Cultures and Settlements: Advances in Art and Urban Futures Volume 3 (Intellect Books - Play Text)

Cultures & Settlements

Edited by Malcolm Miles Nicola Kirkham

Cultures and Settlements Advances in Art and Urban Futures Volume 3

Edited by Malcolm Miles and Nicola Kirkham

intellect

TM

BRISTOL, ENGLAND PORTLAND, OR, USA

First Published in 2003 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK First Published in USA in 2003 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA Copyright ©2003 Intellect Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdoni Book and Cover Design: Joshua Beadon – Toucan Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Set in Joanna A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1-84150-089-5

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd., Eastbourne.

Contents Foreword Marion Roberts

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Introduction Malcolm Miles

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Contributors

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Part One – Culture and Policy

Cultural Planning in East London Graeme Evans

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Culture and Commerce – European Culture Cities and Civic Distinction Judith Kapferer

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Low-income Housing and Community Participation in N E Brazil Denise Morado Nascimento

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Birmingham as a Cultural City Tim Hall

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Part Two – Place Identity

A New Script for the Lake District Paul Usherwood

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Candy Coated Chronotope – Spatial Representations of a Seaside Resort Nicola Kirkham

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Consumption and the Post-Industrial City – Nike Town Friedrich von Bories

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University Campus as Ghost City Habil Jan Hartman

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Part Three – Cultural Practices

Border as Dialectic/Alison Marchant Judith Rugg

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Icy Prospects Liz Wells

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Puppet Theatre & Child Rights Cariad Astles

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Lisbon Capital of Nothing Mario Caeiro

133

Southall Project Helen MacKeith

147

The Gift of Water Jackie Brookner

159

Bibliography

171

Foreword The last decade of the twentieth century saw a revision in attitudes towards the city. The views that had characterised urban policy in the early and middle decades of the century were reversed towards a celebration of the traditions of European urbanism. The modernist project, with its programme for wholesale demolition, disdain for historic urban form and over-valuing of the free flow of space in the form of motorways and underpasses, high-rise towers and disconnected urban plazas, became discredited. Instead features of nineteenth-century urbanism were re-evaluated and set out as virtues to be emulated rather than as ills to be cured. High densities, mixed development, streets and squares were reclaimed as essential components of city culture. Anti-urbanism, which had formed such a major paradigm, not only in town planning, but also in other forms of literary and artistic expression, gradually gave way to a fascination with urban intensity and metropolitan culture. The city was cool, fashionable and edgy. The notion of promoting the city as an entity, as a repository for a broader understanding of culture has been feeding into official bureaucracy, into government policy documents, programmes and projects. The European Union's City of Culture project, the Urban Task Force report, the Urban White Paper, the European cities networks, the New Urbanism movement in the USA, are each expressions of a reformulated, contemporary urbanism that seeks to re-found the virtues and values of traditional, continental European cities. The latter years of the twentieth century also saw the end of the binary division between capitalism and the so-called socialism of the former Eastern bloc. In urban terms this cataclysmic change has left the cities of the former East with problems of a decaying infrastructure and vast areas of brownfield sites that housed now redundant industry. Yet the centres of these same cities often still have well-preserved historic cores that have been protected from the ravages of rampant land speculation and the incursion of the motor car. In terms of governance, attempts to combine the virtues of a laissez-faire market economy and a vision of fairness and social justice have provided the stimulus for a growth of 'third way politics' that has dominated the Anglo-Saxon world and mainstream European politics. At the local level this has resulted in a new willingness to experiment with different types of relationships and structures. In particular there has been a desire to incorporate ideas generated from protest movements in the 60s and 70s against modernist urbanism in the form of a 'bottom up' community politics. This new politics has engendered a brave rhetoric of social inclusion, of neighbourhood management, of the virtues of the public realm. The vision is of pedestrian-friendly cities, planned into coherent neighbourhoods clustering around 5

bustling city centres, in an orderly framework of routes, streets and squares, punctuated by spectacular landmark buildings. Civic consciousness and a strong local identity are expressed in built form, through the urban layout and in terms of local customs and cultural activities, food and, of course, the arts. Citizen engagement is welcomed, through the practice of consultation, in all aspects of governance, planning and creative expression.There is a renewed insistence on the importance of the public realm. The public realm is conceived as public space, in a notion of a visual representation of inclusion that can accommodate difference. Public art plays a role in the definition of the public realm, through flagship projects that proclaim the importance of a city in an international hierarchy and through more modest, community based projects that are aimed at integration. In addition, the public realm is imagined in terms of economic regeneration, positing an urban vitality that is based on lively public commerce, visible in the streets. The vision is laudable but fragile. The sheer scale of contemporary economic units threatens to pull it apart. Major transnational companies operate beyond the boundaries of the nation state, with a total turnover that is larger than the GDP of some developing nations. These companies are driven by growth, by a requirement to provide ever-increasing profits for shareholders. Their commitment is to their balance sheet, not to the country in which they choose to locate, let alone the city region. The dynamic of uninterrupted growth seeks to annihilate competitors to form a global market for their goods.The interest of these corporations in identity is not the identity of the consumer but a desire for brand domination. The situation where local producers and businesses operate within their own markets with a commitment to their city region is gradually giving way to a more global, homogenised culture. This homogenisation has a visible impact on the city's streets as global brands jostle for advertising space and global chains dominate retailing activity. Furthermore the raison d'être for a traditional practice of nineteenth-century urbanism has been eroded as cities become centres for consumption rather than production. Tourism and the hospitality industry are now major industries that are encouraged as a replacement for the loss of manufacturing industry. Cultural tourism forms an essential part of any local economic development officer's brief. Again the questions raised are those of identity and authenticity. If a city's culture has to be developed by the local municipality, sponsored by corporations and 'sold' to a world-wide audience, whose culture is it? The extent to which the local populations can have an influence on or draw benefit from investment in artistic activity becomes a key issue. Cities are not, however, in decline. More people are coming to live in cities with an increase that ranges from a marginal growth in the centres of European cities to an explosion in urbanisation in the countries of the developing world. The 'information age' as as many commentators have elucidated, led not a vaporisation of the urban but its re-affirmation. A new global hierarchy of cities is being forged, with the second tier vying to gain a foothold. Cities have taken on a transformed role as information hubs and as centres for an élite business class. As the middle classes return to inner and central neighbourhoods new markets for urban culture are provided. Although gentrification brings in wealth and the refurbishment of the physical fabric of cities, 6

new spaces of exclusion are formed, whether in the shape of the American Business Improvement District, now imported to Britain, or the gated development. Uneven development is on the increase, both in terms of differences between rich and poor within counties and between richer and poorer nations. Many hundreds of thousands of economic migrants are now traversing the globe, desperate to seek a better quality of life.The nation state may have declined in importance but the legacy of past imperialism lives on. An influx of immigrants provides cities with a dynamic edge in economic terms as new small businesses are set up and job vacancies filled, but problems are posed in terms of forging new types of cultural representation. This question appeared to be purely rhetorical until 2001 when the growth of a far-right politics across Europe and the events of 9/11 in the USA have revealed the extent of peoples' fears. In the face of these tensions the role of 'culture', 'settlement' and 'identity' within cities becomes of critical importance.This book is a contribution to a range of debates around such concepts and the complex processes they denote . It comes at a time of intense re-considerations, not least post-September 11th, but also as political agendas are increasingly set outside structures of representation. The complaint that everywhere looks like everywhere else has literally been taken to the streets by the anti-globalization movement. Cultural producers, intermediaries and commentators have some key issues to address. Does identity accrue to the city, to the neighbourhood within it, or to its various populations? Does 'identity' suggest 'identical', is there a uniformity between or across places or people, or is identity to be cherished as that which is unique? What role can the state, business and enterprise play in the formation of identity? Citizen engagement has often been suggested as a method for producing an identity based both on place and population, uncorrupted by commercial gain, but how is this to be done when it is not part of a protest movement? How can different groups within the population, with uneven access to resources and power, be fairly represented in a public culture? How relevant is the city when real power resides somewhere else? These questions cannot be easily answered but a text that investigates current practices, with a clear perspective on the broader picture, is to be welcomed.The value of this set of essays is that they move beyond the prescriptions of the 1990's that, as has been suggested, had a tendency towards nostalgia and idealism. This book unflinchingly explores the challenges and possibilities that contemporary urban culture faces, from the level of the individual work to a responsive urban infrastructure. Marion Roberts University of Westminster,2002

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Cultures and Settlements

Introduction The theme of this collection, originated by the City Cultures Research Unit at the University of Plymouth, is the mutual relation between cultures and patterns of settlement. The term culture is used here in both the narrow sense of cultural production, as in the arts, and in the broader, anthropological sense to describe the countless everyday expressions of value and response to circumstances which collectively become a way of life. From the anthropological definition, it could seem that nothing is excluded from culture – and in a way that is the case – but the point is that people in different circumstances have different cultures, and the differences which emerge make cultural analysis an interesting process. A further concern, for this collection, is how the fields implied by culture’s two definitions interact. How, for instance, do artists use their specialist skills to lend visibility to the events and traces of everyday life which state the culture of a particular social group? Or, to what extent is that broader culture recognized by policy makers and planners as having an intricacy and depth equivalent to the (for them) more familiar field of the arts? How, since they are always contested, are cultural identities reconstructed, by whom and for whom? Those are the kinds of question which run through the collection, approached in different ways by contributors drawn from backgrounds in both academic research – in architecture, cultural policy, cultural geography, cultural studies, and sociology - and arts practice. A majority of the chapters are revisions of papers given at seminars and conferences, some organised by the University of Plymouth (one of which was held at the University of Westminster, supported by the Landscape Research Group and British Sociological Association), and others at the University of Barcelona and at the Bauhaus University,Weimar. Other chapters were written specially for the book. It is hoped the book will contribute to current debates on cities, at a time when cultural work is beginning to be seen by planners and policy makers as relevant to urban futures, but when, also, some of the implications of such work require further investigation. Marion Roberts, for example, notes, in her Foreword, that culture is increasingly co-opted to the planning agenda, while government rhetoric includes notions of social inclusion which may be addressed through various kinds of cultural work. But she sees, too, the fragility of some of the visions engendered, and argues that conflicts brought about by new forms of economic and social exclusion will be more effectively faced when cultural diversity is better understood. Part One brings together four texts on cultural policy. As Graeme Evans demonstrates, programmes for urban renewal are not always aligned with the cultures of the areas affected, and produce a new kind of urban edge between zones of in-coming gentrification and areas of neglect. Judith Kapferer, from a perspective more based in city marketing, examines three cases of European Cultural Cities. Here, everyday consumption – as of local cooking – is part of the city’s national and international promotion in a race for inward investment, but tends 9

to the officially sanctioned rather than the grass roots: cuisine rather than food. Denise Morado Nascimento, in Brazil, questions the housing policies of states which ignore the role of nonprivileged dwellers in the construction of settlements, looking to the favela (informal settlement) as a more sustainable form. Finally in this part, Tim Hall reviews writing on public art as a vehicle of civic identity, taking the case of Birmingham. He observes that monuments can be reappropriated,though more conventional readings usually dominate. Part Two considers place-identity, in various relations to consumption. Paul Usherwood argues that the English Lake District - long a preserve of walkers, and in the of past poets and cultural commentators earning their place to speak by arduous physical exercise – is now subject of a new script of consumption, in which finding the self is what is being consumed and marketed. Nicola Kirkham, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, interrogates Blackpool’s image as a seaside resort for different social classes. This is accomplished via analysis of the film Funny Bones, in which the worlds of Blackpool and Las Vegas are superimposed in the life of a small-time cabaret agent. Friedrich von Borries, in Berlin, reconsiders the place-construction, as niche marketing, of a global corporation. Using the lowest-key techniques, Nike invents a culture appropriating street-level expression. The marginal spaces of neighbourhood sports then become equivalents of prime advertising sites, and locations of globalized consumption.This exemplifies one of the claims made by Sharon Zukin in The Cultures of Cities (1995), that potential resistance is translated into the demand for jeans (or, here, trainers). Jan Hartman, finally, looks at the equally (but different) artificial town of the University campus – a neglected settlement type in a literature read largely by academics – which he sees as a ghost town, lacking the elements of sociation found in settlements of multi-functional use. Part Three includes two commentaries on cases of visual culture, and four accounts by artists of their work. Judith Rugg critiques Alison Marchant’s projects Close to Home and Kingsland Road London – East, which transpose the domestic into public space, and the invisible into a realm of visibility. The outcome is a contestation of boundaries, and a sense that space is not only reproduced but also otherwise produced. Liz Wells is concerned with wilderness as a realm of imagination and belonging. She describes recent photographic works in Lapland, asking how artists from elsewhere might work with local cultures which are either marginalized, or buried now in archives. Cariad Astles writes about her experiences using puppetry in the participatory way of Forum Theatre, in Spain and Mali. Working with children, she initiated dialogues on children’s rights, noticing different kinds of response in the two countries. Mario Caeiro describes the project Capital do nada, a participatory intervention in Marvila, a social housing zone between the historic centre of Lisbon and the 1998 Expo site. Conditions there could be compared with those alluded to by Denise Morado, and the interventions made by artists draw attention to this (hitherto) white space on the map. Helen MacKeith documents a project undertaken for a local authority in a multi-ethnic area of west London. She is critical of the ability of the authority to see the project through, and wonders whether art may still, for some, be a convenient avoidance of responses which demand more complex and long-term understandings. Finally, a personal reflection by sculptor Jackie Brookner, whose studio in New York’s SoHo once had a view of the Twin Towers. Beginning with an account of making a work in Germany, she ponders mortality, and the artificiality of some of the boundaries, as between the insides and outsides of bodies, which are the props of civilization. 10

Contributors Cariad Astles is a puppeteer. She teaches in the theatre performance area, school of arts and humanities, University of Plymouth. Friedrich von Bories is an architect and co-founder of rude architecture, an urban research and experimental design studio. He teaches in the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University, Berlin. Jackie Brookner is an ecological artist who collaborates internationally with ecologists and earth scientists on water remediation/public art projects and teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York and Harvard University. Mario Caeiro is an Urban Designer and cultural activist. He is president of Extramuros Associação Cultural para Cidade (Cultural Association for the City) and founder of água forte, a small press in Lisbon. Professor Graeme Evans is Head of Research at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design at the London Institute, and author of 'Cultural Planning: An Urban Renaissance?', published by Routledge. Tim Hall is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Gloucestershire. He is author of Urban Geography and has edited The Entrepreneurial City, The City Cultures Reader and Urban Futures: Critical Commentaries on Shaping the City. Habil Jan Hartman is a Teaching Professor in the dept. of Philosophy and Bioethics at Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Judith Kapferer is a professor in Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Nicola Kirkham is a Ph.D. student and research assistant in the City Cultures Research Unit, University of Plymouth. Helen MacKeith is an artist based in London and co-founder of Fuller MacKeith Public Art & Design Partnership. Malcolm Miles is Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, UK.

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Denise Morado Nascimento is a Ph.D. student at the Universidade Federal of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She teaches at the School of Architecture, Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Brazil. Marion Roberts is subject-leader for urban design at the University of Westminster. Judith Rugg is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Contextual Practice in the School of Art and Design, University of Plymouth. Paul Usherwood is an art critic and historian teaching at Northumbria University. He has published widely in tne fields of nineteenth-century British art and contemporary art. Liz Wells is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts, University of Plymouth, UK and has published widely on photography within Visual Culture.

Part One

Culture and Policy

Graeme Evans

Cultural Planning in East London The city does not tell its past,but contains it like the lines of a hand Italo Calvino Invisible Cities, 1979 (p13) In volume one of this series, Sally Morgan contrasts two Bristol characters - Protestant dissenter Sir William Wills, aka Baron Winterstoke of Blagdon, and tagger-graffiti artist ‘Lewis the True Baron’ (2000). Divided by a century, and at opposite ends of the socioeconomic scale, both changed the urban landscape, illustrating how resistance to an urban order takes multiple forms: Baron Blagdon commissioned a statue of the radical Whig MP Edmund Burke for a prominent public space in the city, much to the affront of the Bristolian social elite. In the 1990s, graffiti by ‘Lewis the True Baron’ disrupted the city’s iconic landscape. Both engage with the memories and meanings of place. This chapter extends the theme of contested memory and meaning in urban landscapes by examining cases of cultures related to patterns of settlement in east London – a set of neighbourhoods with complex social histories, recently subject to programmes of renewal and regeneration. Urban renewal and regeneration implies not only a given urban order but also an ‘improvement’ on it, though this may misjudge or misplace local meanings and attachments to community and place to create the preconditions for resistance.The contemporary pattern of settlement in East London is fluid; actively transnational communities live alongside refugee populations and entrenched indigenous groups. These communities sometimes collide but more often than not slide past one another to create a collective urban landscape in which the imprint of regeneration has become dominant and where signs of resistance bubble under the surface. Urban settlement

The act of settling has material and cultural dimensions, whether in a locality or within a community based on shared interest, social class, ethnic identity, or lifestyle. The acquisition of material goods is paralleled by the absorption of social norms and values. Each place or group devises its own means of belonging and the processes of becoming settled in a place or social group (or both) creates cultural complexities. Movement from countryside to the city, within and between cities has been overlain by migration between nations. The term ‘settler’ also has connotations of colonisation, or of acts of economic and geo-political encroachment. In today's cities, the socioeconomic factors that lead certain social or ethnic groups to live in spatial proximity also leads to the growth of residential and social segregation when areas are identified with particular groups (Marcuse, 2002). Processes of settlement in inner city and 15

suburban zones have recently regained the interest of cultural geographers, urban designers and sociologists (Crang, 1998; Jordan-Bychov, 1999), as well as policy professionals. In Sennett’s view, the physical grouping by social and ethnic quartier creates ‘empathy for a select group of people allied with rejection of those not within the local circle…creat(ing) demands for autonomy from the outside world, for being left alone by it rather than demanding that the outside world itself change. The more intimate however, the less sociable’ (Sennett, 1986: 266). Settlement in the past inferred a new residential location, particularly of a previously vacant area of land, though in practice vacancy was either enforced or imposed by colonisation, statesponsorship, or gentrification. In some cities, such as London, gentrification is now the prime agent of social and spatial change, replacing both incremental population movements and the extremes of late nineteenth and mid twentieth-century interventionist planning and urban redevelopment. Industrial change and structural employment shifts combined with modernisation programmes, particularly road building, are therefore the other major contributors to the changing physical and social profile of urban settlement in advanced economies. Cities at any historical moment represent the accumulated cultural and physical layers of settlement – in poorer neighbourhoods this history is often recorded through successive waves of inward and outward migration, leaving its mark on the built environment. Buildings and their uses change – from methodist hall to mosque, bagel shop to balti house (Evans, 2001). Local population change reflects inter-regional, familial, inter-generational ties, the ebb and flow of employment, transnational demographic shifts and property development over time. Market demand and macroeconomic factors are important influences on patterns of intra-urban settlement as are the constraints and opportunities created by heritage planning, conservation practice, planning policy and transport infrastructure development (Evans & Shaw, 2001). All of these factors, alone or in combination, influence the attractiveness or otherwise of a neighbourhood. Despite the nostalgia of the urban village, to ring-fence a locality is often an abstract, administrative or marketing device used to inscribe a specific identity (of a ward, borough or parish) for political or cultural/tourism ends. Such boundaries identify areas for intervention through public investment programmes such as regeneration initiatives, but seldom reflect a meaningful social or cultural identity. Nonetheless settlements that have been created over time through successive rounds of migration and patterns of investment and dis-investment possess complex senses of place (Massey, 1994a) encapsulated in memories of social relations, activities, landmarks and spaces of collective participation (Keith & Pile, 1993; Cohen, 2002). This urban complexity and historical layering distinguishes the settlement of inner city areas from suburban and outer metropolitan developments. Suburban expansion, outer metropolitan development and new towns have culminated in Edge City development expanding the city horizon through greenfield and planned urbanisation. This kind of settlement more neatly (some would say, too neatly) fits into the town planners' map of what the city ought to be - differentiated by function and traditional hierarchies of ‘need’. These greenfield sites and new town settlements allowed the utopian masterplanners to play out their experiments in spatial form and urban design 16 Evans

which the old industrial cities had largely frustrated. As Jencks observed: ‘masterplans were drawn up with the city parts neatly split up into functional categories marked working, living, recreation, circulation…inevitably these mechanistic models did not work; their separation of functions was too coarse and their geometry too crude to aid the fine-grained growth and decline of urban tissue. The pulsations of a living city could not be captured by the machine model’ (1996: 26). Edge Cities can be interpreted as offering ‘monocultural’ consumption based living, as well as the appeal of gated, safe havens, leaving behind the city’s residual, less-mobile communities in near ghetto neighbourhoods. The focus of this chapter is on an area of inner-city settlement marked by the density and mobility of its population over several hundred years, which has experienced most forms of post-war intervention in its physical and social fabric redevelopment, renewal and regeneration. Stepney is in the urban core of London, sited on the fringe of the City. Its social and physical landscape today bares the imprint of many different social settlements – Huguenots, Jews, Bangladeshis, Somalis. It is overlain by a landscape of regeneration and is currently touched by the edging in of new landscapes of gentrification – commercial and residential. Stepney played host to continuous immigration in pre-industrial and especially in late-industrial eras, areas identified as multicultural workshops – from sweatshop to workspace – housing the highest proportions of minority ethnic communities in London and the country as a whole.The tendency for working-class communities to live close to where they worked meant that when Jewish immigrants settled in these low-cost working areas, property rents in neighbourhoods such as Stepney went up in the 1890s by 25% (10% for London as a whole). Stepney was the neighbourhood with the highest concentration of Jewish migrants, with declining housing quality and overcrowding (Feldman, 1989) which went against the trend in other inner urban areas at the time. A Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1889 found general agreement that pauper immigration is an evil and should be checked, while Charles Booth (social reformer and the author of Life and Labour of the People of London, 1902) contrasted the East End worker’s situation to that of the recent Jewish immigrant: ‘He [the worker] is met and vanquished by the Jews fresh from Poland or Russia, accustomed to a lower standard of life; less skilled but in a way more fit, pliant, adaptable, adroit’ (1904). Today, the presence of cheaper housing means that districts like Stepney continue to receive new immigrants and refugees alongside established settlers. However, Stepney's location close to the City of London, coupled with the reversal of deurbanisation in the 1990s, contributes to new pressures which have increased local land values as inner city dwelling becomes attractive again amongst the professional classes (Robson & Butler, 2001). Acceptance of past representations in the built as well as social urban landscape supports a sense of diversity. Marx distinguished between the concept of heritage which he saw as encompassing all historic and style periods and social formations and tradition which is an aspect of the former. Usually, social and physical heritage and urban memory are contested in interpretation so that:‘the wealth of ideas consolidated in the public mind,…requires a choice, acceptance and interpretation of the heritage from the point of view of certain classes, social layers and groups’ (Andra, 1987: 156). Cultural Planning in East London 17

A social class standpoint creates a loaded interpretation of local culture and urban settlement, particularly when notions of heritage and tradition are blurred (or purified) and public and private agencies label areas for city imaging and marketing according to heritage, ethnic or cultural stereotypes – as in Banglatown (Tower Hamlets), Curry Triangle (Birmingham), Little Vietnam (Hackney) and ubiquitous Chinatowns. Labelling and placemarketing may, however, be divisive, and bears little relationship to settlement histories which created enclaves of mutuality such as Little Italy (Clerkenwell, London) and Little Germany (Bradford). Urban regeneration

Despite the attention devoted to inner urban areas in decline, in some localities there is a persistent failure of past and present efforts at social and economic improvement. Partly this is the inability of intervention to change the lifeworlds and opportunities of local residents, partly it is a consequence of the inherently unequal economic structure of cities. In these circumstances poverty thrives. However, some of this failure emerges from a cultural mismatch between the goals of redevelopment, renewal or regeneration, and local aspirations and capacities. In areas like Stepney this has been heightened by urban regeneration regimes, public and private, which overemphasise physical re-development and generic employment training, while minimising social and cultural development. It is particularly evident when property-led initiatives focus on flagship projects with income generating and visitor economy potential but little local regenerative power. Recent regeneration initiatives that draw upon the 'creative' and 'rich-mix' assets of multicultural neighbourhoods are also proving divisive. It has been claimed that multicultural communities provide a vibrant backdrop, encouraging the self-motivating and innovative enterprise that underpins the regenerating possibilities of the 'creative city' (Worpole & Greenhalgh, 1999; Sassen & Roost, 1999).This multicultural urbanism represents a positive manifestation of cultural diversity and serves as the infrastructure of 'cultural quarters' in which retail and restaurant consumption, events/festivals and visitor destinations thrive. Yet multicultural neighbourhoods also carry a legacy of uncertainty. Indeed Lord Rogers, who chaired the government’s Urban Task Force, emotively labels whole swathes of inner London as a 'powder keg'. This presents a paradox of neighbourhoods with a high concentration of ethnic minority communities and high indicators of deprivation, in close proximity to sites of conspicuous cultural consumption. Whilst providing experimental playgrounds for cosmopolitan urban culture they are also sites of urban stress. Both Rogers and other advocates of the 'creative city' (Landry, 2000; Hall, 1998) propose interventions based on forms of colonising settlement – such as the 'reclamation' of brown field sites, canalsides, and local markets which facilitate gentrification by appropriating space for new urbane experiences based primarily on consumption. These strategies do little to alleviate unemployment and urban distress, which are peripheralized. However, alleviating this distress is firmly rooted in another form of East End settlement.This history of intervention is an established part of the urban memory and 18 Evans

landscape of the inner city. In this context the term settlement was used to mean a group of social reformers from a college or other institution who established themselves in a poor or crowded urban district to provide education and recreation for local inhabitants. These groups, earlier identified with the rational recreation and temperance movements of the Victorian period (Quakers and Methodists), pre-dated municipal provision of recreational and cultural amenities such as libraries, parks, swimming baths and wash-houses. They represent an important element in the local cultural landscape, still evident today in community centres, schools, colleges, working men’s associations, crafts guilds, museums and arts centres. Some are still identified with and endowed by their original foundations (East End Mission, Oxford House, Oval House, Toynbee Hall), others have been absorbed into mainstream institutions (colleges/universities, local councils), such as the East End’s own short-lived People’s Palace (Evans & Foord, 2002; Weiner, 1989). The legacy of the cultural and social institutions and the activism of settlement volunteers form a crucial part of the story of the East End. It also marks the emergence of a new form of governmentality that prioritised improving self-governance (Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991). Over the past century this form of governmentality has influenced local movements to clean up music halls and pleasure gardens, ‘convert’ Jewish migrants to Christianity and 'integrate' Bangladeshi communities into post-industrial urban society. Social Exclusion

Multi-cultural Britain, in its industrial cities, is stereotyped by academics (Power, 2001), politicians and the media alike by high rates of unemployment, poor health and housing, a perceived lack of social cohesion and the occupation of some of the environmentally poorer areas of their former industrial quarters. Layers of established and recent migrant communities often co-exist, exacerbating strains on public facilities and amenities and perpetuating the image of such areas as dependent upon government programmes. Indeed the extent of deprivation and de-generation is a prerequisite for eligibility for national and European structural intervention programmes where public funding is based on a ‘basket’ of deprivation indicators. In public policy articulated though urban, social, as well as cultural manifestos, today concern for the socially excluded, or rather, concern for the costs - direct and ‘opportunity’ - borne by the included, can also be conceptualised as the search for a more positive embrace of cosmopolitanism. This classical term has shifted in meaning since its representation of empire and city-state and therefore of military then trade-based expansion. Sennett (1986) identifies the cosmopolitan with the rising bourgeoisie and construction of public space in the eighteenth century, and with coffee-house society (see also Burgers, 1995: 151). The term became perjorative in the nineteenth century, as anti-nationalistic (Hobsbawm, 1990), and again today in the context of the recent rise of far right, anti-immigration movements in Europe. A cosmopolitan perspective in our contemporary context looks beyond the more limited and divisive notions of metropolitanism and even multiculturalism, and their association with an eclectic cultural goods market and celebration of the global village, Cultural Planning in East London

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which in their different ways overemphasise consumption rather than production or the social market. The idea of cultural cosmopolitanism is identified with Iris Marion Young’s notion of radical community and unassimilated otherness (1990, 2000b). Community in her view is a ‘radical Agora’ (see also Sennett, 1998b). Pratt, taking Young’s position, raises the question of decoupling culture and cohesion where cohesion can in fact be damaging to culture when used instrumentally in urban policy (see Foord, 1999; Evans & Foord, 2000): “exactly whose and what culture(s) are being sustained? Thus culture is not a priori more or less inclusive” (Pratt, 2001). This is evident in our case study, below, of a borough-wide cultural strategy for Tower Hamlets based on creative city principles (Landry, 2000), focusing almost exclusively on creative industries and related retail, hospitality and visitor attractions and street markets in the west of this East London borough. The residential multicultural neighbourhoods were largely neglected by this market-led approach, with social programmes which promoted training in new media and patronising capacity building, but which ignored the local meaning and memory of place as well as the cultural knowledges, aspirations and skills of local residents. Culture in its different forms - market and community - were both commodified and constrained, with neither social cohesion nor cultural development achieved. The multiculturalism-pluralism: assimilation-diversity debate therefore arises in relation to social exclusion and public policy responses where there is a high coincidence of unemployment, welfare benefit/service dependency and multiple factors of deprivation in so-called multicultural neighbourhoods.This has the affect of targeting these groups as a problem, thus homogenising them. The political reality of multiculturalism and the utopian ideal of non-hierarchical pluralist society are rejected by post-colonial writers such as Homi Bhabha: ‘Multiculturalism that is practised in most Western societies is at best only partial. Although there is always an entertainment and endorsement of cultural diversity, there is always also a corresponding containment of it’ (1990: 208). Moreover, research into the impacts of migrant settlement in urban areas is generally lacking a longitudinal framework or ethnographic approach beyond basic indicators such as language spoken, housing and employment occupation. Since housing is a fundamental component of settlement and local character, migrant and settler housing occupation is a prime concern of urban regeneration programmes and environmental improvement, and may be a source of tensions. It is, however, the prime interest of the private sector, including both individuals and housing developers. With social housing the norm (for social read rented-public, as opposed to owner-occupied or private-rented property), owner occupation is a key indicator of wealth and settlement, and of social ownership in an area. Where gentrification and private housing development is focussed on social housing neighbourhoods, and where incumbent poorer groups are unable to afford a first time house purchase in an upward market, the potential for conflict arises and social divides are accentuated.This also manifests itself in the landscape and the associated amenities and cultural life of the area. 20 Evans

The degree of social disorganisation associated with complex ‘normless’ societies (Durkheim, 1893) points to the breakdown of social structures where housing deteriorates and no longer provides adequate or appropriate shelter. Residents of these ‘slum’ areas, according to the classical theory of the Chicago School, are insufficiently educated and trained, have poor health, and are therefore more likely to be un- or under-employed and impoverished.Where social structures fail, new housing, schools, and facilities are built, creating an environment where social organisations again carry out their designated functions, and social equilibrium (if that ever really existed) can be restored. This is the urban regeneration philosophy, allied to simplistic economic multiplier and trickle down effects. Attracting the middle classes - or childless singles/couples (Robson & Butler, 2001) - to such areas, and dispersing new and established migrant groups elsewhere, would fulfil this programme. But social conflict theorists present another perspective, rejecting the assumption that the problem lies in spatial and social structures to argue that these underlying structures and institutions themselves need to be changed. Simmel (1955) and Coser (1956) suggest that social conflict serves to strengthen group boundaries through competition, which may increase cohesiveness and clarify group goals and ideologies and even perpetuate important values and cultural beliefs (Driedger, 1991). Stepney: Settlement and Culture

The particular focus of our study is the Tower Hamlets district of Stepney and adjoining neighbourhoods, which have experienced differing levels and treatment of both cultural development and urban regeneration over the last decade. Development in the East End has been uneven, creating pockets of over-development (Isle of Dogs/Canary Wharf, Spitalfields, Hoxton) beside residual ‘bleak’ areas such as Stepney and Bow, resulting in an east-west divide mirroring that of the city as a whole. In part due to it being passed over in successive economic and cultural regeneration programmes, Stepney has been the subject of micro-level investigation of cultural activity and provision, as well as wider regeneration and site-based development through policy and strategic analysis (Evans & Foord, 2002; Evans & Foord et al., 1999; Keith, 1995; Eade, 1997). This locale was described only a few years ago, mid-regeneration, as bleak, empty and non-aspirational - an absence of life and culture.Yet, as we describe above, this and other East End neighbourhoods continue to be some of the most densely occupied in the city. A lack of life and activity seems at odds with this and suggests that much activity is hidden, or not public. This includes the regeneration activity itself - house building, environmental improvements, training, indoor social activities and activity, especially youth work. Certainly some exchange and activity is private, whether home-based, in mosque or church, at women-only meetings, mother and children’s groups, and in trade. However, one might expect that diversity and density would produce a more lively feeling to a day-visitor’s eye. Visibility and activity levels are also functions of housing type and occupation; the proximity to services, social and cultural exchange; and in urban areas in particular, incidence of street crime and perceptions of safety. Stepney housing is characterised by Cultural Planning in East London 21

mid-rise council blocks, older terraced houses, flats with retail shops on the ground floor, with new two- and three-storey housing being built on small vacant sites and the conversion of industrial buildings for apartments and lofts (see photo below). Over fifty years before the latest round of regeneration, the County of London Plan (Abercrombie & Forshaw, 1943) proposed a building programme consisting mainly of flats rather than houses, in order to cope with population density and growth. Stepney’s inhabitants were disinclined to accept this ‘plan’ (undertaking their own survey of people’s wishes and needs which included bungalows). Despite this, the Plan was largely put into effect. Large parts of the East End were demolished with the building of council blocks. Over 40% of the population were moved out of the area to new towns in the surrounding counties, a wholesale application of governmentality which determined much of the landscape of the area today. As Wilson commented, “nineteenth-century planning reports, government papers and journalism created an interpretation of urban experience as a new version of Hell…an organised campaign to exclude women and children, along with other disruptive elements, the working class, poor, and minorities - from this infernal urban space altogether” (Wilson, 1991: 108). In her opinion “there was a whiff of authoritarianism about his solution” (1991: 14), which the Plan confirms: Obsolescence, overcrowding, insanitary conditions, lack of open spaces, inadequate road systems, require a high degree of reconstruction in conformity with modern accepted standards. Comprehensive re-planning schemes have become essential as a means of ensuring satisfactory living and working conditions,and economy and cost (Abercrombie & Forshaw, 1943 in Archer, 2001). However, many of these environmental factors persist today. Despite the location of a large linear park at one end of the neighbourhood (Mile End, below), local usage is low, especially low amongst the Asian population, including children and women.This neighbourhood is also divided by local roads which serve as rat runs cutting between two major commercial roads linking east London/docks with the City/central London. Community facilities such as junior and secondary schools, youth and community centres, are isolated in islands cut-off by uncontrolled traffic, making it unsafe for children and the less agile to move from place to place. Evidence on children’s play for instance (Gehl, 2001) confirms that the preference is for congregation on access streets in front of houses, particularly for under-7s (who would not be allowed to travel to parks etc.). In the UK, 20% of rush-hour traffic is now attributed to the school run, with only 7% of 5- to 10-year-olds going to school by bus or coach, whilst traffic accidents are the highest cause of death for 12- to 16-year-olds. Recreational use of designated urban parks has conversely been in terminal decline (Evans & Worpole, 2000; Comedia, 1995) with a lack of maintenance, on-site management the main causes. Safety within parks is therefore also an issue, and with Black and Asian group usage of parks and open spaces far less than ‘white’ (Evans & Bohrer, 2000; Burgess et al., 1988), together these factors compound the lack of ‘street life’ and visible childsplay in such urban neighbourhoods. 22 Evans

Despite all this, Stepney has been undergoing regeneration and related development for the past 5 years under the government’s competitive Single Regeneration Budget (SRB). Regeneration programmes through the SRB, as in Stepney’s case, rest on a publicprivate partnership as condition of public investment. Many interventions are smallscale, or build on existing cultural and social provision. Others have a greater physical impact, if not necessarily a cultural impact or acceptance by residents. The profile of residents itself has started to change as gentrification is assisted by environmental improvements and new (private) housing development. The place of artists and intermediaries - working in the community and as entrepreneurs - has also been affected by the process. The historic landscape of Stepney representing the layers of settlement discussed above, is long established, reflecting its role on the city fringe as the source of labour for dockyard and sweatshop alike.The local ‘All Saints’ church, St Dunstan’s, located in the centre of Stepney, was known nearly a millennium ago as the Church of the High Seas, with men serving on ships for trade, exploration, emigration and other naval exploits. What the church founders had not forseen was that the same high seas would serve to bring successive new migrants to the area, supporting synagogue, mosque and a diminishing congregation of Christian worshippers. Change - social, physical and symbolic - takes place over time, incrementally, and can only really be judged long term, longer than public programmes allow (and as is argued, at least a generation should be allowed before the ‘success’ of such programmes can be measured). A range of sites and places where community and economic activity occurs in Stepney are therefore presented here, and described in terms of the layers of settlement and history they represent - a deeper representation than either the ‘bleak’ or ‘bijou’ tags which are applied by outsiders today. Photo one: Dame Colet House - Settlement Movement: Continuity and Change

Dame Colet House is a longstanding community advice and support facility deriving from the Settlement Movement. The building stands on Ben Jonson Road, the central street cutting through the residential area of central Stepney. A purpose-built community and housing facility it is a well-known and familiar landmark of local life, with particular significance for the Bengali community and, to a lesser extent, older white residents who use its resources. Spaces within the building have been adapted for gender-segregated activities (crafts, small-scale trade/exchange) while the lobby serves as a safe and sheltered public space where local people meet. There are tensions over the ownership of this space and the meanings attached to it. As it has become increasingly associated with one section of the Bengali community, other ethnic groups and potential users have begun to distance themselves from the facility and its services. Much of the work of Dame Colet House is undertaken by a small number of paid workers and, in the tradition of the Settlement Movement, their work is enhanced by the voluntary services of outside professionals and local community activists. The project's original aims were to support women and children living in poverty through practical help, education and health advice.This work continues today although a legal and benefits advice service is of equal importance. Cultural Planning in East London 23

Photo 1 Dame Colet House – Settlement Movement

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Photo 2 ACME Studios/Matts Gallery (left); Private Apartment Conversion overlooking Mile End Park

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Photo 2: Gentrification as Settlement – ACME Studios/Matts Gallery (left); Private Apartment Conversion overlooking Mile End Park

The colonisation of vacant space by artists and creative activities has a long history in abandoned inner-city locations. The role of developers in capitalising on this 'pioneering' process to promote gentrification is also commonplace in Europe and North America. On the edge of Stepney, along Copperfield Road the process is beginning. Copperfield Road overlooks the canal on one side and Mile End Park on the other and so has two of the most desirable aspects of brownfield reclamation in close proximity: water and green open space. The artists are housed in one key site, a converted five-storey warehouse space. ACME, working as a charitable organisation, converts disused industrial and warehouse space into studio spaces and housing for practising artists. A similar building, nearer Mile End Road, has been converted into private apartments for sale by a private developer. Once ACME converts a building it retains control of the lettings policy and manages the facilities for use solely as working space for visual artists, thus guarding against encroachment by commercial activities. ACME's Copperfield Road site is the organisation's flagship property. It houses 53 individual studios, the organisation's offices and houses Matt's Gallery, an internationally respected contemporary art exhibition space. Matt’s Gallery opened in 1979 and moved to this building in 1992. Never just a space for showing art, each show was ‘the outcome of a collaborative project between the director and an artist responding to the opportunities by the space itself’ (Archer, 2001: 7). However, the specific location of these facilities in Stepney is incidental: Stepney is only a backdrop to the activities of ACME and the building's users. The everyday world of Copperfield Road is miles away of those of the residents of central Stepney. There is little or no interaction with local residents and no intention to encourage association. The users and audiences for ACME studios and Matt's Gallery are drawn from a self-contained art world, although it is claimed: ‘Due to their longevity [they] now stand as established orientation points in the artistic history of the area’ (Archer, 2001: 9). Stepney's gritty urban landscape represents cheap rents and a fiercely protected privacy in which work can be undertaken beyond the public gaze. For local residents Copperfield Road is a no-man's-land, a barrier between their own spaces and those of the park beyond. In contrast, the Ragged School Museum is a local museum housing artefacts of school provision for poor children in the 19th century, in an original building. It captures the philanthropic history of education and enlivens the experience for school parties and visitors through re-enacted classroom activities.The museum and the charitable trust that runs it emerged out of a three-year campaign to save the buildings on Copperfield Road as a key site of local heritage. Those involved in the campaign, and who staff the museum on a voluntary basis, are drawn from a pool of ex-Stepney residents - mainly white retired men and women who now live elsewhere in London and the southeast - for whom the museum building and its activities represent an iconic symbol of Stepney's past. This representation of poor but noble Stepney sits alongside local children's attachment to the museum as a holiday play space - arts and children's activities are run during school holidays with the expressed intention of teaching children to make good use of their 26 Evans

leisure time, like that of the Settlement Movement. For the children though, the museum is just a place they might go for an hour or two to relieve the holiday boredom. Sited on the corner of Copperfield Road it is just within psychological reach. Photo 3: Stepney ‘High Street’ and City Farm

The local high street is most often associated with the main shopping thouroughfare serving a town or urban village. In Stepney the high street no longer serves this purpose, in effect a non-descript and non-functional road dividing two open spaces, turning off the main spine road where the local shops and facilities (schools, community centre) are located. One green space hosts St Dunstan’s Church/Yard, a historic and peaceful haven; on the other side is a city farm, hosting varieties of pigs, goats, sheep and horses. City farms became established in British cities from the late1970s in response to the need for inner city children to experience a living farm, have contact with animals and basic agriculture, and bring the countryside into the urban core. Inner London supports several city farms, now federated by a national organisation (NFCF, Bristol). Some focus on allotments (and work with the elderly, disabled groups), others on animal husbandry, or riding, and some on small-scale production (e.g. honey, yoghurt). The farm serves as meeting point and informal visitor centre for the (predominantly white) local community, particularly children and young families. A redundant former gasworks site is a reminder of London’s industrial past and former energy system. Rusting gas containers dot the skyline in many urban areas, their removal hampered by the prohibitive cost of site clearance and soil cleaning. Some have been the subject of conservation. In Stepney this eyesore is also testament to the limitation of the regeneration process and lack of community ownership of any development master plan for the neighbourhood. Lying opposite the local junior school, the site depresses the landscape and aspirations of local residents who feel helpless in the face of landowner inaction (‘hope value’ - sitting it out until the market/highest bidder emerges) and planning blight. The landowner, a former public utility company privatised as British Gas, owns numerous sites including prime locations (more prime than in Stepney) across London and other cities. The Millennium Dome site at Greenwich Peninsula netted this company over £300m for land which was until then un-saleable. Photo 4: Mile End Park: new landscaping and in the distance Stepney's Gas Holders (redundant site)

When Abercrombie developed his Greater London Plan as part of the post-War reconstruction of the city (1944), he envisaged ‘green lungs’ linking town and country (or rather city and suburbs). Existing open spaces in dense urban areas were to be extended, forming green chains by which urban dwellers could access the lower density suburbia and green belt. None of these green lungs were successfully extended (e.g. Burgess Park, Southwark), whilst new town and suburban/outer London developments were seen as the solution to urban overpopulation, evident in London’s sprawl today. In fact encroachment on existing green spaces, open land long established Cultural Planning in East London

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Photo 3 Stepney ‘High Street’ and City Farm

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Photo 4 Mile End Park: new landscaping and in the distance Stepney's Gas Holders

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for communal usage (for grazing and fairs), has been the norm for over fifty years. Linear parks linking east/north east London with the home counties have struggled to develop a role. In Stepney, Mile End Park - one of Abercrombie’s green lungs, has belatedly been the subject of an environmental makeover and has been branded once again as the people’s park and as a radical park for the twenty-first century.The rhetoric is of inclusion. However, the meaning of the park has to be recreated for local people. Their memory, prior to redevelopment, is of a resource that was not for them. In the 1990s it had become a no-go area after dark, and for dog walking and anti-social activities by day.The park sat beyond the barrier of Copperfield Road with few reasons for young and old to venture beyond the residential streets. In the regenerated park, peaceful plantings, waterfalls and facilities for sport and formal recreation have been included (the park hosts a stadium, dedicated pitches and jogging ‘trim’ trails), with new landscaping producing an Xtreme Sports area and a franchised go-karting track (Hare, 2001). No multicultural references to residents are paid in the use of architects employed to create a Green Bridge (Piers Gough) and sterile Eco-Park. Research into Asian women’s groups for instance found that they enjoyed memories of open space in their native country and had a real desire to use parks here in a similar way for social occasions and relaxation (Rishbeth, 2000). For these Muslim women, a public trim trail is of no value. Although there seems to be more local use of the landscaped park, many of the facilities remain outside the cultural world of many residents. The cost of hiring football pitches and sports facilities were beyond the reach of the local Youth Action Project and Asian Football Club. The sports facilities seem targeted at the new urbane Stepney resident and Docklands office worker (the iconic Canary Wharf Towers dominate the skyline), as marketing is directed at the employees of city firms. Conclusion

Optimism runs through much current urban regeneration and its cultural programmes, suggesting an anticipated urban order in which economic growth and social justice are not only compatible but work in synergy. However, the historic perspective and formations discussed here have largely been ignored, and points of resistance emerge as expectation and experience diverge. In common with other findings (Fainstein, 2001), this chapter has charted how urban change and social benefit are often contradictory, more likely to produce segregation, displacement and inequality. The settlement of the East End with its involuntary population movements, improvements and interventions represents this dialectic. It is a dialectic that is firmly held in past and present cultures of settlement. In Stepney today multicultures of settlement sit in spatial proximity, whilst social distance remains. Gentrification by the creative and heritage industries, housing development and physical regeneration creates isolation as well as insulation for new settlers. Distanced from the everyday mixing of central Stepney, the trappings of gentrification and place-making obstruct the fluidity and heterogeneity of inner-city settlement and urban society.

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Judith L Kapferer

Culture and Commerce: European Culture Cities and Civic Distinction

This paper is about the role of culture and commerce in designating European cities as central to an understanding of one aspect of the phenomenon of globalising state forms. I want to argue that there has been a shift in perspective which has the contemporary city bypassing the national State to run up against the global politics and economics of a capital expansion of increasingly unfettered transnational conglomerates. The power of individual nation states to influence political and economic outcomes is seen here to be in retreat in the face of the rise of the global city of the World System, as Wallerstein (1974), Sassen (1991) and Strange (1996) have contended, albeit from different perspectives. I do not want to make too much of the differences between those who support the idea of the weakening, retreat or even withering away of the state, and those who oppose it. I would suggest, rather, that the form of the State is in a process of being realigned, restructured and driven underground to conform to the economic projects of multinational corporations and extra-State economic blocs. My purpose here is to provide some evidence of the process of globalising re-formation. From this perspective, the advance of transnational (and increasingly monopolistic) corporatist bodies both produces and is produced by the re-emergence of the City as once again the primary concrete manifestation of the hegemony of capital. I want to argue that the dominant discourses and representations of the city reflect a new structuration of power, a shift in the nature of the city, and the State, as adopting the corporation itself as the model for government and governance. The increasingly tight relation between culture and commerce has been forcefully illustrated by Zukin’s (1995) study of ‘a museum in the Berkshires’. The impetus for the establishment of a museum in a once prosperous USA mill town, North Adams, long the centre of an area of declining employment, seems primarily to have been the promise of providing work for the town in the tourism and hospitality industries. Only belatedly did North Adams graft the commercial and employment-generating aspects of a museum development on to its struggle to find a place in the ‘symbolic economy’ of this small town. It mirrors the effort of a thousand villages, towns and cities in economically developed societies to harness the cultural and more narrowly artistic production and consumption of the local area to the redevelopment of local industry and commerce in the ‘service sector’. At the same time, Zukin’s work suggests that there is a limit to the lengths to which individual cities can go in developing their own symbolic economies. This is particularly so when the major focus of cultural tourism is overshadowed by the curating, buying and selling of the arts and artefacts of the wider region, the relevant capitals or even transnational cultural institutions like Sotheby’s, the European 31

University Institute or the various (independent) Guggenheim Foundations in North America and Europe. New York’s or Williamsburg’s relation to North Adams, Bologna’s one-sided competition with Venice, Florence or Rome, even (though less so) Avignon and Provence’s subordination to Paris and its more easily accessible day- and packagetour circuits – all put a competition-oriented and trade-generated slant on the development of the economics of the tourist trade. In this, the city can also be understood as a metaphor for the power of capital, and the promotion of European cities as a metaphor for the resurgence of extra-State economic and political dominance. The cities I examine here provide examples of the ways in which the city concretises struggles about space and power: Who owns the City? How are the spaces of the city peopled, and how are its spaces filled with the city’s customary practices and taken-for-granted meanings? How is its symbolic economy made tangible? The dialectic of the city – any city – is such as to maintain a constant tension between good and evil, light and dark, hope and despair, optimism and pessimism.The ceaseless revolution of the city throws up ever-new formulations of projects, programmes, schemes and plans for improvement and progress. All these schemes, conceived of as advancing either public or private interests, are aspects of contemporary everyday life which contrive to render the city as metaphor. Central to this image is the power and influence exercised over the lives of numerous others, as in the control of municipal regulations, waste management, town planning provisions, the development of transport corridors, the production of order and control, and so forth.These town councils are managing more frequently through the employment of private companies. Refining, negotiating, compromising and confronting the mundane exercise of power gives to a specific site its peculiar textures and configurations, its characteristic – often unique – ambience. The questions I want to ask in this paper concern the extent to which the advance of economic and political globalisation threatens that uniqueness. My research here is focused on Avignon, Bergen and Bologna, three of an unprecedented nine cities that in the Year 2000 were selected by the European Union as ‘Culture Cities’ or ‘Cities of Culture’. The others were Brussels, Cracow, Helsinki, Prague, Reykjavik and Santiago de Compostela – all with the express purpose of celebrating the successes of European urban civilisation in European cities, both capitals and non-capitals. Beginning with Athens in 1985, the following cities have been declared Culture Cities, up to 2000; Florence, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Glasgow, Dublin, Madrid,Antwerp, Lisbon, Luxembourg, Copenhagen,Thessaloniki, Stockholm, Weimar. In 2001 both Porto and Rotterdam have been chosen; Bruges and Salamanca in 2002; Graz in 2003; Genoa and Lille in 2004. The ‘Culture Cities’, creatures of the so-called European idea, ask, ‘What is it to be European?’ and offer a range of answers as variegated, or perhaps as confused as the cities themselves. The colours and shapes of each city, its excitements and longueurs, impart a distinctive flavour to each one, a characteristic style of art and science, architecture, history, cuisine and the social relations of a public culture of civic pride. 32 Kapferer

Central to the idea of a ‘European City of Culture’ as conceived by Melina Mercouri and the European Council of Ministers of Culture in 1985, was that of ‘unity in diversity’ – the motto of what became the European Community itself.The slogan had been used many times before, most famously perhaps, on the occasion of Indian independence in 1947. Whenever an effort has been made to reconcile a myriad of opposed viewpoints and interests in the name of a higher good, unity in diversity has been appealed to.The U.S. motto E Pluribus Unum captures the sense of utilising the skills of the many for the benefit of the whole, the Latin reflecting its European cultural roots while stressing the concept of Federalism so dear to the founders and other agents of the European Union. In this case, the ideal of the Common Market, then the European Economic Community and most recently the European Union was taken to be that higher good, despite opposition from numerous national bodies. The name changes through which this extra-national body has gone parallel ideological shifts in western Europe as the bald ‘Market’ was softened to ‘Community’ – friendly and neighbourly, but perhaps a little too soft and cuddly – to the current tough and businesslike ‘Union’. One of the first flowerings of the revived European ideal (including the ideals of the Renaissance and of nineteenth-century industrial/imperial expansion), was that of a confederation of sovereign states, states with common interests in maintaining relations with similarly placed economic and political entities. The members of such a body were not originally expected to do very much more than streamline coal and steel production, and abolish tariff barriers among member states – hardly simple tasks in themselves, though straightforward enough. But the idea of advertising the benefits of free trade by promoting the commercial attractions of particular European cities rapidly seems to have proved irresistible. As well as glossing over the notion of federalism, the idea of Cities of Culture offered opportunities to embellish economic concerns with an overlay of ‘Culture’ – events around which to focus a city’s singular attractions, not only for tourists and visitors combining business with pleasure, but also to convince local residents that it is a good place to be. Civic authorities everywhere have long negotiated to attract business to their cities by lauding the lifestyle of the town, particularly in accentuating its advantages as a secure and friendly place for families. At the same time, the assumptions and aspirations of, particularly the ‘Culture Cities’, but other cities also, were centred upon a perhaps conflicting ideal of inter-city co-operation and inter-cultural understanding. The concept of a City of Culture posits a broad definition of culture in the so-called ‘anthropological’ sense, encompassing not only the science, technology, arts and artefacts of the city but also, and centrally, its trade. Such a definition of course includes, fundamentally, the idea that culture is to be defined, following Weber, as ‘webs of meaning’ (see Geertz, 1973) – customs, usage and everyday practice. (See also Sahlins [1977] on culture as ‘praxis’.) Many of the growing coterie of workers in what can justifiably be called the European culture industry – researchers, administrators, lawyers, parliamentarians and so forth – spend a great deal of effort in trying to define ‘culture’. The principal purpose of this exercise appears to be coming up with a working definition focusing, in true European Union fashion, on inclusiveness and Culture and Commerce... 33

consensus. Such a definition usually mentions an array of institutions, practices and activities which include history, philosophy, the ‘high’ arts – literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama – and, increasingly, elements of ‘popular’ culture. The attempts at ‘inclusivity’ result in a growing body of work in communications (journalism, advertising, propaganda, popular cinema and pop music), which broadens the definition uncontrollably. And this before any other elements of custom and practice are broached. Sometimes, the word ‘civilisation’ slips into the definition, as in ‘European civilisation’, with an emphasis on the erstwhile imperial empires as the foundation of ‘European culture’: Greece, Rome, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Britain. The inclusion of Constantinople is rather more problematic, given a common assumption amongst many ‘Europeanists’ that an essential feature of European-ness is an identity with Christendom. Sometimes unwary proselytisers for ‘European civilisation’ suggest that the members of non-European cultures – Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Andean – have yet to reach the heights of civilisation exemplified by the Europeans. Others suggest that members of such cultural categories – particularly non-European English speakers – partake of European civilisation through, as it were, heredity, or osmosis. (See Wagner, 2001. For a more self-consciously post-colonialist treatment see Shohat & Stam, 1994.) Trading in Culture

The three cities I discuss here share a common focus on trade. Bologna (population 400,000) can be characterised as a working town. Compared with other Italian urban centres, Bologna’s interests revolve around the commerce of the area, its agricultural production organised in co-operatives, and its electronic industries; not on its tourist trade, though the region is intent on expanding its tourism potential. One of the city’s principal attractions during the year of Culture was the exhibition of electric and electronic inventions and applications. This is not to suggest that the culture of the city excludes a preoccupation with the good life. On the contrary: Bologna is renowned for its being ‘round, fat and red’ like its sausages – a reference to the prosperity and well-fed demeanour of its citizens, and to the colour of its brick buildings. Constituted in the association of guilds and free workers, and designated a free commune in the 12th century, Bologna has had a long tradition of robust independence from the surrounding papal states and ducal fiefdoms, and maintains still a strong (‘red’) socialist presence. In Bergen (population 200,000) the traditions of the Hanseatic League are palpable. Unlike Bologna, with its communal traditions, Bergen was shaped in the customs of outward looking, competitive merchant seafaring. Bergen’s (and indeed Norway’s) love affair with the social democratic welfare state is of a much more recent date. Long before Oslo was anything other than a provincial village of the Danish Empire, Bergen was a cosmopolitan commercial centre. After the demise of the Hansa, the continued dominance of the Norwegian cod fishing grounds was still essential to the maintenance of Bergen’s reputation as a trading city. The newly independent Norwegian State (1905) then began the revival of the trading relations with other European cities which had been eclipsed by Danish and Swedish imperialism.The latter 34 Kapferer

part of the twentieth century witnessed the rapid development and exploitation of the North Sea gas and oil reserves which have been the basis of Norwegian affluence, the mainstay of social democracy and the definitive Norwegian welfare state. Not coincidentally, Norway has also been at the centre of the development of welfarism, and is characterised by the hyper-individualism of post-political state forms (cf. Zizek, 2000). Avignon with a population of 84,000, is a little different. Unlike Bergen and Bologna, the centralisation of French social, cultural and political life might be thought productive of a regional uniformity unless a constant vigilance over communal or regional distinctiveness is maintained. And so it is – assiduously. The example ready to hand is that of the wine-growing regions of France – Burgundy, Champagne, Médoc, or in this case, Côtes de Rhone – all with their own appellations controlés. The traditions of Provencal cuisine are also jealously guarded, despite the depredations of EU administrators and bureaucrats in their search for conformity to ‘European’ standards and the advance of economic and political globalisation. Nonetheless, global transformations are all around. Witness the export of French grapes to the Napa and Barossa Valleys, and the grubbing up and replanting of famous vineyards with more fashionable grapes, re-imported from the New Worlds of the Americas, Australia, South Africa. Witness also the ubiquity of ‘diffusion’ (perhaps ‘eclectic’) cuisine, a feature of extra-European cultures as well. Trade Fairs (often disguised as ‘Cultural’ tourism) are a feature of Bolognese life. Bologna is host to 26 annual trade fairs, focusing on a number of small industries – ceramics, tiles, food and paper manufacture, though like many other cities it has suffered from what one guidebook calls ‘the rude competition of newly industrialising countries’. Of the three cities, Bologna is the most consciously business-oriented, styling itself ‘a city that works’. (There is a telling double entendre here of the juxtaposition of a city that functions and a city that labours – this shift from the idea of workers to the idea of functioning systems was suggested to me by Roland Kapferer). Bologna’s publicity points out that ‘The emphasis on the city’s cultural offerings (in 2000) and its artistic heritage should not overshadow the fact that Bologna is also a global, cosmopolitan city, a city noted for its industrial excellence’. Furthermore, ‘Of course this too is culture: a different sort of culture, more practical and material, but no less praiseworthy, “the culture of getting things done” (my emphases). Bologna has Italy’s densest ratio of businesses to inhabitants – 9 per 100. It has the highest per capita income (38% above the national average) and is the ninth city in Europe for quality of life, in a region (EmiliaRomagna) of low unemployment and a high rate of participation in the workforce (see http://www.bologna. it). Bergen, despite its losing competition with Stavanger as the centre of the Norwegian gas and oil industries, maintains a healthy industry in power generation, merchant shipping and fishing. Its fish market, symbol of Norway’s enduringly dominant fishing industry, with cod being still Norway’s premier export, is known for its fish, for its picturesque harbour-side location, and its well-kept wooden houses painted in multicoloured hues. Thanks to the past prevalence of house fires in the city, the narrow old cobbled lanes and newer wide shopping streets have been closely regulated, while the large central square,Torgemallingen, acts as a firebreak around the town centre, as do Culture and Commerce...

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the wharves of the fish market and the fjord. Bergen was a proud and quite self-conscious city of culture for many years before it achieved its status as an official Culture City in 2000.The annual Festival of Bergen, established in 1951, made, and still makes, much of its international standing, inviting numbers of ‘international’ performances to complement its own artistic events. For example, Edvard Grieg, Norway’s most renowned composer, was the guiding light of the civic fathers’ determination to regenerate the eighteenth century ‘Harmonien’ as the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. At a time when other Norwegian towns and cities were busy concentrating on the financial rather than the aesthetic appreciation of their central business district’s achievements, Bergen was also establishing itself as a city of culture. In much the same way, cities like Manchester or Birmingham sought to utilise the manufacturing wealth of their cities to endow art galleries, libraries, orchestras and universities as a matter of civic pride. Home to nine popes in the fourteenth century, and the site of the ruins of its celebrated St. Benezet bridge,Avignon is creamy sandstone, punctuated by varicoloured, but mainly blue shutters. Unlike the Bergensers, who endeavour to admit as much light as possible into every room (to the extent of leaving curtains un-drawn in the Northern European style, and the widespread use of skylights, and glass staircases and stairwells in newer buildings), Avignon seeks the shade of shutters and awnings against the Mediterranean glare, as Bologna does with its kilometres of porticoes. More than the other two cities, Avignon is focused on tourism. The Provencal climate, its distinctive wine-olives-tomatoes-and-herbs cuisine, its associations with the Côte d’Azur and Riviera warmth and pleasure-seeking, its easygoing ambience and its proximity to an opulent nightlife are the epitome of ‘The Holiday’ for sun-starved Northern Europeans taking a rest from the business of making money. Avignon, rather than Cannes, Nice or Monte Carlo is also the preferred destination for those who feel the urge to soak up a not-altogether unfamiliar (to the British and the Dutch, for example) history. Moreover, this can take place in a location which is capable of allowing tourists to show off their knowledge of that history, geography, fortifications and engineering – Roman aqueducts and theatres, crusades, schisms, Huguenots, perhaps language, perhaps a knowledge of local customs like bullfighting (See Urry, 2000;Also Kapferer, 1998; Munt, 1994). But while the tourists are resting, or engaging in energetic leisure, the denizens of Avignon are still engrossed in the trade and industry of the region – agriculture, viniculture, tourism itself – all making money out of the leisure of others. The religiosity and the patriotically foregrounded historicity of Avignon, the uncompromising and coolly serious egalitarianism of Bergen and the Mediterranean vitality of Bologna – have all shaped, and continue to be shaped by distinctive patterns of everyday life developed over many years, even centuries. These patterns are stereotypically accepted and endorsed by citizens as presenting themselves to themselves. They are deep-rooted, a part of the infrastructure of the daily round of work and pleasure and the comings and goings of schoolchildren, shoppers, workers, that the tourists and visitors rarely notice. Nonetheless, there is evidence that social relations, here and elsewhere, are becoming increasingly instrumental and mechanical under the influence of Europe36

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wide and global corporate processes conducted through telephones, telexes and the Internet. The ties of neighbourhood and community, region and state become attenuated by the disuse of face-to-face interaction with others.At the same time, adults work longer hours, children both in and out of school are cared for by non-relatives, neighbours, professional childcare workers, ‘dagmammas’, local friendship groups or no-one at all (see Hochschild, 1997). City and suburban neighbourhoods become lonelier and more turned in upon themselves. Professional and bureaucratic workers (social workers, security guards) representatives of what used to be called repressive and ideological state apparatuses, come to patrol the city streets and their activities, further stretching and weakening the social bonds of informal local groups. European cultural policy officials and agents began to recognise the importance of The Cultural as a kind of super-structural edifice imposed on the base of European economic co-operation as long ago as 1973.The ‘Declaration of the European Identity’ by the Commission of the European Communities began the process of enlisting the aid of strategists, apologists and opinion leaders engaged in formulating, showcasing, advertising and legitimating the ideas of European cultural construction. This process was centrally concerned with identity formation and European consciousness raising (see Shore, 2000; also Smith, 1992). In this, the older ‘Nation building’ processes of nations like Norway, Finland and the post-Winds of Change African nations, prompted in 1960 by the then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, might have paved the way (however ill-fated) for plotting the outlines of emerging nation-hood. But the elitist conception of civilisation and culture, a very western European understanding of Bildung or civilisation – or even an Arnoldian formulation of ‘best that has been thought and said’ – has hindered the realisation of an extra-national ideal of culture suitable for Europe as a whole. Subsequently, European ‘regional’ unity has been promoted and/or criticised by not only a plethora of Commission officials, but also an army of journalists and academic writers. European identity is seen as arising out of and an advance on the consciousness of single nation states as an integrated formation. Always underneath the negotiations and jockeying of economic coalitions and political alliances, the everyday life of the city continues as a supremely local project. Here, parochial political considerations loom as large as, perhaps larger than, faraway events, however momentous these may be. The local newspapers are full of local political and economic events, and of ‘human interest’ stories of commonplace significance for a limited range of people in relations of face-to-face familiarity. The international wire services and global media may dominate the television programmes, but even their own orientations remain firmly parochial. Except for financial news, with its taken-for-granted global importance, and occasional eyecatching celebrities and international sporting contests, the daily news is replete with tales of single-interest political groups and the activities of local eccentrics and wellknown personalities. Carnivals of Culture and Commerce

Insulated by European affluence, the concerns of other cities world-wide (and particularly the cities of the southern and eastern hemispheres) seem remote from the Culture and Commerce... 37

cosmopolitan centre. Those, like India, which are being denuded of their local skills and talents to swell the coffers of the great financial conurbations of the Western world merely add a new twist to the former nexus of exploitation. Such nations, once quarries and sources of raw materials for manufactured goods, are now transposed as sources of skills for the post-colonial world’s service industries. The free circulation of goods and services becomes a one-way head-hunting exercise or raiding expedition (Prashad, 2000; Werbner, 1994). The concerns of poor nations and poor people everywhere barely impinge on the trade and commerce of the communities and associations of the European Cities of Culture. On the contrary, the trade and commerce of individual cities only provide further impetus for the constant programming of the circulation of human resources bidding for the services and skills of others wherever they may be. One significant aspect of these practices is to be found in the festivals and spectacles that punctuate the financial year. As a focus for the celebration of activities taken to be central and distinctive characteristics of (European) culture in the Cities of Culture – artistic, social, commercial, technological and scientific – festivals, trade fairs and expositions loom large.They are at the heart of the connections of culture and commerce that define the emerging Supra State. The festivals, which heralded the year 2000, were of course world-wide. The millennium was ushered in by a plethora of celebrations extolling the glories and achievements of nations over the last 1000 years, or at least during the period in which various territories have come to be independent, sovereign nations in their own right. Commentators and pundits also greeted the millennium with optimistic predictions about the great deeds yet to be done in national and international arenas. Political, social and even economic difficulties were held in abeyance in an extravaganza of bread and circuses, fireworks and party going. Within this happy milieu, the European Culture Cities of the year 2000 made their debuts. The year-long activities in each of the nine cities in 2000 offered a comprehensive range of broadly ‘cultural’ events. Several projects were common to all the cities, and were visited in turn. These included a number of musical projects – a youth choir from Reykjavik, and performances of the Codex Calixtinus from Cracow, for example. As well, each city was given a particular project to deal with, as follows: • • • • • • • •

Avignon – Tecnomade (history and technology); Bergen – Coasts and Waterways; Bologna (with Helsinki) – Communications; Helsinki (with Bologna) – Cafe 9 (variety performances and installations); Cracow – Codex Calixtinus display and musical performance; Prague – Telelink (technology); Reykjavik – Voices of Europe (choral performances); Santiago de Compostela – Faces of the Earth (cartography and map making).

In addition, individual cities presented sites and activities thought to be in some way ‘typical’ of the life of the city.These provided a focal point for displaying what were 38

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thought to be each city’s claims to fame as a City of Culture. They included Bergen’s presentations of shipbuilding techniques and a history of migration, demonstrations of preserving and renovating an architectural patrimony in Avignon, and a display of five centuries of industrial production and an information exchange on multimedia systems and languages in Bologna. The major events presented in all cities focused on the traditional arts – music, painting and sculpture, cinema, installations and exhibitions as well as a much smaller number of exhibits of industrial advances, discoveries, designs and inventions. Food took a centre stage in many cities’ offerings.All seemed anxious to portray their local produce and cooking methods as distinctive. Bergen, for example, had a large number of presentations focusing on traditional food, combining the domestic with the commercial in a way entirely appropriate to the marriage of culture and commerce in the region. Among the many eating and drinking displays and demonstrations, I mention here two activities centred on the local Bergen staple.These were exhibitions of fresh and dried cod and herring cooked in a variety of traditional ways and served al fresco, and a ‘Local Fisheries Festival’. Here visitors were reminded that, ‘The local fisheries have supplied Bergen’s tables for a millennium, and have been a specific and important section of the city’s and the region’s community’ – exhibition displays included regional activities, historic exhibitions, tastings of local food products etc. Similarly, La Cultura del Cibo, in Bologna, provided ‘A celebration of the pleasures of the table, including regional tours to discover the best created traditional foods and wines, the official menus of Bologna 2000 designed by the best chefs in the city, and an international convention on La Cucina come luogo di identita e scambio’ (official brochure). Interestingly enough, although I could not find many specific Cultural City displays of French cuisine in Avignon compared with these others, the city authorities advertised the city’s being ‘permanently transformed’ by the creation of ‘a gourmet food pavilion’ designed by Gaetano Pesce. The food pavilion, inspired by ‘the 18th century tradition of architectural follies’ was to be constructed in Avignon’s historic Jardin des Doms. Arguably, this structure placed food at the centrepiece of Avignon’s claims to be a City of Culture, with Provencal food as a regional bonus attraction. The connection between the production and consumption of food and the social and cultural construction of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ has long fascinated historians, philosophers, cooks and social commentators (see Brillat-Savarin 1825; Escoffier, 1994; Elias, 1994).The symbolic economy of food – the Harvest festivals, the tradition of giving thanks for the beneficence of Providence on a regular basis at the saying of Grace, Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras, the etiquette of formal dining and place settings – all attest to the seriousness of sociality and commensality at the heart of any community festival. Not only the symbolic economy but also the relations of actual economic production powerfully affect the ways in which the citizens and local authorities portray the position of their town or region to themselves and to outsiders. The olives, herbs and tomatoes of the Mediterranean have a symbolic valency which accentuates and counterbalances the highlighting of fish and cheese in Northern lands – the trick is to have specific brand names and trademarks instantly recognisable as synonymous, virtual icons of a specific place and product at a particular time. Culture and Commerce... 39

My purpose here is to call attention to some aspects of what city officials and civil servants see as the salient characteristics of their town’s culture. Each still maintains its singularity, but all are caught up in the same global flows that place them in more or less commercially advantageous positions vis-à-vis others. Again, the marriage of culture and commerce maintains the symbolic economy as real and concrete, in regional centres and on the world stage.The effort to remain distinctive while swimming in the mainstream of economic flows and cross currents is fraught with the perils of balancing distinction with standard economic and financial practice. The notion of Culture Cities in the Year 2000 was premised on the construction and maintenance of useful networks and connections on a variety of levels. The activities and events of the year emphasised the aesthetic and social contacts to be made and reinforced. But, crucially, the European Culture City celebrated the economic aspects of the pre-eminence of trade as defining the urban experience, as it has done for centuries. The histories of Lombards, Guelphs and Ghibbelines, the Hanseatic League, Elizabethan piracy and ecclesiastical capital accumulation still form a backdrop and a testimony to the continuing importance of economic competition in contemporary Europe.The reactivating of ancient commercial alliances is joined with new patterns of economic transaction, facilitated by the development of ever more rapid communications.This resurgence renders the work of the new financial centres as only a refocused attention on age-old financial practices (including what have now come to be called Casino Capitalism and Mafia Capitalism). At the same time, as the pretensions and the legacies of waves of Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French, and British colonial adventurers put their successive stamps on far-flung places, the Europeans were enriched, and their cultures enlivened by exposure to alien practices. Roman-Dutch law, the Code Napoléon, Lugard’s Indirect Rule, the trade in opium and the building of railways, electrification and telecommunications produced a long lasting and dense network of financial contacts and trading partnerships. These partnerships eventually rolled over the laws and customs of mere national states in which first Europe and then the United States established and fortified the hegemony of global capitalism; the United States, which has given the world the term ‘robber baron’, is more than a match for any of the buccaneers who had preceded it on the world financial stage. Presaged by the overthrow of communism, and the decline of socialism, the confident assertion of untrammelled capital accumulation heralded a ‘new world order’ far beyond the dreams of nineteenth-century Free Trade advocates. Advertising a city is of course a central part of the job of the city councillors and its chamber of commerce in promoting the pre-eminence of their own production/product.The job includes designing a distinctive ‘logo’ – not, as formerly, a coat of arms, but a catchy and easily recognised image. Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, Bergen’s Bryggen houses (which also adorn the manhole covers of the central city), Avignon’s pont and Bologna’s Due Tore all serve this function. The image of the Pont d’Avignon evokes the papal power upon which the city’s attraction as a tourist venue largely depends; likewise the Due Tore symbolise the temporal power of the city’s warring factions over many generations. Bergen-Bryggen’s Hanseatic houses are almost synonymous with the commercial power of this long-lived trading centre. All focus on 40

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a central image of a past glory that still breathes life into the singularity of the city as a thriving business power, and is a crucial advertising image, quickly recognised as distinctive and, indeed, unique. The experience of inter-city commerce and cultural interchange greatly facilitates the work of (often reciprocal) advertising and self-promotion. It is frequently based in common experiences of arranging arts festivals or staging carnivals of community solidarity (see Cohen, 1980; Da Matta, 1984. In a different register, see also Debord, 1977). It engenders the intricate cultural and economic networks that enable particular individuals, businesses or communities to bypass nation states and go directly to the stateless head offices of multinational corporations. But such experience also renders living in the city increasingly spectator-driven, de-personalised, atomised and exclusionist as Debord pointed out. In order to persuade transnational companies to do business with particular cities, local ordinances or national laws are frequently softened, or waived.Tax breaks, below-cost real estate prices, favourable banking terms and so forth are frequently employed incentives to this end. One of the first casualties of globalisation is, paradoxically, to be found in the homogenising of local custom and practice in the name of the smoother running of international financial enterprise.The celebration of hybridity and the insistence on difference produces little more than increasing uniformity and conformity to distant global or regional standards emanating from apparently omnipotent centres of economic and political manipulation. Perhaps the supreme example, though there are many others, is McDonald’s, the hamburger chain.The minuscule changes which produce a McOz or a McFirenze – both with appropriate accents, but still with identical ‘quality‘ and portion controls hardly connote hybridity (See Giddens & Hutton, 2000:211). Nonetheless, such standardisation and homogenisation are subject to countervailing fragmentation as well. In this space the development of resistant communities is possible. The continuing construction and maintenance of all these city-focused developments have implications for the future of the State as a legalpolitical form. In an era in which the national state confines its political and governmental activities to the maintenance of law and order and to smoothing the path of business interests, the city can provide greater freedom of movement. But given the widespread decentralisation of local government and the privatisation of social security, public health and sanitation, public education, public housing and public transport, the city is often left to fend for itself. This means that while resistant social movements (see Dirlik, 1997) may grow in the interstices of the city, the city itself can now confidently bypass the State to deal directly with the corporate and/or private interests upon which, in many senses, the life of the city depends. Of Europe, Cultures and Cities

I began this paper by positing a conjunction of culture-and-commerce as the central metaphor of the contemporary (European) city, the city as capital. I have been arguing that the re-emergence of the City as a social actor vis-à-vis the nation, the State, the nascent Supra-State of Europe and the extra-territorial reaches of transnational economic entities and cultural formations has transformed the city.The city can be seen Culture and Commerce... 41

as a renewed site of power and influence in relation to other cities and in contradistinction to the nation state. I have suggested that individual cities have assiduously cultivated networks among other cities and corporations, effectively sidelining the State as a dominant partner in social, cultural, political and economic policies and processes. The role of the State in legislating and overseeing social and cultural programmes is increasingly being confined to legitimating economic policies emanating from outside that State. The role of the State is being limited to overseeing the law-and-order function and the maintenance of surveillance in the service of capital. Stripped of the ability to instigate political and economic programmes, the State reverts to its fundamental role of managing the repressive and ideological legitimation of the continued dominance of corporate capital within and beyond State boundaries. This is not, of course, an insignificant role. When corporations become unruly, or citizens become restless and dissatisfied, the State is still required to mediate markets and people. It resurfaces, rhizome-like, in situations requiring some mitigation of the worst ravages of the war of all against all. In this enterprise, the cultural and ideological armature of the city, and through it the State, remains crucial. The city can be seen as the site of re-vitalised ideological networks of mystification (of culture, of commerce) and as something of a puppet of extra-state, extra-territorial forces. One might mention here the increasingly Byzantine machinations of the giant transnational corporations and large economic and military blocs – NATO, NAFTA, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund etc. of global power. One notes also the proliferation of the instrumentalities of the EU itself, the flourishing nodes of the political, administrative and bureaucratic practices of largely undemocratic and unaccountable managers. With the possible exception of Brussels and several others, European cities, and particularly the Cities of Culture, have yet to become the urban wastelands depicted by Kaplan (2001:84) as ‘Singapores’ – corporate enclaves dedicated to global business. There, in high technology conurbations and urban ‘corridors’ like the Tucson-Phoenix corridor, North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the cross-border Portland-SeattleVancouver area compete with each other and with other transnational corporations in attracting markets and investment capital, in a larger version of what the European Culture Cities are working toward. But on the ground, as it were, at the grassroots, the people of Avignon, Bergen and Bologna still imagine the city as theirs. The city itself continues to be manifested as the image and the reality of capital accumulation and distribution, of course. But the walls of the Cities of Culture – however vestigial – potently symbolise the local terrain of a community that still has a focal point and a sense of identity, as people of a specific, and still distinctive, time and place. Within this space the inhabitants continue to lead daily lives of joy and sadness, comedy and tragedy, hope and despair, getting and spending on a human scale. There are children playing in the parks, students thronging coffee bars and pubs, old people sitting in the sun and shade; there are weddings and funerals and birthday parties. To the people of the city their town remains a construction, not of an abstract socio-economic polity, but of the concrete local project of their everyday lives. 42

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Denise Morado Nascimento

Low-income Housing and Community Participation The conceptual framework

The previous decades have seen the field of low-income housing transformed from policies that supported ‘mass provision of dwellings’ to ‘community organisation actions’. Policies linked with the notion of ‘… slums representing an urban disease’ (Taschner, 1988:26) changed to the notion of what ‘… very poor people are capable of doing (for their) communities’ (Turner, 1988:n.p.). There is no doubt now that the assumption of repetitive construction of highdensity houses as the affordable solution to the chronic housing shortage is wrong.The ‘Community Movement’ has proved that there is an entirely different production process of cheap and, importantly, good standard housing. In discussing initially ‘who participates’ it is necessary to discern the community concept which connotes the direct involvement of ordinary people in local affairs. Midgley (1986:25) points out that, ‘the proponents of community participation are clearly not concerned with affluent apartment dwellers or wealthy suburbanites or with landowners or rich farmers or other rural elites’. He goes further, quoting Hollnsteiner’s comments (quoted in Midgley, 1986:25) who also maintains that, ‘people’s participation refers not to everyone in an identifiable community – since local elites already have a strong voice in decision-making – but rather to the poor majority with little access to resources and power’. Over time the conception of participation has gradually emerged as a fundamental necessity of a new strategy to provide affordable shelter in which the role of community organisations and individual capacities are importantly involved. ‘From squatter settlements in Third World cities to the action groups and voluntary organisations that are a familiar feature in Britain, the communities have challenged for their right to gain access to land and social services in order to face their housing problem by themselves’ (Nascimento, 1990:2). This article addresses itself to the notion of ‘housing as a process’: the people come together to build and manage their own housing through appropriate organisations and affordable methods and technologies. Vila São Jorge, Belo Horizonte, one of the favelas found in the major cities of Brazil, was chosen as a study case of experiences of community participation. The urban development in Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte was the first planned Brazilian city which was created in 1897, as the new Capital of Minas Gerais State, in order to receive a population of 200,000 people. The city, situated in a hilly area, grew on the basis of a ‘grid scheme’ of wide avenues crossed at right angles by streets. 43

Although many macro-scale modifications were made during the 1940s the original plan did not allow for the rapid urbanisation process. The political decline of Rio, as a result of the removal of the Capital function to Brasília, the improvement of inter-city road networks and the creation of an industrial and commercial centre in Belo Horizonte, as part of the modernization process of the Brazilian interior, have been responsible for its rapid progress. Between 1960 and 1970 the population of Belo Horizonte grew by 78% making it the second fastest growing city of over one million in the world (Gardner, 1972:81). In the year 2000, Belo Horizonte had a population of 2,232,000 people (IBGE, 2001). There is obviously a link between population growth and availability of resources: where land and urban services are under stress – in absolute terms or because of poor management – the impact of additional people can be directly negative.‘… The growth of big city populations has meant that the demand for mass housing has far exceeded supply. However, the greater absolute size of demand and the failure of planning – or other measures – to cope with this has resulted in the widespread adoption of self-help solutions to housing shortage’ (Cunningham, 1980:192-93). In the case of Belo Horizonte, the settlements spread further and further up the illegal land from its hillsides. The community movement in Vila São Jorge

Vila São Jorge is located in the south-west of Belo Horizonte near a middle-class area.The starting-point of Vila São Jorge was the land invasion in 1920s.A group, removed from an elite area to be urbanised, built the initial nucleus. In the beginning everybody planted trees making the favela their little farm, but as more people arrived who were also unable to pay the high rents in the city, the trees gave space to land invasion.The settlements are located in an undulating topographical area around 100,000 square metres which has in some sectors slopes from 20% /30% to more than 47% from the horizontal. The favela occupies 85% of public area and 15% of private area, with a population of 4,015 people and 917 dwellings (Casa do Movimento Popular, 2001:n.p.). The housing conditions were quite poor: predominance of huts and barracks with typical rustic appearance, usually made of planks and galvanised sheets or similar material. To accept this process that the favelados have of providing themselves with their houses, is to understand that they are unable in the first instance to conform to any recognised building standards. The results indicate not only a high degree of prosperity and self-respect, but also that they have their own standards born of necessity and experience. The favelados in Vila São Jorge were not included in the general network of sewerage, running water, lighting and telephones, lacking proper division into streets, numbering, feeing or rating system.The light was only possible through kerosene.The water was provided by a near stream; children and women used to wake up at 4:00 am in order to queue for drinking water.There was no public transportation. The majority of the Vila São Jorge’s favelados do not mention any specific urbanisation programme once they are asked about its urban and social development. The community movement is indicated as the most responsible for fighting for their rights and achieving effective results.The favelados even recognize and reinforce the importance 44 Morado Nascimento

1

2

3

4

Vila São Jorge – Occupation phases

Source: Casa do Movimento Popular (2001:n.p.).

1 occupation according to the contours lines 2 initial nucleus: living room, kitchen and bathroom with access to the services net 3 new houses for relatives and commercial use 4 occupation of the last and risky available plots

Low-income Housing & Community Participation 45

of their associations and representatives: ‘… without their pressure on the Local Government we would not be benefited by any urbanisation programme’ (Casa do Movimento Popular, 2001:n.p.). Today, mainly because of such notable pressure from the Community Movement, the Vila São Jorge, which has 52% of its occupiers with legal tenure of the land, is well served by the infrastructure systems: 73% reservoirs; 79% piped water and hydrometers ; 85% internal bathrooms (in the beginning of favelas, most of the bathrooms are built apart of the main body of the house); 88% legal electricity; 81% official drainage system; 83% sewage disposal system ; 100% public transportation – . Source:(Casa do Movimento Popular,2001:n.p.). Although the dwellings are now densely packed, the hilly sites permit a vertical separation of buildings, giving a measure of light and air to almost every house. The building materials have been collected by the favelados slowly over time: ceramic and fibro-cement tiles for the roof, wattle and/or brick and concrete block walls, old doors and windows, and cement floors. Around 95% of the houses are made of brick walls. In order to assist with jobs, schooling and social welfare, there are local organisations such as clubs, associations, spiritual centres and temples. However, many difficulties doubtless remain such as poverty and violence. The urbanisation programmes

Formal access to the basic needs, such as water supply, sewage disposal and electricity were quite impossible in favelas in the last 40 years. Only by the 1980s, as the favelados represented 13% of population in Belo Horizonte (Plambel, 1983:8) were the favelas beginning to be considered as an important and positive reflection of the urban structure of Belo Horizonte. Since then, the nature of favelas has changed to include some other urbanisation programmes developed by each Local Government in power, but mainly it is because of the increasing participation, pressure and better organisation of the communities themselves in demanding the improvement of their own environment. Nevertheless, the ‘Profavela Programme’ (1985) was set up by the Local Government working at this time. The ‘Profavela Programme’ is a major turnaround to bring efficacious answers to meet the questions posed by the poor population. It is important to emphasise that such procedures and programmes represent the very first effort by Local Government together with members of the community, to promote cooperation and participation between and within the two main groups of actors involved. The programme was intended to regulate the housing conditions in favelas, allowing them to be upgraded within their existing environment, and to offer guarantees to the favelados: 46 Morado Nascimento

(a) the official recording of all plots and the right of the occupier to legal tenure of the land, and (b) the promotion, implementation and coordination of policies in order to give them access to better living conditions (urbanisation programmes). Since 1995, the Labour Party has been in power as the Local Government of Belo Horizonte. Through its Housing Department, it has been working on its Plano Global Específico (PGE). The principle of the PGE is to promote increasing and continuous community involvement allowing the Local Government to make reliable assessments. To do so, needed actions and correct procedures which still need to be set up to attend to the objectives stated by the ‘Profavela Programmes’, but with a different approach: • extensive knowledge and research data survey of each favela concerning social and economic information about the households, the village history, the urban design, the infrastructure systems services, the topographical and geological conservation, environmental conditions and the legal tenure of the land; • complete data collection and accurate diagnosis; • definition and ranking of needed actions and work; • definition of steps for the PGE’s implementation; • PGE’s discussion with the community and its approval. Due to this, in the year of 2000, the Local Government of Belo Horizonte, established that from that point ‘…any new improvement programme should consider the neighbourhood relations, the favelados’ interaction and, mainly, the contradictory and conflicting social tissue which has been revealed. By not doing so, there would not be enough technical, financial, operational and juridical resources to deal with the general context’ (Casa do Movimento Popular, 2001:n.p.). Perhaps one of the most important symptoms of this resolution has been the expanding interest demonstrated by the favelados in the meetings between themselves and the ‘professionals’. In order to be a much more trustworthy movement the favelados elected representatives to form a Resident’s Association. Conclusions

The idea of mobilisation and participation of the poor for social development at the local level has been formalised during the last thirty years. This has been largely popularised through the efforts of John F. C.Turner. Born in 1927, he has been involved for 40 years in developing the theory, practice and tools for self-managed home and neighbourhood building - in Peru, the United States and the United Kingdom. He has also worked on the promotion and design of community action and self-help programmes in villages and urban squatter settlements. ‘When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make their own contributions in the design, construction, or management of their housing, both this process and the environment produced stimulate individual and social well-being’(Turner, 1988:n.p.). Low-income Housing & Community Participation 47

On this basis it may be valuable to define community organisation practice: ‘it is a process by which a community identifies its needs or objectives, orders (or ranks) these needs or objectives, develops the confidence and will to work at (them), finds the resources (internal and/or external) to deal with (them), takes action with respect to them, and in so doing extends and develops co-operative and collaborative attitudes and practices in the community’ (Ross quoted in Grosser, 1976:11). It is at this point that the concept of community participation as the answer to lowincome housing production becomes relevant and valid. According to the Brazilian Government, we lack 6.656.526 dwellings across the country (SEDU, 2002). But, in one way or another the people are living somewhere and somehow. On these grounds some important aspects of the housing production process must be commented on: Most Governments has failed to support housing policies to provide the ‘right’ type of housing delivery system. This has allowed the Community Movement to grow and flourish representing a good development. The housing initiatives by community activists to create alternative means of producing shelter should continue to develop all over the world. The worldwide Community Movement must be supported in its struggle to gain access to housing resources. The ‘partnership’ concept increases the ‘right’ of both the State and community to control and influence the environment. The concept requires the State and professionals to support community work and enables the community to take an active role in housing programmes. Whatever the type or extent of community participation, its productivity depends on agreed channels of communication between the State and the participants. It is also necessary to review the existing codes and regulations that govern the provision of land, finance, and services, in order to reflect the needs and means of local communities. There is a need for structural change; this means the decentralisation of authority and with it access to resources at local levels through local policies and programmes. Community groups must assume responsibility for housing production. On this basis ‘training local communities’ represents an additional step in which management and technical skills can often be accessed as well. Architects must also assume responsibility for the needs of the poor as they are in a position to transform theories into reality. He/she is responsible for the detailed designs of the houses, and for making sure that the actual design is in the hands of the families. The system of construction is also under his/her control and it will be continuously changed and improved by him/her. In addition, the process of construction itself is the responsibility of the architect. Finally, it must be said that housing is just an aspect and a vehicle to integrate the people into a more meaningful development process.

48 Morado Nascimento

Tim Hall

Opening Up Public Art’s Spaces: Art, Regeneration and Audience

It has been argued that the last twenty years has seen a ‘renaissance’ of public art in the cities of Europe, the USA and beyond (Moody, 1990: 2).This has been characterised by a rise in public and private sector commissions, an expansion of arts policy and administrative structures and the integration of artists into the urban design process. A further characteristic of this supposed renaissance has been the basis upon which art for the public realm has been advocated.Traditionally, art has been placed in the public realm for reasons of aesthetic enhancement, memorialisation, or simply because introducing art into everyday life has been seen as an inherently good thing. However, since the early 1980s public art has been advocated as contributing to the alleviation of a range of environmental, social and economic problems locating it squarely within the process of urban regeneration. Since the 1980s public art has been increasingly implicated in processes such as the rejuvenation of decaying urban spaces, the development of flagship projects of urban regeneration, the stimulation of central city economies and the enhancement or transformation of urban images (Goodey, 1994; Hall, 1995a). In this paper I want to review some critical writing on public art and examine the question of how this writing has helped us uncover the meanings of prominent examples of public art employed in fashioning new cities.This involves a discussion of where meaning lies in public art, a reflection on the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches employed by writers on the subject and thoughts on the partiality of much work to date. This echoes a number of on-going debates in cultural studies, urban geography, urban studies. It concludes by drawing together examples of work that offer methodological clues to an alternative approach to uncovering meanings in public art and in everyday engagements with open space, that have been largely missed in critical writing to date. There is great variety both in the urban regeneration programmes in which public art has been incorporated and within public art practice itself. However, in terms of urban regeneration projects we can recognise a broad distinction between flagship or spectacular regeneration projects, which often contain prominent works of public art by internationally famous artists, and neighbourhood or community arts and regeneration projects, typically but not exclusively, publicly funded, often away from central city locations and with a greater emphasis on community development and participatorary arts (Matarasso, 1997; Dwelly, 2001). This chapter is primarily concerned with public art in the former context. Virtually all public art works found within major city centre projects of urban regeneration are examples of what has been called ‘institutional’ public art. Namely, they are art works that endorse ‘official’ views of the city; They celebrate and enhance the spaces produced by and in the interests of local authorities and commercial developers, for example. Unsurprisingly, this very prominent renaissance of public art has not gone 49

unnoticed by a whole range of writers, critics and researchers.There are now a number of critical literatures concerned with public art within the urban regeneration process written from a number of theoretical and discipline based perspectives. Critical writing on public art and urban regeneration has emanated from a number of perspectives including those of artists, arts advocates, cultural theorists, and urban and cultural geographers. Artists and arts advocates have been predominantly concerned with examining the processes of public art production. They have been concerned, for example, with the influence of the contexts of public art production (commissions, briefs, site, consultation and various other local constraints) on the public art works produced (see Jones, 1992).This literature, some positive, some more critical, reflects the concern of writers from this perspective for quality in the production of public art works. By contrast much critical research and theoretical literature has emanated from a cultural studies or cultural geography perspective.This writing has reflected the approaches and concerns dominant in these disciplines since the mid-1980s. Prominent have been a concern for the politics of representation and, associated with this, a variety of deconstructive approaches. Typical examples have seen geographers and others ‘read’, ‘unpack’ or ‘deconstruct’ the meanings of a variety of cultural texts such as landscape paintings, films, television programmes or maps, as well as architecture and the built environment (see for example, Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988; Shields, 1991; Bender, 1993; Duncan & Ley, 1993; Clarke, 1997). Broadly writers on public art from cultural geography and other critical social sciences have been critical of the involvement of public art in projects of urban regeneration (Miles, 1997b). They have tended to situate public art within the politics of urban change and have been concerned with the ways that ongoing processes of urban change have impacted unequally on the lives of different groups across the social spectrum. Public art then, has been viewed as a component of broader processes of uneven urban development. These studies have sought to relate the narratives and myths promoted through the symbolism of public art to social, economic and / or cultural changes occurring in their local and global urban contexts. A persuasive strand of urban studies literature, which emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, argued that culture was being implicated in the process or uneven urban development as a kind of ‘carnival mask’. This thesis argued that culture was being deployed in a commodified and sanitised form in cities to create the impression of affluence, vibrancy, conviviality, change and regeneration, while at the same time being used to mask the increasingly fractured and polarised social and economic realities that characterised life for the majority of urban dwellers (Harvey, 1987; 1989a; 1989b). This critique has been applied to the landscapes of regenerated central city spaces and the disciplines of architecture, planning, urban design and public art that have produced them (Knox, 1993; Hubbard, 1996; Miles, 1997b; 1998) as well as the representation of regenerated spaces and cities through promotional materials and the media (Holcomb, 1993; 1994; Thomas, 1994; Kenny, 1995; Wilson, 1996; Short & Kim, 1998). These landscapes and their representations have been read as texts, into which have been written elite visions of the city. 50 Hall

Birmingham – Centenary Square, sculpture Forward, Raymond Mason (photo T Hall)

Opening Up Public Art’s Spaces... 51

It has been argued that public art works have presented selective versions of history, or myths of harmony, offering another layer in the composition of elite images of the regenerated city. This is of significance, not just because the image (how cities are represented by the minority) is out of step with reality (how cities are experienced by the majority) but because there is a tangible relationship between the former and the latter. Image and appearance are important parts of the way that cities are understood and acted upon and hence they are embedded in the material reproduction of urban space. This critique of public art sees it squarely as one of the elite images of the city and thus it deconstructs its meanings within the context of the reproduction of social justice and injustice in the post-modern city. It is commonly discussed along with other such images of the city, produced, for example, through promotional campaigns or the local media and its architecture and landscapes. Working within the critical framework outlined above I have been concerned with the role of public art in unveiling images of industry in the post-industrial landscape of urban regeneration in one British city, Birmingham in the Midlands (Hall, 1995a; 1995b; 1997a; 1997b). I want to briefly reflect on the approach adopted in this work and, in doing so, illustrate some of the insights stemming from it, but also some of its limitations. The main subject of this enquiry has been a detailed study of Raymond Mason’s statue Forward (figure 1). Forward was unveiled in 1991 as part of an extensive public art programme linked to the redevelopment of the Broad Street area adjacent to the city centre as a conference, entertainment and business tourist zone. At the heart of the research process was an attempt to deconstruct the symbolic meaning of the industrial iconography of the statue. However, the various influences that had been brought to bear on the production of the statue were also felt to be important insofar as they might offer clues both to the symbolic meanings of the statue and the reasons for the presence of industrial imagery in the context of the construction of a post-industrial image and identity for the City of Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s. In this case attention was paid to the career trajectory of the artist Raymond Mason, in particular his concerns for industrial and working-class subjects (Farrington & Silber, 1989; Edwards, 1994), the position of the statue within a wider programme of urban regeneration and place promotion and finally its position within a public art commissioning strategy for the city with the stated aims of being integral to the regeneration of the city while exploring and expressing facets of the city’s multiple identity and diverse character (Lovell, 1988: 1). Exploring these multiple sites of meaning meant that a variety of research methods were utilised within the research.These included a deconstruction of the statue’s iconographies, semi-structured interviews with representatives from the local authority, the Public Art Commissions Agency and the International Convention Centre Birmingham. Archival research was also used to investigate the background to both the urban regeneration strategies in the city and the public art commissioning strategy. This involved reviewing official reports, strategies, briefs and minutes of meetings, a review of Raymond Mason’s career and previous commissions and a review of published interviews with him. It was also necessary to review coverage of the public art programme in the local and national press and to analyse the social histories and reports of industrial and economic change in the city. 52 Hall

It also became obvious that there were two overriding and contrasting contexts in which the statue was situated. These were, first, a programme of urban regeneration, and its associated landscapes and geographies of local urban change, and, second, a powerful notion of the character and identity of the City of Birmingham and its region that saw them as strongly rooted in histories and experiences of industry. It was the contrast between these two contexts that initially appeared to offer some clue to the presence of the industrial imagery in the city’s new public art work and which were explored within the research. On the one hand the statue was clearly intended to be viewed as part of a major urban regeneration project, an attempt to refashion the image and identity of the city and influence its economic development over the coming years. On the other it fitted into a tradition of British civic commemoration that venerates local histories, traditions and experiences and national values. In this context it represented a prominent articulation of civic and regional character and history. These two contexts produced two audiences who were likely to view the statue in very different ways and according to two very different sets of expectations. The answer to the apparent incongruity in the statue’s exploration of local industrial histories lay in the contrast between these two contexts. Rather than seeing industry as polluting, mechanical and redundant, as it overwhelming was during the 1980s and 1990s, Raymond Mason in the statue associated it squarely with a positive set of values revolving around notions of craftsmanship and individual endeavour, a set of values likely to appeal to both local and outside audiences. As Raymond Mason said in an interview published at the time of the statue’s unveiling: “For one precise moment in history Birmingham was unique…It founded a tradition of fine craftsmanship and fine machinery.That shouldn’t be forgotten…It would be a great pity to forget what was a great moment in the human saga of fine work’ (in Weideger, 1991: 14). While not wishing to dismiss such semiotic approaches in themselves, I want to suggest that their perspective is partial and has produced, in debates about meaning in public art, something of an impasse that has characterised much writing on the subject over the previous 10 – 15 years. We can appreciate these limitations by adopting a framework which situates sites of meaning within visual (and other) texts. This framework, outlined for example by Gillian Rose in her book Visual Methodologies (2001), is revealing when used as a device to review critical writings on public art. Rose, in reviewing theoretical writing on the visual recognises three sites of meaning with regard to visual texts. • Site 1. Production: This recognises the influence of technologies, genre conventions, social, cultural and economic contexts within which images are produced and the biographies of individual producers of images on the meanings of images (Rose, 2001: 17-23). • Site 2.Text: While recognising many of the above modalities, approaches that situate meanings in texts themselves typically use some form of semiotic deconstruction to unravel the iconographies of texts (Rose, 2001: 23-24). Opening Up Public Art’s Spaces... 53

• Site 3. Audience:This recognises the importance of the consumption or construction of meaning by the audiences of visual or other texts. It problematises approaches that focus on other sites of meaning in that it recognises that there is no necessary correspondence between intended meanings and those available to the consumers of a visual text. Much critical writing on public art has focused on the first two of these three sites of meaning. Published writing by artists and advocates tends to focus on the importance of the processes and contexts of production, for example, by discussing the influence of briefs, commissioners, processes of consultation, site and local constraints on the outcome of projects.There have also been a small number of serious sociologies of the production of public art (see for example Martorella’s discussion of corporate art, 1990). By contrast critical writing from a cultural studies or cultural geography perspective typically seeks to situate the specific iconographies of public art works in the multiple contexts of their production and reception. While offering very sophisticated methods of saying a great deal about the meanings inherent in public art works, and the influence of the contexts within which this art is produced, the prevailing critical approaches within the literatures of public art have said, and are only able to say, very little about the public. Neither the intentions of the producers of public art, nor its iconographies necessarily correspond to the meanings derived from the incorporation of public art into the experiences of the publics’ everyday lives. While our understanding of the growth, production and intended meanings of public art is undoubtedly very good, our understanding of its readings by its diverse audiences, is much less well developed. Much of the theoretical sophistication of critical writing on public art derives from its employment of a Lefebvrian framework of analysis. However, this seems guilty, as Savage and Ward have recognised of much writing in this vein, of failing to adequately link the realms of signification (the representation of space) and production to that of experience. Lefebvre’s laudable project to find a bridge between experienced space, representations of space, and spaces of representation has proved too hard to put into operation empirically. The crucial link between the construction of place in representation and at the level of everyday experience has not been demonstrated (Savage & Ward, 1993: 132). Loretta Lees, in reviewing broader approaches to the study of meaning in architecture and the urban landscape, of which critical writing on public art is part, makes a similar point: As Bondi has warned, this (semiotic) interpretation ‘strips the built environment of the meanings it is given by the people who live in it and of the transformations, however modest, that they make’.While there has been a great deal of recent work in geography on the cultural production of the built environment, much less attention has been given to its consumption. Contemporary architectural geographies do not emphasize enough the fact that ‘urban meaning is not immanent to architectural form and space, but changes according to the social interaction of city dwellers’ (Lees, 2001: 55). 54 Hall

We might ask, following the logic of such critiques, to what extent the sophisticated readings of public art offered by cultural theorists and cultural geographers correspond to those (clearly multiple) meanings constructed by its audiences. In reviewing the critical literatures of public art, it is apparent that the voices of the public are largely absent. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that the origins of an invigorated critical approach to uncovering meanings in public art might focus on the audience as a site of meaning, rather than the contexts of production and the works themselves, as has been the case in the past. The fragments of such an approach lie in the few public voices that are admitted. Building on these fragments is, I would argue, the task awaiting cultural theorists approaching public art. I want now to move towards a discussion of a few examples of work from beyond the study of public art that offers some possible theoretical and methodological directions. There are a number of precedents in geographical, and other, studies of a variety of urban spaces that the methodological tool-kit exists, supported by a respected raft of critical theory, to uncover the multiple meanings constructed by public art’s audiences. For example, Jacqueline Burgess et al. (1988) have employed intensive, in-depth, small-group interviews to uncover the meanings and values attached to urban open spaces by local residents in South London.The researchers complimented this approach by using photographs of different physical settings to prompt open-ended reflection from interviewees.The findings of this project revealed a hidden richness in the human responses to, often apparently mundane open spaces, and challenged taken-for-granted assumptions that previously underpinned the provision and management of urban open spaces in the metropolis.There is little to suggest that the aims of the project and the methods employed are not applicable to uncovering the meanings constructed by the audiences of public art. Our primary objective has been to develop a methodology which is sensitive to the language, concepts and beliefs of people whose views about open spaces are rarely heard. Through empirical, qualitative research we hoped to explore the ways in which individuals and groups read urban landscapes and interpret their symbolic meaning…We emphasise the language that people used to talk about their experiences and activities for we believe it to be the key to understanding the internalisation of social and cultural values for the urban green (Burgess et al. 1993: 457). By contrast Loretta Lees has employed techniques of ethnographic observation in her study of the architectural geography of Vancouver’s new Public Library Building (2001). Lees was similarly concerned with uncovering the meanings held by the users of its spaces. She argues that: Architecture is about more than just representation. Both as a practice and a product, it is performative, in the sense that it involves ongoing social practices through which space is continually shaped and inhabited. Indeed, as the urban historian Dolores Hayden argues, the use and occupancy of the built environment is as important as its form and figuration… attention to the embodied practices through which architecture is lived requires some new approaches, just as it opens up some new concerns for a critical geography of architecture (2001: 53). Opening Up Public Art’s Spaces... 55

Such a shift echoes Nigel Thrift’s call for geographers and other social scientists to move away from a theoretical concern for interpretation of representation and towards what he calls ‘non-representational theory’ or ‘theories of practice’ (2000). An example of such an approach would be Thrift et al.’s study of the multiple meanings attached to the acts of shopping and its environments (Miller et al., 1998; see also Taylor & Fraser et al., 1996) which have overturned earlier semiotic readings of apparently instrumental shopping environments (Gottdiener, 1986). We might also draw parallels between the concerns of this body of work and Jonathon Hill’s (1998) work on the ‘occupation’ of architecture and Iain Borden’s (2001) on skateboarding as a spatial practice. Lees’ concern is to capture the ways that meanings are performative, embodied and are continually constructed and sedimented through daily, ongoing practices, a dimension absent to an extent on approaches that rely exclusively on interviews to uncover public meanings. In doing this Lees presents a series of ethnographic vignettes that reveal the diverse ways that the library’s spaces are appropriated by its numerous publics for their own purposes. I would argue that ethnographic observations might profitably complement interview-based approaches. Interviews and ethnography are well-known and widely employed methods within the social sciences. However, other less extensively employed methods may also be appropriate to the project of uncovering public meanings of urban spaces and public art specifically. For example, visual methodologies have gained increased attention in recent years across a range of social science disciplines including geography, sociology, ethnography and cultural studies (see Pink, 2001; Rose, 2001). Application of visual methods in these disciplines has tended, on the whole, to reflect broader concerns for the efficacy of representational theory. Most applications of visual methodologies, especially where they have been used to examine the city, have again involved deconstructing professional, official or elite representations of urban space (promotional materials, web sites, films, maps or plans, for example). There has been little attention, to date, paid to ‘lay’ visual knowledges of the city, visual texts produced by the city’s publics. This lack of attention is surprising given the richness of lay visual knowledges of the city that abound since photographic and video recording became widely available and affordable and the centrality of these visual texts to certain, especially, but not exclusively, tourist encounters with the city. Collections of snapshots and video recordings offer extensive archives of public engagements with urban space that appear, at the moment, to have been virtually untapped by academics studying the city. This source is especially appropriate to the study of public art, given that it is frequently the subject, or at least a subject, of such photography. It is also surprising given the significance that has been attached to such knowledges and visual texts by those who have employed research techniques such as autophotography, or who have used family, tourist, or other photographs as a research source (see for example, Albers and James, 1988; Aitken and Wingate, 1993). In applying such approaches to uncovering meaning in the urban landscape, what is sought is not any notion of scientific representativeness but rather reflexive approaches to what are clues to the geography of engagement between the city’s public(s) and its 56 Hall

spaces. Collections of popular, ‘snap-shot’ photography, for example, are largely untapped archives of this engagement. I have argued that researchers examining questions of the meanings of public art, its roles and functions in the context of fashioning new cities, should shift the focus of their concerns from production and text towards audience. Methodologically and theoretically the tools to enable this already exist. At the moment there are a number of basic questions that we seem to know little about.These include: • • • •

Who are the audience(s) of public art? How do they engage with works of public art? What meanings do they attach to works of public art? What are the natures of the experiences they derive from this engagement?

A combination of ethnographic observation, qualitative interviews and analysis of popular visual knowledges of new urban spaces and public art offer the possibilities of addressing some of these issues. Conventional readings of the landscapes of public art and of regenerated city spaces have tended to paint them largely as socially sterile and closed to anything other than the intended meanings inscribed into them by their producers. However, geographers and other social scientists have begun to move beyond the semiotic in their readings of the city. As public art spaces have become increasingly central to the definition and experiences of the post-modern city, it is time that they were subject to such critical interrogations. Such projects offer the possibilities of opening up alternative geographies, histories and sociologies of the spaces of the post-modern city that have only been partially revealed in academic representations of it to date.

Opening Up Public Art’s Spaces... 57

Part Two

Place Identity

Paul Usherwood

A New Script for the Lake District Introduction

Visitors are performing the Lake District in a new way. Where once they felt obliged to act out a script that affirmed English citizenship, nowadays, increasingly, they enact a script that is concerned with individual self-realisation in terms of the body. Until recently the activity of strolling about the Lake District and talking knowledgeably about the area’s picturesqueness was a type of ritual which those with social and political pretensions undertook in order to demonstrate their supposedly superior taste and discrimination and therefore suitability for participation in English public life. For contrary to what is often suggested, the ability to value natural scenery in an aesthetic manner- as with the ability to appreciate art - is not something that comes naturally. It requires cultural capital and is dependant on cultural knowledge. This paper will draw upon the work of writers on the Lake District including, Norman Nicholson (ref), Michael Andrews (ref), Iain Ousby (ref) and John Urry (1995). However, I have chiefly been guided by the work of sociologists and cultural theorists who have written about the relationship between physical and social space and, more generally, the relationship between cultural practices, subjectivity and identity, including Pierre Bourdieu (1984), Henri Lefebvre (1991), Richard Sennett (1977), David Chaney (1993) and David Matless (1998). It seems modern-day visitors to the Lake District are comparatively ignorant of the Romantic writers who went there in the past and who have shaped subsequent generations’ understanding of the area. Nevertheless visitors tend to have a vague sense that the kind of language for valuing natural scenery which they themselves habitually use owes something to writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and that these same writers have long been regarded as somehow especially English by virtue of their place in the English literary canon. Hence, for instance, the sting for most viewers of Ingrid Pollard’s series of photographs, Pastoral Interludes (1989) showing the artist out walking in the Lake District is that she happens to be black: It is hard not to read these images as some kind of comment on the nature of Englishness today. A Cultural History

The Lake District is perceived as inextricably bound up with what it means to be English and thus the issue of who does and who doesn’t have the right to roam its vales and hills has long been a moot one. Indeed, calls for the Lake District to be preserved for those who constitutionally are capable of appreciating the area adequately, those whom one guidebook writer in 1903, in a rather wonderful phrase, called ‘holidaymakers of the stern sort’, go far back, as far back in fact as tourism in the area (Palmer, 1903: 230). Admittedly Wordsworth, in his guide to the Lake District first published in1810 famously argued that the area should be turned into ‘a sort of national property, 61

in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’(Matless, 1998: 251). However, it should be noted that later in his career he took a quite different view. Writing to the Morning Post to object to a proposed railway line between Kendal and Windermere in 1844, he explained, that while he did not want ‘artisans and labourers, and the humbler classes of shopkeepers’ to further their appreciation of natural scenery, he would prefer them to do so elsewhere. As he said, such people could always make,‘little excursions with their wives and children among neighbouring fields, whither the whole of each family might stroll, or be conveyed at much less cost than would be required to take a single individual of the number to the shores of Windermere by the cheapest conveyance. It is in some such way as this only that persons who must labour daily with their hands for bread in large towns, or are subject to confinement through the week, can be trained to a profitable intercourse with nature’ (Wordsworth, 1926:166). Forty years later, Ruskin, another great champion of nature as spectacle and a writer like Wordsworth whose work did much to reinforce the popularity of the Lake District as a tourist attraction, made essentially the same point. If things went on as they were, he predicted, there would be another new railway through the area, this time between Windermere and Ambleside, and when that happened it would not be long before you would find a ‘High Street of magnificent establishments in millinery and “nouveautees” running along under the hills from Ambleside to Grasmere, with the railway to Keswick immediately to their rear, [and close behind it] ‘a Wordsworth Crescent and Silver How Circus, commanding the esplanade which will encompass the waters of Rydal and Grasmere – principally then, of necessity, composed of sewage and a “Lift” to the top of Helvellyn, and a refreshment Room on the summit [ready to] prepare the enthusiastic traveller for a “ drop” to Ulleswater.’ And beyond that, he continued, the Vale of St Johns, on the other side of the ‘rectilinear shores of Thirlmere reservoir’, would be ‘laid out in a succession of tennis grounds’ (Ruskin, 1908: 569). Since Ruskin made this completely incorrect prediction, there has been a steadily swelling chorus of those deploring the consequences for the Lake District of what has come to be called ‘mass tourism’. In 1925, for instance, W. G.Collingwood, Lakelands writer and disciple of Ruskin, inveighed against the spread of what he called ‘suburban villas’. Likewise John Dower, the main architect of what later was to be the Lake District National Park (an organisation which ironically has particularly helped to safeguard the Lake District’s touristic appeal), in 1944 complained about ‘charabanc parties, illcontrolled children’s outings and other “excursion” groups’ (Dower, 1944: 31).And in 1946 Cyril Joad, the popular philosopher, broadcaster and writer on the countryside wrote of the threat of ‘more roads and wider roads’,‘squalid camps’,‘gramophones on the waters of Derwentwater’ and ‘young women grilling their bodies like steaks by Lakeland shores’ (Joad, 1946: 106). Such horrors combined everything which his readers would, he assumed, naturally loath, namely, the seaside resort, the Butlin Camp and the smart hotel. However, in the 1920s,‘30s and ‘40s the citizenship script of the Lake District, with its built-in preservationist stance, underwent a slight but significant modification. Under certain conditions, it came to be argued, the urban poor could, and indeed 62 Usherwood

should, be allowed access to the area. Cyril Joad also a pioneer of the Youth Hostel Association and the Ramblers Association asserted that far from being something to deplore, the fact that ‘crowds of ramblers, complete with rucksacks, shorts, and hobnail boots’ were turning to hiking rather than beer ‘as the shortest cut out of Manchester’ should be seen as cause for celebration (Joad 1934: 12). Yet there was not a complete turnaround in attitudes in these years.Those who now welcomed the urban poor noticeably always tended to hedge around their welcome with heavy advice about how the new class of visitor should behave. For example, H. H. Symonds in his book, Walking in the Lake District (1933) offered useful tips not just on such matters as how to recognise treacherous bog, carry a walking stick or descend steep slopes (keep the knees bent at all times), but also on the kind of conduct that should be avoided: Don’t roll stones, even pebbles, down the fell-side,‘This is one of the first rules of decency in mountaineering’(Symonds, 1933: 279). Also, avoid shorts and bare knees. ‘Bare knees are a fashion merely. Does the shepherd go in shorts? They may be a refuge in some decennial heat wave; apart from that they serve only to expose the knees to the most relentless denudation - unless of course you aim no bolder than passwalking. Not trousers, but knickerbockers, for preference’ (ibid: 277). In a similar fashion, another member of the great and good, G.M.Trevelyan , historian and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, took it upon himself to warn readers against going about in ‘regimented’ groups. Walk on your own or with ‘one fit companion’ he said (quoted in Matless, 1998: 87). Meanwhile, Trevelyan’s friend Joad had something to say about the kind of conversation one should have whilst out on the fells. Avoid Socialism, Town Planning and Theology, he advised. ‘Discussions are artificial things and for the artificiality of indoors’ (Joad, 1946: 52). Talk instead about ‘little, immediate things’, such as ‘What was that flower?’ ‘Where shall we have tea?’ ’How many miles before we get there?’‘What is the name of that hill?’ and ‘Did you see that squirrel?’ Needless to say, the 1930s’ context for this new, up to a point, more welcoming version of the citizenship script was the fear of political turmoil that existed at the time in the minds of the middle class. In turbulent times, it was believed, the Lake District could and should do its bit by acting as a kind of social safety-valve. The same role is perhaps applicable to contemporary urban green spaces, as Mike Davis has discussed in relation to the city of Los Angeles (Davis, 1990: 226-7). As Symonds put it in the preface to Walking in the Lake District, something had to be done for all those who had become dangerously coarsened by modern urban life. ‘..born and confined as we now are, among a discipline of bricks and mortar, or at best among the sham gentilities of the “Tudor tea-shop” style, our problem is not easy: there is a risk of a certain crudeness in us. But we can only learn liberty by the use of liberty; and until we get this free access to the open country back again into our city life, we shall be unsatisfied...’(Symonds, 1933: 6-7) And Joad writing in 1946 agreed: ‘I challenge anybody’ he said, ‘who was a spectator of the invasion of the country by young people in those fine summers just before the war, who watched the youth hostellers, the ramblers, the cyclists, the scouts, the guides and the campers to deny that what they achieved in escaping from the oppression of the towns was a good thing, good no less for their souls than for their bodies. For the feel of the air upon the skin and of the sun A New Script for the Lake District 63

upon the face; the tautening of the muscles of the legs as we climb, the sting of rain upon our cheeks…these things are not of the body alone; they have their influence upon every side of our being’ (Joad, 1946: 57). Slightly after this, during and immediately after the Second World War, the citizenship script was modified further. The Lake District in the 1940s began to be presented as a place to which one went in order to show off one’s ability to respond not just to the picturesque qualities of natural scenery but to its scientific qualities as well. No doubt there were various reasons for this. Partly it was a reaction against the clichéd character of many of the mass-produced representations of the Lake District then in circulation. Partly, certainly, it was a product of a certain kind war-time propaganda which made much of the supposed joys of the English countryside; Penguin, for instance, brought out a popular edition of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne during the war. Also, certainly, there was a huge growth in popular interest in natural history of all kinds in the forties. In particular, immediately after the war birdwatching enjoyed an unprecedented boom. For instance the success of James Fisher’s best-selling Watching Birds (1941) and Bird Recognition (1947) and programmes like the Home Service’s ‘Nature Parliament’, first broadcast in 1946.There was a huge rise in the membership of bodies like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Royal Society for Nature Conservation and Friends of the Earth also during these years (see Urry, 1995:180). A New Script?

Today this citizenship script of the Lake District in either its aesthetic or later, scientific form has not suddenly disappeared, far from it. Go to the Lake District today and you will still come across watercolour painters hard at work at their easels and would-be Peter Scotts and James Fishers, eyes peering up into the branches, binoculars bumping against their chests. Indeed, with the advent of the modern conservationist movement heralded by ‘Nature Conservation Year’ in 1970 there has been a decided increase in latter type of visitor. Interestingly, A.G.H.Bachrach in his introduction to the Tate Gallery’s exhibition, Shock of Recognition notes, ‘the term “conservationist” looks like having come to stay in modern English usage’ as the result of Nature Conservation Year (1971: 2). Likewise, you will still be plied with advice about how to behave whilst out on the fells, albeit couched these days in a more user-friendly, jokey style. So the citizenship script survives. However, overlapping with it there is now another, quite new way of performing the Lake District, a new way of imagining oneself whilst visiting the area: the self-realisation script. The novelist Ian McEwen in his 1998 state-of-England Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam puts his finger on what this is. One of the three main characters in Amsterdam, Clive Linley, described as Britain’s most successful serious composer, goes to the Lake District to find inspiration for the rousing theme for the finale of a major piece of music he has been commissioned to write. By walking alone on the fells, he believes he will find the inspiration he needs to write something with all the power and sense of triumph of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Significantly, however, such a theme eludes him. Or rather, as he clambers up the Glaramara summits, he thinks of something that seems to be what he is after but then, several months later, when he hears it performed - in Amsterdam (hence the book’s title) - he realises to his horror that it is 64 Usherwood

not. Far from being a modern-day equivalent of the Ode to Joy, and evoking what the Lake District has given him, it is nothing more than an embarrassing pastiche. And to make matters worse, while out on the fells he also suffers another kind of failure: a moral failure. Quite by chance he spies in the distance a young woman being attacked by a man and instead of going to her aid, as inwardly he knows he should, he pretends he has not seen her and continues instead to mull over his Amsterdam theme. It is the wrong decision and eventually, at the end of the story, he is made to pay for it with his life. In other words, the implication of McEwen’s book as far as the Lake District is concerned seems to be that whereas in the past the area was capable of providing spiritual refreshment and Wordsworthian inspiration, nowadays it is not. Nowadays, it is somewhere you go simply to work out; or as McEwen says at one point, nowadays it is nothing more than ‘a gigantic brown gymnasium’(1998: 80). Admittedly it has long been recognised that enjoying the Lake District either aesthetically or as a student of natural history is likely to prove physically taxing. For instance, Wordsworth, Ruskin and Trevelyan, all of them prodigious walkers, took it as axiomatic that only by undergoing the gratification-delaying, ascetic ordeal of a good hard slog across the fells, preferably in atrocious weather, could one expect to gain the full moral and aesthetic rewards which contact with nature supposedly brings. But what I think has changed is that a good hard slog is now seen as an end in itself.Thus, for instance, the visitor guide to the modern sculptures installed by the Forestry Commission in Grizedale forest (opened to the public in 1977) seemingly has no qualms about describing most of the five cycle routes there as ‘demanding’ or ‘strenuous’. The assumption appears to be that a substantial number of Grizedale’s visitors would have it no other way. Indeed, Grizedale sculpture itself can be seen as primarily serving to legitimise the Forestry Commission’s redefinition of the forest as a place not just of timber production but of recreation and of this type of exertion in particular. This may seem surprising in that most of the eighty or so works dotted around the forest at Grizedale are the kind of attention-grabbing, populist tat one would encounter in any industrial ‘brown-field’ site or motorway service station children’s play area. However, it should be noted that this is not true of all of the sculptures. For example, it is not true of what have always been the most publicised pieces such as David Nash’s Wooden Waterway fashioned in a seemingly casual ad hoc manner from the trunks of fallen trees and branches or Andy Goldsworthy’s Sidewinder made out of discarded logs bent by the action of wind and snow. Furthermore, such pieces, it seems to me, can be seen as projecting the new gymnasium script of the Lake District in as much as their publicity material has helped to project an impression of Nash and Goldsworthy as very much artists of a certain kind, namely artists who work with simple hand tools well away from the hurly-burly of the modern world. Nash and Goldsworthy, they suggest, are anchorites in overalls following a tradition of reclusive artists in the Brancusi mould and responding to nature in a way which is more that of, say, Henry Thoreau’s Walden than anything distinctively English. (Brancusi tended to be referred to in magazine articles as living like ‘a hermit in a cluttered studio off a blind alley in Paris…in almost complete obscurity’ where he followed a day-to-day existence ‘not dissimilar to that of A New Script for the Lake District 65

his [peasant] parents’) (See Tabart & Monod-Fontaine, quoted in Chave, 1993: 13). Typically, for example, Goldsworthy’s piece is presented by Grizedale publicity as the product of what was for the artist a liberating, Thoreau-esque experience (Sennett, 1977: 34). ‘I have always felt a massive potential at Grizedale to provoke change’, the artist is quoted as saying, ‘not only to make me see things afresh but provide means by which I [am] able to draw together experiences, forms and ideas from work in other places and materials’ (Grant & Harris, 1991: 24). However, in the last four years a new director at Grizedale, Adam Sutherland, has been commissioning work that marks a profound departure from the shamanic, redemptive pretensions of Nash and Goldworthy’s work and which often seems to be making a direct attack on it (see in particular, the Grizedale pieces of Simon Lewandowski, Callum Stirling and Nigel Coates installed in 2000). The most obvious manifestation of the new Lake District script, however, is not places like Grizedale but the clothes and equipment with which visitors kit themselves out. This is not however appicable to all visitors. The older visitors as ever prefer anoraks, boots and woollens in muted ‘sensible’ colours that can be bought from the locally-based Hawkshead company, that is, clothing with connotations of not just the particularities of the Lake District’s gentle scenery and Lake District craftsmanship but also the benefits of cheery, Cyril Joad-ish brotherly rambles on Lake District fells and discreet, serious-minded, James Fisher-ish encounters with Lake District fauna. Younger visitors however increasingly go for something eye-catching and techy. Even in high summer, one will come across hardy souls wielding long aluminium walking sticks as if out on an alpine pass in the depths of winter. Also, it is noticeable that brand names are increasingly in evidence, brand names which carry decidedly un-English, un-Hawksheadish connotations like The North Face (slogan: ‘Never stop exploring’), Wild Country (Slogan: ‘Technical friends’), Columbia (slogan: ‘Authentic. American. Active. Outdoor.’) and Salamon (slogan:‘freedom, action, sports’). Such names conjure up an unrelentingly hostile notion of nature, far removed from the kind of thing that thrilled Wordsworth, Ruskin or Joad: an American notion which construes nature as forbidding wilderness against which the intrepid explorer / adventurer/ sportsman must test himself. So there are signs that the Lake District is fast losing its Englishness and becoming a new kind of social space, one dedicated at once to both pure enjoyment and self-denial in a way which both peculiarly modern and peculiarly American. On the one hand, therefore, the area functions very much as it has done for the last two centuries: as a place like the seaside to which one goes in order to break free of the temporal and spatial shell which according to Henri Lefebvre the body has developed in response to the conditions of modernity. But on the other hand, it is fast becoming somewhere akin to the medieval desert, that is, the kind of place to which one goes in order to ‘find oneself’ psychologically by denying oneself immediate physical gratification. Now it might be objected that the new Lake District is not really so new. It can be traced back to almost the start of Lake District tourism and Captain Joseph Budworth’s A Fortnight’s Ramble to the Lakes and Coleridge’s notebook accounts of solo fell-walks c.1800. However, I would argue that actually this is not so. Budworth and Coleridge’s 66 Usherwood

exploits, particularly the latter’s, were different to what I am describing in as much as they were concerned always with the spiritual and aesthetic effect of being alone in a high, wild, naked landscape rather than just the physical, technical business of getting there. Take, for instance, Coleridge’s description of Striding Edge, on top of Helvellyn: ‘Travelling along the ridge I came to the other side of those precipices and down below me on my left – no – no! no words can convey any idea of this prodigious wilderness. That precipice fine on this side was but its ridge, sharp as a jagged knife, level so long, and then ascending so boldly – what a frightful bulgy precipice I stand on and to my right how the Crag which corresponds to the other, how it plunges down, like a waterfall, reaches a level steepness, and again plunges!’ (Holmes, 1989: 281) Or, similarly take this from a century later, an amateur rock climber’s account of reaching the summit of a Lake District peak, ‘The freedom was what impressed me most’, the writer declares,‘mile upon mile of wild country over which one could wander at will. It made me whirl my arms over my head in idiotic ecstasy.What joy to cast off restraint, to feel out of everyone’s sight or hearing, alone with nature’ (Oppenheim, 1908: 7). In such passages it is evident that merely conquering the crag or the mountain is never enough. It always needs to be supplemented with some kind of passionate, effusive declaration about the aesthetic and spiritual rewards of being amongst Lake District scenery. Also, it is worth adding here, in the past there were always those who were prepared to argue against rockclimbing as a pursuit as being at once both narcissistic and pathological. Joad, for example asserted, ‘…the bitter-sweet delights, painful pleasures and agreeable distresses which go to the making of the rock-climber’s complication of emotions…may well have been intended for the enjoyment only of spiritual masochists’ (Joad, 1946: 99). Finally, let me note again that the new Lake District script has not completely superseded the old one. What exists today in the Lake District is a situation where two different scripts are being acted out simultaneously. As I have said, on the one hand, more and more visitors, especially younger visitors, are going to the Lake District in order to realise themselves through the exertion of their bodies. But on the other, there are still many who go there, as of old, in order to demonstrate a certain kind of cultural knowledge and thus affirm their Englishness. Indeed, the two sets of visitor are not necessarily distinct. It is entirely possible, for instance, to find one and the same person acting out both scripts. A particular friend of mine, an inveterate Lake District tourist, is a case in point.This man owns a Hawkshead anorak but he also owns a North Face one as well; he wears either as the mood takes him. I suspect he is not unusual.

A New Script for the Lake District 67

Nicola Kirkham

Candy Coated Chronotope – Spatial Representations of a Seaside Resort Introduction

The film Funny Bones tells the story of Tommy Fawkes, a stand-up comedian jaded by his easy but fake successes buying acts for Las Vegas hotel cabaret. He returns to his hometown of Blackpool to find inspiration, but while he auditions the town’s music-hall failures, he stumbles across the Parker Brothers, a clown team whose act his own father (played by Jerry Lewis) stole years before. Through this Blackpool entertainment duo, on its way out and available for sale, Tommy discovers that humour is not a marketable commodity. This paper reconsiders Funny Bones’ representation of Blackpool through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. I assess whether it is theoretically effective to use the chronotope, literally meaning space-time, as a basis for investigating the essential, defining cultural characteristics of a particular place. As such I hope to locate this chosen theoretical outlook within the context of a wider scheme of literature concerned with the nature of the relationship between space and culture and the representability of both. I first give an account of the development of Blackpool as a seaside resort, followed by an analysis of some related methodological problems in sociology and geography, and subsequently account for my use in this paper of Bakhtin’s chronotopic discourse. Using Bakhtin I explore the film’s narrative; contextualised by its setting in Blackpool. More specifically I relate the real space of Blackpool, its actual development as a seaside resort, to the hero’s development in the space of the film. It seems the complex dynamic of the film, the narrative, the place and the audience hold particular significance for our understanding of the relations between culture and context. Blackpool: A seaside resort

Unlike the majority of seaside resorts in Britain, Blackpool did not develop from an ‘authentic’ indigenous industry, such as fishing; it’s historical development has materialised solely as a site of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990,1995). In 1783 the Government provided funding to the local council for its promotion as a tourist location in local newspapers. This was motivated by health issues for city populations and a belief, at the time, in the special purifying and healing qualities of the sea. The same period, for example, saw the founding of other institutions based on this belief, such as the Sea Bathing Hosptial at Margate in Kent.The growth of Blackpool as a major holiday resort, began with the construction of a railway from the industrial cities of Manchester and York, bringing with it an influx of workers from their factories (Eyre, 1975). The growth of working-class excursions to Blackpool around 1870 brought conflicting reactions in the town.The tourist population, up to this point, were artisans 69

and country gentleman, people whose time would be spent in leisurely walks along the seafront or playing cards in cottages along the shoreline, and who were advocates of the healing powers of sea-bathing. A system of physical separation was imposed on the multitude of small private landowners to protect the ‘better class’ of visitor from the mass of tourists now visiting from industrial cities. In the central district, surrounding the railway station, street performers, merchants, music halls, drinking houses, shops and other such amusements began to develop, whilst to the North and South such developments were curtailed to secure better class lodgings in relative quietness and privacy. This physical separatism with regards to the spatial planning of various entertainment pursuits along class lines continued until the end of the nineteenth century. However it was the ascendant working-class visitor that created a boom period, and thus the development of all the main tourist attractions for which Blackpool is famous:The Tower, the North, South and Central piers, the Winter Gardens, the Grand Theatre and the illuminations (a spectacle of lights along the shoreline). In addition the municipality banned market stalls on the beach forcing traders onto the promenade and creating the now (in)famous Golden Mile. Blackpool is today characterised as ‘the playground of the North’ (North West Tourist Board, No.17). It is still visited by 12 million people a year, some are day trippers, some stay for the weekend, but half of which are visiting for the tenth time [ibid.]. Its history is such that it is seen to equal the freedom of the working man from bourgeois constraints, the uninhibited progress of proletarian activity. The town itself was built on such freedoms. Auberon Waugh sums it up well; ‘It is the big rock candy coated mountain of proletarian aspirations’ [Waugh,1979]. Some Problems in Methodology

Many disciplines attempt to make sense of the distinct characteristics of particular sites: What relation the physical space has to the nature and order of activities which occur there and the effect this has on how the place is identified and represented. Such investigations of architecture, urban theory, geography and sociology for example, presuppose the necessity to consider ‘context’. Hayden White, a professor of historical studies wrote: ‘When we seek to make sense of the such problematic topics as human nature, culture, society and history we never say precisely what we mean or mean precisely what we say. Our discourse always tends to slip away from our data towards the structures of consciousness with which we are trying to grasp them;or,what amounts to same thing,the data always resist the coherency of the image which we are trying to fashion of them…’ (Hayden White, 1978,Tropics of Discourse) In the first instance a site is always already implicated in a socially constructed level of meaning. At whatever scale a site, whether a shop, neighbourhood, town, city, region or nation-state, they are sites for someone and of something and not simply ‘geographic locations’, in the positivist sense. Thus it is possible to make sense of the cultural context of images and myths which add a socially constructed level of meaning to the ‘sense of place’, the genus loci, thought to derive from the forms of the physical 70 Kirkham

environment in a given site.The study of contextuality must then also take into account the differences of opinion, as to what something is, how it may be spoken about and the kind of knowledge we can hope to have of it. It must take account of the always legitimate grounds for differences of opinion, and the questionability of the discourse’s own authority. As Foucault has noted [1984:168] the claim of the human sciences to study human activities implies that human sciences must take into account those human activities which make possible such disciplines. However both geography and sociology, for example, operating under the rhetoric of scientific discourse, believe that through concrete theorisation, objective knowledge about the world is made possible. Research has assumed observed, overt behaviour provides a realm of solid, verifiable fact for research.This has had the effect of separating the individual (posed as subject) from his or her environment (posed as object) reducing the physical interpenetrative nature of the relation between the human body and a place or environment to a purely visual ontology. However, as Rob Shields notes, ‘Environments are not analogous to images…environments are participated in, being both an object of reason and a container of the thinking subject who does not so much interact with the whole environment as participate in and depend on it’ [1991:14]. Therefore a clear distinction must be made between research into people’s existential participation in their environment and research into the culturally mediated reception of representations of environments, places or regions which are afloat in society. Furthermore the philosophical realism and administrative bias of both geography and sociology focus research on common causations and common underlying social processes. Although both recognized the importance of space to social enquiry, as Doreen Massey notes ‘…the geographic variations of the uniqueness of outcomes were lost’ (1985:12)(see also Massey, 1984, 1994).The particularities and specificities of the internal form of places, the concrete and abstract manifestations, in relation to culture and to individuals were lost. Analysis in general has overlooked the diversity of everyday interactions, belief systems and changing spatial perceptions of a place. Space is one of the axes along which reality is conventionally defined; it is part and parcel of our notions of reality, truth and causality. In order to fully understand its concepts space cannot be divorced from the real fabric of how people live their lives. Moreover culture cannot be treated as a totality which imprints its message on residents of a cultural area or landscape. Work in contemporary cultural studies views society as constituted by a plurality of cultures, some dominant, some marginal, and ‘culture’ as negotiated, resisted and selectively appropriated by people in everyday life. Rarely, if ever, is culture passively internalised. Thus human acts, experiences, values and meanings (amongst others) are brought to the fore as constitutive practices, forming complex patterns in relation to social processes, in turn undermining theoretical reductionism or economic and administrative determinism as modes of address. Finally, central to these methodological problems is the subscription to a view that language and knowledge provide an unproblematic medium for the expression of human sense experience.There is no such thing as an ‘Archimedean point of reference outside of society and the world at which all points might be weighed and called to order’ [Shields, 1991:16]. Just as there is no such thing as a ‘pre-suppositionless’ experience, that is, a method or a way of Candy Coated Chronotope 71

understanding outside the everyday context. The town of Blackpool is not a scientific object, that is, its ‘meaning’ cannot be located purely within either its physical or cultural materialisations, such as its population surveys and maps, but only from within the context of a culturally, historically and spatially specific formation.We can conclude that, ‘Places and their images are not scientific objects…our views of them are produced historically and are actively contested…if place-images or even entire cultures are not objects to be described, neither are they a unified corpus of symbols of meaning that can be definitely interpreted once and for all for every person‘ [Shields, 1991:18] Bakhtin’s Chronotope

In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin [1981] spoke of literary genres as modes of thought, from which the richest discoveries about the relation of people and events to time and space occur. He believed the novel to be the most obvious example of the different ways people represent and understand history, society, politics, and other such categories essential to an understanding of culture. Bakhtin understood literary narrative to be shaped by a specific way of conceptualising the possibilities of action. Different literary genres possess particular parameters within a field of possible actions and events.To sense a genre’s field of possibilities is part of what reading is all about: we tend for example, to shape our expectations to given works based on a sense of what is considered plausible in works of that kind.This is, Bakhtin says, ‘the living impulse’ or ‘form shaping ideology’ [ibid: 18] of a literary genre. In literary genres real historical space and time are ‘artistically expressed’ [ibid:84] using techniques which are available in the given historical moment. ‘‘We will give the name chronotope to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ [ibid:84]. The kind of space and time contained in a work of literature forms a constitutive category of its content. Bakhtin [1981:84-258] asserts that the variety of ways time and space relate constitute a basis for whatever cultural acts, forms and experiences occur. The chronotopicity of a specific societal formation (as it is depicted in the novel) is the determining factor of the representability of its content. This I would argue, can be applied to other areas of culture, namely to actual ‘places’. In the literary chronotope space and time form the essential defining characteristics of the narrative plot. Time is infused with life, ‘it becomes artistically visible’, while space, sensitive to the movements of the narrative plot is charged and responsive. My contention that Bakhtin’s analysis can be applied to real places would imply a ‘field of possibilities for action’ in a particular place, as in the literary genre, and that these different social activities and representations of those activities presume different kinds of space and time. In the case of determining the ‘culture’ of Blackpool, what relation the physical space has to the nature of activities which occur there, the effect this has on how the place is identified and represented, an answer can be provided through its specific chronotopes. This analysis has significant divergences from the philosophical realism briefly accounted for above. In opposition to these studies the crucial difference is that space and time cannot be regarded as transcendental abstractions, nor concretised or separated from our immediate reality 72 Kirkham

whose make-up presupposes different qualities of time and space. The chronotope enables a systematic method of foregrounding the social use and construction of space and place by spatialising feelings, beliefs and activities, placing questions of the social and the cultural as central components of our understanding and in the construction of our most immediate reality. Spatial Representations of Blackpool in ‘Funny Bones’

The film Funny Bones uses the context of Blackpool to provide the spatial and temporal categories essential to its narrative structure. In other words Blackpool provides the film’s essential chronotopic value. The methods of artistically fixing time and space in the film ‘Funny Bones’, in short its novelistic chronotope, corresponds exactly to the type of novel Bakhtin refers to as ‘the adventure novel of everyday life’ [ibid:84]. The critical points to note about this particular genre in relation to its ‘chronotopic value’ are that the entire course taken by the plot is made up by a particularly crucial moment in the life of the hero, the essential portrayal of which rests on two prerequisites: that the portrayal of his life given to us in the film is contextualised by a transformation, and that this transformation corresponds in some way to an actual course of travel. In the case of our hero Tommy Fawkes, his transformation is from an easy but fake success buying acts for the world of hotel cabaret, to the originality and artistic integrity he encounters in the clown duo the Parker Brothers. This ‘path of life’ is marked by his journey from Las Vegas to his home town of Blackpool. Since it is not a biographical life in its entirety, this transformation serves as an ‘artistic method’ for portraying the whole of our hero’s life in its more exceptional and unusual moments: depicting how a man can become other than what he was. We are therefore given very specific, sharply contrasting images of the hero, in pre-crisis (as a child in Blackpool), during crisis (Las Vegas), and post-crisis (premier on the Blackpool stage).This technique is to depict his essential nature as well as the nature of his entire subsequent life, whose course stretches beyond the limits of the film, after his re-birth. The temporal sequence of the film’s narrative is a closed circuit localised in historical time, to the extent that the hero participates in an irreversible sequence of events marking the course of his transformation.Therefore time in this film, ‘forms an irreversible whole’ [ibid:119]. It is not merely technical; a distribution of days, minutes, hours internally unlimited, transposable, reversible along a straight line, it demands that the hero’s situation at each moment is given a concreteness of expression. Perhaps then the most significant characteristic or chronotopic value of this particular narrative is how it fuses the course of the hero’s life with an actual spatial course, to denote everyday time.The everyday and the hero’s transformation within it, is given a concreteness of expression by his journey through space (from Las Vegas to Blackpool). Space then becomes saturated with living meaning. It is not merely a technical form (near/far), but allows the crucial meaning of the hero’s development during the story to be realised and narrated. As an aside this artistic method originates from folkloric tales in which a road is never simply a road but always denotes the ‘pathof-life’ for an individual, which has obvious parallels with 1960s’ American road movies. The hero’s internal struggle is played out and his movements in space, in Candy Coated Chronotope 73

everyday time, are given meaning by their setting in the context of Blackpool. Blackpool thus represents the everyday, the substance of the characters in the story including the Parker Brothers,Tommy Fawkes and his father - express meaning by their movements in relation to the town. Thus the essential meaning of the film’s story is the relation its content is deemed to have vis-à-vis Blackpool. Conclusion

I have explained above Blackpool’s historical development into the quintessential resort of ‘proletarian aspirations’ in order to show that the filmic representation of Blackpool’s space and time, and therefore the narrative function these have as motivators of the hero’s life transformation within the film, are crucially dependent on the real historical development of Blackpool as the location of the spatially specific working-class entertainment.The hero’s ‘path of life’ could not have the same meaning if a series of contrasts were not set up between his easy but fake success in the world of Las Vegas hotels, and the originality of the act devised from within the constraints of the everyday sphere and precisely for the world of Blackpool’s basic entertainment, on its way out and available for sale. From this chronotopic analysis we can conclude that the construction of meanings of ‘place’ always rests on a dialogue between ‘meaning-frames’. In this paper the concept of place-image (of Blackpool) is a variable and non-resolving diversity of circulations of interpretation and communication between film, town and audience (amongst others).

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Niketown Berlin: The city as a brand experience

Welcome to Niketown

In 1999, the first European Niketown opened in Berlin.A total of 19 Niketowns are now found around the globe, in Atlanta, Berlin, Boston, Eugene, Chicago, Denver, Honolulu, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Miami, New York, Orange County, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle,Toronto (see http://www.nike.com/niketown_offline). As tourist attractions and local outposts, the Niketowns are crucial elements in the firm's global marketing plan. Anyone visiting Niketown and expecting to discover some novel conception for communicating brand identity will be rapidly disappointed. The Niketowns are – at first glance – supermarkets for sporting goods, with each sport occupying a corresponding, thematically outfitted space, decorated with the devotionalia of great heroes. Viewed architecturally, the Niketowns are effectively staged, well-designed theme environments. But such a view misses the essential character of the phenomena. Niketown is not so named simply because it is a sporting-goods supermarket, with departments outfitted to mimic the different quarters of a city, but instead because in the final analysis, Nike claims to transform into a "Nike city" any city where a Niketown is sited. Any given Niketown is no more than the spatial and organizational point of departure for a variety of activities that intervene in urban space, transforming the city's identity. On closer investigation Niketown is neither a sporting goods supermarket nor simply a building; it is a city animated by the spirit of Nike.To what extent such a strategy is amenable to real implementation can be assessed by examining Niketown Berlin. Methods of Approach

In approaching the city as a brand-specific space of experience, we will oscillate between three contrasting viewpoints whose superimposition should render both the genesis and the complex functional mechanisms of the urban brand environment more transparent. Firstly, the perspective of the consumer, who identifies with Nike and utilizes its interventions into urban space. Secondly, the perspective of the brand strategist who positions Nike's brand image and tries to develop strategies for communicating that image. Thirdly, the perspective of the urbanist of the city, who attempts to anticipate — based on contemporary trends in the development of branding strategies — the appearance of the city of the future based on such developments and which can be expected to have an enduring influence on its functioning. 75

The consumer: Identity, Experience, Brand Identity

The formation of identity is an essential feature of post-traditional societies.The search for identity and individuality, for the "Who am I?" has come to be the actual content of our lives. Home town, class, family and profession no longer exist as constant factors, and thus no longer provide adequate potential resources for identification (Sennett, 1998). In consumer society, to construct an identity means to generate it from a variety of bids for identification, and communicating the resulting sense of self via product attributes and social connotations. Thus the process of defining and communicating identity is a creative act, a cultural performance – and this is true both of the process of selection from a range of perceived options, and for their investment with definite attributes – i.e. a single product can be endowed with contrasting meanings in different social contexts (see Featherstone, 1991; Fiske, 1989; Miller, 1995). The greater part of our everyday activities consists of recombining various styles and codes – unconsciously for many, consciously with trend-setters (Gladwell, 2000). In this context, there is a perpetual interplay between sub-cultural trend-setters and marketing strategists. If the latter attempt to steer and control the meanings now associated with their brands, labels and logos – and this is the purpose of branding and product advertising – then subcultures continually invest products with new codes, developing new styles that are in turn converted into mainstream-compatible brand identities by branding strategists. The construction and communication of identity is realized through the codes that are imposed on certain styles, brands and products (for economic studies on brand development see; Kapferer, 1994 & Marconi 1993). Classical branding attempts to endow a brand with an image capable of generating a product-specific bid for identification.The ‘Nike boom’ (Bieber, 2000) beginning in the mid-1980s was based on the logical application of this principle. By combining bids for identification, projection surface and product, a holy trinity was formed consisting of message (‘Just do it’), a sports idol (Michael Jordan) and a product (Air Jordan) (see http://sneakers.pair.com/jordan.htm). Moreover 15 years later, this strategy is now being copied by Adidas: The message (creativity, style, personality), the hero (Kobe Briant) and the shoe (Kobe 2) (see http://www.adidas.com/). Experience

The other form of contemporary identity formation is experience-oriented action. Since the 1990s the search for emotional, sensual and bodily experience has been described as one of the fundamental traits of contemporary society (Schulze, 1996). Such experiences, such special, extraordinary happenings, offer the possibility of perceiving one's own identity in ways that transcend daily routine, of viewing oneself in other contexts of meaning and at the same time feeling oneself a part of an ‘event community’ (Gebhardt, 2000). In experience-oriented perceptions of the self, the question:‘Who am I?’ is replaced by: "What do I experience?" In this context it does not matter whether the search for

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exceptional types of experience is interpreted as a compensatory attempt to achieve release from a disenchanted and alienated daily world; as a positive extension of individual horizons of experience; or as a logical transformation of a Fordist industrial society into a late-capitalist one. More crucial for approaching the phenomena of branded urban environments is the fact that a social demand exists for such experiential options. Still more important is the fact that alongside identity-formation via external references, through affirmative consumption and the recombination of preformed identity fragments, an introverted, inner-directed self-perception, formed via active participation in experiential offerings, constitutes a further and vital element of identity-definition and formation. Branding

At precisely this point, experience-oriented branding development begins: What happens when a newly developed experiential offering, one that is also commercialized, becomes identical with the message of a given brand? The hero as figure of identification is replaced by spaces of experience. Here, among various experiential offerings, the consumer can experience new identities, contexts of meaning, and spheres of feeling. Furthermore in the course of such experiences a brand image is communicated, such that a durable connection is established between the individual identity that is constructed thereby, and the given brand identity. Niketown replaces Michael Jordan. Replacing projections of an ideal image with an event environment in which brand identity is relayed via new forms of experience. Identity formation no longer functions through the recombination of external references linked to specific product codes, but now via experiences endowed with specific bids for identification.The consumer's attention is no longer directed toward a heroic figure, since he/she has become one him/herself. There are many examples of firms attempting to develop designed spaces for experience in order to transmit their brand identity. Such spaces do not belong to the everyday, but constitute ideal worlds. In Berlin, Nike pursues a branding strategy going well beyond this, and entailing the transformation of available everyday urban spaces into brand environments. Thus the ideal Niketown is no artificial, ‘environment for experience’, sealed off from its surroundings like the VW Auto Stadt designed by Henn Architekten Ingenieure (Henn, 2000) or Adidas' World of Sports designed by Agnélil Graham and Partner (Klingmann, 1999), rather it is an urban space recoded via interventions directed at target groups. In the process, Nike is altering the forms of use of urban space, defining a new, activated urban sphere as ‘Nike Town’. This new Nike Town is being invested with an image of subversive resistance against every-day behavior. The new urban space is perceived as a space of experience – and is seen by the target group as a ‘liberated’ space, one bound up with Nike’s brand identity. Through a fusion of the ideal Nike Town with the space of everyday urban experience, the level of identification is enhanced.The brand image becomes a new ‘hometown’.

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“Welcome to Nike Town”

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Informal Advertising

Niketown Berlin...

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The Brand: Nike ‘Just do it’: Making the Impossible Possible

Break out of the everyday. Just do it. The ideal image of Nike Town is a liberated, sportive and athletic city. ‘Just do it’ stands for the freedom to do exactly what you please. It embodies the spirit of Nike, and means fighting and winning, even when that seems impossible. Accordingly, among Nike's heroes are not just athletes like Michael Jordan who represent the overcoming of physical boundaries, but also ones like Cathy Freeman, who conquer social constraints through sports. Nike's ad spots show situations in which the rules of daily life are transgressed through sports. Hence in a famous New York ad from the mid-1990s, Fifth Avenue is transformed into a tennis court. Traffic is brought to a halt, and the rules of every-day existence are suspended. The heroes – Agassi as gifted enfant terrible, Pete Sampras as incarnation of the perfect athlete – serve as projection screens for our own desire to escape from ordinary routine. ‘Just do it’ – sports as resistance against regimented and repressive daily conditions. A crucial buttress of Nike's brand identity is its anchor in the sub-cultural protest world of Rap and Hip Hop that emerged from the ghettos of the American inner city in the 1980s.This African-American sub-culture invested this sportswear, as casual wear, with a new social code: Sportswear staged as a kind of urban battle gear. This coding was adapted by Nike, and – with an emerging mainstream form of Rap as catalyst – converted into the new ‘international style’ of global youth culture. Sport as liberation from and resistance against the everyday, united under the auspices of pop-cultural body worship, combine to form Nike's brand identity. Resistance and liberation as a lifestyle that is perceived as identical with Nike: In order to embed this image durably in the consciousness of its target group, Nike had to create experiential possibilities in which sports activities are experienced as being freed from everyday constraints, as forms of subversion and protest somehow associated to Nike. The brand identity must be rooted in everyday experience. Global goes Local: Nike in Berlin

Berlin seemed ideal as a point of departure for anchoring a global player like Nike in local contexts while simultaneously endowing it with an international aura. This is so because the city's image is in many respects consistent with Nike's brand identity: Berlin (before 1989) as an ‘outpost of freedom’; Berlin (during the fall of the wall) as a city of radical upheaval and liberation; Berlin (after the wall came down) as city of innovative culture, home to a multiplicity of exciting sub-cultures. Nike's first step toward anchoring itself in Berlin was to become a partner of the Berlin soccer union Hertha BSC. Its second step was the opening of Niketown as base for local actions and campaigns. The ad campaign for the opening of Niketown Berlin already suggests its objectives: Sport (and hence Nike's products) and protest against unfreedom in the city are to be fused into a single image (v. Borries, 2000). Graphically, the posters were oriented to the simple means employed by spontaneous protest movements: Torn out pictorial elements, captions stuck together from single elements, strips of scotch tape. In terms of content, restrictions on urban space is thematized:‘It is 80 von Bories

strictly forbidden not to play on the grass,’ or ‘there are more places to play than you think – and one of them is directly under this poster,’ express the everyday experiences of the youthful target groups (i.e., nothing is really permitted) and foster noncompliance and resistance. Of course, these posters were not mounted in expensive places, but on building fences and the concrete anchors of construction site barricades. Local Interventions

All local actions described in the following have one thing in common: Through them the urban environment is activated by Nike and contextualized as an intensive space of Nike sports experience.The ad or activation campaign (developed in Berlin by Aimaq Rapp Stoll see http://www.ars-berlin.com/) adapts methods developed and employed by sub-cultural movements. Now Graffiti, now pseudo media guerilla actions, now campaigns à la action art. In Berlin, Nike, as global player, takes up the aesthetic of street culture and subversive youth culture. The "Bolzplatz" Campaign

Berlin's ‘Bolzplätze’ are municipal game courts belonging to the city's park authorities. Generally located adjacent to children's playgrounds, they are surrounded by high fences and resemble the Bronx basketball courts where international Hip Hop originated. In Berlin, the ‘Bolzplätze’ are not fully utilized by youth. Despite this, their aesthetic qualities endow them with a high potential for stagecraft. Nike's goal was to connect union-independent or ‘cool’ street soccer to the firm's brand identity. The summer 1999 campaign, intended to transform the Bolzplätze into Nike-identified spaces, was based on the slogan ‘freedom lies behind bars’.The title is a double allusion to the city's restrictive regulations and to the ‘cool’ image of the Bronx basketball court – and the criminality residing there. This medial activation strategy had an urban dimension. Large format posters displayed city-wide, maps of all Berlin's Bolzplätze. Small stickers with captions reading ‘to the nearest Bolzplatz’ in a neon-colored magic marker style were distributed to youth at Niketown, to be pasted on lampposts and power distributor boxes. Cinema ad spots showed youth practicing on the Bolzplätzen with stars from Hertha BSC. On the high fences of the Bolzplätze, restrictive signs were installed in officious looking lettering, with phrases like ‘enter at your own risk’ or ‘drinking forbidden.’ The name Nike is absent from all of the signs, stickers and posters, only the lettering ‘Berlin’ and the ‘Swoosh’ appeared. But the target group knew what was going on. On the ‘Fuck You’ hotline of youth broadcaster Kiss FM, where young people are invited to vent their frustrations, faked calls were placed, supposedly from frustrated soccer fanatics and their enemies. As a consequence of the campaign, Berlin's Bolzplätze were so intensively used by young people during the following summer, park authorities were prompted to install genuine restrictive signs bearing house rules, hours of rest, etc. The Battle of the Districts

Summer 2001, as a continuation of the Bolzplatz campaign, came the ‘Battle of the Districts,’ a Bolzplatz tournament between self-organized street soccer teams from the Niketown Berlin...

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The Ball Park, Berlin (1)

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The Ball Park, Berlin (2)

Niketown Berlin... 83

various districts of Berlin, organized by Nike. Of interest here is the overlaying of the Nike's brand image on top of the (in Berlin quite distinctive) identities of the city's various quarters, from Wannsee to Kreuzberg,Wedding and Nieder-Schönhausen. Nike saddled the already existing district identifications with its brand identity. Naturally, this action was coordinated in collaboration with the districts themselves and with school officials. This too indicates Nike's pretensions to establish far-reaching connections between brand image and perceptions of the city by means of such actions. On the occasion of the soccer EM, the ‘Battle of the Districts’ was accompanied by Nike Park. For Nike Park, the abandoned site of the former “Stadion der Weltjugend” (Stadium of World Youth) was converted into a Nike soccer school and thereby revalued. Radio spots announcing the arrival of underground soccer fighters – stars like Edgar Davis and Oliver Bierhoff – were spliced into ‘typical’ radio ads in the style of pirate broadcasts, complete with static interference. Subground Battle

In summer of 2001, the ‘Subground Battle’ united the features of the previous projects for staged experiences.These are the staging and recoding of a site; and the heightening of existing potentials for identification by the ‘parasitical’ overlay of the Nike brand image. ‘Soccer Basketball Skateboarding Underground’ was the slogan of ‘Subground Battle,’ referring to a 3-day action using the disused underground station below the Reichstag building, now converted into a thrilling zone of experience space.Terms like ‘battle’ and ‘underground’ were intended to evoke associations with the radical protest movements as this unused urban space was liberated by Nike from the usual structures of control and transformed into a zone of experience. Sports activities were introduced: The underground tunnel became a pipe for skateboarders and the imposing entry area a basketball arena. With the introduction of a barrier fence, the character of spontaneous occupation, the dream of every skater, was emphasized. Slogans like ‘when skateboarding becomes a crime, it goes underground’ alluded to the experiences and desires of young skaters vis a vis public spaces such as underground stations: Everything is forbidden, nothing permitted. But with Nike, things are different:‘Just do it.’As with the Bolzplatz campaign, restrictive signs functioned as an ironic commentary on everyday urban constraints, the ‘reversed’ traffic signs refer to a functionality of everyday urban existence that is hostile to sports and play activities. In all these campaigns, fallow public spaces – the neglected Bolzplätze, the disused underground station – were activated and staged as designed spaces for experience. The reliance on protest culture attempts to mobilize discontent with a regimented city, and the staged protests constitute a bid for identification. Urban space is transformed into brand environment, spaces designed for experience, intended to transmit Nike's brand identity. The City: A brand-specific , experience-oriented environment

The example of Niketown Berlin in communicating brand identity by implementing spatially accessible yet self-enclosed, brand-specific spaces for experience demonstrates how such marketing strategies can be piggybacked onto existing urban structures. 84 von Bories

The Ball Park, Berlin (3)

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Nike Town is a new type of city, and the ideal Nike Town is a counterpart to the contemporary city because it is a realm of uncontrolled experiential density. Nike Town is the urbanized dream of pop culture: The combination of freedom, protest and the body cult. But even more contrary to the contemporary or traditional European city is the ideal Nike Town, since all of its spaces are staged and commercialized. Protest, resistance and spontaneity are staged elements in the stylization of a brand-specific bid for identification, as developed by this global player. The concept of Nike Town manifested in Berlin makes imaginable a city made up of a variety of designed spaces for experience, each invested with its own brand identity.A city thus becomes conceivable in which urban space is developed according to marketing strategies. This global player generates local identity and makes spaces available that are brand-identified spaces for experience, generating durable emotional connections between consumer identity and brand identity.The interventions undertaken by Nike in the urban space of Berlin are prototypes for the brand-specific city. In assessing such developments, the question arises: What is the relationship between such actual and experience-oriented revaluation, and the systematic economic utilization of urban space? Or: How does one live in a city in which any experience can be understood as consumer conditioning? Here too, new cultural habits come into being which make possible both subversive and affirmative forms of interaction with these new urban spaces. A new cultural competence is conceivable, one incorporating a creative and reflexive distance to one's own – brand specific –horizon of experience. For just as Niketown Berlin is a preview of the future city, these young consumers are the avant-garde among urbanites sharing a creative orientation to experience and identity.

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Habil Jan Hartman

The University Campus – a Ghost City In this short paper, I am trying to define the role and place of the East European university campus within the public and urban spaces of a ‘satellite state’ orbiting around the highly developed West. I am especially interested in drawing an analogy between the position of a campus within the city’s structure and the position of a ‘student community’ within the structure of urban populations of an emerging democracy and market economy. Of course, my references also concern the self-image of campus culture and its architecture in the West itself, since the parallel self-image in the Eastern part of Europe can only thus begin to be drawn. In Poland and other relatively poor countries, which have been experiencing political and economic expansion in recent decades, millions of students have concentrated around the multitude of small colleges struggling for university status. These young people have created a clearly distinct social group, which is ill adapted to general norms and largely free of external control. Its awkward sovereignty surfaces in various circumstances, for example in the course of mass entertainment events, or stormy political outbursts. Yet, this sovereignty and freedom are curtailed and limited by a number of hard realities. Firstly there is a total economic dependence on the real society, as it is called (i.e. the money-earning parents, and state assistance). Secondly the shifting and short-term character of the student population is connected to the fact that typically, students remain a resident of the campus for periods no longer than five years. The latter leads in fact to the makeshift and tentative status of an entire group which is unable to display any longterm solidarity, having yet no real basis either in any stable unity of their fates or in a fair division of labour.The third factor limiting the sovereignty of the student class is rooted in the very reason for such human organisation as a university and its campus, which consists of individuals assuming as their goals the promotion of individual career aspirations within specific social hierarchies. This, together with a university itself, is an essentially opportunistic and pro-social motivation.Though isolated, partially parasitic or apparently communal, the characteristics of the lifestyle of a campus create a slight illusion of non-socialization – in a handy way transformed into the symbolism of hippy culture and it more recent derivatives and echoes – only to be unmasked subsequently through the commercial re-socialization and bourgeois normalisation of the key expressions of this illusion. The situation is exacerbated by shifts of class consciousness and opportunity as both students and professors are increasingly drawn from class backgrounds excluded from tertiary education in previous periods; this means that middle-class career aspirations and welfare ideology are imposed on an underdeveloped and semi-conscious contestation that mark a student lifestyle. Furthermore the traditional exterritoriality of the university against the city, its separate geographical location which mirrors its psychological as well as (a)social 87

location, inherited from the Middle Ages, and the subsequent isolation of the campus as an apparently open district, causes some annoying or confusing ambiguities.The claim expressed by this settlement, which is a location only of study, is for the highest level of statesmanship socialization, a claim which in order to be expressed and declared needs to use most of the university’s own ideological power to legitimate itself amongst the highest social strata. Precisely as this ideology legitimates the university, the functionality of the university is reproduced only by its highest representatives in the society whilst students hardly perceive this ideology or at least don’t wish to do so.Thus the student society of a campus, together with the urban substance of their campus, don’t belong to the proper, immanent substance of the city. This campus society – the use of the word community would be a misuse in view of its temporary status – and its urban form (the space which is its vehicle) seem both to be alienated on account of its chronic, provisional, tentative, transitional, to not to say nomadic character. The society of a campus is only partially settled in its social and urban place and therefore its socialization remains dubious. A campus itself, analogously, is only halfrooted in a city, being as much sticking out of its residential and working parts, as it is little credible as a long lasting component of the city’s substance. In effect, for all the external appearances, such as the noisy nightlife and the elaborate networks of illegal or half-legal activities beyond public control (I refer here to untaxed trade, drugs, petty technological thefts such as falsifying telephone cards, and prostitution – see Bordner & Peterson, 1986), a campus ‘community’ is highly fragmented. It is populated by alienated individuals deprived of the sense of a common goal who, as economically and psychologically dependent on external persons, are lonely and unsure of themselves. In East-Central Europe this personal alienation usually takes the relatively unpretentious shape of solitude or loneliness, while in the cosmopolitan West it becomes a much more socialised and politicised phenomenon. However the roots of alienation are always very personal and every disappointment experienced by young people in a community which later turns out to be the ‘community’ without a ‘commune’ damages their personal socialization (Parker, 1992:Angell, 2000). To sum up so far, and suggest some comparisons: shanty towns and ghettos provide examples of Hobbesian type urban spaces where family and street-gang solidarity provides a shelter against universal hostility. Huge suburban districts of apartment blocks are but sleeping rooms of the city. The areas covered with middle-class houses can be dubbed spaces of urbanised privacy. In parallel with these definitions, a campus is a ghost city. It is a nomads’ makeshift camp, temporarily inhabited during the college term and in-between holidays. During the holidays each resident can return to his/her home, i.e. the parental home, or travel elsewhere. This campus city is a temporary urban installation with the atmosphere of an Expo village; it takes on the problem that, after the Expo is over, it is uncertain what uses such a site might then have, when the fair is no longer there. How long is it going to exist? How is it going to function and evolve? The Expo Village in Lisbon raises questions of this kind. Returning to the University campus: if each part of the city space should be perceived from the perspective which best shows its social peculiarity, then this essential peculiarity may be best epitomised by the view from the window, the sight over the 88 Jan Hartman

fence, the panorama seen over the café table, etc. In the case of a university campus in a poor country it is the view from a double-layered bunk bed in a crowded dormitory room. The essential element of such a perspective is a pin-up girl poster, the panorama extending towards the cafeteria, a cheap bar, a nearby shop, other college buildings, and up to the misty outlines of the ‘city’ and the crucial and focal site of the railway station. Looking from inside your room towards the outside of the city is always facing the public sphere from the borderline of our privacy. There are two terms in use, aimed at confronting and comforting both sides of the meaningful space and both of which domesticate the unreal space of a campus; one is ‘neighbourhood’, the other ‘infrastructure of facilities’ (see Dickens, 2000; Bareither, 2000; Dober, 1991). The space of a campus is narrow and overcrowded. Its spatial structure and architectural demarcations partly resemble military barracks and seem to be stigmatised by some hidden forms of repression. The repressive tension on campus consists of the closed spaces, the common use of security devices, watching guards, and the division of genders within the residential accommodation.The intimacy of an overcrowded college campus in a Central European city spreads out of the private rooms and moves toward and conquers parts of the city’s public spaces, like park benches, bars, and even kitchens – in the night. Privacy, lacking in the three-bedded rooms of student hostels is reproduced in a compensatory way through private parties, which become public, seen even as high priority public services. Public parties, however, instead of intimacy, offer anonymous noise, darkness and crowd.The result is that a campus as an academic village with its proper infrastructure, somehow doll-like and slightly unreal in its apparent independence from the city, turns out to be a generalisation of the destructive alienation characteristic of an individual student’s life (see Muthesius, 2001). Like a campus, spreading throughout the substance of the city and alienating in social, psychic and architectural terms, a student is endlessly free and independent of his/her parents to build, together with others, an aggregate community made up of solitary and uprooted individuals from their former social environments. The academic village as a decentred reality is shifted aside by its official image, exactly like its students, who are non-authentic or half-official parts of academic life: parts of its external legitimation rather than its internal constitutive moment. The academic village then shows its true face in the unofficial time of the night. If an external city holds its nightlife for the marginal and suspicious, a village (so to say) keeps living only truly during the night-time. Dark buildings with lecture halls, radiant dormitory buildings and bars are something to be perceived as an initial, zero state for a campus. Its daily activity is in fact, for most of its overnight residents, a time of passivity, a time of listening to the courses, a night, as it were, to be survived and suffered passively and lethargically. It is not before sunset that students really perform their true actions, exercising and circulating amongst their personal relations. Therefore, the truth of campus architecture is the truth of its night architecture – not that of buildings, but of the dusk and the lights (Gaines, 1998; Dober, 1996). This is precisely why we are never happy with how our campuses look. We look at them to assess them in daylight, meanwhile they live in the night when not too much is to be seen.The night architecture is the anti-architecture, and the campus of the night, a The University Campus – a Ghost City 89

genuine, silent contestation and reverse of its official daytime role.Why should a student care about how a campus looks? What is his/her profit from the university’s ethos, what does he/she anyway know about it at all? The reason why he/she became a resident of a student hostel has very little to do with the reasons and motivations of those who decided to build it.The duties of the day can moderate to some extent this misunderstanding, but in the night everything rises to surface – the ugliness of a campus and the real sense of the life it lives.The campus nightlife’s quick and chaotic consumption is disorganised, rough, and uncertain about its own meaning and goal young life – as against the panoptic, centralised composition of the day-campus. So far, in this brief, hence slightly superficial and nonchalant sketch of a campus, I have used the analogies of structures: the campus – the city, and student society – the society of the city. I tried to show that the features of a campus reflect the neurosis and alienation typical of the student society emerging against the background of the academic society, as well as against the broader social background materialised by the ‘authentic city’ surrounding a campus. I also stressed some features of a campus that reproduce and symbolize the relations between a student as an individual and his or her aggregate community, which is constituted by the very failure of its own constitutive and integrational efforts. We must not however forget about the campus urban symbolism, through which the campus as a district of the city shows its meanings as the connections and general relations it has to its urban surrounding. The provisional and doll-like character of the half-real university district reflects not only some alienation and infantilism of the student society against the society of academia, but above all the alienation of academia against the whole of society. After all, the university is in fact, at least to some extent, a place of work without working, a place of fulfilling some duties without the reality and necessity that charges the everyday life of the external, authentic city - the city of survival.The university must permanently prove and justify its right to exist within the working society. It must persuade the authentic city (so to speak, that is, in the wider society) about its use, value, seriousness, and finally about its very participation in that society. This process is of great importance, especially in poorer countries like Poland where the majority of people have no idea what the university is for and why the money earned by its staff should be acknowledged as an honest living. All signs of division of the university space from the substance of the city and society deepen this distrustful ignorance and destroy the prestige and political power the university works to gain.This has the obvious effect of damaging both the university and the society. It is not hard to guess, after what I’ve said, that I am against this urbanist and social invention of the campus, and especially against its variation, the academic village, at least in those countries where the level of education is not yet a measure of prestige. I teach at a Polish university which is over 600 years old, has now over 35,000 students and is perhaps one of the best universities of Europe. The Jagiellonian University, University of Cracow has up to now managed without a campus. However, two years ago its construction began. I can only hope that philosophers won’t be forced one day to leave the old walls of this Jesuit College in the very centre of historic Cracow, to move to a doll-like building in a doll-like university district in the suburbs. 90 Jan Hartman

Part Three

Cultural Practices

Judith Rugg

Class, Gender, Invisibility and the Autograph: Alison Marchant’s Oppositional Encounters with Space Introduction

Alison Marchant’s Close to Home and Kingsland Road London – East used autobiography and personal objects to indicate the subjective experience of women’s working-class history, appropriating sites in derelict houses in the East End of London. In occupying the spaces in between the domestic, private world of the home and the public one of the street, they inhabited the margins between the inside and outside, in what de Certeau (1984) called ‘the threshold at which visibility begins’, and evoked the marginalisation of class and gender in the social spaces of the everyday. In disintegrating over time, they exemplified what Lefebvre saw as lyrical and paradoxical about the everyday – at once stable but also transitory and uncertain, challenging divisions between public and private. In the siting of images and clothing of workingclass women within derelict spaces, they signified simultaneously experiences of oppression and the potentiality of banal spaces for transformation, posing a relationship between dereliction and the deterritorialisation of women. This chapter will examine how Marchant’s works interrogate the totalities of class and gender with fragments lifted from the artist’s autobiographical frame. It will attempt to show how her temporary, minimal and barely seen interventions oppose the visibility of much public art and create powerful discursive spaces about the nature of place. Close to Home (1987-9) consisted of a six-foot square black-and-white photograph sited in the porch of a derelict Victorian house at 32, Coleville Road, East London, remaining in situ for two years. The photograph, from the 1930s, depicted a woman (the artist’s grandmother) and 4 children standing in front of a similar house. In Kingsland Road London-East (1987) the artist hung her mother’s petticoat from a washing line in a garden basement of a derelict house in Kingsland Road. The work was commissioned by Camerawork Gallery in East London as part of a group exhibition, Breathing Spaces and a large photograph of the work was hung in the gallery suspended from the original washing line.The sites of both works were the objects of compulsory purchase orders to make way for the development of the M11. Inclusively of Space

The photograph in Close to Home and the petticoat in Kingsland Road London – East suggest a border between the safety of the house/home and the alienation of the street. These two spaces are conflicted in that the supposedly safe environment of the home is disordered, registering a potential site for violence; and the publicness of the street, associated with order, is here in a state of flux. Their ambiguity as art works creates a liminal zone for strangers passing by and, as such, contests the boundary between the artwork and viewer; the public and private; the home and the street and projections of 93

Alison Marchant ‘Close to Home’ 1987-9 94 Rugg

Alison Marchant ‘Kingsland Road, London – East’ 1987

Alison Marchant from the series ‘East Londoners’ 2000 (photo: Peter Bobby)

Class, Gender, Invisibility and the Autograph... 95

inclusion and exclusion. The relation of meanings conveyed by the impending past absence of the figures evoked in the work to that of the implied absence of the viewer in the present, creates associations of fear of eviction, homelessness, loss of community and desire for fixity through a recognition of history. They seem to make no sense – there is an element of the illegitimate in the works – until they ‘insinuate themselves into the surveillance’ (de Certeau, 1984:96) of the viewer. As the viewer (the walker) spatialises the city, they initiate what de Certeau called a ‘space of enunciation of meaning …into an ensemble of possibilities’ (ibid: 98). In ‘One Way Street’ Walter Benjamin brings seemingly unrelated fragments into a dialectical relationship and in their incorporation into spaces scarred by use and abandonment, the fragments of Close to Home – the disintegrating house, discarded furniture, parts of garden and photograph – form part of a whole.The work is a kind of montage, the photographic image is both collective and public, and individual and private, whist being simultaneously a displacement. Benjamin’s history is for the ‘other’ - the oppressed and marginalised all those that official history erases. The dialectical image arises out of the task of remembering by the experiencing subject and as such the whole city could be art. Marchant’s works, experienced by the viewer walking the streets, are close to being just another part of the city, their meaning ‘revealed’ only by the subjective experience of the viewer ‘for their materialisation as public art’ (Borden, 1999:20). As Rosalyn Deutsche (1998) has pointed out, siting art outside gallery spaces does not necessarily create a different public for it than inside the gallery. Unlike much public art, Marchant has a defined public: those who live or work within the area/community and regularly traverse its streets. Public art has been seen as ‘part of the construction of an aesthetic perspective of the city in which social contradictions are concealed’ (Miles,1997a: 126) but Alison Marchant’s work articulates the social experience of working-class women and relates it to its audience. In siting the works within the ‘community’ of the East End of London, Marchant identifies her audience to set up a relationship of inclusiveness, thereby addressing the exclusivity of road building and the loss it creates. The users of Marchant’s representational spaces include the viewer of the works as art works as well as past inhabitants. In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau studied the ‘utterances’ of the pedestrian in relation to the way in which narratives arise in an urban framework. He identified three functionings that animate the relationship between spatial practices and signifying practices as ‘the believable, the memorable and the primitive’ (de Certeau, 1984: 128). Such sites as Marchant’s derelict houses ‘recall or evoke the phantoms (dead and supposedly gone) that still stir, lurking in gestures and walking bodies’ (ibid: 141). Like de Certeau’s concept of Synecdoche where a word is used ‘in a sense which is part of another meaning of the same word’ expanding the spatial to be more (ie: a piece of furniture in a shop window standing for the whole neighbourhood) (ibid: 101),Alison Marchant’s works refer to the totalities of class and gender with fragments lifted from the artist’s autobiographical frame. In amplifying the details in order to manipulate the whole, she transforms their effects into a relationship with the viewer. The derelict houses are in a state of change and disintegration and simultaneously, the street is continually being ‘rewritten’ by the 96 Rugg

walker/viewer, revealing meaning through disassociation. The ‘moment’ fixing this boundary, represented by the objects, is also a site of anxiety as they (the photograph / petticoat) are historically and materially incongruous. Within the border, they suggest both the vulnerability and permeability of the (female) body - through the collapsing of the past with the present and in the use of the photograph as an illusory symbolic space. The porch, in Close to Home, in articulating the frame as the limit between inside and outside, occupied the conceptual border between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic whilst also being in a kind of suspended space. The work itself is a frame ‘filled’ with the virtual presence of the 5 female figures (the mother and children) and introduces a dual spatiality with the house. In Henri Lefebvre’s terms, ‘representational space’ includes that which is described by artists and which has its source in history. Positioning the 1930s photograph within the doorway and the artist’s mother’s petticoat in the basement created representational spaces as once lived through these symbols. The work incorporates a symmetrical relationship between photograph and porch, suggesting a duplication and reflection of the ‘real’ porch with that in the photograph. As such it incorporates a mirage effect of a two-dimensional, virtual and ‘imaginary’ surface against a concealed and opaque one. In its representational space, the artwork has a life, is fluid and dynamic and is at the centre of a once-lived situation and ‘thus immediately implies time’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 42). In the mirrored, ‘corridor effect’ of the photograph in the porch, Marchant brings a constructed past alive and into the surface of the consciousness of the viewer.The derelict house as home borders on chaos as if the figures lie below the consciousness of the viewer and are brought to light by the photograph. According to Julia Kristeva the ‘mirror stage’ is the threshold between the semiotic – the ‘feminine’ biological ‘pulsations’ which precede language, and the symbolic – the ‘masculine’ time of language, logic and law. In ‘Women’s Time’ she describes time as both linear (masculine) and historic and cyclical (feminine), according to historical representations of sexual difference (Moi, 1986). The position of the female figures in the doorway of the house, outside the social order of the street suggests their absence from language, knowledge and culture as shaped by masculinity. The Invisible as Memorial

In feminist photographic practice and theory of the late 1970s and 1980s, the relationship between the representation of women and the viewer was considered problematic and was radicalised by (for example) the self-portraits of Jo Spence and Mary Kelly’s use of traces of objects which stood as metaphors for the self. Representations of women were associated with the passive spectacle adhered to male voyeurism. Marchant’s use of the archive in her works, particularly that of her own family from her family album, draws on existing images of women that she re-deploys elsewhere. In her use of the photograph and the petticoat as found objects and as signifiers, she repositioned the problematics of representation to that of context, partly eliminating herself from the position of the photographer as controller. Photography’s ability to fix identities and representations of class and gender (among other things) into stereotypes is countered in Close to Home in which the photograph is part of a Class, Gender, Invisibility and the Autograph... 97

Alison Marchant ‘Homeless History’ 1988

98 Rugg

process of change and decay, like the nature of class itself since the 1980s. Representations of class up until the late 1970s had been influenced by 1920s and 1930s social documentary photography (Roberts, 1990:4) and Close to Home, in its positioning of site, artwork and viewer rejected the idea that representation is transparent to meaning. Just as the site which it occupied was subject to change, the image in Close to Home, by its siting within a derelict space, suggested the erosion of fixed representations of class and gender, but this, the work suggested, is fragile, temporary and subject to the disintegrations of time. In using the edges of derelict houses the works question the implied monumentalism inherent in public art works, the nature of public space and the context in which art is viewed. In the deserted houses, the works constitute the ‘private, secret angles of ...public space’ (Wilson, 1995:160) and the bricked up façade of Close to Home conceals the forbidden inside space – the ‘real’ space of the house as home. Both works subverted the primacy of the visual in perceptions of both public art and photography. The photograph in the porch of Close to Home and the petticoat in Kingsland Road London-East ‘stand for’ the absent presence of women – unseen but known and interrupt the notion of the seen as evidence of the known. In Freudian theory, the relationship of the visual to the desire to know can be perceived in voyeuristic and fetishistic terms. In the barely-seen spaces of their sites within East London streets the works critiqued the photograph’s role in satisfying the desire to know. As in a façade, Close to Home is viewed frontally, yet both works are anti-spectacle and are unexpected interventions in a place, evoking a contradiction between a state of belonging (the viewer) and of non-belonging (the unexpected). Alison Marchant’s work is concerned with the hidden fragments of history and is partly autobiographical - her family was relocated from the East End to Essex in 1945 as part of the slum clearance programme - and she uses the East End of London both as archive and as a site of installation. Living Room (1998), Relicta (1999) and East Londoners (2000) used oral history and photographic archives in very different ways and Interior to Street (1989) used large images of her grandmother projected onto the walls and leaves strewn on the floor as part of a performance work. The visible exists within the hidden in many of Marchant’s works as the viewer must first enter the house in order to see it. Themes of a lost past are inherent in her use of derelict spaces reflecting the absence of women’s working-class history in the visible spaces of the public sphere. The female figures in the image of Close to Home, whilst partly representing the return of the repressed or lost, also signify their continuing absence in the present. In their position within the threshold between house and street, the figures occupied a precarious place between memory and forgetting and past and future, situating the present as the eternal threshold between them and evoking a ‘silent presence.’ In their references to the past, Close to Home and Kingsland Road London-East can be seen as memorials to the ‘lost past’ of working-class women – a past which has not been commodified by history. In the reconstitution of London as ‘heritage’, where only specific histories are conserved or constructed, women’s working-class history is largely absent. In her use of the archive, Marchant is engaging in the process of the representation of the unseen in the dominant narratives of history. Class, Gender, Invisibility and the Autograph... 99

Dereliction as Displacement

As opposed to the structures and preserved matrix of meaning and artefact inherent within the museum, Close to Home disintegrated in situ over a period of two years. The work situated the humane in the now derelict - ‘hollow places where the past sleeps’ (de Certeau, 1984:108) and created for it imaginative possibilities, collapsing the past with the future. On the banal (a bricked up house on an East London street), Marchant imposed her image-as-performance and reasserted ‘place’ over ‘space’ and her attempts to ‘repair’ the work by gluing it back in place etc; over a period of two years, became a metaphoric and performative act. In their occupation of the border between inside and outside, the works suggest a space of anxiety between claustrophobia and agoraphobia – historically identified as ‘female’ conditions related to the experience of a feeling of imprisonment within the home. In psychoanalytic terms, a ‘borderline crisis’ subject wants to transform its reality and colonise its space in order to control it (Goldman, 1999). In their evocation of the return of the repressed histories of the past, the group of figures and the petticoat re-colonise the present and provoke a kind of ‘unfamiliar reality’ in the viewer, displacing time and space. Like Foucault’s heterotopias of difference, the works suggest places of crisis incorporating separation in space and time and, as derelict places on the fringe of ‘not being,’ they are also places of ‘otherness’ within the city. As ‘other’ spaces, they are ejected from the continuum of time within the city, and part of its discard. As heterotopic spaces, the works are linked to fragments of time: the frailty of human time against the hard, seemingly enduring time of buildings. The photographic image was pasted up in the porch yet its incongruity in the place makes strange its site.The building’s impenetrability separates it from the everyday – an intervention by the state and authority, creating homelessness whist in turn keeping out the homeless.There is a poignant denial of reality in bricked up houses – a sign of bureaucratic decision-making processes intervening into the private world of the home, suggesting past evictions, loss and despair. Marchant’s interventions silence the violence of this interchange with the presence of women in a kind of act of passive resistance. Despite being closed off and sealed by authoritative control, the works reveal humanity and function not as objects of aesthetic consumption but within a matrix of identifications and meanings. The visual disorder of the derelict house can be seen in psychoanalytic terms. The disorderly site of the boarded up house, strewn with rotting furniture, suggesting the unclean can be associated with the maternal and repressed anxiety about the abject mother.The female figures of a woman and 4 children emerge from this disorder intact and in an a-historical space. The works create a separation between two borders by implying a sense of things which don’t ‘fit in.’The (clean) petticoat and the photograph from another time seem out of place in the polluting and defiled environment of the derelict houses in a state of decay, ‘confounding the general scheme of the world’ (Douglas, 1991).The works can be seen to suggest meanings about the damaging and polluting effects on the symbolic order by women’s working-class history which has been excluded from it. 100 Rugg

Re-development itself crosses boundaries - in levelling houses and destroying communities and the evidence of their histories. In the culture of separation created by redevelopment –where people are alienated from the everyday within industrial capitalism and seek creativity in consumption (see McCreery, 2000) - the building of the M11 represents a division of social space. Ideas of progress and civilisation are manifest in road building – itself a threat to the social order, whilst the existence of roads creates anonymous spaces devoid of subjectivity. The occupations of property which were part of the European-wide housing movement of the late 1970s – mid1980s, are brought to mind by Close to Home. People squatted empty houses as a political act to highlight the primacy of concerns of government for private property and private ownership over the problem of homelessness in European cities. Marchant’s works evoke Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘representational spaces’ of lived experience, and defy the ‘representations of space’ by urban planners and engineers. Her work comments on the cultural ‘homelessness’ and invisibility of working-class women within society, further brutalised in the sweep of redevelopment, and the prioritising of roads over houses and its subsequent erosion of cultural histories. From the particularised place of the domestic home emerges the anonymous space of the motorway. Anti- road campaigns, like that of Claremont Road, East London in 1993-4 demonstrated that place can be ambiguous, unpredictable, fluid, experiential, contested and historical whereas space is controlling and mappable (McCreery, 2000). The utopian city - one that needs to reinvent itself through the processes of redevelopment - depends on the rational, repressing ‘all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it’ (de Certeau, 1984: 94). Marchant’s insertions into the debris that precedes the utopian ideal of rationality manifest the irrational. In the humanity of the photograph and petticoat, the works address the ‘stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants’ (ibid.: 106). Her art works recall the ‘occupations’ of derelict houses destined for demolition but in contrast with the highly visible forms of road protest in 1993 where the eviction of road protesters received high media attention, Marchant’s works were barely visible. Derelict spaces, as part of the ‘waste products’ of the city reveal that ‘the functionalist organisation, by privileging progress (ie: time), causes the condition of its own possibility – space itself – to be forgotton.’ (ibid.: 95). Close to Home was destroyed by developers with the house and echoes Dolores Hayden’s Power of Place project made the following year to commemorate Biddy Mason (1818-1891) an African American exslave whose house was demolished to make way for a parking lot in Los Angeles. The Power of Place emphasised the lack of historical and cultural visibility of African American women and was an ongoing project. Not intended to be a lasting monument, but a work which “agitated in a place” (Alison Marchant, in a conversation with the author, March 1999), Close to Home both integrated within its site - house, street, London’s East End – on the one hand, discursive - and issues of gender, class and redevelopment on the other - functioning as a critical intervention. In its referencing to the meanings and implications of urban expansion, its temporality and disintegration as an artwork resisted its status as a commodifiable object within the capitalist market economy. Class, Gender, Invisibility and the Autograph... 101

Marchant’s use of decaying houses makes visible the structures of power and the concealing effects of redevelopment in the way it erases histories. As opposed to the tendency of redevelopment to appropriate public art to perpetuate associations of prestige (see Deutsche, 1998), Close to Home and Kingsland Road London- East critique the definition and presentation of public art in that the works’ de-materialisation is accompanied by a de-aestheticisation. As such, as public art works they transgress notions of public art as an aetheticising practice of the ‘new’ and ‘developed’ spaces of the city and in their minimal interventions into space, the works question how much the artist has to intervene in a site in order to initiate a shift in meaning. Both Close to Home and Kingsland Road - East were anonymous in the site and raised questions of the importance of the artist’s identity in their placing of art in public places outside the gallery. The use of these anti-aesthetic places counters the tendency of aesthetic spaces both within and without galleries to have a neutrality and Marchant’s work challenges much of public art’s non-critical intervention in the public realm. Within the context of how redevelopment uses public art without recourse or consideration of its public/s unless perceived as a mass of consumers (Deutsche, 1998), Marchant’s works address their audiences, addressing them in a quiet confrontation. As opposed to Rachel Whiteread’s House, where details such as the roof and staircase were removed so that it no longer had associations with the intimacy of a real house, and which lacked an overtly intentional relationship to homelessness, Marchant’s work critically examines ideas about gender, absence and loss. Behind issues of redevelopment is a theory of utopianism which erases the past. In ‘The City of Tomorrow and its Planning’ (cited by Miles, 1997b:130), Le Corbusier advocated – in an era of Modernist utopianism - the destruction of urban centres in order for them to be rebuilt, erasing the past in his belief that it has no role in a futuristic vision of the city.The ‘order’ imposed on the East End through redevelopment is countered by Marchant’s motions of disorder in her use of a disorderly, derelict space and the imposition of a new kind of ‘order’ – the reinsertion of images of working-class women into the context of the visible. They appropriate a kind of permanence through memory, implying that working-class culture endures through its recordings, whilst having an inherent fragility and impermanence as works of art. The covering up and subsequent erasure of histories through redevelopment is made manifest in the works’ eventual invisibility. Whilst the photographic image in Close to Home suggests a billboard and as such references the spectacle of the mass media, it is partially integrated, occupying a space of mistaken identity. The viewer has to confront the relationship between the space as artwork, the derelict house, the street and her / himself as participant in a matrix of meanings. Close to Home is a reference to the idea that, in the society of the spectacle people have become spectators of their own lives. Yet far from exploiting the nature of the spectacle to placate, the works are more subtle, insinuating themselves into a reassertion of place over space. Dependent on the dérive and the viewer’s ‘transient passage’ through the city, they interrupt through their partial disorientation and subvert ‘knowable’ space. The empty spaces of the derelict houses of Marchant’s works fuse a psychological encounter with the viewer, provoking an awareness of places as containers of human memory. Their eventual disappearance is a testimony to the flaws of memory and the 102 Rugg

tendency of memorials to replace and appropriate the cultural values of objects and images to produce a new experience for the viewer - one of the memorial itself replacing the ‘original’ experience of remembering (see Young, 1994). Walter Benjamin saw women as the guardians of the past: in ‘The Conversation’ he wrote ‘every woman possesses the past’ (cited by Weigal, 1993: 22). Marchant’s art ‘unfolds through space’ (de Certeau, 1984: 89) constructing new environments of subjectivity through their relationship with their specified public/s. She suggests that women’s past is never concluded and in using a piece of underwear belonging to her mother on Kingsland Road London - East and an archival image from her own family album, she indicates the subjectivity of women’s personal history as a relevant force within the collective struggle against invisibility.These objects - normally hidden and concealed make an intervention into the symbolic realm of the city. The significance of women’s working-class history is therefore maintained in the present: ‘the present that eternally has been (and) shall be again’ (Weigal, 1993: 22). Yet Close to Home and Kingsland Road London – East are not simply works about the past and its repositioning into the present, but the present as ever-evolving. As works of oppositional public art they functioned to assert that space is, after all, produced through a multifarious discourse and ultimately is the product of social actions.

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Liz Wells

Icy Prospects Wilderness is a place of imagination, a space beyond that which can be clearly known. As such, several contradictory associations adhere to the notion of wilderness: it has been seen as barren, as a place of spiritual redemption, as object of conquest, as natural habitat for animals and vegetation, as challenge for geographic mapping, as military vantage point, and as opportunity for prospectors in logging, mining or fur-trading. Most of us never actually travel in previously unmapped regions, although we may have clear, possibly romantic, notions of extensive vistas, apparently unpopulated, open or forested, savagely hot or freezing cold. Historically, wilderness pictures were often commissioned for topographic rather than aesthetic reasons; but nonetheless played a scene-setting role in landscape photography. This paper is concerned with interventions by two contemporary photographers which question the terms of the genre.The particular focus is on Lapland, that is, the north of Scandinavia. Through reference to the work of Jorma Puranen (Finland) and Elizabeth Williams (UK), it comments on more critical photographic engagements. Although from the South East of Finland rather than the north, Puranen comes from a culture within which the effects of snow and ice are very marked.Williams does not; her fascination is as an outsider. As I shall indicate, both bodies of work reflect anthropological attitudes and are, for want of a better phrase, anchored academically. One reason for focussing on work made in the north is that, although perceived as Arctic wilderness, Lapland is homeland for the nomadic Sámi people. It is wilderness only in the minds of those who don’t live there. My central concern, then, is with artists’ interventions which question notions of wilderness, deconstruct the conventional landscape pictorial, and engage issues to do with fantasy, desire and the geographic imagination, in other words, invite us to dream with open eyes (the phrase is borrowed from Michael Tucker, 1988, Dreaming with Open Eyes on art and shamanism). Wilderness

For the Oxford English Dictionary ‘wilderness’ refers to ‘land which is wild, uncultivated, and inhabited only by wild animals’; this makes it ‘a wild, uncultivated, or uninhabited region’. Historically, colonial attitudes have been implicated. For instance, the American West or the Australian Bush appeared wild and uninhabited to White settlers; that these areas were inhabited and had meaning for Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals is now widely acknowledged. How can we speak of wilderness when it is, by definition, unknown and unknowable? Geographical imagination is conceptual, rather than topographic; accuracy of mapping is not necessary for roaming and reverie.Wilderness can only exist through fantasy. Wilderness explorations, whether of desert, forest, seas, mountains or polar regions, are founded in flights of fancy and desire.Yet, paradoxically, we can only 105

Jorma Puranen ‘Terra Incognita’, 1997 from Curiosus Naturae Spectator courtesy of the artist

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imagine, chart or picture uninhabited regions through reference to the knowable. Questions of representation arise: however dreamlike the imaginary, we formulate or speak our feelings and ideas through language, visual or verbal. It is a semiotic commonplace that Eskimos have over 50 words broadly referencing snow whilst English has three: snow, ice and slush (and hail and sleet describing icy rain). Language, in limiting that which can be expressed, both reflects and frames socio-cultural circumstances and philosophical modes. Northern languages, such as Eskimo or Ural languages, are adapted to Arctic circumstances in ways that English (which is a Germanic-root language) is not. The limitations of English contribute to the unknowability of icy wilderness; and the limitations of experience contribute to what can and can’t be formulated in response to the imaging or picturing of far north snowscapes. But representation (in words, thoughts or pictures, or in the vagueness of dreamlike states) contradicts unknowability and ‘untouchedness’. In other words, in Western rational philosophy, the desire to define wilderness, through exploration and mapping, articulates an essential contradiction. Photography, often perceived as a literal medium ideally suited to the empirical, has been centrally implicated in attempts to chart and reclaim wilderness. It has witnessed the exploits of explorers, and been used for topographical depiction, thus influencing the visual imaginary. Photographs document people as well as places. Contradictions emerge: notions of wilderness are often premised on ignoring the presence of native peoples - the Bedouin, Australian aboriginals, Native Americans. On the one hand, ethnographic photography testifies to habitation. On the other hand, as if turning a ‘blind eye’ to human presence, lands are typically represented as empty sublime vistas, perhaps potential sources of raw materials such as minerals or timber. As Stevie Bezencenet has commented, The ‘Landscape’ genre tends to present aesthetically pleasing images of natural scenes and Man’s intervention in them, whilst serving the ideological functions of investigating philosophical and religious concepts - demonstrating social order, confirming ownership and affirming personal and national identity (Bezencenet, 2000: 56). Photography thus intersects with and articulates broader concerns relating to politics, economics, anthropology, geography, and geology; this adds to its representational force. We want to believe the possibilities implied by that which we see in the picture. Wilderness Journeys

For Edmund Burke the sublime refers to that which is daunting, fearful, yet exhilarating in its natural magnificence. The sublime unsettles, there is an aura of danger. Part of the fascination with wilderness is the risk of the unknown.Wilderness is not tame, not easily subsumable within a landscaped picturesque. But the sublime relates to the aesthetic. Burke was not concerned with the perverse pleasures of actual risk; rather with the speculative pleasures of contemplation, with the awe-full. The pleasure of the sublime thus results from an interplay of the forces of the natural and the perversities of the imaginary. Icy Prospects 107

If people cannot - or choose not to - make actual journeys they can fantasise about the lives of explorers.There is a sub-genre of travel writing and photography premised upon the heroicism of having ‘been through this and lived to tell the tale’ which panders to such imaginary wanderings; the pleasures here are risk-free! Francis Spufford evokes the geographic imagination, One is sitting somewhere in the warm - perhaps it is sunny, perhaps it is a dark evening of a temperate winter and the radiators are on - and whatever one’s attitude,whatever the scepticism one applies to the boyish,adventurous text in one’s hands,into one’s mind come potent pictures of a place that is definitely elsewhere, so far away in fact that one would call it unimaginable if one were not at that moment imagining it at full force. Perhaps the place is a howling trough between two huge waves of the Antarctic Ocean, where a twelve-foot open boat encrusted with ice and containing five men, one of whom has gone mad and won’t move,looks as if it is about to flounder.Perhaps the place is the foot of a cliff in the dark, so cold and still that the breath of the travellers crystallises and falls to the snow in showers, so cold that their clothes will freeze at impossible angles if they do not keep their limbs moving. Perhaps the place is the South Pole itself, an abomination of desolation, a perfect nullity of a landscape, where a party of people are standing in a formal group, one pulling a string attached to a camera shutter (Spufford, 1996: 1). Photographers do not have the luxury of distanced fantasy. Taking photographs necessarily involves trekking in remote areas. Towards the climax of the first half of the recent fictionalised account of Shackleton’s 1914 trip to the Antarctic the photographer attached to the expedition (working in film as well as stills) was one of the five men selected for the tough overland journey to the South Pole - the photograph being seen as necessary for describing place and as witness to their achievement. Such docudramas contribute to the visual imaginary, feeding into a generalised romance of the polar. This particular drama was shot in Greenland, which is inhabited not by penguins but by polar bears, and which, no doubt, exhibits different types of light and ice formation, if only we, the viewer, were skilled enough to distinguish between the icy North and the icy South.‘Icyness’ in itself becomes a symbol of polar extremes - rather as the green grass of the home counties comes to stand for England, masking visual, geological and climactic diversity. Icy vistas also come to stand, metonymically, for masculinity. The post-war popularity of exploration films such as Scott of the Antarctic (1948) rested in part on the drama of the story of an Englishman taking on the challenge of conquest, mastering fear of the unknown and conquering land. The narrative coherence partly rested on a sense of authenticity; although, again, this turns out to be generalised rather than specific. Accuracy clearly was of some concern to the producers who employed two technical advisors to ensure a degree of realism (one of them, David James, had spent the year immediately after the war working for the Falklands Islands Dependency Survey.) A sense of authenticity was constructed in part through narrative accuracy in terms of, for instance, props, methods of using of equipment and behaviour in subzero temperatures. But environment was also of some concern.The film was acted on location in Switzerland and Norway (as well as in the studio). Apparently generalised icy vistas were sufficient for this purpose. However, as David James remarks, 108 Wells

The first point upon which there was complete agreement was that the film should be made in colour, since black and white could not possibly do justice to the blues and greens of pack-ice, the wonderful limpid colours insides crevasses, or the pure pastel shades that are found in the clear air of the Polar dawns. It was obviously necessary that a small unit should go to the Antarctic for atmosphere and background shots (James, 1948: 44). It fell to him to take the camera team on a three-month expedition to the Antarctic to acquire genuine footage. That the explorer is a male figure is reflected in the phrasing of polar fantasy. David James speculates on the attraction of the Antarctic in what might be viewed as archetypical language of the grownup boy scout, What exactly it is about that bleak and austere continent that attracts men is hard to explain, but the thrill of the unknown, the fascination of making the first footprints, the beauty and remoteness of a land as virgin as the mountains of the moon and, above everything, the exhilaration of battling against titanic elemental forces, all conspire to make those who have once been there long to return...(James, 1948: 17). The terminology is indicative: polar land is virgin and men thrill at the unknown and untouched. Landscape photography, historically, has been dominated by a series of ‘great masters’. I have suggested elsewhere that historically (in Western culture) land has implicated men and women differently, and that aspects of this differing relation are reflected in different approaches to picturing land (Wells, 1994: 44-51). Furthermore, men have generally enjoyed a greater degree of freedom to travel.This is not a hard and fast distinction - there were exceptional Victorian women travellers. But landscape photography as a genre, historically, has been dominated by men. Polar photography is no exception to this. Spufford’s home-based travellers of the imagination include women left behind. Lapland - Arctic Wilderness

Both the Arctic and the Antarctic are key wilderness areas, inaccessible through winter months. The Arctic has been more fully charted than the Antarctic. Northern nations such as Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Lapland, are populated, albeit sparsely. Tourism has begun to feature: winter month packages to the north of Scandinavia include adventure holidays involving overland skiing, husky-drawn sledges, snowmobiles and overnight stays in ice hotels. The ‘white nights’ of June/July apparently attract hundreds of tourists to Lapland, travelling by car and camper van from all over Europe to look at the empty horizon towards where the North Pole must be.The view is often obscured by fog, but, as Jorma Puranen remarks, there on the edge of a huge cliff, people drink champagne and celebrate having come to the end. It’s the end of their physical journey and it’s where the journey of their imagination starts (McNeil & Sand, 1998: 75). Icy Prospects 109

Jorma Puranen from Imaginary Homecoming 1991 courtesy of the artist

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Jorma Puranen ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ from Curiosus Naturae Spectator 1995 courtesy of the artist

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Lapland is home and homeland for the Sámi people, now a minority of about 50,000-60,000 inhabitants. The Sámi have a history which transcends, yet has been influenced by, political tensions as Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia variously redivided Lapland over the centuries. It is a history anchored around rather different survivalist concerns and experiences. In Scandinavian terms the Sámi are the exotic ‘other’ of the north, and, photographically, have been imaged picturesquely in modes typical of Euro-centric ethnographic colonialist themes and conventions. Refusing Appropriation

Puranen researched ethnographic collections in the archives at the Musée de L’Homme, Paris, seeking nineteenth century portraits of the Sámi, some of whom were ancestors of people known to him. (The originals are by a French photographer travelling with Prince Roland Bonaparte in 1884). He reprinted the images onto acrylic sheets and carried them to the northern slopes of Norway and Sweden, physically installing the sheets within the ‘home’ environment prior to rephotographing. His idea was ‘to metaphorically return people who had been buried in archives back to the landscape and culture from which they had been separated’ (Gupta, 1993-4: 96). The original aim was to restore each person to their home area, but the wide-ranging geographical origins made this impossible; the anthropological explorers had been extensive and thorough in their treks. As Puranen has commented, photography and anthropology were both implicated (he uses the term ‘abused’) in colonial processes. The series could have been made through digital amalgamation, but for Puranen the ritual of taking home the dispossessed was an essential part of the project. The portraits show faces, or faces and shoulders, a composition typical of ethnography with its requirement for systematic recording and classification of subjects as ‘types’. The ensuing face and shoulder images of (now long dead) Sámi people, their bodies seemingly buried within the snow, appear ‘larger than life’ due to their position in the snowy hills and valleys and to the sense of scale within Puranen’s pictures - historical echoes etched into lands marked by symbols of the present such as power lines or open mine shafts. In the 1993/94 British exhibition, Disrupted Borders, pictures were installed so as to be viewed across the gallery, or at the end of an alcove, thereby adding to the imposing effect (Gupta, 1993). As spectators we first saw the landscapes from a distance, across which we were enticed in order to respond to the faces which confront us. Deceptive beauty! The aesthetic harmony of the images belies uncomfortable questions about dislocation, colonisation, identity, land and belonging. As Peter Orborne remarks, For a travelling culture with a fluid conception of space, the enforced accumulation of its faces at a fixed centre such as an ethnographic archive,amounted to a declaration of war on its cultural logic.The nationalising function of the original imagery also contained the fear and fascination settled peoples often feel in relation to nomads. They seem to them to personify an enviable freedom outside social constraints and yet, in their unknowability and their silent challenge to property and social order, appear to embody chaos.These acts 112 Wells

of symbolic possession represented a form of symbolic exile for the Sámi which Puranen’s work attempts to reverse (Osborne, 2000: 149). Elizabeth Edwards terms Imaginary Homecoming ‘a dynamic articulation of history as a continuing dialogue between past and present concerns’ (Edwards, 1995: 317). His approach is methodical: ‘as a photographer, I have a scholarly attitude, I try to read up as much as possible before I plunge myself into new situations and new places’ (Aula, 1992: 141). That his starting point for the series was an archive testifies to this. However, as Puranen remarks, ‘transforming the resulting information into comprehensible visual form finally entails spending time in the landscape: letting one’s eyes linger in the distance, in the wind and the rain; among the sounds of the animals’ (Puranen, 1999: 11). The artist thus becomes subject to local climate conditions and cultural constraints. Any risk in the making of work is actual, not held at a distance through pictorial framing as it is for his audience. He worked closely with contemporary Sámi people on the project. In some pictures within the series Sámi men hold the images of their ancestors; in others the large plexiglass pieces take position in the snow, in the woods, or near railway tracks whilst images reproduced on polyester sheets were wrapped round tree trunks or hung within bushes. A further dimension to the story lies in the battle for the environment of the north the pictures show power lines, railway tracks, and mining. It is not only people who have been appropriated, but also the land. Imaginary Homecoming reflects Puranen’s deep sense of disquiet about the effects of incursion northwards. This concern was further marked in his later series, Curiosus Naturae Spectator, in which silk sheets, or flags, inscribed with words, were inserted into the landscape. Irony emerges from tension between the scenes depicted and the Latinate inscriptions which reference cartography. For instance, ‘Systema Naturae’ foregrounded against a clearly manmade dam or ‘Terra Incognita’ flowing across a large rock (see frontispiece). Use of Latin references classic Western Renaissance Art which as the language of the Roman Empire, connotes Imperialism. It is also the language both of the Catholic Church, which, since the Romans, has claimed universalism, and of cartography (pursued under the auspices of the Mediaeval Church). The weight of history resonates in the two examples cited, for instance, ‘Terra Incognita’ is familiar from maps; in this context it suggests not only the unknown but also unknowability, except that this particular spot has been accessed by photography. Other examples are more complex: for instance, one inscription reads ‘speculum orbis terrae’. ‘Speculum’ means ‘I see’; also mirror; also copy or imitation. This layering of reflection (mirror) and imitation complexly nuances the edges between sky, sea, and ice in this snowscape which appears almost as the end of the world or ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ in which the land is shown scarred by the debris of mining. One response could be to translate ‘exagitatorum’ as exaggeration in the French mode of throwing up hands in horror (Vous Exagérez!). A more literal translation refers to the land of those who have been displaced. In this nuance, the lands becomes more equivalent to the French ‘terroir’, with its sense of history and belonging. But if the title is spoken aloud, a sense of dis-ease is implied through the staccatoness of the word. Land agitated by those who Icy Prospects 113

have no right to be there? The photographs are framed in accordance with the aesthetic traditions of landscape photography, with emphasis upon depth of field to draw attention to detail, harmony (the golden rule) and tonal contrast. But the words interrupt easy viewing; rather than anchoring meaning the inscriptions throw it into disarray. Phrases such as ‘Terra Incognita’ also bring the observer/ explorer’s sense of cultural centrality and superiority into play. Who gives him the power and the right to name and designate the character of Arctic lands? Naming may be seen as attempted mastery over the otherness of untamed nature designed, consciously and/or unconsciously, to displace threat. Puranen remarks that most of the people who mapped, drew or otherwise illustrated Lapland over the course of centuries had never really travelled there (McNeill & Sand, 1998: 74). Cartographic picturing operates likewise. As Nikos Papastergiadis notes, The sciences of studying other lands and other peoples were always framed through the rhetorical tropes of the theatre.To see them, the self-constituted, the audience had to be safely seated in such a position that they could recognise the exotic as part of that distant land of make-believe (ibid: 73). This theatre of the imagination led explorers, with their various national flags, to forge towards the North Pole. Puranen reminds us of this territorialism through using flagpoles with their flying sheets to note claims made over such lands which take the form of memories, histories, narratives, geographies, but also involve that which is forgotten or lost. In ‘Terra Exagitatorum’ a satellite dish, shed and power lines foreground people and memory as we realise that any claim for autonomy on the part of the Sámi has long since been lost. As Puranen puts it in the title of the catalogue for his retrospective exhibition,‘Language is a Foreign Country’ (Puranen, 2000). In the Land of Make-Believe

Physical journeys north terminate but the journey of the imagination reaches beyond the point of arrest, towards the ultimate goal, the North Pole. Work processes involved in this illustrate the difference between imaginary and actual circumstances. Puranen told me that often he would set out before dawn to locate the plexiglas pieces, effect the mise en scene or pro-photographic event. He would then wait until the light was as he wanted it before making exposures. By this time, the top surface of the snow would be melting, due to sunlight, thus rendering it impossible to reclaim his materials. So the photographic journey involved waiting for the rest of the day until the surface crisped up again towards dusk. He would take his flask and sandwiches, observe the vistas and listen to the birds, necessarily becoming immersed in the environment. Thus the making of an image became ritualised within a carefully planned excursion. The environment imposed its own pace and restraints upon the manner of operating as a photographer. Without this account the geographic imaginary roams free, paying no attention to the specificities of climate and conditions. The geographic imagination may be a starting point for a project. UK photographer, Elizabeth Williams, spent three months in the winter living and travelling in the north 114 Wells

of Finland. As a photographer she wanted to experience the loss of light, the extended twilight, and the reflection of dimming natural light on the whiteness of the ice and snow.This residency was part of a larger project, Wanderings, which has taken her to other extreme conditions of light, space and place in Egypt and in South Africa.As she notes, The aim is that, through living in another place for a while, and having ‘wandered, sweating, freezing, seen the sun set, rise’ one can begin to see links; similarities and differences, signs and signatures, analogies and sympathies, and through making representation open the door to new associations, stories and dialogue (Extracts from correspondence with author, January/February 2002. The quote is from Nils-Aslak Valkeäpeä, Sámi poet). The first installation to emerge from an early visit to Egypt was titled Strange Territory; she describes her research as consisting of ‘an examination of the discourse between a physical experience of the desert, a metaphorical notion of the desert, and a cultural reading of the desert arising from the history of European involvement with the desert and its inhabitants in the middle east’. (Williams, project proposal statement, circa 1997) These extreme places are also spaces traditionally occupied by nomadic peoples.The notion of ‘home’ is a further starting point; as she comments,‘as western culture becomes increasingly nomadic in terms of race and identity, and nomadic tribes become more sedentary in terms of locations and lifestyle, notions of home are constantly changing and challenged’. (Williams, 1998) The anthropological dimensions of the project are very explicit here. Like Puranen, Elizabeth Williams talks of the difficulties involved in realising an image which she had pre-conceptualised. Wanderings involved living and journeying in extreme conditions in three different parts of the world.The icy north was her final venue; having made a couple of exploratory journeys previously, she took a Winter residency at the University of Lapland. Gender becomes relevant: one of the first problems encountered was clothing. Luckily she is tall and slim; British four seasons gear is designed for sale to men! Then she had to get there; as she notes, (Re) your comment about women travellers and safety. How you would need to arrange a hotel room beforehand. I felt the same….but in all three sites my plans for this just didn’t work out! In Lapland I had University of Lapland accommodation arranged for after my through the night train journey north. Nobody told me that I was arriving on a local holiday and that all would be shut up...So there I was, with baggage for two months (which was much heavier than for a hot climate),in well below freezing temperatures,in a country where I couldn’t speak the language with nowhere to go! In the end I managed to find someone who could speak English who wrote down instructions for a taxi driver. I found a taxi and he took me to the university guesthouse, but it was well and truly locked up,so he took me to a travelling salesman’s hotel and helped me get a room. I had to stay there three days as a weekend followed the holiday.The hotel didn’t provide food…so I had to find where to get some on a bank holiday. ...this leads on to thoughts about dislocation, resourcefulness and the temperament or psychology of people who get drawn to desert/ wilderness travel (correspondence with author, 2002) Icy Prospects 115

Elizabeth Williams ‘Feet in Snow’ courtesy of the artist

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Elizabeth Williams ‘Objects in snow-ice: gloves’ courtesy of the artist

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This thrill at the unknown or desire to explore spaces for oneself transcends the Burkian sublime.The risks are all too real.Williams adds, ...alcoholism is strong in Lapland and Finland in general.The laws for sale of alcohol were stricter than here, but beer was easily available.Vodka was the spirit drink...I didn’t see or hear of too much violence in town.At Rovanemi I was pretty much on my own and not in a community.However in Inari (a Sámi centre in the north) I stayed in a cheap B&B with a reindeer herders bar downstairs. Men looking like Canadian lumberjacks came in and had to hand over their knives in their belts or boots to the barman before they were allowed a drink. It had a history of brawls. I was lucky in that an ex-student of mine from Helsinki was up there, so we met and spent an evening drinking in the bar. He introduced me to the Head of Sámi radio and translated & I saw life! My room did have a lock (thank goodness) but it also had a large hole in the wall to the outside –25C temperature! I stuffed it up with a blanket (correspondence, 2002). These are some of the reasons why women, traditionally, have been supposed to wait at home in the relative safety of geographic dreaming! Given the title of the overall project Wanderings, and her central interest in the nomadic, the foot is an important symbol; Williams had made a point of photographing a foot in direct contact with sand or with desert gravel (in Egypt and South Africa respectively). She had imagined photographing the foot of a Sámi woman, but no opportunity to do so arose. So she substituted her own. Here again, the specific conditions of working in icy areas constrained her mode of working: I particularly wanted a woman’s foot in the snow as if she had just come out of the sauna and was about to roll in snow or dip in the lake (ugh!).In the end,I did it myself...twice,as the first lot weren’t any good. By that I mean I used up one film (24) on one occasion and then another film another day. So about 45-50 times I soaked my bare feet in a bucket of hot water,ran out to the snow where my camera was set on a tripod and used delayed shutter release. Then ran back again. Every 5th time I had to bring back the camera to warm it up to prevent the batteries freezing.The tripod was too cold to touch with bare hands so I had to keep gloves on or my skin would have stuck to the metal.Temperatures were -20C and 28C.(Actually my feet felt great afterwards!) (correspondence 2002). In both Puranen’s and Williams’ examples, the work situation, and the determination necessary (given what many would view as daunting circumstances), are clear in the photographers’ accounts. But to what extent do we think about this in considering the imagery? The frozen gloves, abandoned apparently whilst trying to reach out across the ice, seemingly speak volumes! Another photograph, taken whilst ‘wandering’, shows the frozen Kilpisjårvi Lake, over which, or beside which, Williams walked to get to the ‘local’ shop (which, apparently, ‘sold most things’). The journey was one to one and a half hours each way, usually undertaken by torchlight in the dark (as she reserved the limited hours of daylight, from approximately 10.30am-2.30pm, for photography). From an English perspective this is a daunting thought, more 118 Wella

particularly so when we consider the heavy layers of warm clothing, rucksacks, snowshoes or boots, and the business of carrying or dragging purchases on the return trip, not to mention unknown aspects of the territory. The everyday banal becomes a matter for careful consideration with dire prospects associated. Commenting on her photograph of a crack in the ice on the lake she notes ‘the ice was creaking and groaning and it was scary to have one foot on one side of the crack and the other foot on the other side’ Quite! (correspondence, 2002). Icy Prospects

As an aesthetic category the sublime offers the perverse pleasures of pictures, vistas and viewpoints which may imply danger, but offer no real threat. For most of us it is not the real, but rather the imaginary, free of actual risk, which we seek. If the sublime is pleasurable because of the inter-play of fear and desire, then wilderness imagery offers a secure position from which to dream. Paradoxically, as polar regions become more accessible so the imaginary becomes possibly more accurate but also, seemingly more banal.Writing about her cruise to the Antarctic in 1996, Jenny Diski comments: Sometimes, looking out to sea, I had to shake away the films I had seen, the sense of remembering, without having ever actually experienced the event. I had seen such a sea many times on television, film and in photographs. The sea outside my cabin window looked remarkably like those pictures. It was, well, a copy. And here we all were, taking films of what we had already seen on film so that our children and grandchildren and our friends would once again not see it all afresh for themselves.And if they do go off to strange places, it will be, like us, to confirm what is already known.To see again, in nature, what has been seen already in hi-fidelity, sound-surround, full-coloured vista-vision (Diski, 1998: 157-8). This Baudrillardian loss of originality of imagery is endemic within travel photography, saturated as it is with postcards, advertising and topographic imagery. Dreaming with Open Eyes

A landscape is speechless. Day by day, its only idiom is the sensory experience afforded by the biological reality, the weather conditions, and the actions that take place in the environment. However, we can also assume that a landscape has another dimension: the potential but invisible field of possibilities nourished by everyday perceptions, lived experiences, different histories, narratives and fantasies. In fact, any understanding of landscape entails a succession of distinct moments and different points of view. The layeredness of landscape, in other words, form part of our own projection. Every landscape is also a mental landscape.(Puranen, 1999: 11) Artistic investigation which unsettles and interrogates is to be welcomed. Both Puranen and Williams make work underpinned through reference to the anthropological, but this is a radical de-constructive anthropology, one which unseats Euro-centredness and Icy Prospects 119

refuses unreflexive notions of otherness. In inviting us to consider the parameters which allow for the arrogance of claiming and naming of spaces unknown, or for using photographs to typologise and classify ethnic groups; or asking us to imaginatively rethink what it must be actually to experience Arctic winter as a woman, alone and foreign, albeit befriended, both photographers challenge us to rethink stereotypes and other taken for granted notions of how polar regions such as Lapland, appear to us. In considering the historical and cultural circumstances which obtain behind the icy prospects, both make substantial contributions to radicalising the visual and the anthropological. Both draw attention to complexities in the history and actuality of exploration thus subverting the geographical imagination through refusing easy wilderness dreams. Acknowledgements

Jorma Puranen is based in Helsinki (formerly Professor of Photography at Helsinki University of Art and Design). Elizabeth Williams recently moved from Oxford to N. Wales; she lectures at Reading University. Both have been generous in talking about their work and experiences. Thanks also to colleagues in the University of Plymouth Art History research seminars for their comments on an early draft of this essay.

Cariad Astles

Puppet Theatre & Child Rights

Introduction

This chapter will discuss and analyse a project in 2001 using puppet theatre for development.The project was mainly funded by a Millennium/Oxfam initiative,‘On the Line’, which sought to link people from the eight countries lying on the Meridian Line: Britain, France, Spain, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo. The overall perspective of the project was to connect people from West African communities with communities in Europe, via the arts, education, the environment or sports.The project I was involved in, ‘PuppetMundi’, was concerned with the use of puppetry in raising awareness of child rights amongst children of school age, predominantly those in the ten to eleven year-old age group. The aim of the project was to explore methods for participation through puppet theatre. I wanted to translate the participatory theatre techniques of forum theatre into puppetry, and examine the kinds of participation possible using a range of techniques. Forum theatre is a style of participatory theatre in which actors perform real situations of injustice or oppression; the audience are invited to participate as the actors repeat the performance, getting up and taking the part of the protagonist at points where they believe they could change the situation.The audience are thus transformed into spectactors who try out solutions in ways beyond verbal discussion. It is an approach rooted in action, in acting out possible ideas physically. It also comes from the idea that to use one’s actual body, to experience the situation – albeit in a safe space – gives greater understanding of the issues. The simple act of getting up and taking part is an empowering principle in itself. The contexts for the explorations in this project were situations in which children themselves were able to identify, access and uphold child rights. The philosophy underpinning the process is rooted in the ideas of Paolo Freire (1972), that education and by extension participation in civil society is only effective where the process begins with the participants posing the questions and finding the answers themselves.The project arose from conversations with Save the Children some years before and a feeling that children in Britain and elsewhere are not aware that they have rights, what those rights are, or how to achieve them. During the life of the project I travelled to Spain and Mali to meet local puppeteers, explore their techniques, stories and imagery, and see how puppeteers in those countries were working with issues of child rights.The culmination of the project was the creation of a puppet show and workshop using participatory techniques, which drew on imagery and stories from Spain and Mali. This toured to ten primary schools and two church groups in Devon during autumn 2001.The second stage of the project, which is taking place during 2002, is to return to the same two countries with the 121

Puppet workshop, Mali

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show and to set up workshops with puppeteers, educators and NGO workers to examine the potential of puppet theatre and the different techniques for participatory theatre in development situations. Context

My first professional puppet show was with a Chilean theatre company living in exile in London. The show we presented was an exploration of hunger, individual responsibility and the power of nature to restore harmony. I became increasingly aware of the power puppets have to expose and challenge injustice with all its tortuous machinations. Puppets, which are ridiculous, highlight that which is ridiculous. Like Durov’s pig, they make their point visually and succintly without implicating their creators too much. As caricatures, they are able to engage audiences without lecturing or preaching. Puppet theatre is perceived as comical, childish and as something that will not threaten the status quo (as testified to by the numerous occasions throughout history when puppet theatre has been permitted at times when live theatre has been banned). The marginal status of puppets allows them to get away with sharper comment, be it crude or political, over actors.They are greater than the single character they present and so have the ability to represent universal or collective experience; they are a distillation of character or condition. Perhaps their most important quality is that they engage audiences immediately with a world of other possibilities; to believe in a world inhabited by puppets presupposes the capacity of human fantasy to invent, to create and to vision. For Luigi Allegri, popular puppet theatre indicates the more sophisticated ability of children and ‘popular’ audiences to imagine co-existing worlds of fantasy and reality and to cross between them. He emphasises that this sophistication, which is now largely associated with inferior or infantile mentalities, has largely been lost to Western thought with its focus on the empirical. Thus the power of puppetry. The key question of this project, in its widest context, was to investigate how popular and traditional puppetry can be used to address social situations and to understand and articulate different techniques to develop interactive and empowering theatre. The use of popular puppet theatre in performance which scrutinises a community’s identity and ideology follows the belief that folk heroes/anti-heroes share the same identity and ideology as the community. They represent a complex interweaving of icons, symbols and texts, which are articulated through a series of encounters within specific contexts. They are visual, kinetic and verbal. Their commentaries discuss local not universal issues and their stance is traditionally carnivalesque. They are dialogic, evolving with time and circumstance to break boundaries and reject authority, institution and logic (see Bakhtin, 1981). These characters originate from popular living tradition and thus local audiences are able to relate to them immediately. Where images, stories and characters from their own community are involved , it is more likely that audiences will engage. Kershaw notes that: ‘to have any hope of changing its audience a performance must somehow connect with that audience’s ideology’ (Kershaw, 1992). His discussion of the symbols, imagery and rituals which make up a community’s ideology concludes that for the greatest effect a performance seeking to Puppet Theatre & Child Rights 123

Performance, Mali 124 Astles

change the audience in some way should ensure that the central symbols of the community are damaged but not destroyed.The stakeholders need to see themselves in the show for it to have impact beyond the intellectual. By using local imagery they should feel that they own the performance and that they have some expertise in familiarity with the situations or stories. This recognition of local expertise is a key element in the process of empowerment; it has been promoted by development organisations, in particular the ‘Reflect’ approach pioneered by Action Aid. Recognition of local knowledge and skills goes a long way towards the raising of self-esteem and the resultant possibility of action. The use of puppets with children (indeed with anyone) allows them to play and imagine alternatives to real-life situations. It releases the creative fantasy of the participants and breaks down boundaries to visioning new possibilities. Puppet theatre still suffers from a belated entry into academia and into a realm of serious cultural activity. Its perception as such is due to the relegation of puppets to children’s theatre during the first half of the twentieth century and its attendant loss of status, at least in Britain. Only a few puppetry courses within universities exist compared to several in the rest of Western Europe and many in Eastern Europe and Asia where puppetry occupies an important place in people’s cultural perception.This may account for the somewhat scant attention paid to puppet theatre within serious critical frameworks. Puppet Theatre and Development Work

Theatre for Development has become a lingua franca throughout Africa and parts of Asia (particularly India).Theatre for Development projects are also widespread in Brazil and other South American countries, although here the movement in general is not recognised as it is in Africa and Asia. Puppetry has featured largely in all these areas as a medium of communication. In Africa, in particular, puppets and masks have a resonance as a means of transmitting ethical and social messages via the ancestors and deities.Traditionally, African theatre does not recognise the division between education and entertainment as we do in the west, so Theatre for Development meets no resistance from the ‘arts’ movement. The UK has a large number of practitioners and academics concerned with Theatre for Development; in other parts of Europe, particularly Southern Europe, the notion of the arts influencing areas such as social and community development is undervalued and under-exploited, despite the fact that cultural policy in many of the Mediterranean countries insists far more vociferously than in the UK that children must see theatre on a regular basis. Puppetry for Development in Spain is mainly seen as a symbol of solidarity with people from wartorn countries or refugee camps, not as a movement with its own aesthetics and questions. The movement ‘Puppets for Peace’ which took place between 1993 and 1996 was a response from a group of puppeteers to visit orphanages and refugee camps throughout Croatia, Brazil and the West Sahara rather than as an approach to a methodology for this work (a methodology emerges, nevertheless, from the work itself).Another example could be the Catalan group Clowns without Frontiers, an NGO involving a number of puppeteers which work consistently on a solidarity basis raising money for organisations and individuals in distress. There seems to be a generalised Puppet Theatre & Child Rights 125

Performance, Mali 126 Astles

division between that which is considered ‘art’ and that which is considered ‘workshop’. In the UK, however, there are a number of groups and individuals working with puppets in situations of development both within and outside the UK. The most prominent of these are Small World Theatre in Wales and Rise Phoenix, an NGO which began working in refugee camps in Bosnia and now runs a number of projects including local neighbourhood regeneration initiatives in inner London and projects with refugees in the UK. In Africa, there are numerous theatre companies using puppets for education and social action (especially health education) such as the Kenyan group Chapps (Community Health Awareness Puppeteers) which uses puppets for HIV-education, the group Salohy – Magic Puppets - from Madagascar (also health education) and Gary Friedman who works with prisoners and HIV sufferers in South Africa. In Mali, puppeteers such as Maoa Kone present critiques of particular cultural practices within society, invoking Kershaw’s vision of community symbols being ‘damaged but not destroyed’ (Kershaw, 1992: 32).This overall project, therefore, seeks to compare and document practices within Puppetry for Development worldwide and the project discussed in this chapter is the first stage of the research. It would be useful at this stage to identify several key definitions and principles behind the work. It should be added that here theoretical research emerges from practice, or from analysis of other practical projects. Perhaps the first principle is that research is rooted in action. Analysis is clearly related to actual creation and its outcomes. I would therefore like to comment on several key words which will crop up at regular intervals during this chapter. My own beliefs and principles are integral to the definitions and are rooted in the concept of process as part of artistic activity. Certain words, however, are problematic. The first of these is ‘participation’. Participation is essential terminology in today’s arts officer-speak, and can mean anything from providing opportunities to various sections of the community to join in discussions and practical activities, or the extended use of the word to indicate a high degree of involvement on all levels in issues which are fundamental to your social and community identity. I use the word participation to mean having a stake in decisions and events which concern the participant’s existence within the spiritual, material or political sphere. Linked to this is the word ‘interactive’ which is often used to describe performances for children in the hope that the buzzword will trigger happy responses from bookers. Interaction can refer to the patter exchanged between performers and the audience where the end of the show is still a pre-determined outcome. More complex, however, is the notion of interaction where there is a genuine and equal exchange of ideas between people, and – especially – where further action takes place as a result of this exchange. It is a dangerous idea, and implies there can be little or no agenda set beyond the interaction. Within the confines of this theatre project I refer to interaction as that which will define the progress of further action. Further words requiring definition are rooted more in approach than action. The first of these is development. Until as little as ten years ago the idea of development (illustrated in the unequal terminology of ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries) was to bring the inhabitants in third world countries (now more commonly referred to as the ‘south’) to a state of living and consciousness comparable to Europe, North America and Puppet Theatre & Child Rights 127

colonised states such as Australia.The ethics and funding of development projects were aimed towards this goal. Poverty was largely measured in material terms.The notion of cultural and social wealth had little place in the materialist philosophies of western organisations. More recently, development organisations have had to rethink their often paternalistic colonial attitudes and focus more on micro, rather than macro-schemes. Development philosophy has become much more concerned with self-definition and local control; people are now encouraged to take stock of their existing skills and think locally rather than aspiring to inappropriate lifestyles and agendas. Development workers also became aware of the dangers of hiring outside experts who left no longerterm benefits once their contract ended. Development came to be seen as a process of setting up projects whereby people were trained in skills so that the project could continue to have a lasting impact through its local management. Theatre for Development is essentially concerned with the use of theatrical techniques and methods to address social issues and circumstances and to explore possible solutions or processes towards change. Change may be very small as for example, in the rethinking or repositioning of ideas, or it may be very specifically aimed at changing or addressing action such as voting patterns, health awareness etc.. Therefore when I use the term development I am referring to that which has the aim of addressing social concerns and of making a lasting impact which highlights the particular skills and perceptions of people. The last two words to comment upon here are empowerment and efficacious.Within this chapter empowerment means the process by which people become aware of their potential and skills to shape their own lives and to reach fulfilment in collaboration with others. It implies an equality of people, and the need for each person and community to have a real voice in the defining and celebrating of their individual or collective culture. Lastly, when I use the rather clumsy term efficacious I refer to Kershaw’s excellent definition: ‘the potential that theatre may have to make the immediate effects of performance influence, however minutely, the general historical evolution of wider social and political realities’ (Kershaw, 1992: 1). PuppetMundi

The project, PuppetMundi, came about as the result of a couple of years’ planning. I had previously worked with Forum Theatre and toured a puppet show based on traditional Brazilian puppetry. I became interested in combining puppetry with Forum theatre to explore child rights with younger children, and envisaged a performance where both the actors and spectactors were puppets. The question of efficacy arises in developing an evaluation process for this work. It is possible to evaluate in utilitarian terms (counting heads) but the nature of the work necessitates reflection based more on observation, instinct and comment from all participants. Nick Clements suggests a fairly simple qualitative analysis: ‘The process can be judged…in terms of where the participants started and where they ended: their expectations, self-awareness, group identity and understanding…of arts materials’ (Clements, 2002: 4). The methodology developed here employed a multievaluation process. I met with a sample of the schoolchildren during the early stages of the project to discuss with them their understanding of child rights and of the 128 Astles

countries involved in the project, Spain and Mali. I kept a journal throughout the project commenting on its progress, and reflecting on situations which had arisen. I was in regular contact by email with puppeteers in Spain from which all our discussions were documented and recorded. At the end of each month I wrote a report of the project’s process and progress noting successful and problematic areas. I also had regular meetings and discussions with my supervisor for this project, Osi Okagbue. During my visits to Spain and Mali I met and interviewed puppeteers and people working with puppet theatre, schoolteachers and schoolchildren. These interviews were recorded. Finally, after the implementation of the project, all participants were asked to respond to their experience, some verbally and some in writing. Of course, the moment of participation itself offers the most significant area for reflection; reactions to shows were written down and performing patterns regularly changed in response to the previous day’s work. I made contact with Spanish and Malian puppeteers and representatives during February – April 2001. I visited Spain in April where I met three puppet theatre companies, and the Catalan UNIMA (Union International de la Marionnette) representative, Jesus Maria Atienza. Atienza had been closely involved with the Puppets for Peace project in Croatia. The companies were Yheppa, from Asturias, and Teatre Nu and Pengim Pengam from Catalunya. Yheppa works from the fundamental belief that children in Western society are overly controlled and regulated as such their work seeks to open doors towards greater freedom and creativity for the child. The shows they perform show situations where puppet characters seek to express themselves in unusual ways which are unacceptable to their peers; they explore the uneasy relationship between freedom and society and the questions that arise as a result of difference.Teatre Nu and Pengim Pengam are both concerned that their work fulfils children’s right to culture and creativity. Although all three companies are experienced in both workshop and performance situations, the question of different methods of participation is little analysed. In general, this form of work – Theatre for Development and participatory theatre – is underdeveloped in Spain.Theatre is considered to be something essential but within the realm of culture; forays into other sectors such as youth and community development, are not widespread and certainly not amongst development workers. Boal’s work (Forum Theatre), despite his Latin origins, is not widespread. Nonetheless, there is a growing interest in this work and various new initiatives are seeking the inclusion of the arts within social programmes. Puppet theatre in general, however, occupies a higher status than in the UK and puppetry enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the art world. Object theatre and experimental animation are common practices as is the animation of matter rather than of figures. All puppeteers agreed, in particular those who had been involved with Puppets for Peace and worked with refugee children, that the most important consideration from their experience of workshops was that each child should have their own puppet to take away and keep. Ownership of the puppet was crucial. I met with three groups of schoolchildren, one from an urban school, one from a small rural school and one with a high proportion of gypsy children as pupils. My discussions with the children focused on their understanding of child rights and their reflections on their own position in relation to these rights. Although Puppet Theatre & Child Rights 129

in general they felt that their rights were upheld, when asked to invent the rights they would like to have, there was an incredible focus – as there had been with the UK children – on the right to play more, to have more free time and less scheduled activity. This response was so widespread it took me by surprise. It also enhanced my belief that when asked to ‘pretend’, children become more honest about their visions. I travelled to Mali the following month. It was the hottest time of the year – temperatures were rarely less than 40˚C and occasionally reached 47˚C . I adopted the Malian walk – a loping pace which requires the minimum of effort and sweat to arrive anywhere. My research met with a reaction in total contrast to my experience in Spain.All the puppeteers I met instantly understood and related to the nature of the work and the research enquiry. As in Spain, I met with three companies and the national UNIMA representative. In Bamako I spent about a week with Troupe Mongnon (Flame of Liberty) which is run by an actress-director Maoua Kone. Kone’s work tackles social themes and is consciously aimed at raising awareness and changing perception. She writes her own scripts which so far have dealt with corruption in religious schools, prostitution, begging, child trafficking and education for girls. I also met with Yaya Coulibaly who comes from a family of griots (singer-storytellers). His work is more traditional and he performs with beautifully carved and brightly painted figures; some rod puppets, some giant puppets and some string. The last company I met was Troupe Fakoly, made up of eight people under the direction of Kourounko Doumbia. Fakoly’s work is the most collaborative of the three companies I met; they share the jobs of writing, designing and making between them.Their approach to participation is to perform to as wide a range of people as possible; children’s rights are enshrined in their belief about the nature of the arts and access to the arts.Their process in devising a new piece is also collaborative and features a high level of discussion, alteration and improvisation. I later visited a school in Bamako to talk to the children and was faced with the extraordinary experience of the headteacher, a terrifying woman, standing at the front of the classroom brandishing a leather strap and announcing that I, wanted to talk to them about child rights and they had better answer if they didn’t want to be belted. Despite this threat the class of around 70 children, ranging from 10 to 16 years of age, were the most vocal and articulate of all the schoolchildren I had met during the research phase.They were very familiar with the idea of child rights.They knew what they were and located themselves at the centre of the debate. This is something the children in neither Britain nor Spain had done. In these cases child rights had been something ‘other’, something to do with school and learning and something they were not terribly interested in. However for the Malian children, child rights were something they either had or wanted and they saw their own roles in achieving these rights as central. I asked them (as I had done with the Spanish children) to invent some rights they wished they had. Again these extended beyond those of the European children’s and included,‘the right to travel; to play music; to work in an office; to marry; to have children and to pilot a plane’. Not one of them mentioned not going to school; the rights they aspired to were much more to do with being able to fulfil their social function and earn a living. On my return to the UK after my trips to Spain and Mali I began the work of putting together a show which drew together the main elements coming out of the research. 130 Astles

To recap on the aims of this performance: I wanted to create a space wherein children from the participating schools could articulate their understandings of child rights and possible solutions towards upholding those rights within contexts that were both familiar and new to them. The show therefore had to reflect a) what they had said during the research and b) their solutions to the issues presented. The story presented two folk tales, one Malian, one Spanish. Both were adapted to include real-life situations (as I was writing the child slave ship was discovered off the Ivory Coast and this became the link from the Malian to the Spanish story). Within the final story the rights to play, education, healthcare, protection from harm, freedom of expression, rights of refugees and for children to be consulted were all challenged. Issues of cultural identity and language emerged during the research period in Catalunya for the Spanish story, where the status of the language is an ongoing debate. The performance ends (unhappily) with a Malian child imprisoned in Spain.The performances took place in Devon during September 2001. I worked with one class of schoolchildren over a day. During the morning the children made their own puppets, loosely based on Malian puppet-making techniques, and with which they would intervene in the show. During the afternoon I performed the show once with no interventions. I then performed it again having invited the children to intervene with their puppets at any point where they thought they could change the situation in order to ensure their rights were upheld. In Forum Theatre, only the protagonist can be replaced and so they were only permitted to replace the Malian child who is the focus of the story. The remaining characters react to the intervention in their own character and may be resistant to change if it does not suit them. The project took place in 10 schools (including a Small School) and with two further groups. There was an average of 28 children per class with up to three further classes in each of the schools also participating. The experiment was fascinating. In most cases every child in the class intervened in some way; their interventions varied widely and the solutions were imaginative.There was a high degree of enjoyment and engagement with the project, and the children gained a greater awareness of child rights, of puppetry and of the cultures of Mali and Spain.Through the puppets we were able to discuss different cultural attitudes towards issues such as paying for childcare (one ‘solution’ suggested to a Malian puppet unable to pay for medicine was that she could look after other children for money); attitudes towards the elderly (refusing the old woman/witch refreshment); hospitality, men wearing dresses (as with the Malian puppets) and attitudes towards foreigners and refugees. The children felt safe using the puppets to try out ideas – where they didn’t work, the puppet was responsible not the child – not that there is a ‘wrong’ idea in Forum Theatre. The puppets discussed ideas more easily amongst themselves; and the element of play engendered by the use of puppets meant that the children did not get bored. Most of them enjoyed the crafting element and being able to use ‘their’ puppet. Conclusion

The children gained a wider awareness of rights and some improvisation took place on the subject of achieving them. In order for there to be a deeper, more sustained reflection on their role in seeking to uphold child rights and for them to consider Puppet Theatre & Child Rights 131

themselves as activists within their own lives, a longer project would be necessary.This would focus on the identification of specific issues within their community and the use of theatre as a means to explore these issues over time. Short-term impact is a problem in community arts and theatre for development where funds are so limited. The short time available inhibited the interventions a little as the children wanted more time to play with their puppets before engaging with the show; I had wondered whether the forum theatre agenda, which is quite specific, would tie the puppets down too much in expressing the children’s visions. I do not think that this was the case but it is clear that the children needed more time to experiment and play with the puppets. This would have enabled them to develop clearer characters and inter-group dynamics as part of the context of the performance. In some cases it was difficult for the children to articulate reasons to uphold child rights beyond ‘being nice to each other’. Within the Malian story, their lack of knowledge and experience of the situations presented was apparent and solutions presented were sometimes inappropriate although this led to animated discussion on different lifestyles as commented on above. A third strand to the story, from the perspective of a child from rural Devon, would have been a useful addition. It was notable that overall the response from the children who had participated in the original discussions at the outset of the project was more sophisticated.There was also a greater engagement and understanding of the work from the teachers. This was a small, local project experimenting with the combination of forms to increase awareness and participation. The puppet can be a powerful symbol of an individual or community; it is a visual manifestation of the imagination and beliefs of its creator. I believe that its use can substantially increase participation. During 2002 I will be returning to Spain and Mali with the show, and working with development workers and teachers to share skills and explore ways to increase participation through the use of puppetry within development projects. Part of this longer-term process is to set up a network of puppeteers working within development in order to facilitate discussion and exchange. Puppets have considerable potential to encourage people to engage with processes within their communities.They are immediate; they can be comical; they can be rude. Within Mamulengo puppet shows in Brazil audience participation is a regular and normal way of the audience using the form to interrogate and discuss social questions. Puppetry for Development is a way of harnessing the existing propensity of the puppet to question structure and meaning within community contexts

132 Astles

Mario Caeiro

Lisbon, Capital of Nothing (Capital do Nada) Looking first at the title, I would like to underline the zeal with which both the organisers and a number of leading figures took to this Lisbon as the capital of nothing. I don’t believe that any concessions were made in relation to the posture indicated by the project’s name:an intervention in a city that has been pulling in foreign publics with numerous strategies designed to attract, ranging from fado to football to Expo’98, all in a country which is once again putting itself forward on the international chessboard as somewhere that is capable of responding to the requests and the mechanisms of today’s globalisation process. (Maria Armandina Maia, observer of Lisbon Capital of Nothing) At the beginning of the twentieth century Franz Kafka, in one of his aphorisms, affirmed the more horses you harness to a stone block, the faster you will run. You may not be able to move it, but it is possible that the belts break and you will obtain an empty and cheerful walk. Extra]muros[, the team that accomplished Lisbon Capital of Nothing, may not have moved the stone, but feel a kind of suspension of gravity and experience a certain lightness. But what was [is] Lisbon Capital of Nothing? Lisbon Capital of Nothing was a transdisciplinary event which took place in Marvilla, a peripheral district of Lisbon throughout the month of October, 2001. Thirty days of public events including art, architecture, urban design and photography projects, publications, public debates, and performance activities, took place directed by a coordination team of more than 40. In the expansive design of the event, each element had its own role, trying to help to produce an integrated experience where the interaction with the public realm and the territory led to a strong component of reality in contrast with what could be defined as the virtual, or merely theoretical or academic. This contact with reality was based on contributions from the areas represented in the coordination team, which brought together myself, geographer Teresa Alves, architects Luís Seixas and Daniela Brasil, and the contribution of architect Pedro Brandão (Director of the Portuguese Design Centre), who helped to reflect on the project and afterwards promote the publication ‘How to Signal Nothing?’(Extra]muros, 2002) with local dwellers. As for the participants and collaborators, it is important to say that they constituted a mobile, versatile and informal team, among which the information frequently circulated in a horizontal way. Previous considerations

The artists and cultural activists working together as Extra]muros[ sought to answer at least one question: Which role can creators, professionals in urban development and non-professional (who might be called actors in urban life) do to reclaim public space 133

as a stage for responsible citizenship? Considering the size of the District of Lisbon, and with the means of an independent association working in the restricted sphere of an ephemeral initiative, Lisbon Capital of Nothing attempted to raise the visibility of certain issues and publics. This linked context to action. This paper sets out the theoretical context and attitude which informed the project. According to the President of the District in Lisbon where the event took place, it is still very early to proceed to a definitive evaluation of the project; we will probably need a few years to assess its impact. Therefore, now, you will not hear of the affluence, the strategic impact, nor any evaluative categories of the pertinence of the whole project, but of a possible synthesis of what happened.You will hear that the district of Marvila housed an integrated set of dreams, aspirations and debates that revealed, as a gigantic mirror, a multifaceted approach to the city. This approach, certainly rare in Lisbon and never seen in Marvila, consisted of stimulating interaction among state institutions, professionals and the publics of this marginalised neighbourhood, through an idea whose substratum of ethics structured the whole operation.The Nothing of its title was a response to that interaction; an open and non-manipulatable metaphor that allowed various readings and appropriations which, though sometimes contradictory, were in many ways capable of bringing something to the emptiness of the everyday. It might also be seen as an antidote to the title Capital of Culture (see chapter 2) – editor’s note. Some people perceived the event as a festival, others regarded it as an opportunity for a collective workshop, nonetheless it also revealed characteristics of an urban animation. All these acquired forms were in fact complementary ways of exercising a field of knowledge in the area of urban design which could be described as ‘sounding’ the civic body by means of an enlarged set of tools of which some were strictly academic and others were cultural. Defined by its openness to the most varied interferences during the different phases of its process and, above all, by the will of knowing the Other, namely the territorial and existential one, Lisbon Capital of Nothing tried to undertake an escape from the logic of standardization of the affluent society, which is bureaucratic institutionalised and heavy. The working methods of the Extra]muros[ team opened a parenthesis in those peoples lives to whom nothing is ever asked. It tried to do so by inviting everyone to participate in the process of discussion of great and small topics, re-presenting personal values in the context of various media projections. In the same way, designers, architects, artists, as well as representatives of different sciences, were called to intervene in a personal, ethically responsible way, to learn from each other, share experiences and insights and negotiate. The fundamental aim of the informal teams created was to allow discussions and interventions in public space, in a philosophical and inquisitive process resembling the core of Hannah Arendts concept of ‘natality’ (1958: ). It was important not to present the event exclusively as a criticism of political options concerning urban peripheries in general, or as a futile praise of the virtues of the current President of the District. Extra]muros[ had to be honest and maintain ideas and proposals in a latent state.Therefore it was more important to read a territory and its people, rather than to rush to conclusions.The project that emerged was to be an ode to 134 Caeiro

the way things are, in other words, susceptible to change by its participants. As such the way the project approached its public and collaborators was positive, so as not to develop direct confrontation over difficult matters. In a time of preconceived ideas and growing alienation such an eminently philosophical project would have difficulties forcefully making a statement within the existing grammar of communication. However, word of the project spread and interest in it developed through social communication.This chain of communication led to the recognition of our efforts as clearly emphasising open dialogue and experimentation. It also supported our claims to avoid conventional models of public space intervention. Precisely because of this, local participation was less than expected; some people either didn’t recognize the event as their own, or considered it as just another festival happening near their home. Essentially, Lisbon Capital of Nothing demonstrated that certain things are possible, and others either not or unnecessary. People tied to their stone blocks – politicians, architects, artists, designers, ordinary agents of the city in movement - could, for once during the month of this project, in October 2001, release the belts and live, interpret, and investigate urban space as lightly as a fleeting thought. As for the stone block, it is still there. Doing Nothing

With modest resources and a discreet attitude, Lisbon Capital of Nothing tried to bring design, art and many different subjects to places where they usually fear to step. It is not of physical places that we speak here, but of that instance of creation in which the limits between artistic and technical intervention, ethical sense and emotional longing sustain the idea of an active and participatory citizenship. Using a mixture of provocation and a strong sense of its own mission, the attitude of the event was immediately understood by the President of the District of Marvila, who assumed from the beginning the burden of responsibility for its co-production. It was the President and his staff who pointed out priority areas of analysis, who provided information and essential means, and who involved institutions, companies and local personalities. By the time our intentions became public, in May 2001, there was already a group of organizations who had joined the project.These included the Contemporary Art Institute, the Portuguese Centre for Design, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and Camões Institute. Each one of these institutions enquired about the conditions and the premises on which the coordination team worked and then tried to find ways to support the project at the beginning, in its most challenging phase. Once the main events of the programme were defined, other entities joined Extra]muros[ and became vital. For example, the Programa Operacional da Cultura [POC] managed European Union funding for the project. This confirmed that the project’s objectives, strategy and priorities matched those of the POC: • to valorise Marvila; • to fight the segregation and the isolation of the Place; • to promote a new urban image. Lisbon, Capital of Nothing 135

Dispersion vs. utopia

According to Teresa Alves (2002) among several possible organizations of space that emerged from the new contexts of the project, we pointed out territorial forms that are characterized by emptiness; by a nothingness, more material than symbolic and containing the possibility for potentialities and unique opportunities for the creation of a community sense by mobilizing the populatio, so that it can claim public space as a common asset for a better quality of social and cultural life. In Europe, North America and Asia the new spaces of cities are in everything very similar: stereotyped office buildings made of glass and steel; huge commercial surfaces structured in the same way and where we find the same trademark stores; great luxury condominiums whose high prices warrant the uniformity of the residents' social landscape. In the areas inhabited by poorer populations, the landscape also tends to homogenize through the proliferation of degraded housing, the destruction of the feeling of belonging to a specific place, the disappearance of communities' cultural references and the imposition of social models, in which individualism prevails destroying public space as a site of collective experience. The tendency for territorial standardization, according to so-called western conventions, contributes to undermine the structures of any other representational form, giving way to spaces that are not always adapted to their inhabitants' living conditions (Harvey, 1989a; Baro, 1989). The growing presence of trade logics operates as a normalization and homogenization factor, either by standardization of goods and services, or aesthetic standardization of places and atmospheres. Far from losing importance in the matter of urban development, the local appears with new contours. The territory is no longer seen as a type of board that supports human activities, but rather becomes a lived space where the development is actually operated. The generalizations of phenomena such as globalization however do not diminish the importance of the local, quite the contrary, they reinforce its role as a resistant space of social existence, political participation and the construction of citizenship. This theoretical approach to the territory in general framed the work of Extra]muros[ in Marvila, the site chosen to be the Capital of Nothing. There, in a dynamic process, it faced each problem — some technical, some political, some aesthetic — with the means available, permanently testing its capacity to adapt to the progressively deeper reading we were simultaneously seeking. In a dispersed territory ‘…it was very difficult not to operate with the same dispersion... Lisbon Capital of Nothing was to visit a naked territory, without clothes or make-up’ (statement by Daniela Brasil, project coordinator). If Marvila is this discontinuous place, intermixed with uncertain expectant presents and futures, then its present is a place of strong multicultural lines, whereas its future offers Lisbon a space to construct the metropolis that - due to shyness or lack of daring — it is yet to become. Marvila has potentiality, and this is a physical possibility that only a few contemporary capitals have. The theme of Nothing pretended to be the invisible generator of a future which holds the possibility of other existences, in a process where the suspended essence of freedom – all is possible – beared the lightness that occurs when knowledge is shared. Marvila offered itself as the ideal place, even if only for a month, to develop a 136 Caeiro

transdisciplinary post-utopia or an ‘urban happening’ (as it was several times referred to by the public). It was necessary then, to make a cultural event in public space which was capable of dealing with specific matters of place, while simultaneously being capable of reflecting the following lines of the contemporary urban design, identified in Public Space and Interdisciplinarity (Brandão, 2000). •

the relationship between globalized landscape and local condition, in the context of the emergence of the city as spectacle; • the challenge of facing the urban atmospheres where barriers and inequalities prevail, where new typologies show up daily [non-places, centralities of a new type] and consequently provoke a character of crisis; • the development of strategies for the public space capable of foreseeing methods to formulate the problems first, and only after inducing existences; • the sense of the symbolic dimension in the urban space, where we have to deal both with the nostalgia for the past and the representation of expectations and aspirations of the people in the public as well as in the private realm. The process of preparing Lisbon Capital of Nothing lasted more than a year. It began in preparatory meetings and encounters with the representatives of local organisations in order that the project was not seen as a strange entity, but as an opportunity to show facts, values and local aspirations. Organizing the event meant being in direct contact with an everyday reality. The project tried to stimulate real interaction with local structures, in a process of collective creation characterized by a strong creators-team-reality interrelationship. It was crucial in this sense to distribute thousands of pamphlets to promote a workshop feeling and to make the collective process more important than any individual event. Lisbon Capital of Nothing was continuously adjusted to the territory that we as a team gradually acknowledged, to the capacities of the collaborators involved, and to the financial means progressively made available. Territory of Nothing

Any intervention in public space demands the most careful and accurate analysis of the territory.There are essential factors to be considered: One should focus on the the people that make it, interpret it and experience it daily, on the topography, the urban image, and finally on specific spacial idiosyncrasies. More than 50.000 people live and work in Marvila occupying a socially and culturally eclectic district of the city of Lisbon.We can still recognize different moments of its evolution during the last century, in a kind of living archaeology. Marvila’s historical layers are widely visible; large bucolic spaces where old convents, palaces and farms stand out; memories of nineteenth century industrialization (the railway, the factories and the warehouses); the discontinuity inherent in modernist plans for public housing during recent decades; and finally more recent developments (connected to EXPO 98) such as Bela Vista Park, as examples of public space implemented by the Town Hall as part of an urban regeneration policy. Marvila is complex district having Lisbon, Capital of Nothing 137

immigrants from rural areas of Portugal as well as its colonies in Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde and São Tomé. The quality of social housing, mainly in concrete blocks, is mixed, but often poor. The area is quite large, and areas of waste ground, with vacant building plots, as well as unfinished private-sector construction, give it an expectant feeling. But the real situation is one of emptiness – a territory of a diaspora with indefinite borders. Marvila carries the burden of a peripheral place although it is inside the city. It is one of those places that has survived only thanks to the open horizon that we can no longer find in the continuous fabric of the consolidated city. It exists in an imponderable vastness paradoxically provided by that same burden. In our interpretation of such urban space, we chose some situations that, given their strategic and conceptual importance, would work as a lever and object of the whole project: • physical and symbolic discontinuities of the urban fabric which require programmatic interventions; • terrains-vagues, interstitial spaces and empty spaces that call for artistic intervention; • Town Hall facilities that enabled the sharing of experiences; • consolidated areas and transitional spaces that offer an opportunity for conviviality; • the visibility of several layers of memory to be saved from oblivion. Lisbon Capital of Nothing faced this non-democratic reality of everyday space, with its problems of accessibility, lack of identity and auto-valorization. The event tried to reinforce the claim for public space as a stage for creation, intervention and debate. All these ideas were synthesized in pamphlets distributed in the locality: Why Marvila is ‘Capital of Nothing?’ • Because it is a part of the city almost always forgotten and not beloved. • Because it is a group of neighbourhoods with a great history but also a great future. • Because it is a rich and varied territory, where there are people and associations of great dynamism. What is the need for an event like this? • To show the importance of neighborhoods that are most interesting, due to their problems and potentialities. • To change the negative image that people in general have of the District and of its residents, through art and several other interventions. • To help building a more active and participatory citizenship. Marvila, Capital of Nothing

The diverse, dispersed and ephemeral projects developed by Lisbon Capital of Nothing worked as signals and opportunities stimulating contact and, above all, accessibility.These projects did not obey a formal unity because they were meant to mirror the multifaceted identity of Marvila. However it was necessary to create legibility and to appropriate space in order to guide visitors and interpelate dwellers.This was achieved through public art, architecture, experimental signalization, infocentres, and most importantly, the guided tours. Through Lisbon Capital of Nothing, artists, architects or designers used to comfortable galleries and studios as well as to their faithfull publics, were put before an extremely complex locus. For 138 Caeiro

instance, each invited artist had full powers provided that he/she produced the piece within the budget agreed. Furthermore participating artists had to keep track of the territorial analysis and the evaluation of the expectations of the population that were carried out by the coordination team. The subtlety of some projects created a suspiscion as to what was actually happening. In October ephemeral urban design as well as art in public spaces began to make a difference. Several project creators managed to provoke without colliding, managed to criticize without destroying, though many had never before worked in such a radical collaboration with the social fabric. Nevertheless, Lisbon Capital of Nothing became a risktaking laboratory in which many people were challenged to make, in just one month, a parenthesis of urban coexistences usually characterised by distance and ignorance. The main structure of the whole event incorporated the following nuclei: Urban design projects, art, photograph, publications and public debates, and performance activities. The four urban design projects extended the event in time and space. Art and photography provided animation and visibility through their poetic and provocative strategies. The publications and debates supplied a theoretical frame and performance activities managed to integrate local organizations, enriching the programme with musical shows, theatre and dance. Urban Design Projects

On 1st October 2001, four thousand people wearing red t-shirts formed a Human Chain and ‘gave hands for nothing’.The course of the human chain symbolised the union of the old and the new neighbourhoods with all their different social realities. Although there were a few gaps along the course, the event will not be forgotten by those who participated. José Adrião and Pedro Pacheco proposed the recovery of the azinhaga (footpaths) of Marvila as a motto to discuss the theme of connections, a crucial factor of the urban structure of the locality and a first step in the recovery of a global system of azinhagas. Unfortunately, after months of negotiations and difficulties of various sorts, an initial intervention in Azinhaga da Bruxa (Witch’s Footpath), in the District of Beato, did not take place. However the process, though an apparent failure was rewarding for many reasons.A resident contacted us and even visited the architects in their studio in order to offer them further information, including photos and documents of the place. The project E-vasion consisted of an intervention in the valley of Chelas, in a terrain vague where two palm trees are simultaneously a rural mark and an urban reference. Cláudia Taborda and Víctor Beiramar Diniz, both landscape architects suggested ‘the construction of a place defined by the will of the people’. On the surface of the territory a matrix of wooden posts defined the condition and the rhythm of transformation: A signal of an opportunity. One possible idea was to bring hundreds of olive trees and holm-oaks, banished by the construction of a huge dam from their original home in Alqueva (in the south of the country), to Marvila where they would ‘keep company’ with the two forgotten palm trees, and would lead people to imagine the place as green again. During October, members of the Extra]muros[ team, supported by the Mayor and a local construction company planted a symbollic oak, replacing one of the posts that physically defined the opportunity of immediate citizenship. Lisbon, Capital of Nothing 139

Why is there being instead of Nothing? highlighted what the artist José Maçãs de Carvalho defined as the young heroes of Marvila; people who are a reference in their neighbourhood either for their professional/artistic merit, or for their human qualities. Their images were spread around the country and the city of Lisbon as posters, pamphlets and postcards. They all contained a mobile telephone number (a symbol of their individuality), resembling a hotline campaign. In fact, many people called the heroes asking for information about them and the event. By October, Mário, Vanessa, Beto and Francisco enjoyed public recognition. Finally a gigantic picture of Débora (leader of the local African Association and voted [11-2] as the heroine of her condominium building) was placed on the side of a five-storey block in the Armador neighbourhood. Art and Photography

Combined Landscape by André Guedes consisted of a movement of people in the landscape of the valley of Chelas. The project articulated a spacial gesture with the help and readiness of a group of youths from the Clube Recreativo e Cultural Marvila Jovem, who were transformed into actors of the courses that the artist drew. In the two presentation days, a supporting structure with 40 seats was more than a sign that there was a show being held there. It symbolized the spectale embodied by all that urban moment. Fernanda Fragateiro had an idea to build a garden. She began to develop this project with the Association Tempo de Mudar (Time to Change) of the Loios neighbourhood, in order to assure the legitimacy of her activities. Presently the artist is trying to integrate the project in the city’s plan for Raúl Lino Square, and to satisfy the residents' aspirations and their will to intervene in its evolution.At the cost of its immediate visibility, Paradise is a place where nothing ever happens is to allow its potentialities to mature so that its combination of participative urban design, art and urban animation can be a mutually enriching relationship. Vasco Araújo, installed Palanque (bandstand) in the peaceful PRODAC neighbourhood, where one still feels the atmosphere of a village.The piece was intended as a stage inviting everyone to have his/her own show. Its ‘ufo’ like prescence – a black oval stand, with red plastic curtains hanging from the tubular structure soon conquered the hearts of the local residents and of the visitors of guided tours, who subsequently began to sing their favorite songs on the bandstand. Eurico do Vale presented twelve black-and-white photos of a ballerina in movement. Francisco do Vale conceived a circular structure of strong 140 Caeiro

symbolic meaning, composed of twelve concrete walls on which the photos were placed. Roda do Tempo (Wheel of Time) was installed in the Bela Vista Park, giving way to a harmonic dialogue between urbanity and nature. Paula Figueiredo started by picking up archive images ranging from Mavila’s industrial architecture to portraits of workers who lived there.The artist traced a course to the present, involving people who now work in the same warehouses as in the past. Once the research guaranteed an historical pertinence and a level of human involvement, the images were exhibited in the Clube Oriental de Lisboa, a very important Football Club. The pictures co-existed with memories of the club’s glory, creating conditions for a rare fusion of publics. Avenida do Aeroporto by José Manuel Rodrigues consisted of the production and distribution of a series of five poscards. A total of 5000 copies were aimed at a specific public of urban space: the drivers. Every Monday at 8 a.m. members of the production team guaranteed that the experience of driving along the city artery would become a richer reality:The postcards depicted images of the exact places where they were being distributed. Shortcuts by Mariana Viegas, consisted of two exhibitions that registered the paths drawn by the youths’ daily walks to and from school. The artist worked together with students from Basic School 2+3 of Marvila and from D. Dinis Secondary School, giving visibility to their experience of a territory in accelerated mutation. The installation I'm in love with the summer time vs.I love you in the Promontório Gallery portrayed a living structure of the District. Photos of territorial emptiness and memoirs of a sunny summer were suspended in the facilities of the architecture studio, in a public appropriation of semi-private spaces.The intrusion was worth the trouble because many children and teenagers were taken there in guided visits at the initiative of their schools. In Rupestres, by Fabrice Picard, an exhibition at the Flamenga Infospace, presented images representing visual situations of accumulation of signs and meanings. Details of urban surfaces – asphalt, walls – overloaded with drawings in unknown codes worked as a metaphor of the disorientation of the actual spectator before the amount and the specificity of contemporary cultural production. Other activities

The Invented City by Dora Isabel Batalim, a teacher, and Carlos Céu e Silva, a psychologist, listened to the opinions of young people in Marvila concerning the global concept of the city. They based their enquiry on the metaphor of Nothing to question the physical expression and the human relationships inherent in daily life.The first event occurred between January and March of 2001. In this period the authors conceived an inquiry which was later distributed to the schools of Marvila. The individual answers given by fifty children were submitted to a qualitative and statistical study. Following this the authors and the team of Extra]muros[ selected a number of drawings to illustrate the results of the study for a book publication launched in October. Tiago Pereira also had children as collaborators. He invited them to watch his video 0=2, and then to draw their version of the images presented. He then promised to insert their drawings in a final version of the video. All the projects and events described above had to articulate and contribute to a global, though diffuse, identity. This was the role of the whole system of ephemeral Lisbon, Capital of Nothing 141

Installation of Why is There Being Instead of Nothing, Marvilla, 2001

142 Caeiro

Why is There Being Instead of Nothing, Marvilla, 2001

Lisbon, Capital of Nothing 143

Wheel of Time, Marvilla, 2001

144 Caeiro

urban communication which adopted three Doors to signal the Territory of Nothing.The first Door to Marvila worked as a toponymic identity sign, inscribing the name of the District on an iron bridge that marked its limits. The second Door to Nothing commented on the evolving empty spaces of Marvila. The third Bela Vista Door evoked the past of the recently built Bela Vista Park. Red plastic stripes were placed on a steep slope, evoking the pain inherent in the processes of urban transformation. Finally, big red carpet arrows placed on walls and pavements marked the entrances to the events, and red vertical bars marked commercial establishments where information on the district and the event could be found. The colour red is incidentally also the colour of the districts’ coat of arms, and also fits the political image of the district as traditionally represented by the Portuguese Communist Party. Conclusion

The initial design of the project intended to animate a specific social and territorial fabric through an integrated project, at a certain point began to positively influence the way institutions like the Town Hall, Cultural Foundations,Art and Photography Institutes, local organizations and cultural agents approached their activities in public space. It might seem a paradox, but it is also possible that some traditionally arrogant powers — whether this is the artist, the curator, the architect, the designer or the planner — have also been reinforced as they became aware of new tools with which to practise their old vices, once cautioned by an experience which revealed subtle irresponsibilities and ignorance. This was perhaps inevitable. There are still agents who are not yet very sensitive to the challenges that these kinds of projects in public space can offer as places for an ethical, aesthetic or political debate and participation. Perhaps this is due to the fact that there is a growing need for new kinds of knowledge, responsibilities, techniques and availability. The key element in this strategy in which not only different technical and artistic subjects converge but also many non-professional actors, is the capacity to generate participation, co-responsibility and a real empathy on behalf of common fates. Perhaps following this project, institutions and individuals will see intervention in public space with a new care as well as with new demands. Today, we realize that projects which appeared to be simple and/or irrelevant brought up complicated matters, and a burden of reality which urban planning, art, architecture or design often lack. During more than a year, the production team had the opportunity to undertake an extremely enriching experience, especially because human beings learn and grow through difficulties and failure.The ultimate desire of the team – its utopia – is that the continuity of the project is assured by local people. It has made the first step and still awaits an answer. Lisbon Capital of Nothing tried to promote a new culture that is based on giving visibility to the Other, inviting people to share memories, experiences, and expectations, in the context of interaction and conviviality; such values were weakened by the prevalent notion of the city as a sum of solitudes.The stone block might not have been moved, but to paraphrase the Mozambican poet Reinaldo Ferreira, on this blind flight to nothing remain places, thoughts, aspirations, contacts and voices that would have otherwise been choked by silence and anonymity. Lisbon, Capital of Nothing 145

Helen MacKeith

Southall Introduction

In December 1999 Fuller MacKeith Public Art & Design Partnership applied for the commission to ‘create a new town square, a meeting point...to celebrate and promote Southall as a strong and vibrant multi-cultural community in the new millennium’ (EBC, 1999: 1).The Commissioners, Ealing Borough Council, had set an ambitious task for the successful public artists to achieve. Fuller MacKeith (otherwise known as Emily Fuller and Helen MacKeith) were, after a long selection process, the chosen artists.This paper is a reflection on our experiences of that commission particularly with reference to the project’s stated aim. The Commission

The site for the commission is an open park space in front of a sixteenth-century manor house adjacent to a busy high street near the centre of Southall and an additional smaller site at a junction nearby. Since Southall has few public places as focal points this area was an obvious one for re-development with Single Regeneration Budget money being the main source of funding for the project. The Project Appraisal document produced by the Southall Regeneration Partnership to secure funding expands on the aims of the project outlined in the artist’s brief from which I quoted above. It states that the project is to increase a ‘sense of ownership and pride through community involvement’ and result in ‘a much improved street environment linked with two open spaces’. ‘Community involvement is the central theme of the project’. It will ‘directly benefit Southall’s community, particularly school children through their close involvement.’ The sense of ownership developed is intended to have the ‘knock on’ effect of increasing use of the sites by the local population. The document also refers to research done by the Arts Council which suggests a strong link between people’s visual impressions and how they feel about the quality of their environment. ‘That is, improving how central Southall looks will improve how the community feels about Southall’ (SRP, 1998: 2-3). The project brief, given to us as shortlisted artists, does not refer directly to ownership but calls for the piece of work to be ‘innovative, inspiring and generate community spirit’, it should ‘recognise and promote the cultural diversity of the area’ and ‘provide a permanent landmark’ (EBC, 1999). Furthermore, it must relate to the immediate landscape and the wider Southall environment and say something about the aspirations of the town and the people who live there. There is a clear emphasis on community in the aims and process of undertaking the commission. Community building is to take place by reflecting back to itself something of the community identity through a permanent piece of artwork. 147

We submitted an initial proposal in the December of 1999 and heard that we had been shortlisted in January 2000.We prepared a detailed proposal, designs and samples which along with eight other proposals formed a public exhibition in a community arts venue opposite the site. Visitors could vote on their preferred option. The exhibition went up in the middle of March and we were subsequently interviewed by a panel of council planners, representatives from Groundwork West London who were co-ordinating the project and art directors from the Pitts Hanger Gallery - the main local arts centre. We spent three weeks preparing for the exhibition. We plunged ourselves into local research and canvassing of community groups. Using information given to us by Groundwork, we contacted and visited local schools and day centres talking to relevant people and even running mini workshops. In this way we generated material which demonstrated our style of involving people. This is to create a structure within which every individual in a workshop is able to make their personal mark. Our approach is also to give everybody a chance to have a ‘hands-on’ experience of materials and making. In order to create this structure within which to enable individual expression we looked to the ethnicity of the population, as was clearly required by the brief, for inspiration. Southall is commonly referred to as little India as it has the highest concentration of Indians outside of India itself. Hence in order to reflect this in our proposal and thus celebrate it’s multi-cultural community we began a crash course into the visual cultural history of India. It must also be noted that specific attempts were made to encourage local Asian artists to apply for the commission but none did.The site of the commission is a park area immediately in front of a sixteenth-century manor house.This Tudor building is very striking as it is in traditional style - white plaster with dark wood stripes creating a vertical liquorice allsorts effect. This building would stand out in any modern high street and within an area dominated by Asian shops, cafes and Islamic and Hindu places of worship it does so even more. How were we to combine this historic English building with Southall’s present-day predominantly Asian culture ? An Anglo-Asian Design

After research we were struck by the similarities in sixteenth-century Mughal gardens (the Mughal Empire pre-dominated in Northern India at this time) and English Tudor knot gardens. They share formality and geometric pattern in their design. Although Mughal/Islamic art emphasise non-representational art Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic visual culture had overlapped by the Middle Ages and it is clear that patterning at this time is a fusion of styles.Thus we decided to base our proposal around a formal garden design. The overall plan would be geometric with individual elements being floral in motif. The floral element was chosen not only because it was an obvious choice for a garden theme but also because of the textile links between India and England that reach back over many centuries. Flowers and foliage etc. have been a dominant theme in textiles from both countries. In fact, floral hangings from India show striking similarities with contemporary sixteenth-century English crewel-work hangings. The patterns consisted typically of exotic leaves, flowers and fruit. In addition, chintz, an Indian fabric which has become strongly associated with English domestic interiors, 148 MacKeith

was extremely popular in England as far back as the seventeenth century. Trading links between England and India, allowing a significant influx of goods from India, were created by the formation of the British East India Company in 1599. The long imperialist relationship between the two countries was also created simultaneously as the company later took on a governing role. The exact format of the garden design is a rectangular area with a central circular seat, inlaid with blue and silver mosaic. This represents the irrigation tank found in Mughal gardens and four trickles of mosaic run down the sides of the seat at equidistant points down to the ground. Here they each meet an irrigation channel of blue glass bricks running outwards, in straight lines away from the tank.The seat, made of white concrete, is cast with a floral motif set into its sides. The four corners of the rectangle each contain an area representing an earth bed edged by ceramic and cement fondu floral tiles. The third element is four triangles each with a right angle and a curved side which if placed together would create a square with a circle in the middle. These triangles are made of concrete inlaid with mosaic in a floral design. They are designed to be placed at a distance from the seat so that they link up with the tiles. Although the ‘beds’ are ground level the place for people to walk is the paths made up of glass bricks and a mass-produced paving brick. We made the mosaic and concrete elements and sub-contracted the re-cycled glass bricks to Freeform Arts Trust. The reasoning behind the design was to create a piece of work that was a fusion of English and Asian culture rather than a concept which was a compromise of one over the other. We also wanted a design that would encompass the greater historical perspective of the relationship between India and England rather than one which narrowly considered the relatively recent changes in Southall’s demographics. It was also important that the work was in keeping with the site and that we worked with the positive presence of this heritage building within the context of a modern, multicultural community. Community Involvement

For the community involvement aspect we proposed workshops in which participants could make two types of tile which would then be used within the garden design as above. Having described the project each participant would be encouraged to design a floral pattern which we would then facilitate being carved into a tablet of clay. The second type of tile was made by participants pressing personal jewellery into clay in a floral pattern.This creates a mould from which we could then cast in the studio using a cement-based medium, cement fondu, which reproduces very fine surface detail. Using jewellery and other similar personal artefacts such as buttons, medals and in one case the end of a walking stick is an effective way of imprinting individuality and ownership onto a tile. The ceramic tiles similarly give a discrete unit upon which someone could create an individual piece of work but one that could fit within the greater plan. We worked with seven groups in this way involving over two hundred people. The groups included: Two play schemes; one primary school; one secondary school; an Asian day centre; an affiliated centre especially for elderly Asian people and a centre for Southall 149

people with physical disabilities.We also wanted to work with a group of ex-servicemen from India and Pakistan who fought in the Second World War. Having tried numerous times to contact them and being unable to get a response we gave up.We had wanted to work with only five groups each having four sessions.This would have allowed us to get to know the group a little and put across the ideas behind the project in more depth. In the event, we were asked to work with much greater numbers in order to satisfy the requirements of the SRB funding and so we visited each place only once or twice. The workshops began in the Summer holidays of 2000 and the deadline to finish all of the work was the end of January 2001. It became clear towards the end of the year that the site would not be ready for the work to be installed in the early spring as had been planned. Initially a delay of a few months seemed likely. We had no idea that the installation would be delayed not by a few months but by years. In fact, as I write this in the spring of 2002 a date sometime in June looks possible although not yet definite. The project had been linked with plans to re-develop the park land surrounding the Manor Grounds as a whole. Lottery money was applied to make this possible but the plans, confidently submitted by Ealing Borough Council, were rejected by the Heritage lottery. After this upset, the work could have been installed but it was decided to resubmit the bid.This has now been successful and the public art element will be part of a major redevelopment including play facilities and café as well as comprehensive relandscaping of the park. The aims behind the commission are expressed very much in terms of community. Community spirit is to be generated , it’s sense of ownership of this public space are to be developed and it’s aspirations are to be reflected. The rationale is that by expressing the community’s identity and involving them in that expression the feeling of propriety of place and sense of being part of a network will be enhanced. Community is a much used but vague concept. Community tends to be associated with good things like social cohesion, caring networks, thriving families and individuals who are happy and productive.Yet actually defining community is difficult, is it geographic or interest based for instance. Community also commonly seems to refer to a certain set of sentiments people living in a place have and to the social networks and patterns of behaviour that sustain and reflect such sentiments and feelings. It’s this extra aspect of the meaning of community which seems to be invoked in the commission brief. What creates these feelings, behaviours and networks? Peter Willmott suggests that ‘community sense’ is more likely to exist if three factors are present; these are a high number of personal relationships locally, a high degree of consensus of interests and values and a sense of attachment to an identifiable area (Willmott, 1984: 6). So did the commission contribute to the bolstering of the above community sense or spirit ? I am going to limit myself to looking at how two aspects of this commission might relate to community spirit. They are the ethnic profile of the geographic community and the community involvement at workshop level. Ethnicity and Community Spirit

Southall is unusual in terms of it’s ethnic profile. Over 50% of it’s population are from the Asian sub-continent (57.6% to be exact). In total over 70% of the population of 150 MacKeith

Southall are ethnic minorities. Within one participating secondary school there were forty nine nationalities.While on our initial visit to the Southall Day Centre, which caters particularly for the Asian community, we talked to a room of twenty-four men.We were told that there were at least sixteen different languages within it. Our design aimed to highlight commonality between the dominant culture of the area and indigenous heritage. It sought to represent a vision of the future in which there is no hierarchy between them.The emphasis was on the inseparable nature of the two. It also calls upon universal symbolism in the form of patterning, gardens and water bringing life. Thus we were aiming at building consensus as a way of generating community spirit. Does it reflect the aspirations of the community? The truth is that, of course, we do not know.We do know that our proposal was voted for. But by how many people? Initially voting was to take place over the period of a month but this was extended to three as so few people had attended the exhibition. In the end 102 people voted and their ethnicity roughly reflected that of the population as a whole. I do not know what percentage of the vote we achieved just that it was more than the other eight artists. Our selection was also based on interview.The panel were judging each artist on a range of criteria but there was no one there specifically as a representative of the Asian community though the Asian population were specifically targeted by the workshops. It would be interesting at this point to consider how the presence of such a high percentage of ethnic minorities affects ‘community sense’. In our limited experience in the Asian daycentres I noticed how well they were used. The Southall daycentre was attended by over two hundred people everyday at that time. It was obviously an important resource as a centre for socialising and getting help with issues such as benefit difficulties but also in learning English amongst other things.The centre’s remit is to offer care and welfare to people suffering hardship through social and economic circumstances with special reference to the needs of the Asian community.Thus, unlike other local services there was a sense of solidarity here because of the common cultural background. Maybe it was also the common experience of being an immigrant with its attendant problems. What Southall as a whole and the daycentre in particular demonstrates is a common phenomenon that people like to be with others that share their culture, religion, language and background. However, within this solidarity there were divisions we observed particularly between the sexes. It was the women at both centres that we worked with.This was perhaps because the men, in general, thought it unsuitable to be taught by two young(ish) women or that they did not see the activity as interesting and/or important or appropriate to them. We may have involved the Asian community but only it’s women and children. The question of how an ethnic community relates to the broader one is partly illustrated by the daycentres. These thriving institutions are separate from non-Asian people. This connects to a much wider debate on segregation/separation and integration in society and the arguments about what works best (Young, 2000a: 204218). The daycentres work on the basis of separation. This makes sense in terms of service provision but it also reflects the positive choice to gain support by being with others who have similar experiences. Integrationists seek to disperse minority groups evenly throughout a population. The problem with this is that minorities must scatter Southall 151

Tile carved at St Anselms Primary School 152 MacKeith

so the desire to live with others in the same ethnic group is invalidated as the emphasis shifts to the minority group to conform. In Southall’s case the criticisms of the integrationist view seem less valid as with such a high percentage of the population coming from the ‘minority’ group even an even distribution within the population would not leave them isolated. It is interesting that separate Asian services are still necessary and this reflects the fact that just because a population is dominated by one group does not mean that they have a correlating power or control over the area to ensure that services in general meet their needs. Furthermore the separation strategy reinforces a tendency for minorities to define themselves by the very things that make them minorities. In other words being in a minority serves to reinforce those aspects of a group which set them apart and they are defined in terms of their otherness to the universal norms. Asians maybe in the majority within Southall but they still remain a very small percentage of the countries population as a whole. One of the implicit aims of the public art project was to create a common identity for Southall’s community. Creating consensus is about minimising difference and emphasising sameness. But it is also about equality. For minority groups to feel equal they must also be recognised.True recognition requires valuing difference and as such not then wanting to merge with the mainstream. Minority groups which accept the recognition offered such as it is stop defining themselves in terms of difference and this tends to lead to schisms within minority groups as ‘the universal excludes difference and otherness, giving rise to a politics of recognition; but the success of the politics of recognition rests on the excluded being recognized in the terms of the very universal norms that exclude them. The upshot is that marginalized groups enter into compromises with the discredited universal, resulting in their internal schism, and the production of new forms of exclusion, and so on to infinity’ (Gorman, 2000: 222). I have entered into this debate by way of unpacking some of the complexities of trying to represent the aspirations of a multi-cultural community.We envisaged a future which recognises equality and interconnectedness of culture which does not exactly equate to separation or integration. Neither does it equal ‘together in difference’ the paradigm I have borrowed from Iris Marion Young (Young, 2000a: 214). Young’s important work ‘Justice and the Politics of Difference’ (1990) critically analyses the usual democratic mould for inclusive participation concluding that too often a homogenous public is assumed and difference suppressed. She argues for a principle of group representation in democratic publics and group-differentiated policies. I have been considering ethnicity as a way of identifying a particular community partly because it is such a dominant feature of Southall and also because we worked with two Asian daycentres. I am very aware that the people who use these centres may identify themselves more with other groupings. For instance determinist views of urbanisation describe how traditional ties of family, religion and cultural background maybe weakened by living in a city and what this requires in terms of living and working conditions (Clark, 1996: 100-115) Leaving this aside, it is possible that the strong ties internal to the daycentres may have mitigated against one of Peter Willmott’s conditions of community sense which is an identification with an area as well as a group of people. Southall 153

Carved Tile

154 MacKeith

Workshops and Community Spirit

Our predominant experience of the ‘unit’ of community was that of service provision. The discrete communities we visited to run workshops were those based on common needs. Thus in terms of our experience of public art commissions local service providers are key to community involvement and schools, youth clubs and play schemes predominate within this group. Geographically, three of the centres (The Southall Day Centre, St Anselm’s Primary School and the Albert Dane Centre) were very close to the site. The others were up to several miles away. This link did seem to make the experience of the workshops more relevant to the participants. The schools and play schemes were the most ethnically diverse. They also connected to the wider community as parents linked up to the project through their children. We were aware that the children in the secondary school had a sense of where their school came in the pecking order of other local schools. This is an interesting addition to the divisions which occur in a local area through quality of housing etc. Children are the future of a community and therefore perhaps the most important people to inspire with positive aspirations. They are also captive audiences! and the least inhibited when in comes to having a go with something creative.The Albert Dane Centre caters for people with physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, stroke victims, and people with head injuries.This group was the most dispersed geographically in terms of their home addresses although the centre itself is less than a five-minute walk from the site. These people were bussed to and from the centre and there was a clearly expressed feeling that they were invisible from the rest of the neighbourhood. This group had a wide variety of physical needs, they also spanned a large age range and were mixed in both sex and ethnicity.Their obvious difficulties in physically bringing themselves to bear on their local environment and their determination to make the most of the opportunity we were providing meant that it was, for us, the most inspiring group to work with. It is need that often creates an openness to social networks but the places we worked with despite being a community within themselves, with the exception of the schools, appeared to have little relationship to their neighbourhood. The workshops varied in the numbers involved and the degree of enthusiasm of the participants! Generally we were well received, the only occasion we were not was when a group of elderly Asian men made it clear they had no interest in taking part at all.While, in contrast, the members of the disabled centre were very keen and showed great determination and ingenuity in creating their tiles. Each workshop produced moments of achievement for individuals as a particular ear-ring was found to make a great pattern or a complicated design was successfully translated into clay by someone who had said they ‘were crap at art’. Emily worked with a partially-sighted little boy to create a fantastically unique tile. In fact, this is what we love about this way of working, the techniques are very accessible and the results are, almost without fail, appealing and varied. Did the project reflect the aspirations of the children and disabled groups? The Anglo Asian design was in general appropriate to the ethnicity of these groups but it was our practical approach to giving everybody the chance to create a tile that, I Southall 155

believe, facilitated a sense of involvement. We enabled a common experience which linked not only the participants in the workshops but also the centres. This shared project connected to a local site is a potent way of generating a local network of commonality and community spirit. However, the workshop experience was affected for us by a number of factors. We had to work with more people than we had intended to ensure that conditions for funding were met. Forms had to be filled in at each workshop, recording numbers, ethnicities and comments. There was a feeling that we were involved in a quantitative rather than a qualitative exercise. Speaking to a representative of the Pitts Hanger Gallery who had been asked to be involved with the creation of the brief and the selection of the artists she commented that it had been a rush to put it together. There are often time limits on the spending of money provided by particular budgets and this was part of the pressure on this project. However, the main problem with the workshops in terms of successfully generating community spirit was the delayed installation. Although the work will now be part of a more comprehensive development these major efforts to involve the community have been greatly undermined by the lack of information offered to the groups following their workshop involvement and the subsequent breakdown in the immediate progress of the project necessary to sustain a sense of connection and involvement for the people who took part. I am not suggesting that the motivation to generate community spirit was not genuine but that this aim seemed to get lost as other priorities took over. Motivations behind the Commission

As mentioned community sense is generally accepted to be a good thing but as a practising Public Artist it seems responsible to be aware of the wider motivations and mechanisms driving its development. The political context of new Labour’s government is characterised by its fundamental shift from planned, paternalistic economy to a more free wheeling marketled approach associated with new politico-social jargon such as citizenship, social inclusion and democratic modernisation. The so-called ‘third way’ sees the Capitalist economy and Socialist ideals not as mutually exclusive but mutually beneficial. The majority of funding for this commission came from the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB).This budget, set up in 1994 under the previous Conservative government, aim’s to support local regeneration projects which will improve the quality of life of local people in areas of need. Economic development is key to how the regeneration is to occur. Improvement in people’s quality of life will result from the influx of private sector money attracted by the injection of SRB money. Groundwork’s agenda of local environmental regeneration fits closely to the government’s emphasis on promoting social inclusion and democratic modernisation. To be explicit connecting people to places by involving them with improvements to their locality has the knock on effect of connecting people to their community. Gaining a sense of ownership also creates a sense of responsibility: Citizenship is born ! The role of Public Art in this process of uniting people with place is important. Here is a project component which hopefully can capture the imagination, provide practical opportunities for involvement (through 156 MacKeith

workshops) and truly reflect the local history and population. Southall’s project brief fits in with this model of the function of public art. A further component in this framework of government policy and government sponsored organisations is the involvement of the Heritage lottery and behind that English Heritage. Their approval of the project was necessary because of the historic location, and was vital to securing further funding which was to enable an expansion of the original project remit to a greater area. Culture and heritage are increasingly recognised as key national economic resources. Tessa Jowells as she launched the new government white paper ‘The Historic Environment: A force for Our Future’ (DETR, 2001) stated that heritage ‘makes a major contribution to the economy…indeed this sector can be regarded as a sleeping giant in both cultural and economic terms’ (ibid, 2001: 1). Public Art is important as it contributes to the economic regeneration of an area through tourism and attracting private sector investment. (The Southall project was to take into account the SRB Southall Tourism Development Study and it’s promotion was to be planned in consultation with Southall Tourism Forum). In this context the aim of generating community spirit seems less about idealism and more about pragmatic economic sense. To be fair to government policy, it is not it’s task to debate Sociological paradigms of community. Additionally, social inclusion, one of the big buzz phrases, does implicitly recognise that there are social networks that some people are not part of.What both the Single Regeneration Budget and Groundwork assume as integral to the notion of community is place. If improving the environment is going to enhance community then community must reside in the environment.

Conclusions

Within this broad context for our work as Public Artists what did we achieve ? Did we celebrate and promote Southall’s vibrant multi-cultural community? The reception of our Anglo-Asian design remains untested.We endeavoured to find a conceptual and practical framework which would thoughtfully embrace two cultures. However, whether this vision of inter-connectedness is a reflection of Southall’s community identity is difficult to say. There are many definitions of community. Some would reasonably question if it is possible for two white English Public Artists to reflect Southall’s identity back to itself.Thus the failure of attempts to find an Asian artist for this project is an important area for concern in itself. The selection process for this commission was conceived of as a democratic election and we established our place as artist facilitators by canvassing for votes, but as Iris Young suggests, are such models really fair ways of creating representation for minority groups? Were we just pawns in a tokenistic exercise in consensus building ? The practical implementation of the workshops was based on a service provision model of involving the community. Such an approach skews the representation of participants in favour of children, places with pro-active staff and institutions (other than the schools and playschemes) which otherwise may have few links with the wider, geographical locality. There were difficulties in involving the men in the Asian Southall 157

community and we felt that the emphasis of the workshops was more about quantity of people involved rather than the quality of their connection to the project. With the artwork still to be installed it is not yet possible to judge the overall success of this public artwork. From our point of view we have a slightly uncomfortable feeling that we came with promises of a project soon to be apparent and went leaving unfulfilled expectations in our wake. Having visited the site recently we are sanguine about the prospects for it’s successful completion. Not only is the park being re-landscaped but the whole adjoining highstreet is to be re-paved. However, time has moved on for the participants of the workshops. Children have left school and members of staff have moved on. I called the Albert Dane Centre recently to enquire what they had heard of the project since we had seen them. I was told they had heard nothing and that the centre itself may be closing soon: This particular community’s very existence is under threat, so that the disabled people who attend it will be better integrated into the wider society.The debate goes on. I think our design is based on a positive notion of an inter-connectedness of nations and culture and it’s actualisation could provide a presence in a way that would not be possible in other spheres of a community’s life. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talks of an ‘impossible image’ of ‘A group of Sikh, Muslim, English, Irish, and Afro-Caribbean pensioners ruminating in a park in Southall’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2000: 4). Is it possible they will come and talk together in this park ? I believe that the human connections we make in workshops do give value to the work we do whatever the flaws of the context. Above all else communities are made up of relationships and we met and worked with many people.Those meetings may have been transitory but they gave many a direct link with the artwork. As an artist who works in non-art situations I often feel I am called upon to have special properties which will have a magical transformative quality. The reality is of course that I do not. I have skills and knowledge which range from the imaginative, to the inter-personal and the practical. This combination is very important to the success of our contribution in such a commission as we had many roles to play. Not only were we designers and makers but also social facilitators moving between diverse groups. Whether or not this project is to any great extent, able to fulfill it’s stated aim I believe in the role of the Public Artist in such situations.That is, despite the multitude of factors that modulate intention and result, it is worthwhile to take on the struggle uncynically in order that the process can produce its own positive outcomes.

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Jackie Brookner

The Gift of Water Introduction

This essay traces the conceptual context and process of making a biosculpture commissioned for a public site in the small town of Grossenhain, north-west of Dresden in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). In 2002, the town hosted a regional horticultural exhibition – the Landesgartenschau – which it saw as key to economic regeneration in an area (typically for the former GDR) of high unemployment and widespread redundant industrial plants. Preparation for the show included permanent upgrading of parts of the urban landscape, including restoration of waterside paths, and re-use of industrial spaces for changing cultural purposes including both art and the garden show itself. Something of a showpiece is a new open-air swimming complex. The biosculpture I designed and made, functioned as part of a plant based, chemical-free water treatment system for the pool. Unexpected events after I returned to New York – the destruction of the Twin Towers - urged me to think about the persistent metonymy in my work and to explore the psychology of how we imagine our bodies and the consequences this has for our relationship to earth’s life systems. Making the sculpture in Germany led me to think about such issues, but within the opportunities and constraints of making a work in another country, learning enough of a language to communicate, and dealing with technical as well as conceptual matters during a fixed time period. Returning to New York, the same issues took on a bigger reality, still personal but not only that. Gathering in between

I sit writing at the table next to the window in my studio in New York’s SoHo, where I used to see the Twin Towers - no longer there. The emptiness and stinging smell from the still burning ruin do not let me forget how bent we are on destroying our own species. In the face of this, is there any hope we might have some regard for what we are doing to other species, the background bio-terrorism and chemical warfare we have been waging now for decades? Amidst the epic scale of our self-destructiveness and the acuteness with which we refine our deadly powers, is it trivial to point to the unintentional fallout of the daily round of our lives, of the extinction of fish and birds, plants and land animals, and the burdens of pollution we excrete into the world’s waters and air? I think not. It’s all part of the same scenario of self-destruction, depending, of course, on what we mean by self. Reasonable beings, we use our reason as reason enough to separate ourselves from other animals. But the root of the word animal tells a different story.The Latin animus means soul, air and breath, life principle. Rather than 159

separating us, it is about what connects us to the rest of breathing creatures and to air, life’s breath itself. How can we rediscover this sense of connectedness? Can we find our way out of our destructive and atavistic patterns to imagine a more accurate sense of ourselves, where we can recognize and even celebrate our necessary immersion in the rest of creation? Physicist David Bohm makes a distinction between intelligence and intellect: intelligence, from the verb intelligere, has the sense of to gather in between, the ability to make new connections and to play with new categories. It is dynamic and creative, while intellect, from the past participle of the verb, suggests what has (already) been gathered (Bohm, 1989: 114-5). It’s about the already existing order, conditioning, received notions, the relatively fixed and static, habits of thought. The capacity for making connections, making new categories is so basic to our existence we usually take it for granted.To give a sense of the power of this capacity, Bohm (1989: 37-8) tells the story of Helen Keller who was blind, deaf and unable to speak since early childhood.When Anne Sullivan was hired to teach her, Helen had no concepts and could not communicate. Realizing she would have to teach her a concept, Sullivan invented a kind of game. She would bring Helen into contact with water in many different forms-- a glass of water, rain, water in a pail, taking a bath, water pouring out of the pump. As Helen was having each of these different experiences, Sullivan would scratch the word ‘water’ onto the palm of her hand. After a long time, Helen suddenly grasped that these radically different experiences were all connected to and by what was being scratched onto her hand.This was her first idea of a name, that this stuff had a name. Keller suddenly realized everything had a name. As Bohm points out, this could not have been based on previous knowledge stored in intellect; rather it was an act of creative intelligence. There is a clue here about how we can find the new connections we need, when it’s not the concept water that is elusive but the real thing that is so in danger. It is through heightened tactile sensation, through feeling, not at first through words, that Keller comes to this powerful capacity for symbolic thinking. This is compelling for me as a sculptor. Like sculpture, it underlines how we think with our bodies. It shows how body and mind work together, even in the realm of words. Project/Process

The story moves me, also, because I work with water and because of its relation to the project in Grossenhain. A year before reading Bohm, I was invited, with other artists, to submit a proposal for an exhibition associated with the Landesgartenschau (LGS) 2002. We were asked to link art with local history and the theme of the garden show. Grossenhain had a flourishing history producing woolen textiles well into the twentieth century. However, with the reunification of Germany in 1989, and the end of government subsidies for industry, unemployment has risen to huge proportions. In the last 10 years the population has dropped from 20,000 to 17,000 as people have left to look for work in the west.Water, as a symbol of renewal, figured prominently in the plans of the LGS, which would bring the opportunity to restore two large lakes for boating and to build a new public swimming complex on a scale surprisingly large for a small town. Remarkably, the water in the swimming complex is filtered by a 160 Brookner

constructed wetland – an organic solution, no chlorine, just plants.The wetland system closely relates to my own work of the past half-dozen years, works that I call biosculptures. These are sculptures that are living systems and function ecologically as well as aesthetically and metaphorically. They work just like the wetland, using plant based ecosystems to clean water. Mosses and the bacteria that live in their roots transform toxins in the water into nutrients for their own metabolism. The excretions of fish, snails and other organisms living in the water are food for the plants. As in all wetlands, and all healthy natural systems, there is no waste. My first idea for this biosculpture was based on a piece I had just finished called I’m You. Made of mosses, volcanic rock and cement, the image is based on the microscopic structures of certain mosses, that in cross section look uncannily like human hands. But soon another image that had been in the back of my mind for years surfaced: cupped hands reaching into water. Two enormous hands reaching from the banks into the water, holding water and wetland plants. Moss would grow over them and be kept moist by a misting fountain in the centre. A few months after the proposal was accepted I arrived in Germany to choose the site. We decided the piece would be best in the wetland pond where it could bring attention to the way the wetland was cleaning the water.The whole complex was under construction, with large excavations. It was clear the pond would be much shallower than I had expected, and my image of an intimate tree-shaded grove for the moss would have to go. No tall trees could be sited near the wetland because the falling leaves would create too much decay and upset the carbon balance of the system.This meant I was going to have to find sun-loving mosses. I was also told that the town wanted the piece to be permanent. Therefore I would have to build the sculpture to withstand the temperature cycles of many winters. After researching various materials, I learned that the Technical University in Dresden was developing a durable textile reinforced concrete.They invited me to make the piece at the lab in Dresden with the help of their team and equipment, and we agreed the best way to get from my 7-inch model to something over 8 feet would be to make periodic cross sections of the model as an internal structure and then build a skin over it. Using this method I built a half-size armature in NY and returned to Grossenhain in July. I was astonished to see how beautiful the finished swimming complex was, profuse with flourishing plants and flowers. My next surprise was the space I was given in Grossenhain to make the full scale model, to test the size of the piece in the pond.The studio of my dreams - an enormous empty room with a 40-foot roof. It was one of the buildings renovated for the LGS, the old foundry where textile machinery parts were cast. After finishing the model I commuted to the lab in Dresden. Initially there were difficulties fitting my schedule (dependent on public transport) to their working day, but a broader cultural accommodation was also in process. In the former GDR, life is still very important, more so than work in some ways. And life is part of work too.The lab was like a big family. Everyday at 9am everything stopped and people disappeared into the adjacent building for about 45 minutes to have breakfast together. And again at noon, for an hour’s lunch break around the picnic table outside. At least once a week there seemed to be a reason for someone to make an elaborate feast. The Gift of Water 161

Proposal Drawing

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Wonderful as this was, it made my work day too short to finish my project on schedule. I had planned my time to include working at nights and on weekends, but as the first weekend approached and I asked about access, the answer was no. I was told I would have to wait until the boss returned from vacation the following week. How this was resolved had great significance for me. That very night, after I had been insistent about needing to work longer hours, on the train home I noticed a red line making its way up my arm. A small puncture wound on my hand was getting infected. At 8pm I made my way to the small hospital, dictionary in hand. Next I knew, besides the penicillin, my arm was being put in a cast.The doctor said I couldn’t work for a week and I had to come back the next morning. With great embarrassment the next morning I called the lab to tell them I was at the hospital and would be coming in late. Instead of the judgment I expected, when I arrived at the lab one woman asked me if I wanted a special glove. The meister, who had been keeping his distance, offered to help me bend the stainless steel for the armature. He assigned two of his assistants to help as well. Much to my surprise, my vulnerability was a bridge. It seemed to make me more accessible, less the visiting American. It was after this I was asked to join everybody at lunch. Not having the full use of my own hands made me realize how much I take them for granted and what a gift they are. Breaking the wholeness of my skin led me to thinking about the metonymy in my work, these hands cut off at the wrists, immersed in water, overgrown with moss, parts of the body standing in for the whole, yet that insistently declare themselves as parts. This brought me to the thought that we are not so much whole as finite. I started thinking about the implications of this, wondering how our imagining of our bodies plays out ecologically, on the species level. Fictions of Wholeness

Henri Lefebrve writes: What conception of the body are we to adopt...as our point of departure? Plato’s? Aquinas’s? The body that sustains the intellectus or the body that sustains the habitus? The body as glorious or the body as wretched? Descartes’s body-as-object,or the body -as subject of phenomenology and existentialism (Lefebvre, 1991: 194) There is the Eastern body and the Western body. I can only speak from the viewpoint of the latter.As adults we seem to take for granted that the body is an integral object bounded by skin and are unaware of what an act of the imagination this is. However, this way of experiencing ourselves as whole within a skin is something we develop in early infancy, and is subject to disturbance. ...the skin functioning as a boundary....this internal function of containing the parts of the self is dependent initially on the introjection of an external object, experienced as capable of fulfilling this function...Later...this function ...gives rise to the fantasy of internal and external spaces. Until the containing functions have been introjected, the concept of a space within the self cannot arise...the optimal object is the nipple in the mouth, together with the holding and talking and familiar smelling mother (Bick, 1988: 187-8). The Gift of Water 163

The Gift of Water

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The Gift of Water

The Gift of Water 165

The Gift of Water

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The Gift of Water

The Gift of Water 167

The experience of body wholeness is an illusion maintained by privileging what happens inside the skin and ignoring the porousness of the boundary itself, repressing the fact that our existence is dependent upon our continuously breaking the bounds exchanging with the world around us, taking in and letting go. The idealization of wholeness may be partly a compensation for the fragmenting conditions within which the sense of self develops. For the Ego to appear, it must appear to itself, and its body must appear to it, as -subtracted and hence also extracted and abstracted from the world. Being prey to the world’s vicissitudes, and the potential victim of countless dangers, the Ego withdraws. It erects defenses to seal itself off, to prevent access to itself. It sets up barriers to nature, because it feels vulnerable.It aspires to invulnerability (Lefebvre, 1991: 202). These fragmenting conditions must be particularly disorienting against background memories of symbiotic union. In the earliest weeks of life, in the ‘ideal’ situation, the baby feels at one with the mother, with whom he was indeed somatically at one prior to birth. In this state of primary identification, the baby is unaware of himself as a separate, autonomous human being: he does not realize where he begins and ends, or that he begins and ends. Subjectively, he feels completely merged in with the mother-environment (Fuller, 1980: 202). That our imagination’s pull toward wholeness may also be an attempt to restore the experiences of union with the mother, both as an infant and within the amniotic skin where the exchange of fluids occurs quite passively. The fiction of wholeness is thickened, and boundaries must be hardened as children are taught to control and distance themselves from what issues from their bodies. Learning to actively control our excretions is crucial to the attempt to elevate ourselves above our animal nature. Freud writes about how children find great pleasure in, and are proud of, their excreta, seeing them as part of their body and a source of self-esteem. But gradually, the child is brought up to repress this and their excreta become a source of disgust (Freud, 1939: 88-91). Facing the prospect of love’s withdrawal the child learns to attach anxiety to everything about excretory materials, to their sight, and smell, and touch (Dollard and Miller, 1950: 137, cited in Perin, 1988: 137). Anxiety indeed.We must dissociate ourselves from ourselves to be human. No wonder mastering our bowel and bladder has come to have cosmological significance. Dante’s Inferno is a vast excremental dungeon. Bacteria, of course, get dumped in here too, even though we cannot survive without them. Because some bacteria produce disease and are present in feces, filth, dirt, soil, earth, it might seem sensible to consider them dangerous and unhealthy. But in fact, our health itself, our ability to digest food, and our immune system all depend on the work of microbes living with us whose disregard for borders threatens our unity. We cannot risk the ambiguity, and consign them all to the realm of germs, part of the excrement of which we try in vain to rid ourselves (Rosebury, 168 Brookner

1969: xiv, xvi, cited in Perin 1988: 177). This creates an unbearable tension. What do we do with this disgust? We project it onto others, though not onto any others.The Others who embody the disgusting contents must be seen as safely different from ourselves. This works on both the individual and societal levels. As society helps build the boundaries of the self, that bounded self gets projected back into society. Object relations psychology has investigated show individual development and the social world reciprocally influencing each other. Drawing on this work, David Sibley, who also cites Julia Kristeva on the ambiguities of abjection (Sibley, 1995: 8), explores the ways repulsion is embedded in the construction of social space, in what he aptly calls geographies of defilement (Sibley, 1995: 75-86). A couple of examples will give the texture of his ideas. In cosmographies of medieval and early modern Europe, firstly, the grotesques (seen as imperfect, deformed, at one with nature) are banished to the edges of the world map along with uncivilized natives, the less than fully human, safely distant from the civilized centre. The grotesque was partly other, but also a boundary phenomenon in which self and other are enmeshed in a heterogeneous and unstable, hence dangerous, zone (Sibley, 1995: 51). As Sibley says, “those threatening people beyond the boundary represent the features of human existence from which the civilized have distanced themselves - close contact with nature, dirt, excrement, overt sexuality (Sibley, 1995: 57). Secondly, something akin to this happens in nineteenth-century urban planning when the bourgeoisie are isolated from the smelly working class, or anything which might “offend the senses - which implied the expulsion of the dirty, the poor, the unclean, the malodorous (Sibley, 1995: 57). Of course, this is not all projection. There were real sanitation issues in industrial cities – stagnant, undrained puddles and drinking water fouled by sewage and industrial discharge; rampant cholera, yellow fever, and typhoid - but these were initially attributed in part to the moral depravity of immigrants. Although repeated epidemics spurred sanitary reform, and water became an agent of purity - running water seen as purifying itself (see Stauffer, 1999: 7) - the driving concern “remained not the purity of the drinking water that entered the city, but the pressure of the polluted flow that left it (Miller, 2000: 34). The Finite Mirror

So we are back to the river, which today suffers such severe pollution from human wastes and from industrial and agricultural chemicals that fish populations have plummeted and drinking water supplies are in crisis. Water is our first mirror. Its surface symbolizes the surface of consciousness and the material (concrete) process of decipherment which brings what is obscure forth into the light (Lefebvre, 1991: 186). Can we bear the tension and humility of what the mirror tells us? Waters we thought endless turn out to be finite. As water, so we ourselves.What might it mean to think of ourselves as finite? Instead of having an image of our bodies as a contained whole with a clear (and transparent) boundary, though a boundary ever encroachable, problematic, whose fragile hold needs the buttress of rigid denial, instead of this we could acknowledge The Gift of Water 169

our edges.This is difficult, in part because it means acknowledging our limits.We don’t seem to much like limits. They stop us, and affront our desires for infinite power, but we literally cannot exist without them.Any individuated form, by definition, must have limits, edges, boundaries. We need to see the value of limits, and to see our edges as places of possibility, places of relationship. Every boundary that separates also connects. As in ecosystems, these edges are opportunities for heightened diversity. Our membrane, that glorious and treacherous territory we must traverse to meet the world, we must negotiate to be. The edges--the territory of exchange--where all our senses vibrate in molecular excitement, where the world scratches its being on our skin, before names. Pores where the world can enter us and leave, orifices, the issue in, and out--places of terror and delight. Membrane leaps quantum, to heart and glands, spasms us, contracting inward, releases, extending out. Considering ourselves finite means bearing the consciousness of these limits. It means apprehending that like all organisms, we cannot exist in isolation from the world we inhabit. Less autonomous wholes, we are more like pieces of an immensely complex fractal jigsaw, entangled and interdependent with all the other finite parts for our meaning and existence. We are parts reflecting the whole, yet insistently parts. Immersed in the rest of being. Hands immersed in water. It was time to find those rare mosses that love the sun. When the day came, I was taken to a several hundred acre site on the outskirts of Grossenhain, where the Russians had practiced military exercises and tanks compressed the soils year after year. After the Russians withdrew, the site was set aside to recover as an ecological reserve. Species that could not grow elsewhere were thriving here, among them many rare, sun loving mosses. What a delicious irony that fields dedicated to such destructive power would become home to these delicate and ancient plants, that in new intimate habitation will grow to take the shape of human hands as they transform toxins into food to yield clean water. Buddhist master, poet and philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about interbeing. He sees a cloud in a sheet of paper, and rain and the sun, the river, the tree, space, time, you and me (Nahn, 1988: 3-5). The existence of all of these parts of being are imbedded within each other. Acknowledging our finiteness acknowledges our place within this larger context. Choosing to identify with our finiteness instead of repressing it could mean the possibility of being secure enough within that fact to celebrate our interdependence. Celebrating interdependence may sound romantic, but really doing this is anything but. It brings us face to face with our utter dependence and our ultimate puniness. For all our language, all our intelligence, our networks and biotechnology, not one of us can transform primary energy directly into food as even the smallest plant can. The ultimate insult to our fantasies of autonomy is not our dependence, material or even emotional, or our finiteness in space, but our temporal finiteness that declares how little any one of us matters. The abiding horror of the felling of the Twin Towers is not the cruelty of the acts or the innocence of the victims, but the void that screams, and the reality beyond apprehension that these two sky-high buildings, the best our hubris can do, came down so quickly. Each one of us will leave. Or, we won’t leave - that has too much will - we will just stop.The emptiness breathes and gives space to light and air. Finite in space, also finite in time. It is this final edge that is hardest for us to bear.

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Advances in Art and Urban Futures Volume 3

Contributors Marion Roberts Malcolm Miles Graeme Evans Judith Kapferer Denise Morado Nascimento Tim Hall Paul Usherwood Nicola Kirkham Friedrich von Bories

This volume considers the making of settlement as a process of identity formation. Taking the position that a culture signifies a way of life, it asks how cultural frameworks inform patterns of settlement, and how the built environment, as process and design, conditions cultural production and reception. The disciplinary fields this intersects include architecture, urban design, sociology, cultural and human geography, cultural studies and critical theory. Contributors work in a range of such fields, in Europe and Latin America.

Habil Jan Hartman Judith Rugg Liz Wells Cariad Astles Mario Caeiro Helen MacKeith Jackie Brookner

ISBN 1-84150-089-5

intellect www.intellectbooks.com/

9 781841 500898