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Cities and Citizenship: Surviving the 21st Century at the RSA

[photo credit: kla4067 flickr]

Having attended the ‘Cities and citizenship’ at the RSA I have since been meaning to record my reflections on the rewarding debate that was hosted.

Subtitled as ‘surviving the 21st’ century’ the diverse panel discussed the challenges posed to urban planners, and policy makers in designing public space and in attempting to cultivate and serve urban communities. Part of what made for such an exciting discussion was panels breath of perspectives on many different aspects of urbanism. As a general overview here is a brief introduction to the speakers and the most interesting insights they brought to the debate.

Andrew Mawson
First up Lord Andrew Mawson - social entrepreneur and founder of the Bromley by Bow Centre in East London. Mawson spoke about the challenges of translating government policy into local education and healthcare services that really fit their communities. The approach he advocated was one of engagement, bringing planners, social workers and Mp’s together to the street themselves to engage with communities first hand, in his words:

“Designing cities isn’t about top down or bottom up, it’s about inside out… Streets need a story and a vision so communities can connect with them.”

Wolf Prix
Influential German architect who is also visiting professor at the Architectural Association in London and at Harvard University. The key questions Prix asked were – “How could future urban planning strategies be more agile and flexible?” And – “Now that the funding for civic and public space projects no longer comes from the church or nobles, how can companies be enlisted to help realise the democratic potential of public space?”

Anna Minton
Anna Minton is a writer and journalist. Author of ‘Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City.’ Anna spoke about how developments such as the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford city create urban environments which are more fearful and less democratic, but also how private sector developments don’t have to conform to this model. I just started reading Ground control so I look forward to gaining a more detailed insight into her work

Matthew Taylor
Chief Executive of the RSA since 2006 asked

"How do we reconnect individuals with the social fabric of their cities?" and "How can our architecture make meaning, tell us who we are supposed to be and unlock our capacity for altruism?"

Andrew Mawsons reflections on building the Bromely by Bow centre were especially rewarding. For me he managed to highlighted the common practices and principles that exist across service design, commercial co-creation initiatives and Mawson's own focus of community service entreprenuership. Governments and corporations end up dislocated from their end audiences/beneficiaries in similar ways. The notion of building meaning and narrative around streets is something I found particularly compelling.

Seven Lies - James Lasdun

I first encountered James Lasdun’s writing through a review he’d written in The Observer, in praise of Rawi Hage’s The Cockroach. Prompted by the accolades he poured on Hage's novel I ordered it but was Lasdun's own writing which struck me most immediately. A Google search led to a number of other Guardian articles, two novels and a number of poetry and short story volumes. On finding his second full-length novel The Seven Lies in Foyles I started from there.

Though ostensibly it appears to be an international espionage yarn The Seven Lies is a novel which evades categorisation just as its protagonist Stefan Vogel slips guises. Set primarily in the former East Germany and within a climate of communist paranoia this is a tale which disregards the historical grandeur of its setting and instead opts instead to push the mutation of one soul to the fore.

I don't know if many other people discovered James Lasdun as a columnist like I did. But if so they'll probably expecting the lyrical flourishes of the opening section. What may come as a surprise is the discovery that both through the structural elegance and emotional resonance of this narrative Lasdun's real flair is for storytelling itself. In the opening scene a glass of wine is flung in Vogel's face whilst attending a New York cocktail party. This lustrous scene prompts the telling of a life story which traces a spiraling arch through former East Germany, 1980's Manhattan before arriving back at precisely the same wine drenched tableau.

As the prefacing Martin Luther quote pronounces 'One lie most beget seven more lies if it is to resemble the truth.' Plainly this is a logic which animates Stefan's life. His are not wild lies - but almost prosaic responses to the situations which befall him. Of course each of these deceptions comes with a snag. To stage his first fraud - to being a poet protégé at his mothers left-wing saloon he must suffer the sexual molestation of the apartment janitor and plagiarise Whalt Whitman poems from the family trunk. From this first calculated evasion - deception and trickery become his elected tactic for steering clear of life's barriers. Yet he is just as detached from the morality of these deceits as he is from the surreal nature of the incidents which befall him:


"Exactly how I feel about life itself: I realise: that it has come unaccountably into my possession, somewhat to its own dismay."

The sense of fraternal alienation felt by the Stefan inspire the most vivid, almost autistic series of meditations on nature - the 'intangible pathos' of autumn leaves and the leaf dappled sunlight hitting forest lakes in upstate New York.

This dislocation also yields an amplified subtlety and depth in the portrayal of the other characters in the story. Principally Stefan's mother who nurtures a superiority complex of her families past and tirelessly contrives to invert every misfortune into an artful affirmation of self. This is also reflected in the portrayal of Stephan's wife Inge - who in fretful response to the couples new life in America is compelled to go on charity missions – assisting the poor and crippled of New York City. Eventually she resigns herself to simply cutting stories of homicide and corruption from the newspapers and pasting them into scrap books – as if this simple ritual would counterweigh the cruelty of American life. The novel ends in simple adulation of her, as though cheating the society and following the most demeaning paths were all worthwhile means for securing her devotion.

BLDG Blog Book Launch

Last Tuesday I attended a really interesting talk at The Architectural Association by Geoff Manaugh. He was there to promote his new book BLDG Book - a printed compendium to accompany his acclaimed blog of the same name. BLDG BLOG is focused on exploring architectural discourse from new perspectives and showcasing speculative projects.

Geoff used his presentation to deliver a breathless synopsis of the books main subjects which seemed almost randomly plucked from a grab-bag of architectural relics and speculative modern day concepts. These are not their official titles but some of the main subjects from the talk included:

Layered civilisations and structures
The way architecture is influenced and constrained by the layering of structures and systems. Geoff talked of farmland sewn over burial grounds, an anti-nuclear bunker which was thought to hinder the London IMAX's construction and how Manhattan's grid of skyscrapers needed particular positioning so that they rested on the islands bedrock.

Phantom Closets & Connections
This segued into a conversation about phantom spaces and connections - Spatially starved Manhattanites who dreamt of finding secret rooms extending in a Narnia like fashion from their shoe closets. A freak called William Little aka 'the moleman' who lives in Hackney and has structural endangered houses through digging an extensive network of tunnels and emerging in people’s gardens.

Meteorological Engineering & Nostalgia Weather
There was some interesting stuff about using decommissioned military equipment to change weather systems too - pulling the aurora borealis over Rome to make it a more profitable / idyllic tourist location and even modifying the weather to re-create weather systems from the past - or 'Nostalgia Weather' as Geoff entitled it.



[Image: An illustration by Brendan Callahan, from The BLDGBLOG Book].

My favourite part of the evening was the guest speaker slot from Kevin Slavin - a cross-media games designer from New York based consultancy Area/Code. I should say that Alternative Reality Game design is a discipline I never really held much interest in, Slavin's presentation definitely shook me out of my ambivalence. The background he gave and his reasons for creating augmented reality games it were utterly illuminating.


Bad War -Hans Holbein [Photo credit: Wikipedia]

This began with a dissection of what we mean by the word nostalgia. Slavin talked of the homesickness Swiss_mercenaries having been displaced from their homeland from their homeland in battle and how this gave rise to Heimat (a German concept describing the way in which people are bound by their birth, their childhood, their language and their earliest experiences). Whereas once nostalgia or heimat described the longing for places which we no longer inhabit - now as we live longer it is the rapid transformation of culture which becomes the most disorientating factor. In other words we've moved into an age of spatial rather than temporal dislocation - and it is this form of spatial displacement to which nostalgia has come to imply.

We travel more than 16th century man did, but we know the places where explore and settle in infinitely more detail, electronic mapping technologies have brought the intimate spatial parameters of our environment to us at the press of a button (or the swipe of an iPhone screen). Mapping technologies also nurture a supremely self-centred worldview - in which we always locate ourselves right under the crosshair - at the centre of the map and at the centre of the world.


[Photo credit: Matt Jones]

Area/Code's projects are driven by an ambition to counterpoise these prosaic certainties through purposefully ambiguous experiences which encourage participant’s to re-orientate and rediscover the boundaries of urban life. One such experience - a game called Crossroads takes a simple Pac Man like concept but situates the player in the city streets. Players move their sprites by walking from place to place holding their mobile phones, with points awarded every time they cross an intersection. As they do so they are pursued by Papa Bones - a skull-like avatar who kills them if they cross his path. This situates the city dweller/game player in a surreal situation - sprinting across real lower east side blocks - yet from an illusionary creature.

Perhaps the uncannyness of this situation is emblematic of our future relationship with urban environments. As pervasive technologies become more embedded in our lives surely we will find ourselves forming increasingly personal and idiosyncratic relations to the space around us - gradually moving away from national and civically conferred manners of acting within the environment. In the process we will return more closely to the core meaning of Heimat.

Associated links:
AA School of Architecture
BLDG Blog Book
BLDG Blog
Area/Code

Delusions of a consumer utopia

[Image from Dezeen]

Of all the bright ideas at The Royal College of Art summer show one project shone particularly brightly and remains lodged in my mind.

Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project pursues a simple but daunting task: To deconstruct the most ubiquitous and humble of electronic products and recreate it from scratch. That the finished object resembles a caveman’s approximation of its Argos parent is comic in the first instance and then rather humbling when you see the incredible lengths Thwaites went to in producing it. On display alongside the toaster are the range of makeshift tools used in its manufacture. These include an electric leaf-blower and chimney pot iron-smelting furnace, electrolytic tanks used to refine the copper for the wiring and a mould for the plastic casing (hewn from a tree trunk).

At the culmination of the project he’d spend nine months, travelled the length and breath of the UK and spent £1187.54. The backbreaking endeavour involved in replicating a product which can be purchased for £3.49 in Argos powerfully invalidates the apparent convenience and viability of mass manufacture in itself. But the projects primary genius is in how it confronts myth that modern man is somehow more intelligent and proficient than his predecessors – when in reality modern life is entirely dependant on a multitude of products and infrastructural solutions that we outsource to the developing world and have no knowledge to replicate ourselves.

Snapshots of Holland And Belgium

The following hastily snapped images document some of the aesthetic highlights of a 200 mile cycling trip from Hook of Holland to Brussels

An aesthetically pleasing Dutch power station









Two minute ferry ride across the river.





A watchtower - which resembled some kind of futuristic concrete totem pole from a distance.




The sights and sounds of Antwerp.








An obligatory shot of the Atomnium

What Comes After The End?

Every three years the Tate Britain gallery holds a Triennial exhibition celebrating current trends in British art. For 2009 Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud proffers the term ‘Altermodernism’ which he defines as follows:

‘Postmodernism was shaped by ideas of multi-culturalism, origins and identity, Altermodern is expressed in the language of a global culture. Altermodern artists channel the many different forms of social and technological networks offered by rapidly increasing lines of communication and travel in a globalised world.’

For me Bourriaud’s distinction between the post and alter-modern is sophistic and the justification for its existence as a genuine movement seems unconvincing. On the evidence of the works at the 2009 Triennial Altermodernism seems more like a continuation of postmodernisms semantic fragmentation than a cogent ideological successor.

The 28 artists exhibited pursue widely divergent lines of inquiry but only a handful seemed to break new conceptual ground. For some the decaying corpus the post modernity seemed to inspire deviation and not a move forwards.



Charles Avery’s work for instance side-steps ideological inertia through regression into the past. Expelled from Central St Martins after only six months Avery spent the decade enacting the fate of a 19th century explorer who maps an imaginary island occupied a people addicted to gin-pickled egg and suffused by Greek myth. Whilst the concept of his work sounds arduous it is in fact redeemed by its visual intricacy and beauty.



Of all work in the Triennial Wallead Beshty and Simon Starling’s works seem most central to the concept of polyglotic, displaced art forecasted by Bourriaud in the exhibition’s manifesto.

Beshty FedEx damaged glass cubes and airport x-ray photographic papers are objects scratched and dented in a synthetic hinterland. There is something simultaneously sublime and audacious in the way he completely sidesteps the command to create art objects. Instead the articles he introduces to the space are conspicuous through their absence of expression – the vapid ghosts of global transit and nothing more.



Simon Starling presents contiguous form of displacement in ‘Three White Desks 2008 – 09.’ The desks which are obviously loose replicas of the same design descend in size – the third left as unvarnished timber. All are based on a photograph of a desk designed by Francis Bacon – but the mounting levels of inaccuracy in each successive replica are a result of the photographs given to three different furniture joiners. The increasing digital compression of each photograph results in a less faithful reproduction of the original.