Walk II: Regent's Canal east

So I went for a walk.



That map torn and battered, had it since the day I first moved here, guide and gospel to the city I at first struggled to like. Places I go most it gets tears, loses pages, each new friend and each new flat bequeathing rings on their pages, got to find that place again. But this low-tech doesn't work any more, Highbury, Lea Valley all changed but the drawings on the paper haven't - so time to draw back, write my own geographies on top of those already marked.



The estate's boarded up, condemned - but I've lived in worse places than that, those blocks last alright enough so what do they want to go knock it down for? Ah, the canalside got cleaned up no longer a rubbish dump but an amenity too good for social tenants. So knock it down, build it up, sell it to the middle classes at £500 a square foot. That's the capital.







[Skipping over Queen Mary university and all its Serious Architecture (as if in competition with London Met's Libeskind); capoeiristas in Mile End Park; an artic tern fishing in the canal; smell of salt air ahead of me unexpected and drawing me on]



Shiny yuppie stuff's back. Limehouse Basin a weird area committing the same residential-only zoning sins as NY. Nice, but too far from anwhere with there there, and nowhere to eat, so not actually nice at all. Wapping a slog along its cobble-lined uninhabited so-called High Street, luxury warehouse developments hogging the riverbank for theirs alone. We'll watch your BMWs in the basement garages flood when the Thames Barrier fails, just you wait...



Body aching just the sight of the water is refreshing; the sun after the cavernous closed-off streets a relief. The river is wide here, the birds and yachts maritime. I had not known this as my city before, and finding it has exhausted me.





But when she's this beautiful you forgive, don't you.

Paint the City green

This gives me an idea: why aren't all cars covered in grass? Real grass, green growing stuff. What with poor air quality in the City thought to kill 2,905 people every year we need all the photosynthesisers we can get - and covering the key pollutor problem in its solution would seem to be particularly neat answer.



Front gardens are getting dug up to provide off-street parking and this increases the flood risk, as water streams off tarmac and into the sewers rather than soaking into the grass and soil. Lawns are being lost - so let's transfer them on to the surfaces that sit above the ground instead. The grass/herb/succulent-covered roof is a well-established concept, and living/green walls are not infrequently seen - for example this one below on a children's centre on Liverpool Road, Islington. These plants grow vertically, so why can't vegetation be fitted to the shape of a car? Ok ok, it's not exactly aerodynamic - but then again traffic in town rarely moves fast enough for that to be an issue. Lovely as a rooftop meadow of daffodils would be, low-growing sedums and maybe the odd bonsai tree would be more attainable. Seriously now, does anything stand in the way of covering cars in mosses and liverworts? Mould grows easily enough on aging sports car soft-tops, and we have the rain and pigeon shit to feed and water these things. Imagine the gorgeous colours, the deep greens and ochres and chartreuse, the velvet texture between your fingers, and cool cleaned oxygenated air for us pavement-dwellers.

Plants not paint! The revolution starts now.

Shared space

I liked this - not beautifully written, but as I sit on my own in my studio flat, it said something to me. Semiotically this place is so under control, so perfect: the rectilinear lines, the street and found art on the walls, the fading tulips exactly matching the yolk yellow hue of the champagne bottle next to them. I have wood floors and orchids and my clothes are precisely rolled in their drawers - I know no other way to live now, and yet is this right? (He is in New York; no, it's not.)

I put so much energy into signs, into performance, such that these things become the meaning of the space and the codes by which I read it. But that language of reading: it presumes an audience and thus a fourth wall, an inside/outside relation. What happens when you share space, what is created, what is this topology of intimacy? Instead of the single dweller writing this controlled autobiography through possessions and pristine order, Garnett's ideas implicitly suggest a reversal of this relation - new spatial circumstances re-writing the self. In turn, this raises an idea that fascinates me: equivalency between the home and the body as both spaces in & through which we live. Through pristine accessorising, Garnett was forming herself - then the accessories change, and so does that self. Thus we find ourselves assemblages not individuals, and something about human-object relations becomes a little more focused.

"That's the thing about moving in with a lover: you can't prepare yourself for it, or lay down rules or decide how it's going to be. You just muddle through. But I was, at best, just muddling through living on my own, only with a better kitchen and more acccessories. And no-one to witness the boring bits. And though I've never been prissy I was, on my own, in my own nice flat, in danger of becoming tight-arsed. [...]

"Most of the time, you just have to be your normal, boring, human, honest self. If I've loved getting to know my boyfriend more intimately than I ever imagined I'd know anyone, then I've enjoyed watching my real self unfurl itself infront of somebody else. I've never had to do it before. But everyone who lives with someone does! Sometimes I'm amazed by this feat. It's so trusting and honest of us. Amazingly, my partner doesn't appear to mind when I am boring or ratty or over-tired or sad or blue. He just puts his arms around me and comforts me. He likes it less when I am unreasonable or determined to punish him for some perceived wrong, but then one of us makes a jump and we manage to get out of whatever heavy weather we've sailed into.

[...] "A more interesting lesson has been learning to live with myself. I don't mean that in a cheesy, self-help, 'You have to learn to love yourself before anyone else loves you' kind of way. I mean that when you live on your own you can wave away the bits you don't like about yourself to an extent, but when you live with your lover you can't. It's all thrown out in front of him and you can't take it back. It's like the tree in the forest: if no-one sees or hears it fall, does it actually topple? I did lots of toppling in that flat by myself and, of course, word seeped out. I went to therapy regularly, I had a good many close friends and they, as well as my family (most of my family), got to see me at my most boring and irritable. But you don't have to win your family over in terms fo love. And I didn't live with my friends. No. In this flat there is, day to day, me, my boyfriend and not that much else. But you don't need props, I've discovered, to live together, because what you're doing isn't a performance."

Daisy Garnett, 'Moving On', in Vogue September 2008

Cities lectures at LSE - Spring 2009

LSE's consistently excellent public lectures programme (follow on Twitter) has the following cities-related lectures this spring:

Architecture as Investment
Monday 27 April 2009, 6.30pm
Professor Alejandro Aravena, Professor Ricky Burdett, chaired by Tyler Brûlé

The challenge to provide affordable housing is a global issue. At a time when market forces are eclipsing architecture’s social value, Elemental’s pioneering housing is transforming urban communities in Latin America. Prof. Aravena is director of Elemental in Santiago de Chile (and Mr Brûlé, of Monocle magazine, just has the best name ever).

The Tycoon and the Tough: towards a comparative anthropology of urban marginality
Thursday 7 May 2009, 6pm
Dr Joshua Barker, Professor Chris Fuller

Anthropologists often use key figures, such as the street tough, the child witch, and the flâneur, as a means to elucidate, personify, and critique underlying dynamics of social and cultural transformation. It is a method that is widely used, but seldom scrutinised. In this lecture Joshua Barker uses examples from his research in the slums of Bandung, Indonesia, to argue that this method can make a powerful contribution to a comparative anthropology of urban marginality.

Picturing Poverty: London past and present
Wednesday 27 May 2009, 6.30pm
Sue Donnelly, Mishka Henner, Professor Gillian Rose, Dr Mike Seaborne

From Charles Booth’s 19th century maps and early photographs of East End tenements, to rich-poor divides in Hackney, this discussion will consider old and new ways of seeing poverty – understanding the underlying political processes that serve to reproduce and reduce it. Sue Donnelly is head of Archives at LSE. Mishka Henner is a photographic artist. Gillian Rose is professor of cultural geography at the Open University. Mike Seaborne is senior curator of photographs at the Museum of London.

All That Life Can Afford
Tuesday 26 May 2009, 7pm
Mishka Henner

What does poverty in London look like? And can photography expose the often hidden mechanisms that keep the rich divided from the poor? Mishka Henner discusses the making of his photographic essay, All That Life Can Afford, deconstructing its production to reveal the negotiations and obstacles involved in visualising poverty.

The Fog of Games: Legacy, Land Grabs and Liberty
Reporting the London Olympics
Thursday 28 May 2009, 7pm
Mark Saunders, Martin Slavin

The Olympics are brief and transitory television events that disguise and justify mega projects of vast urban restructuring that permanently distort our cities for the benefit of a few business interests. The common features of these mega projects are unprecedented land grabs, the peddling of myths of ‘regeneration’ and ‘legacy’ benefits, the sweeping away of democratic structures and planning restraints, the transfer of public money into private hands, and ‘information management’ to hide truths and silence critics.
Mark Saunders is an award winning independent documentary filmmaker, media activist and writer. Martin Slavin's continuing interest in photographing and writing about urban experiences, development and natural life is encapsulated in his current focus on the 2012 London Olympics in his neighbourhood.

City, 1 April 09

Builders watching the bankers watching the protestors just out of shot at the Climate Camp on Bishopsgate, or perhaps this was Bank of England.

Financial Fools' Day aftermath

Aftermath of the anticapitalist (antiwar, Green, anti-Labour) protest march and rally; Hyde Park, 1st April 2009.

Please recycle?

Somers Town, 25 Sept 08

The City is not a hospitable place for hippies, mystics, and idealists - they graitate west towards smaller towns like Totnes and Stroud. A few pagan shops still exist round Seven Dials, and there's a fortune teller in Selfridges, but by and large the City is about power more concrete than cosmic. Bless these women's groups in the pictures above, then! It was a two-storey building with this sterile, masculinist steel and granite facade more suited to an accountancy or law firm - but there they were, working on dreams of freedom regardless of the difficulties outside.

Stoke Newington, 28 Sept 08

Watch your skin peel indeed - love this haunting intervention in the abandoned church in Stoke Newington's cemetery. The medium is fantastic: moss grown upon felt, we reckoned. Cheers to Caspar for the walk that morning and showing me around his neighbourhood - hope Berlin's treating you well these days!

Design Museum: Richard Rogers exhibition

A couple of themes struck me about the Richard Rogers exhibition at the Design Museum a few months back - absence and the nature of the architectural model; and microflats and confined urban living. The latter will be another post, something to discuss in relation to my own 250 sq ft dwelling. So here I will talk about:

ABSENCE

I've mentioned the dissertation I wrote on the philosophy of dust - how, if you think about it far too much, dust is this really weird force in the domestic. Dust holds a mirror up to human dwelling, showing us back to ourselves as alien. Derrida was an influence here, offering ideas of absent presence and spectrality. And it's those sort of questions I want to ask about the architectural models displayed. What isn't there, and how is this a problem for architecture?



The idea came to mind when I was looking at this perspex-built model, and realised that there wasn't a speck of dust on it. Helen Lloyd at the National Trust has done a lot of research on visitor numbers, the dust they produce, and what this means for their conservation work. The Design Museum hae to be cleaning like maniacs to keep these models pristine (wonder if they pay living wage?). So what does this mean symbolically? It is an erasure of the traces left by people and time, when people-over-time equals life. It is a desire to elevate these models into the Ideal, to proclaim their forms as absolute truths like Platonic solids. It's a great big denial and repression of materiality, and when the practical outcome of the architectural design process is building stuff for embodied use, that's a fucking problem.



This is the big objection that, coming from a social sciences perspective, I have with architecture. It's not about fucking form. The arrangement of pretty shapes and lighting in space (whether in the model or the actual construction) is... method, means to an end. What actually matters is the effects of these forms: environmental impacts, the responses and feelings that buildings elicit from people, the social interactions they enable or proscribe. But the architectural model stops half way through that process, reifying what's secondary to built space (i.e. form) to the sole signifier. It's exactly a monumental arrogance on the behalf of the architect, this desire to deny the fact that every single person's use of the building is a form of interpretation and thus authorship, and to claim this creative generation for themselves alone.

To be sure, I know that architecture students are now trained to think seriously about inhabitation and use and radical architecture - and that's great. Sometimes the results aren't so abstract as to be incomprehensible and useless: even better! But these traditional models ignore all of that, and by being shown in this museum they're being called definitive architecture. NO.



This is a model of the Millennium Dome. What does it say? Everything it tells us is in the absences. The failure of the Dome project was that it was planned as a model (and reconstructed at 100x the scale as the same); that its contents went in because they seemed educational and a good idea in theory, and theory only. The model is white and sterile; the Dome was never planned as living breathing processual space, somewhere that could encourage culture rather than just displaying it dead and fixed. Was its handling of multiculturalism and Britain's hybrid and colonial history also pristinely white in the sense of racially normative? Sure there was PC, but that's not real inclusion. Planned as an unpeopled model, the only participation the Dome allowed was consumption, the only way we could express what we thought of the place was by where we chose to queue. And then they put this model in a museum like it is a good thing?

I want to look for people who are modelling and planning architecture in other ways than these perspex and plastic tombs, ways that bring what matters about the discipline (that is, staging social life) in from the beginning. Suggest things to me...

Choked up

The weather has been ropey this last week, and bang! look at its effects on the systems of the City. So it's been raining. It's bloody November, of course it's been bloody raining. But can we deal with it raining? No. People stop walking and cycling and take to their cars, they jump on buses for the shortest of journeys. So everything snarls up, King's Cross is essentially stationary, and buses don't go anywhere any more. I find this isn't terribly helpful... This is what I am looking at for 20 minutes at a stretch:



God forbid, I may just listen to certain of my friends and get a fucking fixie, hipsterrific as they are. I do not have the space in my teeny tiny flat for a bicycle, and nor could I possibly be restricted to clothing practical enough to ride in. But the way these guys talk about cycling: the way awareness extends in space and time as you slip through this shifting system of road-cars-pedestrians-destination-enironment-self; the physical challenge (and the phenomenal lean grace of their bodies, more real than anything gym-built); the speed and satisfaction... Their eyes light up, their speech is poetic, enthralled, persuasive. Perhaps there's something in it...

Transmetropolitan

I have regressed to age fifteen and started reading legendary comic series Transmetropolitan. Been reading writer Warren Ellis's blog for years, of course, so it's about time I got round to his real stuff. Transmetropolitan tries quite hard to be cool, and of course it's essentially deriative - but this is postmodernity so does that matter? I think I like it. Worth scribbling about it here because Transmetropolitan - as the name suggests - is urban as hell. Urban like ur-city, or at least ur- like originary if your year zero was Bladerunner. There are other urban archetypes in Dickens, Le Corbusier, Ancient Greece - but yes, Transmetropolitan's doing all it can to capture a particular one. So let's take a look at it.



"I hate it here. I hate the way it smells (except when you get into a fully residential quarter where people are predominantly first-gen American: the way people express their culture in their cooking is one of the few good reasons for being alie). I hate the way it looks (except for that weird beauty that hits you in the eye eery other second). I hate the way it thinks (except when it buys this newspaper). I hate the things it does to itself (except when it lets me do them). I hate the way it loes me, and I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate it here... but God help me, I can't imagine liing anywhere else."

(Anti-)hero Spider Jerusalem just refers to it as 'the city', which fits this blog way too perfectly! The series seems to have quite a fixation on prostitution as proiding definitive urban background colour, too, which I need to unpack - that 'Sex and the City' post I promised. Of course it's essentially just romanticised misogyny, but the trope (common enough, think Sin City too) hints at a bigger about urban social relations too, I suspect... But first another trope of Transmetropolitan: drugs.

"You know, when I was a kid, we listened to music that made our parents' eyes bleed and took drugs that made us want to dance and fuck and kill things. That is the way things are supposed to be.
It was, therefore, in the spirit of honest investigation that I internalised a heroic dose of Space, the new social drug enjoyed by the young folk of today as part of the youth culture referred to as Supermodernity.
Supermodernity, apparently, is the experience of being between places; that is, not being in a real place at all, but waiting in transit between one place and the other. This is why SM/Space Culture music appears to us to be utterly silent. You hae to be on Space - slowed down, across places, in the one between ticks of the clock - to be able to hear it.
This is what they do for fun, apparently: suck up appalling volumes of a drug that traps you in an airport waiting lounge of the mind and doesn't let you go for approximately two hundred years while someone plays an antique handheld electronic keyboard in your ear."

First, what the fuck, a reference to the Marc Auge Non-Places: ...Anthropology of Supermodernity that is basically A. getting Terribly Upset about driving on the motorway? Unexpected... But also the suggestion that real cutting-edge spatial theorists ought to be hoovering up ketamine and the other space-time distorters (salvia, perhaps?). The eco actor-network theory of Tim Ingold is essentially based on the acidhead realisations of Gregory Bateson: 'oh shit, man, it's like, all connected! We better be nice to the plants and reindeer now...' So what would the results be for embodiment and architecture if working with disassociatives? Of course architecture students are always already doing these drugs by the bucketload, but is anyone out there integrating it with their practice? I want to know...

New York, New York

Twelve days ago I went to New York for the first time. I didn't visit for the sake of the city at all - hell, I wish it didn't exist - oh, let's just say it separates me from someone, someone who's pretending for the moment that the City isn't the one true place to be. Nevertheless, this is enough of a someone that I would consider leaving my beloved City for his - so while I was there (and because I lack the money, and because I'm an anthropologist not a lousy tourist!) I was thinking about how NY operates as a place to live. A few comments on its urban space and architecture, to begin with:

The Bowery was one of the streets I liked the most, even as gentrification starts to go too far. (The less said about the hotel these days the better.) It let me take a satisfyingly evocative (cliched) photo, and still seemed to carry a few ghosts.



The Bowery hosts the New Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the very few bits of proper, committed new architecture I found in the city. (I didn't go even as north as Midtown, though, so I accept I may have missed a bit! Then again, no-one was trying to convince me that the Upper East Side was a happening place to see...) The rainbow 'Hell Yes' on its side didn't exactly 'fit' as such, but the building had a scale and a rhythm that worked well. I liked its texture, I liked its balanced imbalance, and it proided a fitting space for its gallery purpose.



One of the other rare bits of serious new architecture I saw in NY was Tschumi's Blue Building on the Lower East Side - I failed to get a decent picture, but thankfully the New York Times did. Apparently, "its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings." No no no! It's just a bog-standard tower block that happens to be wonky. It's a monolith of glass and steel that doesn't speak to any grittiness or disorder; it seeks to be a singular landmark rather than dispersed or multiple; it's blocky, aggressive, still fucking phallic. This longer review is more astute when it observes that the asymmetric form is all about maximising the square footage, i.e. capital-with-a-capital-C. If I gave a shit about the Lower East Side, perhaps I'd cry.

Oddly enough for America, New York's best buildings were its old ones, with their fragile rusty balconies and sense of speaking in harmony with their neighbours. I was surprised to find that the city had a facility for elegant decay, something I associate strongly with Mediterranean cities and perhaps Latin America. Paint peeled, graffiti layered on top of posters, the sidewalk fallen apart fit to break a leg... Unexpected, but quite beautiful in its anti-statist way. Sea air helps, too, I suppose. I'd thought Coney Island might have this quality but instead it was sadder than that, surrounded by housing estates and derelict land, an illustration of New York's segregation and deelopment rows. Shame. (Fucking enormous seagulls, too.)



Further commentary in another post regarding the 'suburbanisation' of New York and other suggestions as to why I didn't feel it was somewhere that worked very well. But as a teaser, I like this comment by Rocco Landesman, a Broadway producer:

But I think there has been a delibidinization of our city, I really do. ...In terms of public planning there’s been a kind of prudishness, a kind of social and political correctness that’s gone on.

Sex and the City, now there you go - and now that's such a topic for this blog, too!
x

29 Aug 2008, 15:18

Also, I like this 'fuck you' response to the anti-flyering paint: more than one way to appropriate an urban surface for one's own purposes!

City-related lectures at LSE this autumn

There are a thousand reasons why the LSE is brilliant, and one is the quality of its evening lectures. The full list is available here, but below are details of the best on urban and spatial topics. I'd like to attend them all, but that'll be easier said than done!

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Running Cities: London in context
Sir Simon Milton, Prof. Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
What is the new administration's vision for London? Speakers discuss how to design and manage the powerhouses of the global economy, assessing London's development compared to the megacities of the world.
Simon Milton was appointed deputy mayor for policy and planning after serving as chairman of London's Local Government Association. Ricky Burdett, chief adviser for the London 2012 Olympics, and Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, are co-editors of The Endless City.

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: social order revisited
Prof. Robert Sampson & Prof. Paul Gilroy
A look at classic urban themes as they are manifested in the contemporary city, focusing on social reproduction of inequality, the meanings of disorder, and the link between the two.
Paul Gilroy is Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory at LSE. Robert Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair of sociology, Harvard University.

Tues 4 Nov, 13:00 - Big Ideas: Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

Weds 12 Nov, 18: 30 - Desiring Walls
Prof. Wendy Brown
In this lecture, Professor Wendy Brown will draw on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine the desire for walls in the context of eroding sovereignty. Why the current proliferation of nation-state walls, especially amidst widespread proclamations of global connectedness and anticipation of a world without borders? And why barricades built of concrete, steel and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed or networked? Why walls now and how are they to be understood? While acknowledging variety in the explicit purposes of the new walls, this project argues for comprehending the recent spate of wall building in terms of eroded nation-state sovereignty. Above all, the new walls consecrate the boundary corruption they overtly contest and signify the ungovernability by law of a range of forces unleashed by globalization.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thurs 13 Nov, 18:30 - Our Urban Future: the death of distance and the rise of cities
Prof. Edward Glaeser
Improvements in transportation and communication technologies have led some to predict the death of distance, and with that, the death of the city. In this lecture Professor Ed Glaeser will argue that these improvements have actually been good for idea-producing cities at the same time as they have been devastating for goods-producing places. What, then, does the future hold for our cities?
Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard.

Tues 18 Nov, 18:30 - The Politics of Mobility
Peter Hendy
Sprawl versus dense? Public transport versus private car? This debate will outline how London's transport strategy shapes - and is shaped by - environmental policy, quality of life and political imperatives.
Peter Hendy is commissioner of Transport for London.

What I've been working on in these weeks away from this blog - this is the introduction to my Masters dissertation entitled Dust: Disturbing the Domestic:

I first started thinking about dust when lying on the sofa in my flat, procrastinating on putting together a dissertation proposal. Eyes casting around for things to do other than study, I noticed that an enormous amount of dust had gathered under the table. Where trapped by chair legs it was forming dustbunnies, tangles of an oddly purpleish fuzz and hair that were a prodigious size seeing as I had swept only a couple of days previously. It didn't seem fair. I had to be the one to blame – my previous flat had been excessively dusty too, but that was clearly due to sharing it with two engineering-student boys. Now, living alone, this dust had to be my responsibility – yet I was neither balding nor scrofulous, and my flat's soft furnishings were not becoming threadbare. Where was this material coming from? I was disturbed.

The problem of dust was clearly a more interesting question than any possible dissertation. How frequently did I need to clean in order to prevent dust, daily? But that would be silly. The dust was quite a pleasing colour and safely out-of-the-way, so perhaps I should just leave it? After all, dust wasn't really yucky – it just sat there quietly – and cleaning to avoid my dissertation was clearly procrastination to be discouraged. I had thought I lived in every inch of my tiny flat, yet on reflection dust marked all the spaces in which my presence was absent, the out-of-the-way places my feet didn't tread and my body didn't occupy. Dust sat in corners, under the bed, and on top of the cooker hood, while the rest of the flat acquired discarded clothes and coffee stains, traces instead of use. And paradoxically this dust marking all the places I wasn't was nonetheless made of me, made of my skin and made of hair no more dead than that attached to my head. It suggested a sort of hidden embodiment-apart-from-the-body, dispersed over space and time. The accumulation of dust was like the accumulation of the past, which must at some point become suffocating to the present – housework the only thing preventing the transformation of the home into a nightmarish haunted house. What if dust could be sentient, like the animated soot particles in the film I'd watched recently, Spirited Away? This stuff was weird, intriguingly so.

I decided I wanted to do some serious thinking about dust.