“The fetish, then, not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problem of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems.”
William Pietz (1985) ‘The problem of the Fetish – 1’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9(9): 5-17
Don’t get excited. This short blog post isn’t about fetishism in the sense of deviant sexuality. It’s about a brief encounter (alone) with a sofa and how in that moment two very different systems of meaning coincided and momentarily surrendered me to the special power and poignancy of that furniture. Pietz identifies the anthropological notion of the fetish – of certain material artefacts imbued with special powers – as forged at the meeting-point between two very different social systems. Whilst his encounters of concern are cross-cultural, mine are paradigmic: concerning the prosaic realm of soft furnishings and the emotionally loaded realm of grief.
The story begins a few days after the death of my grandmother. I’m tasked with the job of taking her false teeth to the undertakers. As a family we can’t decide whether she’d want to be cremated with her teeth in or out. This is a question that has no logical resolution. Wearing her dentures was her day-time practice. In the public realm she would wear her teeth (and would be incomplete with out them) but at night she took them out before going to bed, and therefore being at rest didn’t involve having her teeth in. But being at her funeral would place her in the public realm (so logic said ‘teeth in’). But she would not be visible in her casket, and was otherwise dressed for – eternal – sleep (so other logic said ‘teeth out’). We couldn’t decide what was right. But we didn’t regard her dentures as the kind of memento that would be readily cherishable. So we decided to put the decision into the hands of the undertakers – literally: give them Nan’s teeth and let them decide.
So, there I was walking towards the undertakers, a small bag in hand carrying my grandmothers’ dentures. Maybe I was reflecting on the public/private dichotomy of false teeth. Maybe I was thinking about what to have for lunch. I don’t recall. I was simply in a normal place, in a normal mode of ‘getting on with life’.
I entered the funeral parlour. Those are the correct words for such a place, but they don’t carry the right connotation. ‘Funeral parlour’ summons up images of gloom, solemnity. Something faintly Victorian. Instead the room into which I stepped from the street was far more domestic in tone. It felt like a living room. It was quiet. And for a moment no one was there. Then a young woman appeared. She spoke slowly, in a manner designed to communicate a modern solemnity. She was young, but damn good at her job. As she spoke (and I have no recollection of the words she used to invoke her pleasantries) she created a calm, caring impression that melded with the design of the room. In my memory everything in that room was larger than you would normally find. I’m sure that is a distortion of my recollection. But as she talked I surrendered into the role of grieving relative. My flippant thoughts of Nan’s dentures and of category-confusion faded away. Via the young lady’s hushed intonations, I was invited to think of myself as someone who – on that day needed special care and attention, and as she spoke I surrendered into that.
I was invited to sit down on the sofa behind me. The young lady said she was going to take my package through to her colleagues and she needed me to stay for a moment. Again, I forget why. Maybe a receipt needed to be handed over.
But as I stooped to sit my body started to echo the surrender that was already working its way through my mind. My body committed itself to the support of the chair (as we do – without poetic thought – every time we choose to sit). And as my bum connected with the sofa the super-sized embrace of this cleverly chosen furniture kicked in. I could feel myself sinking into the upholstery, it wrapping its arms around me. It held and consumed me. It was the softest, biggest, deepest, most relaxing sofa I’ve ever sat in. And for a moment I felt truly cared for.
The moment passed, of course. The young lady returned. Perhaps she gave me a receipt. I leant forward and departed the sofa, stepping back into the street. No small bag in hand, but with a feeling of calm certitude.
I’m both impressed and shocked by this moment of calm surrender – and of the momentary power of the sofa and its circumstance over me. It was appropriate and helpful to be mesmerised in this way by the skilful setting of a place and a person – but in how so many other ways might artful interactional design create an atmosphere conducive to getting me to surrender so willingly and completely. Had a sales proposition been woven into that moment of surrender, I fear that I might have signed up to anything.
“In the history of mankind the Industrial Revolution in Britain was a unique phenomenon whose repercussions have spread throughout the world. We live today in a society whose economy is essentially industrial, our prosperity is based on the fruits of industrial activity and our surroundings, both urban and rural, are largely the result of over two centuries of progressive industrialisation. Industrial archaeology is concerned largely with those surroundings. In simple terms it is the examination and analysis of the physical remains of the Industrial Revolution period.”
Neil Cossons (1975) The BP Book of Industrial Archeology, David & Charles: Newton Abbot, p.15
I have the BP Book of Industrial Archeology in my hands. It speaks of a different time, in at least two senses. It purports to speak of the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century, but it also speaks of the time when the book itself was written. With its confident talk of ‘mankind’, the uniqueness of Britain’s industrialisation and of a faith in industrial progress it is alien to the sensibilities of the early Twenty-first century.
But what strikes me most is the book’s association with BP, as the oil industry garners less than two pages of consideration in the works’ 500 pages of industry-by-industry exemplification. At that coverage is largely confined to the working of shale-oil deposits in West Lothian in the late 1800s. Meanwhile gas is addressed only in relation to municipal processing of coal at local gas works. The rise of crude oil importation and processing is not considered part of the book’s story, it is too contemporary. And the North Sea oil field – at the time of the book’s writing – was yet to send any oil and gas ashore.
All history-writing is selective, and reflects the preoccupations of the era in which the history is written. Industrial archaeology emerged first as a hobbyist pastime in the 1950s, and then reached a peak of popularity in the late 1960s / early 1970s. David & Charles (the publishers) had a lucrative business in publishing accessible ‘laymans’ guides to fuel this ‘serious-hobby’. And meanwhile BP (and Shell) were keen to support (to fuel in a literal sense) this ambulant pastime. The book has gazetteer sections: it is nudging the reader to get out and explore (and to consume petrol in the process).
The last decade, or so, has seen a boom in oil-related books, and whilst most take the form of an angry indictment, some are more concerned to summon a curious lament or nostalgia, and here I’m thinking of Marriott & Mccalister 2021’s Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation (Pluto Press). Both types of book seek to spotlight a phenomenon that we have lived along-side but have paid little heed to: the petrochemical estate, its shaping impact upon the UK (and global) landscape and its strange ability to lie unseen, in plain sight. But Marriott & Mccalister’s book, and the road-trip around the vanished footprint of the UK’s oil and gas industry that it presents, is not all that can be said (or noticed) about the oil and gas industry and its legacy. And I guess that’s the point that Just Stop Oil would make – that their protest actions at art galleries are about forcing oil and gas back into consciousness.
But for me the punctum moment was stumbling upon the ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal on Anglesey. Opened in 1974 the terminal stored pumped crude from the then-supersized oil tankers that were too big to navigate down the Mersey to Shell’s Stanlow refinery. So until 1990 their oil was stored and pipped from this rural site. But the site was closed in 1990 and lay vacant for many years. When came upon it, I wandered in and found the footings of multiple large tanks, and orderly lanes between them. With all tanks and pipes long gone the effect was of a strange embossing – a rural landscape faintly indented with hints of a previous super-ordered arrangement of space. But the site was completely open, isolated and context-less.
(I acknowledge – of course – that oil and gas installations leave behind legacies of soil and groundwater contamination which are a much less wistful residues of former industrial activity.)
Last year my conscience was niggling me – I was feeling that I needed to address my knowledge gap around oil and gas, having been engrossed watching the Norwegian drama series State of Happiness (about their North Sea Oil era). So, I set out to read books that would bring me up to speed with the shaping impact of the Twentieth century’s dominant fuel (oil and gas): the petrochemical century and its’ hiddenness. In part there was a desire to knit make sense of time passing – for in the 1990s and early 2000s I’d had some association with BP facilities in South Wales, including its refineries and large petrochemical complexes spread along the Severn estuary.
Those places, when visited in the 1990s had felt a bit tired and speaking of an earlier optimism via their faded 1960’s design. But in their solidity I had assumed them to be eternal. I had no clear sense of what these locations must have been like before oil came, or that these mammoth complexes, with their gantries, pipes and tanks, might ever cease to exist. And yet, as an environmental lawyer I’d been a very small part of the creeping de-industrialisation process that would in due course (after I can left South Wales) culminate in the elimination of these sites.
Marriott & Mccalister chronicle this passing surprising well. I say surprising for two reasons. First, because I initially found their book too complicated by their attempt to weave reference to references to songs into their narrative. Secondly, because I thought that I would get a deeper insight and understanding from less psychogeographically inclined works. But how wrong I was. The histories of the oil industry that I found and read were dull, dull, dull. A succession of competitive commercial rivalries, imperial misadventures and mergers. My family laughed and me when I told them that I’d found these books boring. “Well, obviously”, came their reply.
But this begs a question, what makes the story of (for example) coal something that can be culturally embraced as an epic story of local and national identity, but oil and gas slithers into the shadows getting little purchase on consciousness?
Marriott & Mccalister suggest that the Oil and Gas industry likes this ability to have hid in the shadows, and that has served it well, largely. All the odder then that BP chose to sponsor an industrial archaeology book in the 1975s – I suspect that there is little chance that it would choose to do so now.
‘The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. “All that is solid”—from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all—all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to “Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals”‘
Marshall Berman (1987) All that is Solid Melts into Air: The experience of modernity, London: Verso p.99
2022 was a pretty full-on year for the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group. Somehow we managed stage seven workshop online events, three on our originally proposed theme of ‘Changing Places’ and a further four on the spin-off ‘Changing Campuses’ theme.
The Changing Campuses theme carries on into 2023 via a series of events which Jill Dickinson (now At University of Leeds) is leading with Sam Elkington (University of Teesside) for the Society for Research in Higher Education, on the theme of the future of learning landscapes. The three hybrid sessions are 1) Assemblages (22-2-23); 2) Networks (26-4-23) and 3) Flexibilities (14-6-23). Full details are here: https://srhe.ac.uk/landscapes-of-learning-for-unknown-futures-prospects-for-space-in-higher-education/
Meanwhile, as a follow-on to the Changing Places theme the SHU SPG’s theme for 2023 will be ‘Creative Destruction’. This post is a call for proposals, in order to see how much interest there is in engaging with this theme, both within SHU and beyond. The level of interest will then shape how this year’s series of online events is pulled together. So, please send me (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk) a proposal by 15 March 2023 if you would like to contribute, for this please provide a title, a paragraph setting out a summary of your project, idea etc and details of by when in 2023 you would be ready to present your contribution.
At our online events (which are free to participate in) each contributor gets 15 minutes to give their presentation, followed by discussion. The focus in our events is on relaxed interdisciplinarity and on the creative power of juxtaposing “presentations that by rights wouldn’t normally appear in the same event, but when they do it gets you thinking”. In our 2022 sessions we hosted presenters from management studies, architecture, education, facilities management, tourism, creative writing, disability studies, film making, sports & leisure studies, criminology, performance, graphic communication, law, museum studies, urban studies, jewellery design and social policy.
Growing out of 2022’s concern to examine through a variety of arts, humanities and social science lenses how places change, this year’s SHU SPG theme seeks to provoke an open (and playful) interpretation of the expression ‘creative destruction’. Perhaps there are four main sense that could be applied to this term:
how the act of destruction has certain aesthetic potentiality (i.e. can be used as a creative resource or object)
how the act of creativity necessarily often requires an (underacknowledged) element of destruction, elimination or subtraction (i.e. you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs)
how an urge to destroy-in-order-to-replace (i.e. to create the new) underpins capitalism and its urban processes
how the entropy in all things cannot be resisted, but can be curated (e.g. DeSilvey’s ‘palliative curation’ of ruins).
Through our call we seek contributions from any discipline that can speak to any of the above (or add new interpretations of the phrase). The only requirement is that the contribution either directly or indirectly applies to the built environment. An indirect contribution could be a presentation concerned (for example) with sculpture as a subtraction process, if the presenter was happy to allow an onward discussion to consider how the act of stone sculpture could be likened to urban subtraction processes. In other words: bring us the stimulus and then we’ll see where it can head onward to.
In disciplinary terms ‘creative destruction’ has a clear meaning in Marxist economics – in its theorisation of capitalism’s destruction drive in the quest for the constant production of new surplus value. Meanwhile in the arts, as expressed by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin in 1842, “the urge to destroy is a creative passion”. But destruction is more than just catharsis: destruction-based artworks embody a conundrum in that through subtraction, inflicted damage or disassembly the resulting / remaining item is rendered more noticeable, more noteworthy. Thus, destruction creates poignancy for a residual object (and/or memory of the moment of destruction). Meanwhile in the gritty realm of the prosaic, cities shrink through urban editing (de-densification) and buildings a subtracted through the industrial arts of demolition.
Our 2023 theme seeks to develop a conversation about creative destruction, editing-down, subtraction and disassembly that stretches productively across scales, domains and objectives to help inform consideration of creative destruction within urban change processes.
“Browse a bookstore’s philosophy section and you will find hefty tomes devoted to the analysis of single concepts such as friendship, authenticity, guilt, power, morality, freedom, and evil. Scholars wrestle with the precise meaning of these concepts because they are inherently abstract. Unlike concepts that refer to categories of things that we experience with our sense, these concepts lack a concrete referent existing in the world outside ourselves.”
Landau, Robinson & Meier (2014) The Power of Metaphor: Examining its influence on social life. American Psychological Association: Washington DC, p. 3
Like intestines, UK hospital estates are a characteristic cramming together of a variety of eras, sizes and functions of buildings. Navigation through, along, between and into such an assortment of functional elements is a feat of achievement in and of itself. It calls for a unique culture of wayfinding instruction (by the institution) and active, ambulatory interpretation (by the visitor). What follows is an attempted psychogeographical account of one such navigation.
The hospital’s outer car park is quite a way from the destination, but it is convenient, familiar open space. It lacks that squeezed-in aspect of more proximate, characteristically inserted-feeling, hospital parking sites.
It is a cold, frosty morning. To get to my destination I must navigate the contorted labyrinth of paths, roads and buildings that make up this estate, its vital organs and its interwoven passages and dead-ends.
In leaving the bright, winter sunshine of the car park I must first enter and squeeze through the dark narrow lane that runs between the secure psychiatric ward and a high bank. The windows are bulbous at their base, their protruding metal caging preventing escape of the ward’s content, but allowing moments of controlled ventilation,
Next, I emerge onto a slippery path, set on a gentle (but today perilous-feeling) incline. The passageways have been carefully prepared over night with specialist salts in anticipation of my tentative passage. These surfaces are notably clear-looking and the crystals glisten in the early morning sunlight, reflected and magnified in the adjacent window screens.
Indeed, touring this estate is a constant dialogue with the myriad surfaces, screens and cameras that mediate this journey, by turns offering-up images of far away and (very) close at hand.
I step down into Central Lane. I turn South but soon find myself in a waste storage compound. Here, everything appears to have its place. There are laundry bays, clinical waste bays and a variety of refuse trolleys. But there are no people and no doors through which I think am invited (or permitted) to pass. So, I reverse from this dead end and head North, up the long straight channel of this service lane. To my left the otherwise smooth banking has been recently excavated. Mini-diggers sit abandoned there and fluffy brown earth billows out of the ground. This fibrous outbreak unmasks the two-dimensional appearance of this bank – reminding me that the bank has depth, substance beneath the surface that enables the surface to stay so, stable, taut, smooth and unremarkable-seeming.
Meanwhile to my right I’m passing endless apertures of workshops and stores, their windows and doors acting hour-by-hour as membranes receiving and emitting supplies and services vital to the life of this hospital-organism. And still I have seen no people.
Reaching the end of Central Lane, I’m conscious that I’ve now spent many minutes walking in the opposite direction to my destination. But there have been no opportunities to enter the hospital complex through these walls. So, I feel somewhat relieved when I at last reach a sharp bend, which will finally enable me to turn South. But the bend is awkward, and requires me to contort my body and step out into the road. Here I must suddenly make sense of the road markings that seem to invite me to walk amongst the traffic. The clarity of Central Lane’s singular routing has given way to shapelessness and uncertainly. As a clarification of sorts, a sudden blast of cold, sharp air hits flaccid flesh, causing my face to wince.
Ahead of me a delivery lorry is parked perpendicular to the pavement, jutting out into the road. A yellow box painted onto the road shows me that it undertakes this awkward insertion on a regular basis. Through the evolution of this estate this kink in the route has become normalised, accommodating to the growing-over-time functional needs of the blank building into which it is now a necessary daily attachment. To move forwards I must step blindly out into the opposite carriage, and hoping to find nothing speeding towards me.
Time is now marching on, the deviation of my journey has eaten away at what I had though was adequate journey time. I am now breathing heavily. My heart is starting to pound as anxiety starts to mount. What else lies unexpectedly ahead? How much longer is this going to take? This site’s internal anatomy is not what I was expecting. Things looked more simple on the estate plan that I’d casually glanced at before setting out (and which I now wish I’d studied more intently).
I pick up the pace. I only have 10 minutes left now. I hug the edge of cluster of new buildings which look like the Westward turning point I’m seeking to transpose the required route from the map onto this terrain. (With time now tight I have abandoned my improvisational drift, and I am now surrendered to my phone’s map). But in self-admonishment – noting the mistaken fit between the cluster and the map – I chide myself that “the map is not the territory”.
Hastening towards my destination I finally find the entrance to the cluster of buildings which will deliver me to my destination. Upon entering I am reunited with the realm of people – all moving at notably slower pace than my now running-out-of-time stride. I chide myself again: “be grateful that you can move swiftly still, these folk are not choosing to be slow or uncertain in their movement”.
Once inside a new form of disorientation takes over. I now have to work in three dimensions: to find the right level and direction of travel. I get it wrong at first try and hurtle up, and then back down a flight of stairs. I passed through doors that lead onward to other doors, and pass through rooms within rooms (each seemingly smaller than the last). Generally, I’m passing further and further inside, but occasionally a corridor spits me out into gaps between buildings, a third space of exterior interior (courtyards of sorts).
Then with one further turn I finally reach my destination: Caecum House. And the procedure is completed.
“There is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present where there should be something”
Mark Fisher (2016) The Weird & The Eerie, p61.
Last night we held the final online session in Sheffield Hallam University’s Space & Place group’s ‘Changing Places’ series. The event took the form of an online book launch for the exciting and timely new collection, Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments, edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Routledge, 2022). Featuring contributions from around the world, this collection looks at the ways in which sport and physical activity react to natural and man-made shocks to place, whether by armed conflict, natural disaster or socio-economic turmoil.
The event featured the following presentations:
Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)
Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments: Tuning to the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’
Dani Abulhawa (Leeds University)
Moving toward understanding through open and expressive physical activity: Findings from a preliminary study into the work of Skateboarding charity, SkatePal in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories
Kevin Bingham (Barnsley College)
An urban explorer’s experiences of meshwork, melding and the uncanny: invisible cities of the rubble
Kass Gibson (Plymouth Marjons University)
Informational Hazards and Moral Harm: Sport and Exercise Science Laboratories as Sites of Moral Catastrophes
Here’s the recording of the session, and my reflections on the event follow.
Jim and Jack opened the event by outlining their conceptualisation of ‘catastrophe’. They see catastrophe as more fundamental than disasters (which can be anticipated, and to an extent planned for). A catastrophe is a circumstance of rupture where we come to feel torn from familiar notions of being, doing, belonging and inhabiting. It engenders a feeling of ‘end times’ and forces us to acclimatise to a new, unsettling, environment and context. A catastrophe puts us in place where it is hard to dwell, and yet we still must strive to live there. So, we learn how to normalise the abnormal, whether that’s the climate emergency, war, socio-economic turmoil etc. In the face of catastrophe, we witness the end of what we were previously able to take as stable, familiar and grounding.
So (they then provocatively ask) what role does sport and physical activity play within these changed places and contexts of dwelling? It seems incongruous to ask: surely sport is for ‘the good times’? But being so deeply ‘of the body’, physical activity conducted within the context and environs of catastrophe melds two things: that heightened phenomenological sense of being alive that exercise can summon and that empirical confrontation with unsettled contexts and environments. In short, exercise and confrontation of catastrophe, both require physically and cognitive exertion in order to accommodate to altered capacities of body and place.
Now, that formula (which is my extrapolation from Jim and Jack’s comments, and they may not like the direction I’m taking this) sets up opportunity for their contributors to explore the presence and actions of moving, adaptive bodies and minds within catastrophic places. Thus, Dani Abulhawa introduced us to the role of skateboarding projects in the West Bank, and specifically of how the act of learning to skate instils a sense of agency, growth, accomplishment and resilience in the individual skater, and also summons that communally via the shared experience of developing these community projects. Meanwhile in his account of his urbex forays into post-earthquake Christchurch’s ruination, Kevin Bingham used Italo Calvino’s motif of ‘Invisible Cities’ to suggest how this destroyed cityscape offered up a site of open-reading, such that this was (but also no-longer was) New Zealand. Instead, the city had become a distorted (and or distortable) place in which (in his words) “our maps and memories are deceiving us”. Kevin detailed his body’s lines of flight, contortion and accommodation to new logics of movement across the rubble where “we were spared the boredom of following the building in the usual way” but instead had to invent your own path of movement across denatured streets and ruptured buildings. And as with movement, so with meaning-making – in this invisible city Kevin would forge new – personalised – frameworks for his aesthetic consumption of this terrain. Kevin is unapologetic about this appropriation of place, and tantalising holds together the eager to explain theoretical realm of his academic training and the reticence of the urbexer’s experiential consumption logics of ‘it is what it is, I do what I do, because I do it’ (that’s not a quote from Kevin). In his account Christchurch was an open-form playscape, evacuated of other humans. But he conceded in the Q&A that not everyone liked that he and his crew had come to the city to play (my word, not his). So, it was interesting that the final presenter, Kass Gibson, then placed moral considerations front and centre of his talk, examining fitness laboratories as sites of moral catastrophy and of how the origins of such lab’s measured and evaluated physical activity lie in the control sciences of prison regimes, military training, time and motion studies etc. In presenting this analysis, Kass presented the body as a changing place and a site of trauma, invoking the haunting title of Jean-Marie Brohm’s 1978 collection of essays: ‘Sport: a prison of measured time’.
“…to examine this background assumption, to consider the idea that law does not stop at the utterance, but continues on through causal chains into the world of stuff. Actually, it was never anywhere else. The violence that law authorizes or blocks happens on bodies and elsewhere in the material world. This is not separable from law, nor are these simply ‘effects’.”
David Delaney (2003) ‘Beyond the word: law as a thing of this world’. In: Holder, J. and Harrison, C. E. (eds) Law and Geography. OUP: Oxford, pp. 67–84.
Anyone who’s read my work will know that I’m a lawyer-cum-geographer-cum-artsy kind of guy. I’m interested in that point where law as words and symbols collides with the physicality of the world around us, and how we take as natural many of these quite strange collision effects. But these collisions are necessary, important and they make fundamentally important regularities in the world, they form territories, they instruct us in how to move within and to co-inhabit our worlds. And its always struck me as odd that there is no academic journal targeted towards analysing these materialisations of law in (and into) the world, and how (formal and informal) rule frameworks form, subsist and fade for the spaces and places that we dwell in.
So, I’m very pleased to now announce that earlier this year I was appointed editor-in-chief of the established Emerald Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law. Admittedly that’s not the sexiest sounding journal title on the planet, but within the cover of that rather bland tagline, there’s great scope for the journal to become a home and heartland for investigation of the ‘rules’ of space and place.
Here’s the Journal’s recently refreshed Scope and Aims statement (featuring my editorial steer in bold) and an indication of the range (and scales) of studies that the journal has published in recent years from around the world:
The Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law publishes original legal research contributions for the benefit of scholars, policy makers and practitioners in these areas, including those operating in the fields of legal practice, real estate, place management, housing, environmental regulation and land use planning. It is an established, well-regarded journal; international in scope and with a commitment to comparative legal studies, the journal publishes scholarly legal articles dealing with the application of law in these areas as well as theoretical and policy orientated research. We are happy to accept articles taking a doctrinal approach as well as those engaging with empirical and socio-legal research.
JPPEL brings together scholarship from the inter-related areas of property, planning and environmental law, as well as a diversity of methodological approaches. The journal seeks to encourage new, interdisciplinary ways of examining how law (in its widest sense) shapes how places and spaces are conceived, made, used, owned, operated, managed, transacted, changed, harmed and/or eliminated. We are particularly keen to encourage contributions from fields such as legal geography, regulatory studies, political ecology and law & technology scholarship that explore the role of law in place-related matters.
To give an illustration of the breadth and importance of the subjects that we cover, here are some of the themes that our published articles have examined over the last three years:
Situating real estate law for the new outer-space economy
Transitioning towards circular systems: property rights in waste
Blockchain technology in Dutch land registration
The law and policy on coastal damage in New South Wales, Australia
Regulatory failure in hotel projects in Bali, Indonesia
Land expropriation in China
Legal frameworks for Syrian urban reconstruction
Developments in the law of repair in the UK private sector
Civil liability for nuclear operators in the United Arab Emirates
Logics of value in community ownership of UK pubs
We currently have an open Call for Papers, and are also open to proposals for special issues that align to the Journal’s Scope and Aims.
We also have a current specific Call for Papers (closing for submission on 21st February 2023) for a special issue to be guest edited by Dr Rebecca Leshinsky of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia on ‘Sharing sky high stories – A narrative research approach addressing the law of concerns, complaints, and conflict in multi-unit residential developments‘, here’s the text of that Call:
“Sharing sky high stories is a special issue for the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law. It supportsa narrative research approach addressing the law of concerns, complaints, and conflict in multi-unit residential developments.
Land use planning and environmental studies have a long tradition with the rich information that can be gathered from narrative research. This may be through interviews, focus groups or factual discussion from court judgements. Multi-unit residential development, be it private condominium or government/community housing, comprises of concerns, complaints, and conflict. Behind these matters are narratives involving humans as lot owners, renters, committee/board members, service providers, property/strata managers and other stakeholders. Dagan (2008, 814) reminds us there is no inherent or inevitable content to property law. We argue that the time is ripe for narrative research to play a role in gaining knowledge on the lived experiences of multi-unit stakeholders. Carruthers et al. (2021), regarding their research into the pedagogy of property law teaching, note findings from their longitudinal study that some teachers want a more critical socio-legal approach to property law, rather than strict doctrinal teaching. Sherry (2021) comments that land law contains social, economic, and political values that are obvious to legal and property theorists. These are values well known to judges but the time-pressures of modern justice limits the ability of judges to “explicate those values in their decisions”. In turn, lawyers cannot see the underlying social, economic or political rationale in property case law or doctrine (Sherry 2021). The rationale then for this special issue is to align narrative research in the legal context of property, planning and environmental matters as they relate to multi-unit residential developments. Knowledge from a legal lens on multi-unit developments, from the narratives, and stories of stakeholders, will add a richer understanding regarding the lived experiences of residents and stakeholders associated with multi-unit residential developments.”
“Today we have made the common charger a reality in Europe! European consumers were frustrated long with multiple chargers piling up with every new device. Now they will be able to use a single charger for all their portable electronics. We are proud that laptops, e-readers, earbuds, keyboards, computer mice, and portable navigation devices are also included in addition to smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers. We have also added provisions on wireless charging being the next evolution in the charging technology and improved information and labelling for consumers”.
Alex Agius Saliba, European Parliament Rapporteur (European Parliament News, 2022)
The summer starts with a provocation in June: “You need to get rid of all of those cables”.
July then brings the above birthday card and its accusatory meme.
August then brings annual leave and a negotiated list of jobs to be done. Clearing out the cables is item 4.
I ruminate. I clear out other stuff, but can’t bring myself to tacking the cable mountain. I ponder the reasons for this.
Throwing these items away is a waste of rubber and copper.
The residue of illicit cable stripping or burning occasionally stumbled upon in dog walks reminds me of the value inherent within cabling, if sufficient metallic mass can be gathered together. My cables would not produce enough bounty to attract a scrap dealer. But this argument for inaction has become shaky. There’s a recycling site in my city that takes domestic cables, and sends them for reprocessing. So, Reason 1 is becoming untenable.
I might need them
Here we touch on something primal. Being a competent adult is about being able to solve things, and to have the right tools for the job. In the recent BBC drama series Marriage, the husband of the couple (played by Sean Bean) is a shuffling, somewhat emasculated figure. He is unemployed, slightly lost in the world, and presented to the audience as largely impotent in his interactions. But there’s scene in Episode 2 where the family home’s router is playing up, causing major productivity challenges for his more in-the-world and active wife. He is called upon to fix the problem. He shuffles into his hallway and opens the door below his stairs and reaches in. He pulls out a plastic basket, full of cables. It is clear that this is his solutions store. He finds and fits a replacement cable. The router starts working again. His wife is relieved, and appreciative of the arcane magic that he has just performed. The cable basket returns to its under the stairs lair. The husband’s cable-hoard has proven its worth. It has also vanquished threats to its existence; for a while there will be no talk of the useless, tangled nest of electric string. The husband seems less emasculated for the remainder of the episode. There is a subtle air of competence to his shuffling.
Throwing out a lead is a very final step
Sharing our lives with an ever-changing array of electronic equipment has empowered us but it has also shackled us. We are (or at least need to be) tethered to our devices, and their cables are those essential umbilical cords that feed power and data to our electric friends. To throw away cables is to alienate yourself from previous devices, to abandon the prospect of rebooting that outsourced memory unit from 10, 15, 20 years ago. It is a decision to kill, because it is a decision to not just unplug life-support but rather to pull the plug on a machine in suspended animation, to renounce its possibility of resurrection. Yes, I know that most of these devices will never be reactivated (giving little – if any – resumed companionship or glimpse-of-the-past if they were lead back to life). But the decision to thrown away a proprietary charger is a death knell, and thus a decision easier to defer indefinitely.
Each lead is a talisman, acquired via a quest
With the power to breathe life back into a device, the humble charge or data lead takes on the demeanour of a key or talisman. Only the correct lead will reanimate the device, and finding the correct lead has quest-like properties. The unboxing of the newly purchased device will have been the first glimpse of the devices lead-key. The view of that element will have been unremarkable, but essential. The first act (the act of digital birth) is to power up and/or connect the device. And then in later life of that device there will perhaps have been a moment when a replacement lead was needed – triggering and online or on-the-high-street search for a replicant. The box of leads is the end stage of this questing – and in the pile is invested the effort and urgencies of the circumstances in which each lead was originally acquired. That each once had to be urgently hunted and recruited into essential projects of machine-interaction, has left a resonance within this pile. The cable-pile is a the trophy mound of former questing: this stuff was once so very important, and that residue remains, like the smouldering embers of a once-roaring open fire.
The cable-pile is a material history of our industrial revolution
Azhar (2021) reminds us that the act of living through an industrial revolution looks very different to the contemporary participants than it does to historians looking back at it from a critical distance. To live through an Industrial Revolution is to live in a state of constant adaptation, and to habituate to that. To live through an Industrial Revolution is to be in the state of the slowly boiled frog – it takes effort to notice how far you (and your society) has travelled over recent years. The change is incremental, but adding those increments together leads to a big gap between the world and ways of ‘then’ and ‘now’. We can only cast off our acclimatisation – and notice change, by pausing to consider the accumulated, materialised debris of earlier increments; totems that mark out steps along the way and remind us of our journey. Old leads serve this function. Azhar also points out that a hallmark of our technological progression is a move towards interoperability. He illustrates this with text messaging on mobile phones – originally messages could only be sent within (rather than between) each provider’s network. The ability to send messages between networks was mandated by legislation and licensing. The cable-mound speaks of something similar: the oldest leads are fully proprietary – they are designed only to work with one originating device. The direction of travel has been towards common standards for cable design: USB mini, the micro, then ‘C’. In the case of mobile phones by 2009 there were 30 different chargers, but now most phones charge with one of three leads (USB micro, USB ‘C’ or Lightning). Already we see some devices being sold without cables, the expectation being that every household already has an ample supply of generic USB cables of the right type.
As Criddle (2021) notes the European Commission’s research estimates that disposed of and unused charging cables generate more than 11,000 tonnes of waste per year. As indicated by the epigram, there is now pressure for interoperability of cabling, with the European Parilament pressing for EU-wide legislation to mandate that all new mobile phones, tablets and cameras must only be designed to be powered and data-fed by a USB C cable, by 2024. Apple is presently fighting to preserve the existence of its proprietary ‘Firewire’ cable, but it seems only a matter of time before iPads and iPhones must themselves submit to the ubiquity of the USB C cable.
One day all leads will be USB C leads. One day I will throw away all of my other leads. But for now, I prefer to ruminate, rather than to eradicate.
References
Azhar, Azeem (2021) Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology Penguin.
“As I concentrated on these forms in the middle of apartment buildings, in courtyards, and in public squares, I felt as though a subterranean civilisation had sprung up from the ground.”
Paul Virilio (1994) Bunker Archeology(Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, NY), P.12
This blog is an attempt to come to terms with painted cannons. A recent trip to a conference in Portugal brought me into a series of encounters with four former coast artillery emplacements, their bunkers and their painted guns. The details of these places and their roles in guarding the approaches to the harbours of Lisbon and Setúbal as part of the mid Twentieth Century ‘Plan Barron’ will remain to be substantively addressed on another occasion.
What I want to unpack today is more universal, more phenomenological. I want to make sense of my serial encounter with ‘big guns’ across the four sites, that each (but differently) emphasised to me the role of paint in the present manifestations of these structures.
We will start this meditation on paint and coastal artillery with a painted picture of a cannon: John Minton’s (1953) Portuguese Cannon, Mazagan, Morocco, painted in 1953.
Portuguese Cannon, Mazagan, Morocco 1953 John Minton 1917-1957 Presented by the Royal College of Art in memory of the artist 1957 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00159
Looking closely at the barrel of the cannon we see the patina, and this is an effect created with paint. But we see it (and the broken gun carriage) and we think of rust, decay, disempowerment. In the Tate (n.d.) commentator’s view we see Minton signalling (and materialising) the stretched-across-time (and now aged) effects of colonisation (the fortress dates from shortly after the Portuguese invaded the area in 1502).
Here then we have two intertwined meaning-making processes: the symbolic potency of cannon (what they may stand for) and the physical fact and form of cannon and their not-quite-as stable-as-we-think presence over time materiality.
In launching its ‘Save our Cannon’ campaign in 2018 English Heritage drew together these two aspects, asserting the heritage-value of coastal cannon as “precious objects, vital alongside our castles and fortifications in telling the story of England as an island nation” (English Heritage, 2018) and then raising the spectre of the material vulnerability of these sturdy-seeming structures, for “coastal guns are regularly battered by strong winds blowing corrosive moisture and salt spray over then which means that, untreated, they can corrode 20 times faster than those just a mile or so inland.” (English Heritage, 2018).
Big guns (and cannon in particular) are a quiet but ubiquitous feature of heritage sites. Sometimes the guns are survivals from the site’s former defensive purpose, at other times they are interposed. Think for example of cannon encountered at stately homes which speak to former owners’ colonial campaigns ‘abroad’ rather than the original defence of the cannon’s new-found home.
And in other modes cannon become appropriated as a surface to be written upon, a scribble pad to articulate new (and sometimes fleeting) meanings. Take for example the 1797 naval cannon in given Tufts University in 1956 and which since the era of the Vietnam war has been a beacon of ‘multilayered meaning’ (Ferguson 2018). As a focal point for anti-war protest the cannon was removed from display between in the mid 1960s. It was reinstated in 1977 following a campaign by alumni, but then painted by a protestor opposing the conferral of an honorary degree upon Imelda Marcos. Almost immediately it was repainted by counter-protestors. Thereafter it became a canvass for successive paintings, accruing over 1,000 coats of paint. A recent stripping of the accumulated paint players took contractors six weeks to accomplish, as they closely worked through the layers, hacking off chunks of multicolour paint, some of which ended up in the hands of the University’s art collections registrar, Laura C. McDonald: “we’re object people – we love objects – and we were amazed that, through the simple act of repeatedly painting an object over and over, the paint had become an object, with a top and bottom, cross-sections and colors. It was something you just wanted to look at and hold” (Ferguson, 2018).
Ferguson’s account of the refurbishment work suggests broad support not just for the stripping away of the paint layers – but also for the iterative work that the successive paintings represented. However, she also points to the guarding necessary to preserve one iteration of the paint scheme (for example, on the eve of a sporting event). As one defender put it: “we organized guarding shifts in an Excel spreadsheet, and divvied up blankets, sleeping bags, snacks, hot cocoa…several groups tried to either bribe or non-maliciously attack us, but we fended them off. You might think painting the cannon is easy, but nothing about the cannon is that simple”. (Ferguson, 2018).
And in other recent instance of US cannon-contestation a homeless man was seemingly paid by a protester to deface a Civil War era cannon in Mobile, Alabama that had been painted in rainbow hues in celebration of Pride month, with the blessing of the city officials. The protestor’s colour of choice was black paint: perhaps seeking to restore the cannon to its original military colour scheme (Mobile Real Time News, 2022).
(The Mobile Pride Cannon: John Sharp/jsharp@al.com).
Cannons then can become a canvass onto which both symbolic notions of identity are projected and enacted with paint. They are also chunky metal objects which have strange sculpture-like, phenomenological qualities.
My recent encounters with Twentieth century cannon around Lisbon brought me to extant gun emplacements in various states of abandonment (and not always ruination). At some sites the emplacements were in near pristine condition (despite having been decommissioned from military service in the 1990s) – due to still being on sites under the care and maintenance of veterans (or the military itself) elsewhere the guns had become blank canvasses for colourful graffiti. But at each site paint was at work, either holding these guns in their original mode, or distorting their form and purpose far away from military uses.
It would be easy to ascribe an anti-military purpose to the graffiti-covered state of guns at other, unguarded, sites – but very little of the paint added to these structures was a commentary upon what the guns had been (or arguably still were). Graffiti of unattended flat surfaces in the Lisbon area seems to be a fairly ubiquitous thing – this graffiti was no more a protest against militarism than an equivalent image painted at the rear of a supermarket should be taken as a critique of consumer capitalism. And there was nothing final (and everything provisional) about these continually overlain and overpainted graffiti at these unguarded sites.
If this painting was an instance of what Giorgio Agamben (2006) has called ‘profanation’ then it is an example of how the effect of profanation (moving something out of a cherished and foregrounded state into something more prosaic and unremarkable) is not dependent upon a particular motive to bring that about. Instead, the profanation can simply be the side-effect of a new use having been found for the thing, its place and/or its surfaces. Indeed, only one graffiti image seemed to directly engage with form of the gun (below) all other graffiti ignored the three-dimensional form of the gun emplacement, treating the surfaces instead opportunistically, and simplistically, as flat ‘canvasses’.
Meanwhile, at the ‘pristine’ emplacements the fresh-looking, super-thick and uniform grey-green paint communicated order and a timelessness: provided this paint continues to be applied this scrupulously, this gun will remain ‘as-is’ (with the clarity of its ‘gun’ identity unfettered) forever.
But in either case the clue to these gun emplacements’ survival is the paint. Without regular painting and overpainting by either crew (the military or the graffiti brigade) these structures would succumb to entropy, especially in salty, coastal air.
I hear talk of unease in the heritage sector about the fetishization of bladed weapons within similar presentations of ‘our’ island story. But this press release (and its connected campaign) suggests no squeamishness about coast artillery. In part perhaps this reflects the ‘defensive’ nature of that type of gun fortification, but the outbreak of a new artillery-based war in eastern Ukraine makes in harder to unquestioningly ‘love your local cannon’.
And yet, once again, I find the phenomenological taking over. I’m tumbled back to visceral recollections of childhood: of super-thick paint on myriad tanks, planes and warships presented to me as places of curious encounter and clambering during ‘Open Days’; of the chipped paint of the sea mine sitting innocently as a tourist ‘attraction’ on the seafront promenade; and of the feverish dreams of the anticipatory child the night before a visit to Salisbury Plane to clamber into the wrecked hulks of exploded tanks. It is the overwhelming impression of being inside a machine, of metal wrought into shapes and sizes larger than any everyday from and encounter: these were the strongest impressions stirred by my trips around the Portuguese gun emplacements.
In short, the mere presence of a gun signals something. But what that thing is seems to be somewhat elusive (or at least multitudinous). A cannon can summon an impression of the past. Or it can be a less certain phenomenological object – something large, unusual, and distorting expectations of local sound and temperature (think the sounds of struck cannon, and of the colder (or hotter) surfaces of the cannon than of its surroundings).
Cannons sit in a family of objects that register in multiple ways, and this is why I can’t make up my mind about my encounters with these Portuguese guns. Should I approach them as strange, alien objects that leave the mind and body to ponder metaphorically. Or should I situate them squarely in in a context – read them as materialisations of militarism and celebrate their decline (or survival) accordingly?
References
Agamben, Giorgio (2006) Profanations. New York: Zone Books. (trans Jeff Fort).
“The ‘Idea of a University’ was a village with its priests. the ‘Idea of a Modern University’ was a town – a one-industry town – with its intellectual oligarchy. The ‘Idea of a Multiversity’ is a city of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some rise to the top within it; most fashion their lives within one of its many subcultures. There is less sense of community than in the village but also less sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose than within a town but there are more ways to excel. There are also more refuges of anonymity.”
Clark Kerr (1963) The Uses of the University, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p.41.
Writing over 50 years ago Clark Kerr’s nested (Village – Town – City) analogy for the evolution of the University as a place, and as an experience, seems at first glance quite modern (in the sense of contemporary). But thinking about it further it’s actually more Modern in the sense of a now-strange-to-us embrace of a diffraction of identity and experience. It’s a very liberal, mid-Twentieth Century, view of a university being a place of liberation, immersion, diversification.
Our Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s recent set of online ‘The Changing Campus’ sessions have perhaps identified an increasingly prominent diffraction of place-experience and place-identity. Across our final two sessions we’ve heard how campus spaces physically encode and sustain exclusionary assumptions about mobility, we’ve heard stories of enhanced senses of connection for some enabled by covid-era shifts towards online ‘places’ of interaction, and we’ve heard of the indeterminate boundaries of ‘the campus’ and of increasingly complex and hard to separate on-site and off-site university effects and impacts.
Here are the recordings of our two final sessions (the recordings and reflections for our first two sessions are here), they feature:
The Changing Campus #3: Embodiment, Materiality & Flow
Petra Vackova (SHU) & Donata Puntil (King’s College London)
Rooms of Possibilities: Making Spaces for Posthumanist (Un)doings
In our talk we will be exploring and asking what it means and what it does to be a community in the post-digital era. We will reflect on a Dream Team session we organized at the 2022 European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in which we challenged digital capitalism, including digital labour and production, in academia by re-imagining and enacting a new approach to communing during a conference session that accounts for bio-digital becoming in/with/through rooms, both physical, virtual, and imaginative. As online, virtual ways of working are becoming normalized in academia, we argue that new meaningful and ethical ways of inquiring, living, writing, collaborating, and growing with/in/through bio-digital-material spaces must be developed to respond to the changing relationship between human and more-than-human others in the academia. Through a process of ‘quilting together’ with comments, images and connections in our online conference space, we paid attention to the role of bodies, objects, sounds and materials, the ways we encounter and entangle, across and between our physical and online ‘rooms’. By wandering and wondering between rooms, using all of our senses in physical movement, we diffracted, expanded, (re)experienced what is possible, what is valuable and what is often unseen or unheard in our bio-digital-material ways of working.
Carol A. Taylor (University of Bath)
Research-creation in the ‘posts’: Institutional kitchens, doors, cupboards
For a long time I’ve been interested in how mundane materialities constitute institutional life. In this talk, I focus on how human-nonhuman relations produce practices of mattering within material assemblages. The mundane materialities I focus on – kitchens, doors, cupboards – are often ignored, unnoticed, or taken-for-granted within the broader life of higher education workspaces. My argument is that such liminal, marginalized spaces/places/materialities can help shape the habits, routines, practices, values and norms of the everyday institutional life they are enmeshed within. The empirical materials I draw on were generated through a variety of research-creation encounters which favoured an experimentalist practice and an attentive stance. The analysis I offer is shaped by three ‘posts’: posthumanism, post-methodology and post-disciplinarity. I draw out some insights into the material, affective and political dimensions of the mundane materialities of our institutional lives and how these vital materialities produce resonances and connections across bodies, spaces and times
Pamela Holland & Nick Russell (on behalf of the SHU Staff Disability Network)
The Changing Campus: Challenging ableism
This session will explore the challenges faced by disabled staff when working on campus and remote Hybrid working. The importance of consulting disabled staff from a wide range of disabilities when designing and renovating campus buildings and facilities cannot be emphasised enough. Inclusion shouldn’t be an afterthought; it should be ingrained as part of the normal process from the start. Pamela and Nick will talk about their own positive and negative experiences as well as drawing on experiences from the wider staff disability network. We will cover a range of disabilities including physical, hidden, mental and medical within the case studies. On campus and Hybrid working challenges will be discussed to raise awareness of disabled staff experiences from both positive and negative aspects.
The Changing Campus #4: Wider learning Environments & Interactions
Teri-Lisa Griffiths (Criminology, SHU) & Jill Dickinson (Law, University of Leeds)
“I’m in a lecture hall with chairs and a big screen and someone talking […] it felt special in a way to me […] it felt like all my hard work had come to something”: Exploring what learning spaces mean to the student experience.
During the 2020-21 academic year, campuses across the UK were in lockdown. Our research explored how students’ learning spaces had changed as a result of these restrictions. In this presentation, we will report on our key findings and explore how learning spaces can support and inhibit the social, cultural, and academic ‘becoming’ of learners. Using a sociomaterial framework, we will illustrate how students adapted and managed previously unimagined spaces of learning and what we may ascertain about the student experience as a result. We will invite discussion about the long-term considerations for policy and pedagogy which arise from our research findings.
Vicky Mellon (Tourism, SHU)
“It feels like a job” : Understanding commuter students: Motivations, engagement and learning experiences (Stalmirska & Mellon 2022)
The number of students choosing to commute to university and remain at home, rather than relocating to the place of studying is growing, particularly within post 92 HE settings. Increased tuition fees and introduction of student loans is attributed to this growing trend. Subsequently, they are a valuable part of the student population. However, there is a lack of research on commuter students, including focus on their motivations, engagement and learning experiences. Here, the qualitative study addresses this gap and explores their reasons for commuting, their engagement and disengagement with extracurricular activities and their sense of belonging at university. The research highlights the challenges facing commuter students and how these differ from other cohorts, and offers some recommendations for overcoming barriers preventing engagement.
Julian Dobson (CRESR, SHU)
The long shadow of the campus: ‘place’ and the civic university
Universities cast a long shadow over places. The notion of the ‘university town’ is baked into European history: places where cultural identity and spatial form are significantly shaped by their higher education institutions. Even modern, isolated campuses ripple out beyond their boundaries, skewing property development, housing markets and neighbourhood dynamics. As universities become more conscious of their civic mission, they increasingly position themselves as agents of economic and social change within their wider communities. But the consequences of such interventions are not always fully considered. This talk will explore the porous interface between places and institutions, and present an emerging framework for understanding and assessing universities’ impacts on the places that host them.
“…whenever [Mozhayev] forgets who he is, and what he should do next in life, he gets on a bus and rides to the old familiar bus stop where he grew up and suddenly everything makes sense again”.
Peter Pomerantsev (2017) Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. Faber & Faber: London
In his book chronicling the strange, ‘through-the-looking-glass’, world of modern Moscow, Pomerantsev presents a chapter chronicling the hectic and disorienting pace and nature of that city’s recent ‘regeneration’, wherein:
“The city changes so fast that you lose all sense of reality, you can’t recognise the streets. You look for a place where you went to eat a week ago, and before your eyes the whole block is being demolished.”
Set against this disorientation, Pomerantsev introduces Alexander Mozhayev, an urban explorer cum psychogeographer cum rescue archaeologist. Mozhayev leads walking tours in search of vanished and vanishing buildings, who declares there to his audience:
“We’re here to say a wake, to this building, to old Moscow, all these buildings are set to be destroyed.”
In Pomerantsev’s portrayal at least, Mozhayev is driven by a strong sense of a need to find and preserve the past, in order to hold his own sense of individual identity together. For Mozhayev:
“When my parents died, I could remember them through the building that we lived in. Buildings aren’t so much about recollecting time as about the victory over time.”
This strong sense of the power of place to ground an individual’s identity, and in particular of the role of the local and familiar material environment and its arrangement as a cherished store of personal memory and meaning struck me as running deeply through the five presentations given in our recent two ‘Changing Places’ online events, for which the session recordings are now provided here.
In Changing Places #1: Changing Places & Changing Identities (held on 24 March 2022) Nantia Koulidou (Art & Design, SHU) explored her experience of international migration through the design of electronically activated jewellery that could be programmed to comfort the wearer through release of visual and/or audio mementos when triggered by the environmental effects (e.g. altitude) of travelling between home countries and new horizons. This brought a sense of the way in which both jewellery and mobile electronic devices are now intimate companions in our life-journeys, props by which we remember, below and move-on.
Then Jess Scott (Social Science, SHU) outlined her ongoing research into how younger residents of care homes acclimatise to their new dwelling places, and make sense of their past, present and future by reference to the physical arrangement of their new surroundings. Jess’ concern is to better understand ow such transitions occur, in order to find ways in which the managing of that adjustment can be made to be the most positive experience possible.
Finally Joanna Dobson (SHU Humanities) presented an intimate account, through memoir and wider reflection, of a very formative family event, showing how the experience and recollection of childhood home and holiday locations was framed for her and her family members by that event and its perceived incorporation into the very form of the local landscape. [Joanna’s presentation was not recorded]
Meanwhile, in Changing Places #2: Change and the Material Fate of Place,Joanne Lee (Art & Design, SHU) and Rosemary Shirley (Museum Studies, University of Leicester) outlined the five key areas of inquiry that they are developing for their intended project to explore ‘the local’ (and it’s quality of ‘local-ness’) led by development of creative methods for the investigation of place. Growing out of their own experience of dwelling within narrowed ranges of existence during the covid years, their work seeks to find ways to characterise and explore the multiple locals inherent in any seeming place, and of the mundane (but fundamental) ways by which such senses of the local are made and transacted. In discussion it was noted that teasing out how ‘community’ and ‘locality’ differ (but potentially overlap) could be key, as will showing how qualitative (and narrative) based ‘creative’ techniques now used by marketeers and ‘place branding’ consultants can be distinguished from the more holistic (and less instrumentalist) aims of their project.
Then film-maker Esther Johnson (Media, SHU) outlined her multi-modal attempts to preserve both the form and symbol of Hull’s Co-Op department store’s ‘three ships’ mural. Esther’s project, and its collaborations with Hull residents and contemporary heritage campaigners, brought us back round to the question of where the urge to preserve the cherished built environment comes from, and how it reflects both individual and collective identity and (perhaps) a positive dimension to nostalgia, now that modernism’s faith in the-future-as-progress has itself become something of the past. It also flagged how, if (contrary to Mozhayev’s desires) buildings themselves are not good bets for “victory over time”, then perhaps a more durable victory (and aspiration to memory-survival) can be achieved by multiplying and disseminating the most iconic symbolic representations of the building’s former identity-power. Through Esther’s efforts the ‘locals’ of Hull now connect as a community of collective memory, carrying the three-ships mural emblazoned on T-shirts and other printed, portable media even in the face of the Hull Co-Op building’s imminent demolition.
Image Credit: Esther Johnson, mural on former Hull Co-Op department store
lukebennett13 