Dorbrietz I am going to take an exploratory stroll through this immense field that the symposium is addressing by outlining and demarcating four pillars: Practices and Care, Spaces and Memory, Ecologies and Constellations, Economy and Dreaming. Each pillar in its own way speaks to me, where using the word desire means to seek an understanding of what the real world is about, what it is like, what it is made of and whom it is made by. Importantly, each pillar is also proposing different readings of, and engagements with the challenges ‘we’ in inverted commas as humans and non-humans face. And the ways in which other types of knowledge is situated and embedded in the title of this symposium, can provide alternative takes on such challenges. Be that a crisis of care, climate emergency, or the crisis of disciplines, much of what we are discussing here is about the overcoming of existing dualisms,
of binary notions of what the world is about, and if not erasing, then certainly questioning existing and extremely violent power hierarchies. My stroll, at times is carefullytiptoeing and circling around issues, whilst also stomping across different countries and locations. Therefore,being less careful at times than others take me through different fields and question the notions inherent in this wish to transgress boundaries, to overcome binary assumptions that we live in but also to bridge these kinds of obstacles. I always find it interesting to think about whether this field requires a name, if not at all. My hesitance towards titles places you in certain categories and boxes that otherwise you would not choose to be part of. Categories demarcate territory and produce lines that in themselves bring into being uncertainties, where sometimes very rigid lines are often open for interpretation. When we describe our own practices, we might talk about critical spatial practice, or critical design studies. There is a term in urban practice in Germany where we use the word or banner ‘praxis’ that is increasingly becoming popular. Sometimes it is ecological this or that, where words, names and titles attempt in one way or another to bring order, to those working through alternative methodologies. However, I want to leave those words for now and argue with gesture, that it might be more interesting to look at the things that those manifold descriptions attempt to frame about our world and that they also have things in common. The deep desire to challenge hegemonies is important, but to question existing territorialisation’s, to contest existing narrow sets of reference that taken together might eventually guide us towards something different. With this you could argue what is that different? What is that something ‘different’ that we want to get to? Following the writer and educator Escobar, I would argue that the intensification of the climate qu To expand on this, Cristina mentioned that I am embarking on a new research project with Jeremy Till, very broadly speaking, the spatial practice in the face of the climate emergency. The project will focus on an expanded set of practices and disciplines that are engaged in spatial production that value a holistic approach and global perspective. In the context of the immense intensification of the climate emergency itself, the climate protests see children, and young adults fighting for their rights to a future on this planet and expand our knowledge of the discourse and the built environment. My own practice is rooted in technocratic regimes or technological responses to this emergency. This means a discussion about non solar panels on the roof, rammed earth walls, retention systems for rainwater and air tightness, and monitoring devices for energy use are in discussion. These ideas have been put forward to save the mess that we as humans have manoeuvred ourselves into. However, technical fixes deflect the issues at hand and deflect from the fact that our environments are much more complex expressions of a wide range of factors that position space within much broader dynamics of the political, cultural and social, they require a different mode of understanding.
The question for me as a researcher is not necessarily one about architectural research, or how this might be embedded or used to learn from and recognize different methods of organisation but understanding places and networks. The fundamental question is why do this now? Why work in situated and embedded ways? Why embed yourself in organisations, places and networks. The fundamental question is why do this now? Why work in situated and embedded ways? Why embed yourself in organisations, places and networks? Why work and research in ways that are interested in the messiness and hairiness of the world that surrounds us? Why leave ivory towers? Some of these questions are rhetorical, but I think I that’s the point, why do we make our hands dirty? Why is it important to maybe seek ways of doing that are also never really valued by ‘proper scientific discourse’, and always accused of being subjective. And why is there opposition and difficulty in explaining and justifying your position. These PhD statements that have been put forward in this symposium question why you do research in certain ways, how you place yourself in organisations. There is an immense need to constantly justify what you do, and it has value as well, but there is always this ‘also’, there is a standard way of doing and then there's other ways, and you must go against this and constantly to work in that field. This leads me to, why intentionally seek multiple conversations that are around this, why not explore pluriversality as well, and the messiness. Why look for other ways of understanding other perspectives? Why look at the world the eyes of dust particles, why look at the world from the eyes of a fox, or the stream of a river, why change perspective and why not bring other species into this discussion around types and forms of labour where they have not been considered irrelevant in our society.
I want to bring back climate emergency into this discussion, when I talk about the climate emergency, I want it to be understood as this great combination of crises that have already alluded to a long-established issue of inequality, and violence and consequences of the mechanisations of new left liberal capitalism that are being exposed more than ever by this emergency. They have been produced by and through a complex tangle of ideologies and power that place value in those epistemologies of the North. So, the technocratic, the seemingly objective, the universal, the neutral, and at the same time, belittling, the other, the emotions, affections, feelings, the everyday things. Therefore, I came back to this as something critical and fundamental, I think it cannot be talked enough about and needs to be further nurtured, cared for and supported as well as it points to and makes visible those connections and interdependencies of nature on one side and us on the other that is inherently rooted in what Escobar calls design disaster; the disregard of nature in inverted commas, through violent and exploitative, extractive practices of capitalism that are, of course, not external to us, we participate in it.
We are all entangled in it in one way or another. I want to use Mariana cokes work here, she is the curator of the Danish pavilion this year in Venice and in her work, she says we need to develop new languages, new structures and new mindsets to be able to listen to what is out there, which is not just about understanding that counterpart, but about finding ways, means, and methods to talk about coexistence and interdependence to create futures that have a future. Escobar uses the term fundamental design principle to design ways to do things that have a future. I think the work produced in this symposium speaks to these examples, I for sure have spent much of my professional life collecting such examples, investigating and writing about them, talking about them and integrating them in one way or another in my work. There are many people around the globe, who do similar things. And it's important to tell those stories again and revisit them. As a guiding principle, this also leads to environments that are less barbaric to quote, and less exploitative, less violent. And in my own field architecture, the widening of perspectives in recent years. This comes down to a growing body of research in areas ranging from critical care to environmental health humanities, to critical spatial practice, and postcolonial studies that gives me hope that those bigger forces who worked so hard on the planetary devastation might be on the brink of collapse. On the other hand, I am also critical about those experiments and practices and do not deny the power of such practices, the impact of research and activism in this area has had with regards to creating those other perspectives, landscapes of emancipatory futures and possibility. We should idolise those forces that encourage more caring, more common, good oriented, coexistent focused world which celebrates a whole range of projects from community gardens to neighbourhood initiatives, artist driven regeneration projects, housing developments, social and cultural work that has been going on. This links me back to the important point of; we are not quite at the finish line, especially through the lens of those more recent social movements that have built around Fridays for future or extinction rebellion many which have considerable limitations. On top of this, their work has been hampered and seriously threatened by, the pandemic. But the point I want to make here is that many of those experiments that we could name here today collectively, often also do not manage to escape the logics, they want to counter. Instead, they often reinforce established ways of doing and we see that many practices, especially those rooted in the epistemologies of the North have only managed to develop forms of Commons and commoning on a very insular scale. This is not a critique of those practices; it is a critique of the system that we operate in and remain at just that insula. They stick band aids on those motor engine sized track marks that sat violent forms of production have been carving into our landscapes globally. This is not to say that we as researchers also are powerless or important or we and they are naive, or that they've built, they fail to build networks and other such connections that play an increasingly
important part in the existence. Yet, I also think that there's a need to think bigger, and be much more precise, and clear about the politics or such practice where it is much more vigorous politicization, and connection across countries and different hierarchical networks as well. However, it is also important to connect those links and as Escobar quotes to go hand in hand together with those practices and those others who are protecting wellbeing whilst fighting patriarchy that is at the root of all forms of subordination, including ratio, colonial and imperial domination. There are a couple of things that I want to put out there in a quite a tentacular way with no closure, what I have been trying to convey in this talk is that there is too little attention paid to why things are done in certain ways. We are at a point where we acknowledge certain ways of doing but now, we need to have this global perspective on top and question why. We talk about embeddedness, situatedness, liveliness, and connections and interdependence in ways that sometimes suggests that they are ends in themselves. But those methods and tools to engage differently in and with this world, are much more important than this, they cannot just be a means to an end. We need them urgently in order to address those pressing challenges and counter those extractivist all-encompassing practices, with other practices and with futures, as I said before, that have a future. This is sensitive territory since research methods too often also replicate and reproduce extractivist principles from elsewhere and tend to reduce complexity when attempting to fit this complexity into the straitjackets of academia. We all question this; what academia does with that kind of embedded and situated research that we do, and that it must be words very often and nothing else counts. I think this is something that we also must work towards to challenge what is acceptable in that context. The final point is really a plea, more than anything else, it's a plea to you, to us all, to whatever you do wherever you are to fight these kinds of reductionisms that are being put onto us to fight this kind of feigned subjectivity of false innocence and to politicise as Donna Haraway puts it, stay with trouble, and challenge those assumptions that are being put forward. That's me. Thank you very much. Prof. Tatjana Schneider (TU Braunschweig)
Practices/ Care with SADACCA https://www.sadacca.co.uk/ To care is to recognise our interdependence and precarity in relation to one another. What are the (public) spaces of care within our cities, landscapes and streets? How can we recognise them and support such practices to flourish across difference and what role might collaborative research have in this? What does it mean both personally and institutionally, to open ourselves to others, or to establish practices and ethics of care? What knowledges and subjectivities are required? Sheffield and District African and Caribbean Association has a long history in the city of Sheffield, established in the 1950s, by first generation African and Caribbean members of the local community, as an important social space. Its current programme includes elder care, a library with the experiences, contributions and journeys of people of African descent, work around mental health, and programmes to support young entrepreneurs establish themselves.
Abstract The capital city of Northern Ireland (N.I.), Belfast, is fractured with a network of walls, fences, and barricades that divide traditionally Protestant/Unionist/Loyalists from Catholic/ Republican/Nationalist communities. They were mostly constructed between the late-1960s and early-1990s, during a period of conflict known as ‘the Troubles’. Since 1995, the walls have been rebranded with the official euphemism ‘peace walls’, and the groups they divide renamed as ‘interface communities’. Seen as a barrier to economic, cultural and social prosperity, the government in N.I. set out a goal to remove all interfaces by the year 2023 through a policy document entitled Together: Building a United Community (2013), as an extension of commitments drawn out in the Good Friday Agreement (the 1998 accord that largely brought an end to the conflict). However, due a plethora of factors, such as N.I.’s devolved government, a lack of funding towards the advocacy groups needed to bring these divergent communities together, among other opaque issues, this goal is increasingly unattainable. This paper takes three interface communities in Belfast as a case study to illustrate how local interventions are operating in parallel to the T:BUC policy framework in more poetic and relational ways. I use feminist philosophy to demonstrate that such interventions by local communities and grassroots organisations are demonstrable of more multiple enactments of living with difference. Leaning heavily on the work of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Peg Rawes, I argue that the state- led, goal- driven methodology at times serves to reinforce uncertainty, which can perpetuate a segregationist culture. I engage which such affirmative readings to produce a more fluid, discursive construction of intersubjective relations between and across the interface, hoping to add to a body of research that exists at the nexus of post- conflict studies and histories of architecture, offering up poetic examples of transformative spatial practice, thus demonstrating that peace should be approached as ‘always transforming’.
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AHRA_MMcL_Intro.mov
Maria McLintock
Abstract AHRA_PhdConference2021_Martina_DiPrisco.mp4 Vimeo
The threshold spaces as mediation and narration of diversity. The structure of the city and the quality of urban space are elements that influence human behaviour. They contribute to create living environments that should have as prerogative the welfare of people, in their diversity. So how does the city deal with who has a different sensibility so that society is able to accept it? My Phd research focuses on care spaces, in the relationship between clinical and social phenomena that develops in forms and spaces architecturally defined. I studied and compared residential and therapy facilities for people with cognitive disabilities and mental disorders, once hosted together in the same institution. The collaboration with Senshome Project1, which studies interior architecture for autistic people, allowed me to deepen the topic of autism in the different forms in which care and design can be interrelated in the shaping of urban objects and spaces.
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The first studies revealed the significant role of threshold and transition spaces between inside and outside, city and home, city and care places. As places of encounter between therapy and society, these are also places of narration of what activists for the rights of autistic people call neurodiversity. These places become fundamental as area for physical and social adaptation for people who live an atypical sensory experience of the environment. The research aims to verify how spaces can be designed for the needs of people with an atypical sensitivity but also as a form of empathic openness between neurotypical and neurodiverse. Sociologist Damian Milton defines the problem of double empathy, arguing that autistic and non- autistic people lack understanding of each other’s perceptions. Although a problem of reciprocity, the imbalance of power allows some to consider themselves normal, while others are categorized a- normal based on a social deficit. For this reason, the construction of "sensitive" urban environments becomes fundamental: the role of designers is to re- conceptualize disability in social rather than exclusively medical terms, to make an important change from inclusion to reciprocity. 1 Conducted at the University of Trieste and funded by European Community "I make this drawing for my Daddy’s birthday. He asked me for a drawing of a beautiful city. So I made a beautiful city." Felix, Imaginary City Map, age 11.
Jill Mullin, Drawing Autism, 2009
Martina Di Prisco
References S. Ahrentzen, K. Steele, At Home With Autism:Designing for the Spectrum, Bristol 2015 C. Bates, R. Imrie, K. Kullman(eds.), Care and Design:Bodies, Buildings, Cities, Oxford 2016, pp. 1-15. B. Belek, Autism, in F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch(eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2019, pp.1-21. A. Capuano, La città come cura e la cura della città. HealthScape: nodi di salubrità, attrattori urbani, architetture per la cura, Macerata 2020, pp. 65-83. D. Milton, On the ontological status of autism:the double empathy problem, «Disability & Society»,a.6,n.27, 2012, pp.883-887. O. Solomon, Sense and the senses:Anthropology and the study of Autism,«Annual Review of Anthropology»,n. 39,2010,pp.241–259.
Abstract Hala Ghanem AHA 2021 YouTube
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The Collective Role of Actors in Promoting Social Cohesion via Public Outdoor Spaces in Amman This paper focuses on the multiplicity of actors who produce, authorize, educate, activate, advocate, fund, and use public spaces for socio- cultural integration in the context of Amman, Jordan. With its long history of hosting refugees, and to mitigate the exacerbated tensions between host and refugee communities, the city is witnessing the emergence of actors utilizing public spaces to promote social cohesiveness. Together, they introduce a new public space narrative that realizes the spatial potentials of care, via an array of fragmented socio- spatial endeavors in the city. The paper raises questions first about how the collaborative nature of this research expands civically, linking theory with education, decision- making processes with related policies, and socio- cultural needs with practice. Second, about the role and power of the researcher as a mediator with multiple positionalities, disclosing a constellation of voices. Through defining target actors and various entry points to researcher- actor relationships, the research adopted a tailored methodological inquiry for each actor, before mapping situated inquiries to find interrelations and draw conclusions of a network. Methodological tactics included were interviewing authoritative personnel, volunteering tasks with activists, researcher residency in a practice firm, consultation opportunity with an NGO, and ethnographic excursions with refugees.
Hala Ghanem Hala H. Ghanem
In this paper, I question the extent in which a researcher can initiate a city- wide discussion informed by creating alliances, nudging underlying power hierarchies, amplifying the voice of the ordinary, and creating unprecedented venues for knowledge exchange in a context that lacks such practices. By doing so, I will reflect on the processes of interweaving research between different actors and forms of agencies: to rather situate the researcher as a contributor to an ever- growing eco- system, and the PhD research as a commitment to the process itself rather than an outcome.
Abstract Honoure Black PhD Symposium_AHRA 2021 Vimeo
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NIIMAAMAA The Forks KC Adams, Jaime Isaac & Val Vint, 2018 The Forks, or Niizhoziibean, Winnipeg, MB polished painted steel, copper, and core ten metal Photograph by The Forks Media
Honoure Black She/Her/Hers
Investigating Storied Memories in Space and Place As Told Through Public Art in Winnipeg Manitoba Known for its vibrant Indigenist arts, culture, activism and politics, Winnipeg is home to over one- hundred thousand Indigenous and Métis peoples and has the second largest urban Indigenous population on Turtle Island. [1] Contemporarily, through creative acts of resurgence, Indigenous and Métis artists have begun (re)placemaking, (re)claiming and (re)mapping the urban landscape with site- specific public art. This has been in part, the result of the 2015 Canadian Government Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and it’s Ninety- Four Calls to Action to redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation. Since the release of the TRC, arts and funding organizations such as the Winnipeg Arts Council (WAC) and the Winnipeg Foundation have begun to combat racism and initiate reconciliation through a rapid installment of contemporary public works. In my research I ask: How do Indigenous and Métis artists design public art that speaks not only to their community, but also to all non- Indigenous peoples while maintaining a connection to their worldviews, land and sacred knowledges? I believe that through memory, relationalism and storywork[2] as applied design considerations deeper connections can be made between the public, artwork and landscape/ urban space. I am currently a PhD Design and Planning student in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in Canada. I consider my work transdisciplinary, rooted in intersectional feminist theory and working to see with two eyes[3]as a settler colonizer, white female who writes about Indigenous, Métis and settler colonial landscapes and public art. My research abductive, and critically reflexive as I use intuition to shift and transfer though and between required theories and purposes when appropriate.[4] Methodologies I currently employ are Western ethnography and Indigenous notions of storywork and land knowledge. I have begun to examine works of public art as case studies to examine their connections to land and memories of space and place. Where I would like to unpack my work further is in the realm of settler colonialism and settler colonial theory. As I do not want to be appropriative in my methodologies, I feel remaining critical and cognisant of my settler origins is an important act in remaining anti- racist. Therefore, I would like to dialogue about settler colonialism if possible, at the symposium as well as my other areas of interest mentioned in this abstract. [1] Owen Toews, Stolen City, Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg. (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2018), 16 [2] Storywork described by Jo- Ann Archibald is: Special connections to the land— to “Mother Earth”— help in strengthening our cultural identities. It is important to recognize the spiritual power of particular places and healing nature (physical and emotional) of the environment. I also learned to appreciate how stories engage us as listeners...I call this pedagogy storywork, because the engagement of story, storyteller and listener created a synergy for making meaning through the story and making one work to obtain meaning and understanding. [3] Two- Eyed Seeing by saying it refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing ... and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all. Institute for Integral Science and Health “Two Eye Seeing”, Cape Breton University, Accessed November 2020, http://www.integrativescience.ca/Principles/TwoEyedSeeing/ [4] Linda Groat and David Wang, Architectural Research Methods, Second Edition, (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013),
PhD Symposium AHRA 2021_Lara Anna Scharf Vimeo
Abstract CO- PRODUCING KNOWLEDGE: Mapping Trajectories of Spatial Practice
Lara Anna Scharf
In the current crises- riddled times, marked by, in addition to ongoing conflicts, neoliberal capitalist discourses, fear of the “other”, and the expanding ecological crisis, contemporary cities become the main site of reproduction of social inequality. Situated within the ever- changing field of socially engaged spatial practice, the project explores the relationship between such contexts of socio- spatial inequality, the role of the urban practitioner, and the transformation of spatial practice. In parallel, the project seeks to explore how its methodological approach can reflect its values, inquiring how the knowledge, methodologies, and practices of spatial agents can be collected and dissem inated while acknowledging the agency of the research, the researched, and the researcher. This is framed towards a methodology of co- production of knowledge, a conscious and critical approach on research as a production of situated knowledge and a continuous reflection of present, past, and future trajectories. The project is carried out as a case study analysis, combining knowledge collected through secondary research and a series of reflective interviews. The explored case studies are formed as trifolds of contexts, practitioners, and practices and include: Nicosia - Socrates Stratis - AA&U For Architecture, Art & Urbanism; Johannesburg - Jhono Bennett - 1to1 Agency for Engagement; Sheffield - Mark Parsons - Studio Polpo; and Paris - Doina Petrescu - Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée. The project’s outcomes culminate to a series of mappings that critically reframe the relational trajectories and highlight personal positionalities, and moments of shift. This approach offers a reflective and interpretative perspective, placing the involved practitioners in the forefront of the research and simultaneously reflecting their values within it. This project’s importance lies in the junction of the collected knowledge and the methodological approach of co- production, unveiling an introspective view of the selected practitioners’ trajectories and re framing how research can be approached otherwise. This research is based on the master’s thesis project “Co- Producing Knowledge: Mapping Trajectories of Spatial Practice”, as part of the MA in Urban Design in the University of Sheffield, completed in September of 2020 and awarded the John MM Jenkinson Award for Best Thesis. The topic has beeen reframed towards a PhD study commencing in October 2021.
Abstract
lucasdrogan_intro.mov https://vimeo.co Vimeo m/529533699
Diana Lucas-Drogan
Performative Critical Mapping From the perspective of critical cartography in the context of architectural spatial research, the phd contribution focuses on being on- site and asks questions about the discrepancy of "on- site" and "off- site" qualitative data collection in architectural studio context. From my own doctoral research at GTAS TU Brunswick, with Prof. Dr. Tatjana Schneider, the research scans the practice of critical mapping as a performative intervention in the field and its forms and process of representation as a „map“ (set- up). The performative angle is splitted for the symposium into the methods of producing mapping set- ups and tools of critical architectural pedagogy. SET- UPS: This performativ and producing angle focuses on where the maps are performed (in the context of architecture, activism, art, ethnography with and without audience and listeners). The focus challenges how the process of mapping (here based on qualitative data collection in ethnographic and artistic manners) also changes with the spaces and context for which it is produced (set- ups) or want to be shown. Consequently, the map does not end with the product of the map, but becomes an actor via materializing and the presents of raising questions and making them visible. The call for action is part of the spatial production of critical mapping and includes the presents of the body (voice, body parts, movements), thoughts, behavior and reactions.CRITICAL RECORDING PEDAGOGY: As the second layer of the research, the process of critical recording focusing on research ethics and methods of care- taking critical recording practices in architectural education. How is criticality and care- taking involved in the format of methods, group dynamics and language within the mapping construction? The reflexive positioning challenges the choice of the medium and scratches on the drawing ground and thus can address forms of sound collage, installation, evidence, sound walks and mapping performances.
Abstract Introduction Bruna Montuori YouTube
Bruna Montuori
Learning from within: relational practices in urban research through the case of Redes da Maré, Rio de Janeiro My PhD research focuses on the narratives of rights produced by the local organisation Redes da Maré, which is based in Maré, a set of 16 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Maré emerged in the 1940s and carries a legacy of social exclusion reflected on the lack of basic needs and the criminalization of its residents, whose majority are black subjects. Maré is under a dispute of narratives, which, on one hand, symbolises it as a place of resistance and emancipation (Silva 2015, Redes da Maré 2019a). On the other, it is portrayed through stereotypes of precariousness and violence (Redes da Maré 2019b, Brum 2018). As such, the production of narratives is part of the organisation’s aim to create a collective consciousness of rights –to basic needs, to public security, to education, to culture– historically precluded for its population. From September 2019 to January 2020 I conducted my fieldwork in the everyday life of Redes da Maré using ethnography and participatory research methods aiming to map narratives of rights and join activities as a designer and observer. In this contribution I will narrate and discuss my personal experience as a participatory researcher in three parts: (1) ‘listening’, noting my positionality in that territory; (2) ‘inhabiting the territory”, discussing the limits of the research; and (3) ‘working together’, reflecting upon trust, relationships and moments of knowledge exchange. In light of theories from feminist ethics (hooks 1994, Huisman 2008, Swartz 2011, Montes and Pombo 2019), ethics of care (Tronto 1993, 2015, Puig de la Bella Casa 2017) and participatory research (Freire 2014, Kindon et al. 2007, Cooke and Kothari 2001) I seek to depict each of these moments through fieldwork annotations and experiences. The aim is to critically reflect on research methods in spaces of inequality and make a case for relational practices in urban research.
Abstract Stu Hansom, introduction Vimeo
What I meant was Planoaglossia, but this may be more interesting: An investigation of how misunderstanding is a site of significant creative productivity. This research has begun as an investigation of potentials which occur through misconstruals and misinterpretations between different individuals in conversation, developing from the establishment of an experimental, non-transactional artist residency project. One proposed outcome of this research project is the definition of planaoglossia as a term referencing generative and productive sites of engagment with emergent contingencies and is intended to signpost wanderings which began in talking at crossed- purposes or misinterpretations. The project engages with weak theory and the productive and generative potentials it opens up. In particular this project follows Kathleen Stewart’s interest in “the moment itself when an assemblage of discontinuous yet mapped elements throws itself together into something”. This research also connects with Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges through Haraway’s assertion that “[t]he moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision”, connecting to Pablo Helguera’s statement that “conversation is the center of sociality, of collective understanding, and organization”.
Stu Hansom He/Him
Bahktin, M. (1941), ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Holquist, M. (Ed),(1981)The Dialogic Imagination Clarke, H. (2017) ‘Dancing in the Archive’, in Clarke, H. & Kivland, S.The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, London, MA Biblioteque. Easterling, K. (2020) ‘Medium Design’, London, Verso Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges’ inFeminist Studies, Vol 14, No.3, (Autumn 1988) Helguera, P (2011),Education For Socially Engaged Art, New York, Jorge Pinto Books Reed, P. (2018), ‘Distributed Situatedness’ in Blamey, D. & Haylock, B. (Eds),Distributed, London, Open Editions Sennet, R (2018),Building and Dwelling, Ethics for the City, London, Penguin Stewart, K (2008), ‘Weak Theory in an Unfinished World’ inJournal of Folklore Research, Vol 45, No. 1, Grand Theory (Jan-Apr 20)
PRACTICES/ CARE To care is to recognise our interdependence and precarity in relation to one another. What are the (public) spaces of care within our cities, landscapes and streets? How can we recognise them and support such practices to flourish across difference and what role might collaborative research have in this? What does it mean both personally and institutionally, to open ourselves to others, or to establish practices and ethics of care? What knowledges and subjectivities are required? Sheffield and District African and Caribbean Association has a long history in the city of Sheffield, established in the 1950s, by first generation African and Caribbean members of the local community, as an important social space. Its current programme includes elder care, a library with the experiences, contributions and journeys of people of African descent, work around mental health, and programmes to support young entrepreneurs establish themselves. Our discussions throughout the conference explored practices and care in relation to embedded research in the city. Delegates presented work from sites of conflict, or difference, explored questions of subjugation, mutuality, and struggle and how knowledge could be built in these contexts and situations. Our conversation explored themes of care and institutions (particularly in relation to PhD research from the university), intersectionality and care (and what capacities and respons-abilities this required) , autonomy and interdependence (particularly in relation to who the state cared for, and how certain communities were policed, or supported), conviviality as a way to produce spaces of learning across difference, and the relationship between care and protest, or conflict. jmu.
The Researcher ?
community
?
community organisations
University The Researcher
? Local Authorities
Negotiating Power With(in) Care
?
What does Care mean? silent conversation but it can be a reciprocal process, over time,
From <https://www.google.com/search? q=care+definition&rlz=1C1CHBF_en- GBGB915GB915&oq=care+definition&am not about measuring what is given, but also 1. 1. 2. the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or willing to accept- sometimes to receive is also something. part of the caring...? For example to be hosted, 3. "the care of the elderly" 4. Similar: to be taught, to be supported... (quiet reply) 5. safe keeping 6. supervision 7. custody 8. charge 9. protection 10. keeping creating safe environements, means the need of a lot of skills and the ability looking ahead 11. keep 12. control 13. management "Care as a concrete work of maintenance, with ethical and affective implications, and as a 14. ministration vital politics of interdependent worlds ... three dimensions of care - labour/work [I take 15. guidance 16. superintendence care of], affect/affections [I care for, I worry], ethics/politics [I care about]..." reproductive labour 17. tutelage 18. aegis "The 'ethics' in an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of moral obligations, but rather 19. responsibility about thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to 20. guardianship 21. wardship be posed. That is, it makes of ethics a hands-on, ongoing process of recreation of 'as well 22. trusteeship as possible' relations." 23. trust sometimes not visible but very essential 24. provision of care Puig de la Bellacasa 2017 25. looking after 26. parenting 27. mothering 28. fathering reproductive work as creating and using spaces - SADACCA opened up 29. concern 30. consideration youth spaces 31. attention never rest, to care is a full time job - where are the boundaries - when do you not care anymore? 32. attentiveness 33. thought 34. regard 35. mind 36. notice 37. heed making reproductive labour visible 38. solicitude 39. interest 40. caringness 41. sympathy 42. respect
Is care only altruistic? Offering care does not mean to get something out of it (Nick)
training us to be more sensitive, cautious
Opposite: 1. neglect making reproductive labour visible 2. disregard 3. 2. 4. serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk. 5. "he planned his departure with great care" 6. Similar: 7. caution 8. carefulness 9. wariness 10. awareness Care involves "everything that we do" to maintain, continue and repair 'our world' so that 11. heedfulness we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our 12. heed environment, "all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web." 13. attention 14. attentiveness 15. alertness Tronto 1993 in Puig de la Bellacasa 2017 16. watchfulness 17. vigilance 18. circumspection 19. prudence 20. guardedness 21. observance 22. discretion 23. judiciousness 24. forethought 25. thought 26. regard 27. mindfulness 28. conscientiousness 29. painstakingness 30. pains 31. effort 32. meticulousness 33. punctiliousness 34. fastidiousness 35. accuracy 36. precision 37. Opposite: 38. carelessness verb 1. 1. 2. feel concern or interest; attach importance to something. 3. "they don't care about human life" 4. Similar: 5. be concerned 6. worry (oneself) 7. trouble oneself 8. bother 9. mind 10. concern oneself with 11. be interested in 12. interest oneself in 13. trouble oneself with 14. have regard for 15. burden oneself with 16. give a damn 17. give a hoot 18. give a rap 19. give a hang 20. give a tinker's curse/damn 21. give a monkey's 22. lose sleep over 23. get worked up 24. 2. 25. look after and provide for the needs of. 26. "he has numerous animals to care for" 27. Similar: 28. look after 29. take care of 30. tend 31. attend to 32. mind 33. minister to
What does care make possible as an ethical practice within research?
"Circles of care” / "care chains" - who is within, who is outside?
the complexities, of needing autonomy in relation to oppressive structures, whilst recognising your interdependencies
SADACCA
Lack of tr ust but also agency?
'If it is about us, it must be owned by us.' Rob Cotterrell
Self- Care giving a voice what you care for and keep on asking questions
Trust- Handing over the use of the music studio to a group of young people to use and hopefully transform relies on trust.
how can the local authorities realise what we care for?
"an anchor organisation"
pretending to give space provide a carrying and care space for young people (like youth club, recording studio)
you helped us to fail - made the electricity by there own and out of own finance - so who depends on who?
FRIENDSHIPS - finding other ways of doing with people you trust
FRIENDSHIPS, MUTUALITY AND RESPECT
1 2
Finding other ways of doing things with people you
Providing and creating a
Trust
Care Space for young people e.g youth clubs
and recording studios.
3
To have an
4
To
Equitable with other organisations and institutions.
Recognise
"Not wanting to be let down"
recognise the effects of our interference in communities
be willing to give something up
" [...] insurgent spaces, can provide us with a future imaginary I believe that insurgent spaces of public art offer alternative speciality is in the public realm public art is a visual counter to the dominant power spaces stories in history." Black
Institution(al) care role of researcher VS the role of the university
SEEKING WIN-WIN SITUATIONS
Academic Researcher ie: the decisions and prioritisation of topics/matter within the urgency of 'caring' academics to fix in their role/lifetime as a means of escaping complicity versus the urgency of those being affected and their prioritisation
Equal Access Multiple modes of outcomes Equal Partnerships
urgency: urgency to act now (to fix) versus urgency to not be part of the problem versus urgency of the people being affected
Community Organisations
How to establish a continuity of care with (potentially) short- term academic projects?
Is it possible to fund a PhD that supports a longer- term community or organisational goal?
Who gets to decide what needs to be researched?
tensions between collaborative, embedded research and the idea of a unique and original contribution (to knowledge)
AUTONOMY, INTERDEPENDANCE AND SELF-ORGANISATION
"THE WIRING WAS HORRIFIC"
critical listening how do we form constituencies across difference? white people less able to consider defunding of the police because they have less experience of the social solidarities/ self organised spaces
at the same time I'd think this (the experience of solidarity) needs to be looked at intersectionally? gender, class...
Joni Dean - reflective solidarities require "depth of attention to the uniqueness of the other" ... "remaining attuned to the myriad differences"
"WE HAD TO DEAL WITH IT OURSELVES"
What does a person practice when they move into the space of providing a self organised, autonomous interdepepend ant entity:
"It was thousands of hours to sort out"
why-ing: why are we doing this? (Tatjanas key note)
"we are not subjects that calculate, [...] because prior to any calculation, we are already constituted through ties that bind..."
Care, Subversion, Protest
Researcher as a hostcreating a the sharing of being- sharing beyond property relations, and practicing incompleteness- Stephano Harney
WARM
SPACE
"...when speaking of public space in relation to refugee communities the discourse is dominated by integration- rather than governance, access...or its potential for care" Ghanem, Hala
FOOD DRINK & MUSIC
Uncertainty directly affected my research providing me an insight that my methodology could not be based on my prescribed model, instead, it should be informed by the lived experiences and the rhythms of that territory. Montuori
" [...] my work is about conversation, thinking about the ability of people to join that, say if you are deaf, or hearing impaired, visually impaired, the language...I did do some radio work, many years ago [...], I do recognize that that's that's sort of intimacy you get." Hansom
The Decorators Commensality The Table holds a significant role as a Trojan Horse to the start of many of the Decorators projects. The table is a symbol of a place where: 1. We nourish ourselves, 2. Where we come together 3. Celebrate 4. Share experiences 5. Create new understandings.
what role do our memories (and what shapes/ defines those memories) have in what we care about/ what we work on?
Autonomy, Interdependence and Self Organisation "Infrastructures for some, threaten others[...] It has been commonplace to build dams and to provide electricity for the South, but the North [with larger indigenous populations] is strongly mistreated" Black
"Circles of are” / "care hains" - who within, who s outside?
ndependence aim for design? n we design for erdependence, relations, onnections?
recognising the value of not getting too comfortable, and the need to challenge power...:
"[...]remaining belligerent, remaining feisty" yet, also, asking:
"who can afford protest? Who can afford being belligerent?"
INTERSECTIONALITY, not just as identity, but as situation (in space, between many places, multiple) Translation is about the kinds of precision; precision but also guesswork required to know an audience and about the choices we make to target what we have to say, and how we speak in any given context. Translation is also about imprecision and about how we carry a fuller range of meanings, subtleties and inferences across space.
'the interviewing process was this idea of creating common concerns , situations and opening up debates, and in that way reframing possibilities and providing alternatives to to problems that exist.' Scharf
'The Hangout' experience in Amman
Shared Resources - PRACTICES & CARE
"For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices".
https://www.practisingethics.org/
Spaces / Memory with East Street Arts www.eaststreetarts.org.uk We are interested in the kinds of space that embedded research might reveal and/or produce; to consider the spatialises at different scales of such approaches. How are spaces produced (Lefebvre, Massey) through research practices, and what are their characteristics? East Street Arts in Leeds is an arts organisation that works at a national level to find and transform different kinds of spaces for artists, including studios, galleries, live/work spaces, print workshops and community spaces. ESA are also interested in questions of archives, and their role in the operation of the organisation and the production of space that it enacts. Therefore we append Space with Memory to encourage contributions that might speak to the relation of these terms through analysis of embedded research in the city.
anousheh kehar(s/h)_intro Vimeo
Anousheh Kehar (s/h)
Abstract While fire functions in many life- giving capacities specific to the terrain, destructive fire events referred to as wildfires have come to the foreground in Turtle Island (what is known as North America). In centering the wildfire across occupied lands of the Fernandeño Tataviam and Gabrieleño Tongva (present- day Southern California), for instance, relations of the political- economic organization of land as property and commodity emerge. The relations grow from seeing wildfires as a living spatial archive and deepen in confronting the violence of settler- colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism, to name just a few, which continue to transform the environment in the present and future. Closely looking at the complex entanglements of the wildfire calls for rethinking research and specifically architectural research, given my positioning within architecture. Through the space of the wildfire, ecologies and humans can be understood in a way that transcends problematic constructs such as natural, urban, and even the term wildfire itself. In its settler- colonial construction, wild operates as natural, lush, and pristine and as an unknowable destructive force when the wildfire wreaks havoc on settler properties encroaching the wildlands. If the wildfire is centered, the entanglements of space challenge the closed definitions of land and landscape which make it impossible to think of a different present for bodies and ecologies alike. Thinking with the relations of wildfires in the built environment develops from the human dimension and along with seeing the ways in which ecosystems are made vulnerable, there is the potential for mapping different processes of the exclusion of bodies. Here it is especially helpful to reimagine the implications of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s proposal of “...making abolition geography....” There are possibilities to recuperate the resilience lived out in spaces marked by the continued violence of land policies tangled with dispossession, subjugation, extraction – of resources and labor – and incarceration.
Abstract AHRA PhD Symposium Introduction YouTube
Spatial Infrastructures and Distributed Agencies: East Street Arts as Urban Activator
Catalina Ionita she/her
My research into the practice of art organisations seeks to investigate the benefits of cross contamination between the fields of art and architecture through innovative methods of investigation. My research motivation comes from a personal interest in the position of the architect- researcher in the contemporary practice of art and how it might lead to a diverse, creative mode of thinking. In my presentation, I will seek to expand on the artist - architect- researcher dialogue and its consequences in practice. In pursuing this research, one of my objectives is to investigate East Street Arts (ESA), a contemporary arts organisation established in Leeds in 1993 by Karen Watson and Jon Wakeman. ESA was created as a support artist infrastructure with an aim to provide opportunities, space, services, and facilities’ access for visual artists. Operating on an international level, ESA is focused on exploring how the organisation can change and influence decision- makers to improve communities and environments. My aim is to delve into East Street Arts’ archive as an organisational memory, (which may be partial/incomplete), analyse how the organisation has developed over time, understand how its strategies and tactics align throughout their projects, as well as investigate their long- term goals and decision- making process. Attempting to understand the contribution of an architect- researcher to East Street Arts’ artistic practice, it is my aim to embed myself within the organisation and its archive, and through considered analysis and active involvement, seek to enable and support a dialogue across disciplines. Using my personal architectural experience, I will be analysing the agency an architect- researcher might have within an arts organisation and how that might intersect with East Street Arts’ practice. This is a concept explored by other contemporary practices such as Turner Prize winner Assemble, who work across the fields of art, design, and architecture to develop projects focused on urban activation. Karen Watson, East Street Arts’ Artistic Director, talks about a mutual benefit of having artists and architects working together. She believes this relationship can be envisioned as a tool for activating an emerging space for collaboration and learning that would not otherwise exist.
Abstract AHRA vid 03 21 YouTube
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Noor Ragaban
‘Researching Saudi Housing: Gaining access to hidden domestic interiors’ In terms of housing and everyday life in Saudi Arabia, existing literature has tended to privilege and amplifying the contexts and experiences of a limited segment of a nation - whilst muting others. The ‘permeance' and ‘reliability' of literature renders it dominant, whilst more local and nuanced narratives and realities are increasingly ignored and vulnerable. This study will seek to challenge this approach and the implications this has for research. Focusing on the city of Jeddah, it will first ask why certain housing types have been overlooked, and what these houses can tell us about life in Jeddah. It will go on to discuss the methodological approaches deployed to listen to these unheard voices and overlooked dwellings. As a Jeddawi immersed in the community, I was able to gain access to the 'hidden interiors' of many houses of family and friends, however, visiting these houses for the purpose of research proved to be different, and concerns over privacy were often raised. For that, along with Covid-19 restrictions, cultural- sensitive and home- respecting methods have been developed to enable a broader range of participants to share their dwellings’ lived- in experiences. The methods include online semi- structured interviews, observations and auto- photography. The physically non- invading home explorative methods are employed to enable a broader range of inhabitants to voice their lived- in experience, which will allow a user- based documentation and analysis of dwellings, as opposed to sole professional theoretical interpretations. Such documentation is to bridge the need and perspective gap between users and professionals, in hope to achieve user- friendly homes.
Abstract AHRA PhD Symposium 2021 - Yufei Li Introduction YouTube
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Yufei Li
Atlas in Motion: Visualising Manchuria through Moving Images Moving images offer us opportunities to sense a place of other space and times. The mimetic nature of film gives it the ability to create a place in cinematic geographies that is bonded to the particular time and spatial coordinates and tinted with historical and social contexts. As a practical example of such virtual recreation, a specific group of films were produced during the period of the 1930s-40s, all serving a place- making purpose: to portray a territory named Manchuria. Manchuria, corresponded roughly to the Northeast China region, suffered from international conflicts and conquered by Imperial Japan from 1932 to 1945. While Japanese architects planned its cities as a dreamscape of Far East modernisation, political architects relied on the use of media in cultural construction, to promote the region towards the wider world. Films, produced by the Manchuria Film Association (1937—1945) and its affiliated institutions, mapped out Manchuria in a collection of moving images featuring its urbanscapes, customs and daily lives. However, after the Japanese retreated in 1945, the region's colonial past as Manchuria remains distant from the mainstream historical accounts of modern China, despite the glorious propaganda on screen. How was the place lived, experienced and picturised? Can we visualise its past, through film as a 'live' medium? How has the absent Manchuria shaped the current cultural identity of Northeast China? With these questions in mind, this research uses film as a medium to contribute to the visual and experiential depictions of a place in its past, in this case of mapping the historical geography of Manchuria in a collection of moving images. The research sources available Manchuria films produced between 1932 and 1945 as the materials to illustrate the cinematic ukiyo- e of Manchuria in the light of its contemporary urban cultural regeneration.
- YouTube
Abstract
YouTube
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‘In cities, women have no outside territory to occupy. They must be endlessly moving or enclosed.’- bell hooks, Belonging This paper is an auto- ethnography of my experiences as a woman running in the city. I probe the meaning of what an ‘archive’ is by presenting an assemblage that reveals my tracks and tactile engagement with the places and space I run. In December 2020 I collected objects found through rural running in Hampshire. In January 2021 I am collecting objects found through urban running in East London. Deposited in a shoebox under my desk during this period, the artefacts memorialise my experience. To gather this female running practise, I follow the traces left behind by my female feet and collect memories, creating an archive of lived experience of the wunner. The wunner must be defined separately from a runner; a wunner is a woman runner who requires her own title to acknowledge that the female running experience differs greatly from that of her male counterparts, a subject who is seen but who is transient. The archive houses objects found on run routes alongside notes, stories and recordings representing the moments of visibility and invisibility, of consumption of the city and of being consumed. How do I collect these items? Arrange them? Display them? I explore how my collected artefacts create a scene and express some of these tensions. Lefebvre speaks of how all space is political, I look to bell hook’s analysis of how women can belong, Elkins analysis of the flaneur and Kern’s Feminist City. Iain Borden used skateboarding to illustrate exploration in the city (Borden, 2003), I however use running and my body as an instrument in a methodical exploration and examination of the challenges women face.
Sarah Ackland she/her
I reveal both how running creates an unconscious confidence, but also exposes the limitations or constraints of women’s access to the city and society raising questions of visibility, the female flaneur and patriarchal systems. My paper asks how we archive female running to analyse how the wunner explores transformational space in running.
Abstract 29 March 2021 YouTube
What was your first purposeful clash with your city? That one moment when you peel away received notions of how you inhabit the built environment and question your place within the processes that shape your physical surroundings. This paper focuses on the potential of urban research thinking to infiltrate secondary school curriculum and develop mutually beneficial research relationships between researcher, pupil, and school. The paper draws on the experience of a research- led courses based on urban planning and architecture, designed as part of Brilliant Club programme and delivered in secondary schools across the Midlands by the doctoral researcher. In total more than fifty students took part in six different interactions of the course entitles ‘Can Youth plan the Future Smart City’ with three submissions by secondary school students published in the Brilliant Club Journal (Aksu, 2019; Alkatheri, 2019 and Maan, 2020) The Raynsford Review of Planning in England (TCPA, 2018) identifies planning education in secondary schools as one of the key factors for a better understanding of architecture and planning by the public and achieving active citizenship. This paper tries to unpick the role of urban- led research in secondary education and the challenges, trade- offs, and opportunities it presents to participants on all sides. It also discussed how the memory of research practice in architecture in secondary school could defining the future of the city and how we, as researchers, can define that memory.
Simeon Shtebunaev
The paper will look to alternative ways of introducing architecture in the curriculum such as the RIBA National Schools Programme and PLACED (a Liverpool- based charity), discussing future directions and focus.
AHRA Symposium - X. Gaillard Vimeo
Abstract Trauma sites as ideological urban enclaves: The Ebrat Jail Museum of Tehran
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How do sites of trauma remain embedded, through museumification, in the city fabric? While the practice of turning former prisons into exhibition spaces or lieux de mémoire has blossomed over the past few decades in Europe and North America, accompanied by a fair share of scholarly research, such spaces remain vastly understudied in the Middle East. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the Ebrat Museum in Tehran (established to narrate the carceral horrors of the Mohammed Reza Pahlavi era) and how it correlates to the wider state- sponsored urban network of discourse- based museological historiography. Drawing on in- depth examinations of the exhibition spaces conducted in 2019, and resorting to a multidisciplinary array of literature extracted from the fields of sociology, political science, memory studies and architectural history/theory (from Bourdieu’s work on symbolic power to Rossi’s conceptualizations of the collective memory of the city), this research first overviews the years of operation of the prison and the revolution which discontinued it, and then delves into the timing of the museumification, the agents involved, the physical readaptation of the space and its process of re- signification.
Xavier Gaillard
The study ultimately argues that – through its presentation, content and aesthetics – the museum displays a “fascistic” investment of memory (to borrow philosopher Adrian Parr’s Deleuzian terminology), part and parcel of a constellation of urban populist- hegemonic attempts to “fix” history and justify the character and policies of the current regime (whether it be other exhibition spaces such as the former American Embassy or the Holy Defense Museum; the abundance of remembrance sites for “martyrs”; or the naming policies of the city metro). As such, not only are they insightful enclaves from which to better understand the self- perceived nature of the state – they also illustrate how sites of heritage and memory may be manipulated and their symbolic meaning(s) recodified.
Abstract F_Guo Vimeo
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Fangjie Guo (She/her) /‘fɑːŋdʒɪe gʊə/
Research practices and the reproduction of Liuhua Apparel Wholesale District in Guangzhou, China Research practices produce new spaces rather than merely passively representing existing spaces. Spaces are produced by social relationships (Lefebvre,1991; Coleman,2015). Through research practices, social relationships are represented, analyzed and reorganized into new networks. Spaces are decoded and reconstructed by the networks. During the process, research practices function as an essential agency to explore spaces’ characteristics that might have been ignored by planners and end- users of spaces. Although over the last 30 years, the production of space has drawn much attention (Massey,1995; Roy,2016; Zheng,2019), discussions on the role of research practices in producing spaces still appear lacking. This research offers Liuhua Apparel Wholesale District as a concrete example to reveal the role of research practices. Due to inadequate planning and institutional control at the beginning of Chinese economic transition, Liuhua Apparel Wholesale District around Guangzhou Railway Station grew into an apparel wholesale district through ‘spontaneous self- diversification (Jacobs,1961)’. As a result, apparel wholesale buildings, plastic model shops, tag shops, logistics stores and all the other types of commercial units – constituent parts of apparel wholesale industry - all locate in certain places and cooperate to enable apparel wholesale in this district. To individuals, the formation of Liuhua Apparel Wholesale District, as a result of merchants’ activities to pursue profits, is unnecessary to explain. However, on an urban scale, potential commercial competing logics guiding the evolution of the district are worthy to investigate and learn from. By adopting embedded approaches including observation, semi- structured interview and mapping, this research aims to represent the logics of spatial appropriation in Liuhua Apparel Wholesale District. Thereby, the district is regarded as a systematic commercial machine with various components set in appropriate places. Through this concrete example, we will be able to interrogate and reflect on the role of research practices.
SPA CE / MEM ORY
How do you move and become part of an organisation? How does your research become part of a wider strategy or plan? Why are you engaging with "delicious, sensory" forms of archiving and mapping? What are the challenges of engaging with living archives and other memories of cities and organisations, which can only be accessed through embedded approaches. How do we use these types of memories to change current/future activity?
Xavier Gaillard Negotiating individual /collective
De Certeau’s enigma of the consumer-sphynx: frameworks, products, resources given to people But how are they really used, consumed and internalized?
A classic conundrum of the social sciences: structure/agency Can memory be supplied as a symbolic good?
Heritage
To which extent is heritage an actual shared social thing?
Organizations: thought of as “engaging”, “bringing together”, “building”, etc.
Inter- disciplinary collaborative, live archiving
A new proposition: organizations as destroyers of reconciling views and caterers of differences
In the case of memory: a preservation of widely differing memories – an amalgamation of contrasts Preserving the inherent agonism of civil society
actor network vs. researcher (neutral)
The researcher as a sponsor of such memory schizophrenia against the monopolizing tentacles of power
Promotion of studying not so much the structures, but also the anti-structures
Voices unaccounted for, going beyond official narratives
Revolutionary Protest Graffiti in Tehran, 1978: polyvocal, messy, contrasting
VS.
Institutionally sanctioned graffiti in Tehran, 2020: univocal, controlled, fixed
how to capture memories? Negotiating individual /collective
De Certeau’s enigma of the consumer-sphynx: frameworks, products, resources given to people But how are they really used, consumed and internalized?
A classic conundrum of the social sciences: structure/agency
EMBEDDED?
Can memory be supplied as a symbolic good?
Heritage
To which extent is heritage an actual shared social thing?
Organizations: thought of as “engaging”, “bringing together”, “building”, etc.
Inter- disciplinary collaborative, live archiving
experience --emotion --agency place, identity, memory
A new proposition: organizations as destroyers of reconciling views and caterers of differences
In the case of memory: a preservation of widely differing memories – an amalgamation of contrasts Preserving the inherent agonism of civil society
actor network vs. researcher (neutral)
AGENCY
The researcher as a sponsor of such memory schizophrenia against the monopolizing tentacles of power
Promotion of studying not so much the structures, but also the anti-structures
Voices unaccounted for, going beyond official narratives
Revolutionary Protest Graffiti in Tehran, 1978: polyvocal, messy, contrasting
VS.
cultural geographies layering the image of the city from physical to sensorial placemaking - in both spatial and time axes (copy pasted from Yufei, Noor)
Identifying and amplifying invisible voices, strengthening the legal recognition
Institutionally sanctioned graffiti in Tehran, 2020: univocal, controlled, fixed
Yufei
Atlas
place, identity, memory cultural geographies layering the image of the city from physical to sensorial placemaking - in both spatial and time axes 'human geography is grounded on the shifting intersections between society and space on the one hand, and people and place on the other' — Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn, ‘Re-Presenting the Place Pastiche’, Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, 1994, 9.
visual archives
space & place
Narrative mapping inherits an analogous structure to the territory and the relationship between people and place in its cultural geography
map & territory
Taking the nature of map as both a form of representation and an analytical instrument
a visual catalogue of the city & a collective cultural and sensorial experience
who's got the "privilege" of creating/editing/influencing memories? (Noor)
Privilege place, identity, memory cultural geographies layering the image of the city from physical to sensorial placemaking - in both spatial and time axes 'Human geography is grounded on the shifting intersections between society and space on the one hand, and people and place on the other' — Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn, ‘Re-Presenting the Place Pastiche’, Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, 1994, 9.
Atlas
visual archives
space Removed? & place
EMBEDDED? or...
Narrative mapping inherits an analogous structure to the territory and the relationship between people and place in its cultural geography
map & territory
Taking the nature of map as both a form of representation and an analytical instrument
a visual catalogue of the city & a collective cultural and sensorial experience
RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES / MODES OF COLLABORATION
Ella
The importance of maintaining a humane approach (research-wise, or in running a business collaboration)
Contextualisation, importance of what's already there; "recognition not intervention"; listening, observing, witnessing
The need for a "catalyst" between the different groups to bridge proprietors / academia / institutions
THE PURPOSE OF RESEARCH
How does the research serve others? What and whom does it aim to make a contribution towards?
Process of research more important than the "end piece / presentation"
RESEARCH WITHIN THE PRE-EXISTING SYSTEM
The exclusions of and opportunities within inter - disciplinary engagement
Identifying and amplifying invisible voices, strengthening the legal recognition
RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES / MODES OF COLLABORATION
The importance of maintaining a humane approach (research-wise, or in running a business collaboration)
Contextualisation, importance of what's already there; "recognition not intervention"; listening, observing, witnessing
How does the research serve others? What and whom does it aim to make a contribution towards?
it is so difficult in academic research (i.e PhD research) especially with focus on impact, rather than archiving/unarchiving and collecting new data. (Noor)
do we strengthen or dismantle that system?
The need for a "catalyst" between the different groups to bridge proprietors / academia / institutions
THE PROCESS OF RESEARCH
Process of research more important than the "end piece / presentation"
THE masters TOOLS WILL NEVER RESEARCH WITHIN THE DISMANTLE THE masters PRE-EXISTING SYSTEM HOUSE- AUDRE LORDE
The exclusions of and opportunities within inter - disciplinary engagement
Identifying and amplifying invisible voices, strengthening the legal recognition
cat
stay with the trouble the archive informing the present transdisciplinarity
LEGACY
archive as a field of focus
AGENCY
collaborative research
ethnographic research
the role of the architect-researcher
EMBEDDED? or... the act
patches of visibility
ARCHIVE as an organisational memory
speculative ethics
theoretical positioning
Removed?
of giving
anxious position
multiple
voices 'in and out'
a VOICE
archive
SPATIAL INFRASTRUCTURES
unlearning... molding
traces crumbles.... crumbles
silenced archive
making the archive organisation
creating futures for the future
the archive informing the present transdisciplinarity
LEGACY
archive as a field of focus
AGENCY
collaborative research
whose
ethnographic research
the role of the architect-researcher
EMBEDDED? or...
patches of visibility
ARCHIVE as an organisational memory
speculative ethics
theoretical positioning
Removed?
anxious position
voices multiple
stay with the trouble
of choosing
the act
of giving
'in and out'
a VOICE
archive
SPATIAL INFRASTRUCTURES
unlearning... molding
traces crumbles.... crumbles
silenced archive
making the archive organisation
creating futures for the future
NOOR
"literature has tended to privilege and amplifying the contexts and experiences of a limited segment of a nation - whilst muting others. The ‘permeance' and ‘reliability' of literature renders it dominant, whilst more local and nuanced narratives and realities are increasingly ignored and vulnerable." from my abstract
How do we strip nostalgia from the archive?
What is our narrative? What are we bringing to the table?
objectify the archive? should we do that?
new ways of reading, analysing and scrutinising, based on users lived in experience, collective objectivity, moving away from objective perspective. speaking of homes: how can you objectify/unify(as in generalise) a home (unique) experience?
Unarchive the archive yellow brushstrokes: women who DO NOT "mix" with men, according to architectural research. but here they are! such "unarchiving" would force/motivate a revisit of all the previous research, speaking about the case of Jeddah
You become a problem when you describe a problem - Sara Ahmed
WHAT I AM INVESTIGATING IS A PROBLEM BECAUSE IT IS NOT ONLY CULTURE RELATED, BUT ALSO RELIGION RELATED TO MANY
Negotiating individual /collective
"literature has tended to privilege and amplifying the contexts and experiences of a limited segment of a nation - whilst muting others. The ‘permeance' and ‘reliability' of literature renders it dominant, whilst more local and nuanced narratives and realities are increasingly ignored and vulnerable." from my abstract
How do we strip nostalgia from the archive?
What is our narrative? What are we bringing to the table?
objectify the archive? should we do that?
new ways of reading, analysing and scrutinising, based on users lived in experience, collective objectivity, moving away from objective perspective. speaking of homes: how can you objectify/unify(as in generalise) a home (unique) experience?
yellow brushstrokes: women who DO NOT "mix" with men, according to architectural research. but here they are! such "unarchiving" would force/motivate a revisit of all the previous research, speaking about the case of Jeddah
You become a problem when you describe a problem - Sara Ahmed WHAT I AM INVESTIGATING IS A PROBLEM BECAUSE IT IS NOT ONLY CULTURE RELATED, BUT ALSO RELIGION RELATED TO MANY
Unarchive the archive
Negotiating individual /collective
SARAH
Unarchive the archive
Jon Wakeman: I was trying to place the value on something and for ourselves, place the value on the process and the long attitude something
The archive houses objects found on run routes alongside notes, who has who does and moments what is this been here?
important?
help?
Physical space vs psychological space
of visibility and invisibility,
of consumption of the city and of being consumed.
the politics of care LEGACY
Unarchive the archive
Jon Wakeman: I was trying to place the value on something and for ourselves, place the value on the process and the long attitude something
The archive houses objects found on run routes alongside notes, who has who does and moments what is this been here?
important?
help?
Physical space vs psychological space
of visibility and invisibility,
of consumption of the city and of being consumed.
the politics of care LEGACY
patches of visibility
SIMEON The Archivist how to capture memories?
The emotions of the city locked in memory.
00:07:16.740 --> 00:07:29.310 Jon Wakeman: And, and I think I keep on thinking back to this memory thing, because I think the memory, the memory side of it is so important and that that you that we all, we all kind of tried to deal with is. transform
experience --emotion
memory 00:07:12.510 --> 00:07:15.480 Jon Wakeman: Because there's such physical there's a physical aspect to it.
FILM
pa im
ation
BREATHE
capture what? where?
recucit
rt
PHOTOGRAPH FOUND OBJECT
NARRATIVE
FOUND OBJECT
Re-using/ making the archive
is an archived memory dead?
The Archivist how to capture memories? 00:07:16.740 --> 00:07:29.310 Jon Wakeman: And, and I think I keep on thinking back to this memory thing, because I think the memory, the memory side of it is so important and that that you that we all, we all kind of tried to deal with is. transform
memory
The emotions of the city locked in memory.
experience --emotion --agency
FILM
pa im
ation
FOUND OBJECT
BREATHE
capture what? where? NARRATIVE
recucit
rt
PHOTOGRAPH
Jon Wakeman: a physical aspect FOUND OBJECT
quite the opposite, at least in the case i am looking at, that archive put to public, has become the only memory to some. (Noor)
Re-using/ making the archive
is an archived memory dead?
Fangjie Experiences
Embededness
Archives
Map& representation
Place making
Memory
Time
Competition
Spatial organisation
Conflicts
Space is a resource Negociation
Cooperation Contribution
Fangjie Experiences
Embededness
Archives
Map& representation
Place making
Memory
Time
Competition
Spatial organisation
Conflicts
Space is a resource Negociation
Cooperation Contribution
Ecologies / Constellations with Regather Cooperative https://regather.net/ Embedded spatial research practices situate themselves in existing relations between organisations, spaces, infrastructures, and various flows (economic, labour, knowledge etc). Drawing on contemporary ecological thinking (Tsing, Haraway, Guattari) we invite contributions that interrogate the ecosystems that embedded research both reveals and generates. We also introduce the term constellations to this node, as a way to think relationally otherwise, since constellations have for centuries been used to tell stories, frame myths and hold things together across different scales and temporalities. Regather Cooperative in Sheffield is a social enterprise as an ecosystem that includes a farm, orchard, community apple press, agroforestry project, veg box scheme, and community venue.
Abstract brenda duggan YouTube
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Walking with ‘durations’ to see a relational post- human place. I am a visual communication designer taking an extended set of design principles out walking with concepts of ‘durations’ (human/mine). In deploying walking as a way to perform seeing, writing, drawing, documenting, I am asking the question - can I see comparatively other different durations at work alongside mine? This research is questioning embodied visible ways of language- ing with walking as a performative meaning making activity. This practice is me paying attention, through critical performative ethnography, to walking- drawing- seeing- writing in a cemetery. This series of visits is called ‘dead movements’[1]. In walking ‘with’ a cemetery, I am producing markings that help me reconfigure a knowing- seeing- walking that allows a view of other, more- than- human correspondences. I want to know, could this form a critical and creative way to see within a relational world – thus broadening what accounts for ways of knowing? This is an important question for designing in how we are moving from being anthropocentric, individual, entity framed humans. I am enquiring into whether this can go some way to articulating a movement towards an ontology of ‘becoming’, with an ecology of other different happenings. How do humans become response- able[2] among a multiplicity of posthuman subjects.
Brenda Duggan
[1] Twelve walks between March 12th and April 15th 2020, where I set out to walk in an old cemetery. Attendance at funerals had been strictly curtailed at this time due to a world- wide pandemic. Normal human rituals of walking there had stopped. [2] Donna Haraway talks about ‘response- ability, in ‘Staying with the Trouble’ (Haraway, 2016, 12).
Infrastructuring Solidarity in Rural Regions Jamie Baxter AHRA 2021.mp4 Vimeo
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During the AHRA PhD Symposium 2021 I would like to share and explore the theme of social innovation infrastructures, a concept I have begun to flesh out in a recent article (Baxter, forthcoming). It draws on the empirical work and data collected during my doctoral research in which I investigate the spatial spread of social innovation in two European sites. Here, social innovation refers to innovation in social relations (Moulaert and Nussbaumer, 2004) distinguishing it from other types of innovation (e.g., technical or social business). Social innovation infrastructures are expansive socio- material systems, at once consisting of innovative social practices in themselves, whilst also providing support networks for other new ways of meeting social needs. The research studies two such infrastructures. The first, a novel constellation of farming practices spanning Portugal, the second, a network of open ‘lab’ spaces in villages, towns and cities across Austria. Each project aims to contribute towards rural transformation in distinct ways (e.g., providing communities access to a network of spaces for meeting, sharing and learning together which otherwise did not exist in rural Austria). Drawing on the work of Barad (2007), I approach the research with an agential realist sensitivity in order to highlight the performative and entangled material- discursive characteristics of infrastructure.
References Baxter, J. (In review). Infrastructuring Solidarity in Portugal after the 2007-8 Financial Crisis. Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, Durham and London. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128- 002 Moulaert, F., Nussbaumer, J., 2004. The Social Region. Eur. Urban Reg. Stud. 12, 45–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776405048500
Jamie-Scott Baxter
In the paper, according to the cases I aim to describe and characterise social innovation infrastructures. I argue they are at once territorial objects and relational- spaces, and that such systems support the spreading- out of social innovation in particular ways. I conclude they are relevant to rural areas, which in order for spatially distributed groups to act in solidarity, the territorial effects of distance, peripheralization and fragmentation must be overcome.
Abstract AHRA PhD Symposium Introduction Vimeo
Project Title: Down To Earth Website Link: https://downtoearthresearch.org/
In the 1950s the London Brent City Council set out to build a social housing complex above a former sewage farm and a filled- up gravel pit in North West London – St Raphael’s Estate. Located beyond the – then – urban periphery, sewage farms constituted one of the uses that late- nineteenth century urban policies sought to keep far from human inhabitation. Indeed, cities have historically produced different types of waste that they needed to dispose of, and urban policies have usually implied displacing it to the peripheries, affecting the ecologies and environmental qualities of the sites where they settled. Over time, however, cities expanded, and what lie beyond the urban borders at one given time may have become part of the built environment a few decades after. In fact, Brent was of course not the only city council embarked on this type of project: a few miles further North- West, a low- income housing estate was also being constructed on a former sewage farm: Beaumont Leys, in Leicester. This emerging project interrogates what persists and what has changed in this peripheral, waste- d condition of the soils on which the St Raphael’s and Beaumont Leys estates are now settled. This is done with a view test of the potentialities and limitations of phyto- and bio- remediation techniques to mitigate remaining toxicity on site. They could involve, the use of wild grasses for phyto- stimulation in St Raphael’s, although this is at this stage a preliminary hypothesis. In urban terms, both sites are going through remarkably different processes, as St Raph’s is experiencing a rapid process of council- led gentrification that may lead to the displacement of many families, while Beaumont Leys remains marginalised.
Can Ozerdem
AHRA INTRO_Chun Zheng
The project is highly interdisciplinary, combining environmental history methodologies, research- by- design, and collaboration with colleagues from the natural sciences. The project is also inscribed within contemporary debates about co- design.
Scaling processes of commoning: A case study of Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, USA
YouTube
Abstract Commoning projects promote their success in the language of how they’ve been lasting over time, increasing their production, serving more people, and building connections with other groups, which I refer to as the out- scaling and up- scaling processes of commoning. However, these visible and commeasurable criteria are not sufficient to understand the mechanism of commoning practices. We imagine the commons as an alternative to binary public- private ownership systems and a way to gain the “right to the city”. If we still use the old language to measure commoning practices, aren’t we falling back into nostalgia capitalist paradigms, that is, to define the success of the commons by their productivity and proliferation?
design.cmu.edu
Chun Zheng | Carnegie Mellon School of Design
Chun (Pure) Zheng
In this presentation, based on my ethnographic fieldwork on the Garfield Community Farm in Pittsburgh, I intend to explore deep- scaling processes of commoning practices. Through synthetic analyses of the farm’s organizational structure, reciprocal ecological, social and spatial (re)productive systems, and multi- level future visions, the case study provides a comprehensive perspective into the sustainment of an urban commons as an example to reveal the incommensurables of commoning practices. In the research, I will examine how commoning can satisfy individual and collective needs, deepen social connections, enhance human- nature relations, and shift worldviews. The case study also serves as a starting point where frameworks are tested to represent deep- scaling processes of commoning projects. These frameworks can potentially be developed into tools that help designers and commoners better articulate and advocate for their commoning strategies.
zoom_1.mp4
Abstract
Vimeo
Michal Huss
Hester Buck
This paper argues that walking, a seemingly banal activity, can serve as a tactic of urban resistance and transcultural memory activism. It draws on two examples of walking tours, which mix local memories and displaced traveling memories to open a space of recognition and interchange and assign new meanings to dominant memory narratives. The first are walking tours in Berlin, guided by Syrian refugees, which use memorials of local traumatic history to testify to refugees’ current traumas. The second are walking tours in an impoverished neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv that weave East African asylum seekers’ traveling memories into the local arena as part of the story of those streets. Through these examples, the paper provides insight into the ways the displaced are affected by and intervene within a city’s public memory of past division and a city in ongoing conflict. To this end, walking has a dual significance to this paper, as a topic of study and a research method, demonstrating a methodology of a ‘walk along’ ethnography. The paper’s theoretical framework builds on Tim Ingold’s (2007) understanding of paths as place- making that replaces the ontology of locals with urban wayfarers. Accordingly, the tours’ activism involves the mapping of the plural and diasporic nature of urban space and complicating genealogical cultural notions of 'origins'. As the paper demonstrates, using the collective walking bodies, the tours interweave spaces together, and transform official mnemonic sites or illuminate overlooked ones, making marginalised voices and perspectives visible. In both cases, the tours subvert landscape of official public memory by demonstrating its entanglement with memories from elsewhere, but also with other locally present- absent traumatic pasts (of the Cold War and the 1948 Arab- Israel War and the ethnic cleansing it entailed). Thus, the paper argues, the tours’ memory activism opens potentials of hybridity, of comparing, mixing and performing shifting positions, speaking from within and without.
Abstract The participatory design of a moss wall begun in 2017, around the garden at the community project, R- Urban, in London, highlights the different expertise the architect can bring to embedded projects. The research explores how the practices of architecture and citizen science can develop ecological solutions, exploring how care is produced through the ongoing process of learning about the design. The design evolved from a public programme of talks exploring the conditions which contribute to the poor air quality in the local area, from residents, academics, and the local authority. These abstract ideas informed the construction of a moss wall, making these ideas more accessible to a wider audience. The design of an object expanded the conversation beyond air quality, to explore the ecological impact of the design to improve biodiversity, slowing down water movement and improve wellbeing. Care for the project by the designer has facilitated interactive prototypes which learnt from the previous workshops. The role of the designer to consolidate knowledge fixed a series of design principles: the use of moss to filter air, the design of a permeable structure, considering the polluting effect of airflow and DIY construction techniques. A further prototype, a moss bench, highlighted the role of the designer in responding to how young people applied these design principles, creating a collective care for the prototypes, shared by all those taking part. The paper will explore the tension of participatory design projects. The ecological nature of the projects requires a synthesis of ideas from different fields, disrupting this process by placing within a wider context. Care moved between different members of the group, at some points focusing on a defined object, and other points engaging with more abstract ideas about air quality and wider environmental agendas.
AHRA Introduction - Emma Vimeo
Abstract London’s Urban Markets: Adaptability, Agency and Inequity
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Emma Colthurst
This research investigates London’s urban markets through the exchange and interdependence of agricultural practices, social life and environments, as explored through the relationships of trading farmers. Street markets are frequently associated with the local, urban exchange of material goods and social life; however, this research does not necessarily ask the same questions as traditional anthropological and urban approaches to market studies. I follow trading farmers’ livelihoods and practices, to understand the interconnection of the marketplace. I argue urban markets intersect and ingest multi- scalar geographical and social coexistence - both human and non- human, here and anywhere. I therefore explore London’s urban markets as nexuses of material and social exchange that reveal and generate multiscalar relations. This investigation requires an interdisciplinary approach to spatial, cultural and material fluidity, framed through new ecological theory and practice. I explore the cases, Borough Market and Broadway Market, to empirically excavate and follow the social and material trails intersected in the markets. I utilise an anthropological approach through the methods: participant observation, interviews and visual analysis. For this presentation I will specifically discuss how participant observation is used to reconsider the multiplicities of everyday life intersected in the markets. This research includes a pilot study carried out in the first three months of 2020, which comprised working on a market stall, filming (as part of a discussion on urban anthropology through city films), interviewing and chatting with both traders and customers. I will also discuss the changing opportunities and difficulties of participation during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This presentation concludes by reflecting on the initial fieldwork and insights that examine the adaptability, agency and inequity of the urban markets’ interconnection. London Urban Markets: Adaptability, Agency and Inequity, is an academic research project for the researchers’ MPhil/PhD thesis at University of Greenwich, London.
Abstract AHRA Intro YouTube
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Park Hill Sculpture Garden, Sheffield: An Archive of an Imagined Place. I am ‘inhabiting’ a place through its archive. As a building, Sheffield’s Park Hill flats are celebrated . However the surrounding parkland landscape has been less noticed, and since 2006 replaced with some urgency, even as (built and unbuilt) representations of this landscape are used to promote the site’s wider development. These changes are traced and indexed in the city council’s planning portal. Darren Anderson has suggested “Architecture... always begins as fiction,” and Park Hill’s planning archive traces these ever- changing fictive futures. Marotta and Cummings have identified the affective power of these ‘images of the future’ can have and I draw on Franco Berardi (failure of the ‘modern promise’ and Mark Fisher (his use of the distinction between 'no longer' and 'not yet') in my practice- led research into the images being used to construct this new place. In this talk I will outline my work to date, which uses ‘archival art’ practices and collage/montage , as methods to explore the photography, drawings, renders and texts output during the reconstruction of Park Hill’s gardens. From desktop archaeological studies, ecologists’ field reports to ‘Design and Access’ statements, these representations privilege and territorialize certain views of the landscape. My privileged position as a researcher (allowed ‘fair use’ of others intellectual property to an arguably greater extent than other practitioners) gives scope to challenge the complex questions of ownership of this imagined public space: although these documents might constitute ‘found material’ they are valuable, protected, commercial product.
Tim Machin
Drawing on Jill Stoner’s and Jennifer Bloomer’s ‘Minor Architecture’, I aim to assemble a version of this imagined landscape which sees beyond the monument. Mine is an occupation not of a walkable landscape but of the (still) public and democratic ecology of the planning system at its intersection with a built environment.
ECOL OGIE S / CONST ELLA TION S
How do we navigate roles and response-abilities in work e.g. research-design or business-anarchist? Hats, jumpers, skins or superimposition ?>
"We're just a bunch of business-minded anarchists" "How important is it to be connected to wider discourses e.g. transition towns or Co-op movement?"
..."they don't provide us with customers.... they provide a kinda background noise... to show solidarity with other non-capitalist ideologies..."
IMAGE FROM J.K. Gibson-Graham: The economic Iceberg
How do you think about scaling up or spread (of your organisation)?
..."lots of little is good!" There are different types of spread (in social Innovation) including 'Iterative Spread'. Here innovations emerge locally but are trans- locally orientated. They spread 'iteratively' across territorial space... here's an example from Austria... it seems to fit with Gareths comments "lots of little"......
Image and findings taken from Jamie- Scott Baxter's research which examines the spatial spread in social innovation troubling rural- urban boundaries.
Find ways to create futures that have a future.
what conditions enable or restrict alternative ecologies existing
Human and non human relations
moss like us breathes behavioural change avoid solution based thinking - stay with the trouble
How does embedded research reveal mutiscalar relations? the molecular and the planetary
feel our organic common ground political change
How (do!?) we scale up? Differentiating between individual and the system // Engaging with the institution where friction emerges scale or spread an idea
FInd a syntax that speaks to power
Power Falling through the cracks
Power structures - visualing alternatives as way of acting on these
Rhizomes
People as infrastructure -AM Simone
response- ability agency "to act"
what different kinds, domains, fields of knowledges do we draw from or work with?
Local history
indigenous
scientific
more- than- human https://feralatlas.org/
Little Sheffield area / Club Garden
Regather Farm Soil
Gareth: "I’m a product of subcultures - which are ecologies"
Gareth: "Where are my roots?"
Try growing something in soil without micro- organisms!
Microorganisms as colleagues // From there comes everything else
Arts council
Ecologies "practice is a language, I am a text" [Brenda]
Gareth: "I’m a product of subcultures - which are ecologies"
How
do w e list en to /at/f rom/ throu gh th e city ?
stomach
Ingestion of landscape... Some of the UK’s intensive units can hold up to 3000 cattle at a time. Photograph: Bureau of Investigative Journalism/Guardian
n digestio
The ruminant digestive system
Diagramming thinking. Diagrams to think with
what conditions enable or restrict alternative ecologies existing?
durational scaling - smal for long... [hester]
ecologies: draw different kinds of knowledge into new relations - scientific, indigenous, popular culture - all real! e.g. wetlands destruction, sites of settler colonialism, yet also through those different knowledges, can open up new imaginaries -
Sam
SYMPOIESIS
"cho osin g yo [Hes ur f ter] ight s" (Haraway)
Microorganisms as colleagues From there comes everything else
[Gareth]
Infrastructure vs Ecology
Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies Ecological thinking remains a powerful lens for understanding complex adaptive systems. CHRIS REED & NINA- MARIE LISTER
Giovanni da Modena, Inferno (1410), Basilica di San Petronio, Bologna
The Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism by Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli
mess y
waste
conflict contradiction slippery unseen ...
Friction of encounters
Who are my affiliations with?
Lichen is a really interesting non- entity, collaborative community to think with.
Scale LOTS OF SMALL
Economies/ Dreaming with Foodhall https://www.foodhallproject.org/ What role can the imagination play in thinking with others? How can we move beyond seemingly inescapable constructs such as capitalism, that shape our understandings of what the spaces in which we live, work and play are and can be? Can we understand our disillusionment with current solutions, not as a dearth of hope, but as a point of opportunity for radical shifts beyond what we take for granted? (Androtti). Can we dream with others, and what are the organisations, or spaces that support this? Feminist economic geographers have drawn attention to the many ways in which we sustain ourselves that are outside of or beyond capitalism, wage labour and the market economy, that may offer more ethical and just forms of relation (Gibson-Graham, Healy). What role does research have within this picture? Foodhall is a pay-as-you feel cafe and social space that is working to extend forms of mutuality and non- hierarchical forms of sociality. They are also convening publics to establish a National Food Service that would position food as a basic right, and one which should be enjoyed with others.
Abstract AHRA Symposium - Introduction YouTube
Elif Kaymaz
‘Where the Magic Happened' For a Few: A Micro- History of a Downtown Movie Theater in Ankara Roland Barthes (1989) describes the movie- going experience as a magnetic effect of the darkness of the movie theater that attracts the spectator “from street to street, from poster to poster” until he or she finally buries him/herself “in a dim, anonymous, indifferent cube” where the “festival of affects” awaits. While he was right when situating the movie theater experience within an urban network of places, signs, and symbols, he was misguided when defining the movie theater – a place that is maybe dim, but certainly distinct thanks to its socio- urban identity. This paper deals with the ‘movie theater’ as a site of socio- cultural exchange where the processes and actors of the production, exhibition, and viewing practices shape collective memory and urban affiliation. Specifically, in my project, I look at the case of Büyük Sinema, a downtown movie theater whose design and construction coalesce the radical and populist modernisms of post- WW2 Ankara. First, through an examination of plans, photographs, testimonials, and interviews, I analyze the site vis-à- vis the lenses of both its chief architect and its builder within the context of the changing dynamics of urbanization and modernization by taking into account their economic motivations. Then I juxtapose the high- modernist, entrepreneurial vision of those creators with the programming decisions, audience practices, and mass culture of the epoch in order to rectify previously misunderstood perceptions regarding permanent sites of film exhibition. I argue that rather than isolated, fixed, and stable, these sites are interconnected with their built environment, receptive to their performative audiences and users, as well as materially, economically, and functionally flexible/resilient. Ultimately, the paper raises the need to approach movie theaters as containers of a series of complementary relationships: between the builder and the owner, between the architect and the spectator, between architecture and memory.
Abstract
Elin Eyborg YouTube
Elin Eyborg Lund
RESEARCH THROUGH PRACTICE The Bartlett, UCL ATTENDING SPACES – Elin Eyborg Lund, www.elineyborg.dk
There is increasing interest to use the site- specific dance and artistic movement performances as a way to inform the architect’s design methodology. As performance maker, I enact the ways built environment grows beyond the control of the designer. My practice- based research aims to simulate in a performative way, how we do things with our hands, how we move around in a space, and how we arrange stuff within a specific place. In other words: ergonomics, circulation, and logistics. These three notions are matched by their artistic twins in performance making as: task- making, choreography, and stage design. Throughout ten years of artistic performance practice, I have often made the props from building waste. Consequently, I have been able to build large scale stage design at a small cost. Increasingly, I have focused on construction sites as public performance spaces in response to sustainability and circular waste management. Furthermore, imagining the construction site as the stage, the building workers take the role as actors, the technicians and public authorities become instructors each with their responsibility, the different clients become producers each with their different interest, and the public opinion is represented by passers- by. It is all about ecology by the means of constellations between different agents. Conventionally, an intentional approach dominates the architectural design process, opposed to an attentional approach. This project argues that an intentional approach reduces the scope of design opportunities available and eliminates those with latent and hidden value. Movement performance has the potential to change the designer’s emphasis from an intentional concept to an attentional practice by moving into specific situations and places. A richer and multifaceted architectural design can then evolve from the ability, in gesture and movements, to respond sensitively with the surrounding environment. Furthermore, movement performances can augment the designer’s ability to communicate ideas to a range of stakeholders, thereby offering new opportunities on how we finance building projects. Construction sites, with their easy access to materials and structures, offer an exciting environment for the artist. Performing on such sites, however, also raises attention to material flow, construction waste and the circular economy. (Whether this is disposable, supporting structures during construction, or the recycling of materials once a structure has depreciated.) By drawing attention to connections normally hidden in the construction phase, with the introduction of choreographed task- making, site- specific movement performance can help stimulate the early ideas that conceive a building project, just as they can predict unforeseen results of the completed structure. In the hands of the performance maker, construction sites are turned into stages for dance and movement. The inaccessible construction sites with their purpose driven intention become attending spaces, expressing the intricate memories of people and society.
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Zahira El Nazar
Abstract Federica _ AHRA 2O21 Vimeo
Federica Giardino
The Legacy of the Water : A Comparative Study of the Literary and Urban Identities of Glasgow and Genoa With a critical focus on the antithesis of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, my PhD explores the role of late 20th century urban literature in the physical transformation and analytical reading of the post- industrial city. The study presents a comparative analysis of prominent works of literature from Glasgow and Genoa, interrogating the extent to which such works have been instrumental in promoting a measurable shift in the municipal spirit of their peoples and the specific cultural geographies from which they emerged. This informs the evaluation of the means in which metropolitan structures can influence and shape fictional narratives across the cultural paradigm (e.g. Alasdair Gray’s better nation trope). Current areas of specific interest are the dialogue between the real and textual dimensions, and the literary word understood as a political act, with its capacity to represent and/or knowingly misrepresent the cities’ civic and social identities. The existing theoretical framework comprises theories of embodied geography, urban sociology, and the spatial turn of de Certeau, Foucault, Barthes and Lefebvre. It is expected that the chosen methodology will blend the scrutiny of archival materials, field research, a phenomenologically- orientated approach grounded on the experience of space and place, and the development of a series of original conceptual graphics which function to integrate observations of a socio- historical nature with site- specific interpretations of the selected texts. The proposed cross- curricular investigatory operation provides the opportunity to interpret the structural and social complexity of cities in a uniquely holistic way. The research project enriches the discourse concerned with socially charged and imaginary urban spaces that are produced through literary practice. As such, it is cogently embedded in the themes of Economies and Dreaming.
Abstract Thomas Moore AHRA 2021 YouTube
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Thomas Moore
Mapping Liminal Practices of Civic Education: Between The University and The City. Since its formation in the 19th century which was made possible by public donations under the promise of an institution ‘within reach of the child of the working man’, Sheffield University has been considered a ‘Civic University’. Looking to contemporary society, this idea of the civic university has seen somewhat of a resurgence, as a response to the increasing abstraction of academic knowledge, universities have been called to aid against the effects of increasing globalisation, weakening democracy and environmental crisis (Ostrander, 2004). In 2020, Sheffield Hallam University was named the host of the Civic University Network, placing Sheffield back at the centre of the debate surrounding the university and the city. This paper will introduce the first phase of a PhD research project which aims to speculatively and critically explore the civic university phenomenon, through an investigation of the spaces of civic education emerging ‘betwixt and between the university and the city’. Working through my practice with the UKs first University backed Urban Room, I will position Sheffield School of Architecture’s (SSOA) Live Works as a ‘liminal urban space’, a ‘[de]constructive’ institution in- between the many and varied community initiatives of the city, and the university itself. In this paper, I position Live Works as a distributed urban actor, constituted by its practices of care between SSOA and urban communities. Through a mapping of these many and varied practices, utilising Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) as a methodological tool to work across scales, the research works toward a speculative imagining of a ‘distributed civic university’. Presenting this ‘dream’ of a network of Sheffield’s urban knowledge practices, this paper aims to act as a catalyst for a collaborative re- imagining of the civic university, turning its gaze outside the structures of the institution toward its effect on the ‘other’, ‘outside’.
Abstract Ioana Petkova Introduction Video - AHRA PhD YouTube Symposium
London’s New Housing Imaginaries Markets are inherently reliant on their local communities – this is the main premise of Stephen Gudeman’s The Anthropology of Economy. And yet, when it comes to housing, it seems that it is precisely those communities that are most vulnerable to market change. This is especially true for the case of London's housing landscape, which was shaped by a history of urban population displacement. While local communities were facing redevelopment evictions, housing financialisation and austerity measures, they developed a variety of alliances to assert their ‘right to the city’. This history of housing struggle proved to be crucial in shaping today’s community- led housing scene.
Ioana Petkova
This paper is about a particular type of housing activism in London which is based on the community- led development of de- financialised housing stock. As these projects cut across the notions of ownership, sociality, economic exchange and collective action, the paper suggests that these new urban alliances are a form of commoning practice; and that they are constantly producing various types of material or non- material housing wealth. In addition to mapping the spatial forms of these housing commons, the paper aims to historicise them within a longer genealogy of housing struggle in the capital.
Abstract AHRA PHD Conference 2021 - Juan Usubillaga YouTube [Introduction]
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Juan Usubillaga (he/him)
Envisioning Urban Futures What can Urban Design Learn from How Political Activists Imagine and Enact Urban Change? How do we envision the future of cities? This question is particularly relevant when doing research in (and about) cities today. We currently live in a context where traditional politics and policies struggle to cope with increasing urbanisation rates and growing inequalities. Meanwhile, social movements and political activists are rising up and inhabiting cities as sites of contestation. However, activists don’t just occupy space; they contest spatial manifestations of power and fundamentally transform cities. This paper will interrogate the meaning of envisioning urban futures in practices of political activism to argue for an understanding of them as a form of urban design practice. It will do so by comparing how activist practices transformed entire neighbourhoods in Bogotá (Potosí) and Berlin (Kreuzberg) between the 1970s and 1990s. Both cases illustrate how visions of urban change can be critically placed within a tension between utopian thinking and prefigurative politics. In Potosí, a community- based pedagogical project quickly evolved into a wider mobilisation to address the lack of health facilities, infrastructure and services in Bogotá’s informal settlements. This involved various discussions on how to achieve their desired societal change by: enacting in the present the society they wanted to create or engaging with the governance structures they criticised so heavily. Similarly in Kreuzberg, a critique of housing renewal policies triggered a cycle of mass mobilisation which encompassed wider discussions about squatting as an alternative development practice. Political activists in both cities deployed tactics and strategies that embraced the complexity of their urban context and raised questions about the means they needed for the ends sought. By arguing for an understanding of political activism as a form of urban design practice, the paper outlines the potential of (re)locating activism within design discourses and rethinking how we, as designers, envision and enact urban futures.
ECON OMIE S / DREA MING
WHAT IS YOUR DREAM ECONOMY? Unbeknownst to us, Louis had reflected on the fact that during community meetings, it is a requirement that the conversations be recorded on paper. The following pages present the result of his written recordings of the workshop's discussions:
Louis
In late capitalism, we rarely are afforded the opportunity to dream, although the process of dreaming is fundamental to all inventions. In the workshop, we were asked to take some time to dream of an economy, and reflect on how it relates to our own practice and ideals. This space has allowed us to express our views uninterrupted, so that these could be collectively absorbed and facilitate the dialogue with others. The responses are raw, urgent snapshots, images of a collective consciousness which have emerged from our dreams of ideal economies.
Thomas I did the opposite of dreaming. I looked at my everyday life, trying to expand it as a way of dreaming. Coming out of lockdown, I was desperate for my personal wellbeing. I had a weary body and weary mind. So I signed up to football, desperate for something to do. We went out to the pub afterwards. It is interesting to see how the football club started other activities as a result or consequence of playing football. They signed up as a C.I.C, and started supporting food distribution services. This example is something I see as being more prevalent when looking into the future, where everyday life and personal wellbeing converge and subjectivity and political action are the future of the economy. I’m also sad that John Lewis (here in Sheffield) is closing, although there's a part of me that is happy that retail has run its course. Perhaps we can articulate how new economies will exist in the city. As an example, I imagined John Lewis becoming a football pitch and part of a distributive network of flows of knowledge, food security, wellbeing, tools for commoning.
Louis When you bring people together to do something they can [end up doing] all sorts of things. But it can create cliques, there is a risk of people in the kitchen not engaging with people in the front; not overcoming these frictions but translating them into a different social model... One of my key understandings is that we need to continuously re-design what we're doing. a continued re-evolution. Achitecture traditionally as a methodology does not do this.
CONFLUX OF INTERESTS convergence of self care/ personal wellbeing and collective political action.
Building on COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST
LEAR EVERYDAY RADICAL ACTS as experimenting with new ways of being - civic learning
How can liminal spaces of civic education between the university and the city catalyse the civic imagination of new ways of being-together?
Liminal - anti- structure "betwixt and between"
How can universities avoid exploiting their civic partners?
NING CITY Re-Imagining the city as a distributed university for learning new ways of being-together - Tom Moore
Elif I was thinking about the movie theatre and its space, how this can be perceived as a kind of economic model.
SCALES OF ACTORS / HIERARCHY / SEGREGATION
In the previous versions of movie theatres there were different areas, really rigid hierarchies in space. In the front line, you consume something. In the back line, you get the same service, but from a different position. I am having a hard time understanding if this is a good model. For example, we see this applied to housing. With different people paying different amounts of prices for the same thing, still being under the same roof but within different spaces for different groups, different classes of the same economy.
BEING UNDER THE SAME ROOF VS. SEGRATED PLACES
Federica This made me think of an aspect of my own study. In Italy, there are social housing schemes which were built in alignment with ideas of equality and egalitarianism. Even within these complexes there is inequality, because people have inequitable access to, say, daylight and views. This is perhaps an economy of positioning, which relates to the discussion concerning the position of the researcher within the community.
COMFORT AS A CURRENCY
Elif Maybe in the movie theatre they are paying a different amount of money for different comfort levels: you pay more for your comfort. I found this within a certain historical period from my case study: they opened a prestigious cinema, and separated themselves from the crowd.
SPATIAL POSITIONING: A TOOL? A METHOD?
Elif
Federica It also relates to ideas of marginality and liminality, as highlighted by Tom, with the university having a centralised position within the city. It points to the existence of a privileged geography.
Juan
HIERARCHIES
I think there is something in thinking about hierarchies, in the case of movie theatres. It emancipates the spectators. On the other hand it makes me think of the cult movies that are acted out... Powerfully and politically speaking.
Elif This division was more visible in, for example, times of racial segregation. When women and kids had to sit in the back...
SEGREGATION
Louis Is it social first?
Cristina It is interesting to read into spatial manifestation of hierarchies or structures, as evident in the cinema building. An economy of positioning, the spatial positioning of people or something else... Exploring the challenges and opportunities of doing embedded research within the city. One's position is always an issue to be articulated. It’s a fertile starting point to talk about the economy of positioning, and also relates to positionality.
ECONOMY OF POSITIONING
politically
in space what is the economy of positioning?
research
us as researchers
Federica My idea of a dream economy is a 'radical economy of language', where language is the currency against which the equality or inequality of wealth are measured. If words are political tools that can be used to subvert established powerstructures, then a radical language aligns with an egalitarian economic system. Language plays a fundamental role in activist practices. Through coalition and withdrawal from a 'professionalised' language, practice enables academics to organically engage with culture, and resolves the eternal moral dilemmas associated with the positioning of practitioners in the city and our right to speak for the needs of--or propose solutions for--the community.
Breaking hierarchies / power structures through the re-appropriation of language.
The right to the city: who controls the use of heritage? Who has ownership of the 'appropriated'?
Cristina What would a radical economy of language look like?
Federica The language of Scottish author James Kelman, for one, merges dialects and hybrid forms. It constantly changes depending on the circumstances of the narrative, and actively resists hierarchies and relationships of power. There exists a form of linguistic politics that relies on localism, registers and particular sub-languages. Finding ways to re-appropriate language to de- stabilise power structures is critical.
WOR Interrogating the 'positioning' of fictional narratives in the city alongside the 'positionality' of the practitioners.
Cristina I really like the idea. I was also thinking, in relation to our theme of dreaming and doing research, as well as doing storytelling, how these politics can be manipulated to tell stories.
Indigenous epistemologies
KERS CITY
[D i s a p p r o p r i a t i n g t h e a p p r o p r i a t e d]
Iterations of James Kelman's 'hybrid language' (J.Rodger, 2021; Image F. Giardino) - Words as a political tool
Collage by the speaker. Material from Spirit of Revolt – James Kelman Collection
Cristina Many radicals use language to transform the perception of lgbtq+ communities. They often present relative conservative and social context. Prefigurative value: Decide and design the position you want to achieve. Retrospectively, it can have a ripple effect. A book that talks about story telling... New skills for the future: Learn to tell compelling stories of what you want to achieve. How can you mobilise people and resources through stories? By manipulating the language in a way that is destabilising?
Schitt's Creek - normalising LGBTQ+ narratives Prefigurative scenarios
Elif I am exploring how we are writing the history of the movie theatre. It was beautiful until it was taken over. The name is also in the cinema, it is 'Beauty' because it is grand. It solicites a sense of grandeur.
Practice of making up new words amongst sub/culture (or children)
Louis When I was a child I kept on making my own language.
Juan There is a made up word in German that merges occupation and repair. It’s very interesting how these words can be powerful in the context of social movement and activists. In the context of LGBTQ+ activism, some of the words that used to have a derogatory meaning have been reclaimed as a form of protest.
Instand(be)setzung
Juan I don’t have nice drawings but I do have a lot of words. Going back to informality... There is a lot we can learn from innovations in the Global South. A lot of people use limited resources and have limited time. So something I would like to see in a dream economy is knowledge not as something you accumulate, but co- produce. This helps challenge power structures. As a researcher I like to understand how our knowledge is not superior to that of people who live in local communities and their everyday life experience. Another aspect is having the Earth at the centre of discussions around future economies, instead of looking at it through monetary or financial terms.
Autonomy as a creative practice: societies in constant movement
To be or not to be a part of the state?
There is a lot of discussions in the green movement, for example, in whether we should have a carbon tax and whether we should start putting numbers into carbon in the context of capitalism. But when it comes to tackling the Climate Emergency, I am not sure if this is compatible with capitalism. Rather than talking about transactions and profit, should we talk about our own wellbeing? This goes back to what Federica was talking about around the notion of language.
Do we need a new vocabulary to contest existing economies based on profit and transactions?
'Welcome to Potosí' - children holding banner in Activist School (Bogotá 1980s, Archivo El Tiempo)
Occupied buildings in Kreuzberg (Berlin 1980s, Manfred Kraft)
Activism as a form of design practice
'A Squatters Block' - drawing by activists in Kreuzberg (Berlin 1980s, Papier Tiger Archiv)
Climate Strike 2019 (Cardiff 2019, Juan Usubillaga)
Veronica I explored the concept of education that connects with segregation. In my research, the segregation in Chile limits aspects of growth as most people don’t have easy access to higher education. So my ideal economy would put the value of individual personal growth over profit, in an economy of education. I was lucky to come from a more privileged background, in many cases, to grow personally, people end up with incredible amounts of debt. The option of growth is so limited and it’s only for those people who have a privileged background. In Chile, it’s also very common for people to live with their parents, it is very limiting. And it’s connected to to oppression from the government who want want to keep people working forever.
"My dream economy is an economy which values personal growth"
Economy of education
Within this system the economy remains within the small group of people who have all of the money. My dream economy is advanced enough to encourage personal growth. This idea of tackling the elephant in the room, the segregated...
Oppression
Education over profit An economy that values personal growth
Santiago defined by the six main districts. (Teodoro Dannemann, 2019)
Students protesting for free education in Santiago, Chile. (Mario Ruiz, 2015)
The survival of the richest
OPPRESSION & SEGREGATION
The beginning of the historical Social Revolution, October 2019 Students leading in massive Metro payment evasions due to unfair government fee increase for transport, Santiago, Chile. (RPP Noticias 2019)
Vitacura District in Santiago, Chile
Santiago according to socioeconomic level, where S5 is the most vulnerable. (Teodoro Dannemann, 2019)
La Pintana District in Santiago, Chile
Louis
Conflict - managing difference when people come together
In terms of the transactions in Foodhall, I think the issue of anything in community is the idea of it being utopic, but also conflicting. No matter what situation you create, there will be explosive creativity and then moments of conflict. Divergence brings about a sentiment of community but then forces people to understand something about themselves - puts up a mirror in front of people. When you bring multiple groups together to exchange in a way the capitalist system doesn't allow you to experience, people have different modes of understanding. That is a luxury actually of the capitalist economy, where we don't experience this - there's no friction or difficulty. The labour exchange is so highly efficient that you don't feel guilt, there is no baggage.
Labour exchange is 'efficient' and there's no room for baggage
Bringing people together to play and then produce lots of different activities
But in economies of community you're unconsciously creating an element of (social) debt.
Creation of networks based on a shared activity
Louis
Political labour is fundamentally unpaid. only those with privilege can afford to engage with that.
One of my key understandings that we need to continuously re-design what we're doing. A continued re-evolution, and architecture traditionally as a methodology does not do this. There is an ongoing process of learning and refining. When you bring people together to do something, they can do all sorts of things. But this creates cliques... People in the kitchen don't always engage with people in the front. We must not simply overcome these frictions but translate them into a different social model.
Ideologies of how we use our cities are defined by our economies
Experimenting with different ways of exchange: timebanks, tokens, pay as you feel
Collective Political Action
Re-appropriation
Conflux Hiearchies and Power Structures
Emerging Themes Marginality
Communities of Interest
Education
Communication
The Personal and the Political
Diana We talked yesterday about the problems of perceived power relations in doing embedded research, and of taking / giving. I thought that Suzanne Hall’s use of the terms resonance, contestation and translation was potentially very useful here as a way of thinking about who is speaking to/with whom, collaborating with whom. This also made me think about the issue of confidence. I know that, for myself, one of the reasons I have found a place doing archival / library research is, quite bluntly, because I’m very shy. Reading and writing becomes an apparently more productive way of communicating than always being ‘out there’. I’m always trying to confront this in myself! Collaborative research can clearly offer all collaborators a way of finding their voice, and sharing it. I wonder if looking at the confidence- finding of all those involved might be worthwhile, wherever they fit in the apparent hierarchies of power.
Resonance, Contestation, Translation
Confidence finding
Evolution: Architecture as a series of transformations
Nomad researcher: viewing projects through story telling
Autonomy: learning through practice = long term process
Why look for other ways of understanding?
Too little attention to why things are done a certain way
The process of Architecture connected to its use
Housing Activism
Political Activism
Tension: to be in or out of the system
Why change perspective?
Fighting reductionism
Architecture as a performance
Relevance of Political and Economical Context in Housing
Development through Activism: to be a part of the state or not?
Our role as researchers, designers, humans
Climate Emergency: -Inequality -Violence -Capitalism -Nature vs Us: Disregard of nature
Sharing information: speaking up
The importance of use of spaces
Community led Housing
Redevelopment vs repair
Spatial practice in the face of climate emergency
What needs to be done? -New languages -New mindsets -Coexistence -Interdependence
Crossing borders in research
Adapting to changing situations
How to write a fair History?
Tactical vs strategic engagement
Complex Environmental Dynamics: Social, Economic, Political
"Design with a future"
Research: Finding a community
Performance as a practice
Cinema space creates community
Autonomy as a creative practice: societies in constant movement
Why embed yourself in organizations?
Responsibility as a guiding principle
Researcher vs designer role
Performance in situ: non invasive interventions
'Precarity'
Organic process of the non invasive intervention
The Principle of "not knowing"
Food hall - "if we see something wrong or missing in the city, we build it."
Imagining (dreaming) New Worlds "Together"
Why is it important to seek ways of doing?
Contesting oppressive structures of power
The importance of individual time pace
Ethical research: our positions shouldn't be exploitative
Stay with trouble and challenge: "Walk hand in hand to those who are fighting"
Blurring the boundaries between the university and the city
Commons and commoning practices
Audienceship can change hierarchies in building sites
Space as a stage "where social life unfolds"
Positioning activism between prefiguration and utopian thinking
The civic university model
Becoming a part of the intervened environment
Performance as world- making
Community-led development of de-financialised homes
The theatre as a container of complementary relationships
The importance of names in Space and Architecture
Language as a political tool to appropriate / disappropriate
The right to the city
Different paces exist in the same locations
Name: the political and historical weight
We do not dream enough
Who controls the use of heritage? Who has ownership of the 'appropriated'?
Being a nomad researcher
University campus as a city itself
People taking over the space
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andreotti, Vanessa. “(re) imagining education as an un-coercive re-arrangement of desires.” Other Education 5, no. 1, 2016. pp79-88. Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge, Mass. ; Oxford U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. Gibson-Graham, J. K. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. New Edition. London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 2008. Hall, Suzanne. City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary. Routledge, 2012. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell, 1991. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage Publications Ltd, 2005. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Anna Dawson Anousheh Kehar Brenda Duggan Bruna Montuori Can Ozerdem Catalina Ionita Chun (Pure) Zheng Cristina Cerulli Diana Lucas-Drogan Dr Suzanne Hall East Street Arts (Leeds) Elif Kaymaz Elin Eyborg Lund Emma Colthurst Fangjie Guo Federica Giardino Foodhall (Sheffield) Goran Vodicka Hala H. Ghanem Hester Buck Honoure Black Ioana Petkova Jamie-Scott Baxter Jon Orlek Juan Usubillaga Julia Udall Lara Anna Scharf Maria McLintock Martina Di Prisco Michal Huss Milena Vasileva Noor Ragaban Prof. Tatjana Schneider
Regather (Sheffield) Sadaaca (Sheffield) Sam Vardy Sarah Ackland Simeon Shtebunaev Stu Hansom Terri-Louise Doyle Thomas Moore Tilo Amhoff, Chair of AHRA Tim Machin Tom Stovold Xavier Haillard Yufei Li Zahira El Nazar Zamira Bushaj
AKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to all the staff, facilitators and AHRA project partners at Sheffield Hallam University for the funding to organise and deliver the AHRA 2021 Symposium.