Investigating Infrastructure – The 2018 SHU SPG conference, 13 June 2018

This year the SHU Space & Place Group’s interdisciplinary conference is themed around “Infrastructure”. Drawing across an array of disciplinary traditions and perspectives in a mix of presentations and activities our presenters will invite participants to explore the ways in which (tangibly and intangibly) infrastructure permeates space and enables place. Our event will take an expansive definition of infrastructure, ranging from big, heavy, monumental industrial objects to the faint structures that quietly enable and shape the world around us, and our daily experiences within it.  During the day, in an optimum and productive mix of playful and serious, you will encounter infrastructure in the shape of singing turbines, hot pipes, chatty buildings, dancing places, recuperative greenspaces and as refuges from the zombie apocalypse.

The event is free to attend, and you will even get refreshments and a packed lunch (courtesy of sponsorship by SHU’s Department of the Natural & Built Environment).

SHU SPG events are open to all, and whether SHU staff or beyond our institution. A physical limit is set for by the capacity of the venue, thus registration will be on a ‘first come first served’ basis.

Tickets can be booked here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/investigating-infrastructure-the-2018-shu-spg-conference-tickets-45721336749

PROGRAMME

9.30-9.45 WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

Luke Bennett, Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU

This introduction will summarise key themes arising from the SHU SPG panel event Beneath the City Streets: four researchers explore urban infrastructure and its invisibility held on 21 March 2018 and suggest how these themes might productively inform this conference’s ruminations.

9.45- 11.15 SESSION 1: INFRASTRUCTURE, POWER AND PLACE

Chair, Luke Bennett, Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU

9.45 – 10.00 Infrastructure’s objects

Richard Brook – Manchester School of Architecture

Infrastructure, whilst often characterised in terms of its invisibility via network multiplicity, functional ubiquity and semantic indeterminacy, still depends upon local, fixed, physical points of presence. This presentation will consider the objectification of infrastructure from an architectural perspective by showing how the seemingly invisible and diffuse is necessarily materialised and localised in the form of the built artefacts of infrastructure which are, by turns, prosaic and monumental. Infrastructure will be described as object and as producer of objects and the materiality and materialisation of infrastructure as concretised yet simultaneously ethereal. Such a situation seeks to explore the limits of the urban, the expanded geography and the morphology of the contemporary city.

10.00 – 10.15 Infrastructures of autonomy

Sam Vardy & Cristina Cerulli – Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU (Architecture) 

We will present critical readings of infrastructures as fertile grounds for the development of autonomous initiatives. Drawing on insights from design research developed within the context of a Masters’ architecture design studio,  we will explore what we might understand as infrastructure, looking beyond common instances (pipes, roads and communications systems etc.) to reveal other possible of alternate infrastructure(s) manifestations, implications and affects – spatially, socially and politically.

10.15 – 10.30 Transforming urban heat infrastructure: place, territory and politics.

William Eadson, Centre for Economic & Social Research, SHU

Urban heat infrastructure in the UK is undergoing transformation as cities seek to move towards, cheap and secure low carbon energy sources. But such transformations are contingent on a wide range of entanglements between actors and materials that are often spatially distanciated and precariously held in place through a range of different means. In this presentation I will use case studies from English cities (including Sheffield) to focus on the territorial politics of urban heat: how territory is constructed and put to use in the development of new urban heat infrastructure.

10.30 – 10.45 Lost infrastructures and historic visual representations: case study of power generation in east Manchester in the post-war period

Martin Dodge – University of Manchester (Geography) 

Drawing on ideas from historical geography, visual culture and cartographic communication this talk considers how far large infrastructure sites can be recovered through historic visual representations that have survived and are publicly available in archives. Looking in particular at the massive fossil-fuelled energy production sites which had a dominating physical presence in many British cities from the late nineteenth century and through first half of twentieth century, this talk focuses on a distinctive cluster of gas works, power station and colliery that were situated in the Bradford area of east Manchester. Nearly all trace of these major infrastructures is lost from the urban landscape by the late twentieth century and it is interesting to consider how far their distinctive form, architectures, production methods and material presence can be envisioned and narrated using original building plans, engineering drawings, OS mapping, process diagrams, aerial photography and other technical inscriptions.

10.45 – 11.15 Panel Discussion

11.15-11.45 BREAK

11.45 – 1.00 SESSION 2: INFRASTRUCTURE, INTERFACES & INTERACTION

Chair: Carolyn Gibbeson, Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU

11.45-12.00 High society or squatters? Competition dancing, affordances and engaging with the infrastructure of the ballroom

Fides Matzdorf – Sheffield Business School, SHU (Facilities Management)

Dance is all about space – moving through space, sharing space, claiming, ‘hogging’ and defending space and thereby framing and operating a highly structured social interface. Just as matter moves through hard infrastructure (pipes, wires, channels), so bodies flow through the ballroom. I’ll take you on a short journey of pictures and stories through the spatial trials and tribulations associated with a competition day – complete with paradoxes, contradictions and ironies in order to explore this and the underlying infrastructural orderings of the ballroom as a competitive space. This journey will reflect on the awkwardness of the notion of ‘backstage’ as a place in which the necessary messiness of an event is hidden – and will by analogy further question the supposed ‘invisibility’ of any infrastructure and of its operations.

12.00 – 12.15 The interaction zone: interpreting English and Dutch urban domestic interfaces as an infrastructure for sociality

Kaeren Van Vliet – Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU (Architecture) 

Public private interfaces form a continual infrastructure running through the built environment (Wohl 2017) where messages are recorded and relayed. The interface can also be understood as a place (Dovey & Wood 2015) where public and private are negotiated and values are displayed. This presentation uses the tensions and synergies between emerging theoretical understanding of the interface to undertake a micro-spatial and visual exploration of English and Dutch domestic interfaces

12.15 – 12.30 Green Infrastructure for mental health

Jo Birch – University of Sheffield (Landscape Architecture) 

This paper foregrounds ‘the value’ and ‘values’ of a city’s green infrastructure and urban nature in responding to societal challenges around human wellbeing and mental health. Whilst nature-based therapeutic activities are acknowledged as potentially useful in mental health recovery (Bragg and Leck 2017) and/or ‘social citizenship’ (Parr 2007), we know too little about how green infrastructure may play a role in coping with mental illness, recovery or prevention. Through discussion of findings from the Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN) project I share values of urban nature told by a group of people with mental health difficulties living in Sheffield, discussing what this means for both urban planning and healthcare.

12.30 – 1.00 Panel Discussion

1.00 – 1.45 LUNCH

1.45 – 2.45 SESSION 3: INVESTIGATING THE SPACES & PLACES OF INFRASTRUCTURE

Chair: Becky Shaw, Sheffield Institute of Arts, SHU

1.45 – 2.00 Towards the development of innovative interfaces for spatial mapping of cultural infrastructure

Rebecca Sharp – Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU (Geography) 

The proposed work will aim to develop a prototype of an innovative interface to map cultural infrastructure. The research will draw on the theoretical and data analysis techniques from engineering and infrastructure studies and apply these techniques to non-infrastructure research. The work will apply innovative spatial visualisation techniques together with social media textual analysis to provide an overview of different spatial social cultural interactions. Social media data analysis has been a growing area of research over the last decade with geotagging analysis becoming increasingly popular in the last few years. Gaps in knowledge still exist in effectively visualising this data and the outreach of this information to communities and policy makers. This research will thus build on the previous literature to review different ways to visualise data in an interactive (spatial and temporally) multi-layer interface.

2.00 – 2.15 Sonospheric Investigations

Matt Parker – University of the Arts London (Sound Artist) 

This presentation will introduce the sonospheric investigation as a research methodology for attending to the obfuscated energies and vibrations of media infrastructures. It will introduce some of the practical and ethical challenges encountered when negotiating access to critical nodes of the Internet ’s material plane, from the position of an artist and spatial practitioner. Lastly, I will discuss some of the weirder things you might find the other side of the high security perimeter fence.

2.15 – 2.30 White Thorns: the poetics of windfarms

Brian Lewis, Longbarrow Press (Poet)

The story of the Isle of Axholme, an area of reclaimed marshland in North Lincolnshire, is one of engineering and extraction. Even before it was drained, realigned and flattened in the 1620s, the land was regarded as a source of fuel; by the 1980s, small-scale peat cutting had given way to intensive harvesting, a period in which gas and coal exploration also fissured the isle. The colliery at Thorne is now a solar park, and the flatlands are crowned by the wheel and flicker of wind turbines, including a 34-turbine array at Keadby; the largest onshore wind farm in England. Drawing on a sequence of poems based on recent walks around the isle, this presentation will reflect on how Axholme’s resource infrastructure has moved above ground in the 21st century and consider how the scale and dynamism of the ‘white thorns’ impacts on the affective experience of landscape.

2.30 – 3.00 Panel Discussion & briefing for the two activities

3.00 – 5.00 SESSION 4: TWO ACTIVITIES NARRATING INFRASTRUCTURE

3.00 – 4.00 Activity 1

GROUP A: An indoor walking survey with John Grant (Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU) to assess a university building’s infrastructural resilience and preparedness for surviving a zombie apocalypse (guided walk from Norfolk 210 to Cantor Building Room 9140).

GROUP B: A short outdoor walk to inspire an infrastructural haiku writing workshop led by landscape poet Brian Lewis of Longbarrow Press (assemble in Cantor Building Room 9140).

4.00 – 5.00 Activity 2

GROUP A: A short outdoor walk to inspire an infrastructural haiku writing workshop led by landscape poet Brian Lewis of Longbarrow Press (guided walk from Norfolk 210 to Cantor Building Room 9138).

GROUP B: An indoor walking survey with John Grant (Natural & Built Environment Dept, SHU) to assess a university building’s infrastructural resilience and preparedness for surviving a zombie apocalypse (assemble in Cantor Building Room 9138).

5.00 END OF THE EVENT

 

Image credit: Matt Parker

Advertisement