The disarming comfort of things: the deep sofa and the relief of surrender

“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.   

Image credit: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/this-newark-2-seater-sofa-is-an-exdisplay-item-and-has-therefore-had-some-light-use-it-is-otherwise-in-fantasic-condition–441141725991797853/

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The Invisible Ruins of Oil & Gas

“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.

Picture credit: The embossed ruins of the Rhosgoch oil terminal https://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/business-news/site-former-shell-depot-anglesey-8462664

“Creative Destruction” – announcing SHU Space & Place Group’s 2023 Theme – a call for contributions

‘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. 

Recordings of our themed sessions held over recent years are all available here: Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group – YouTube

Creative Destruction – a call for contributions

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:

1. how the act of destruction has certain aesthetic potentiality (i.e. can be used as a creative resource or object)
2. 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)
3. how an urge to destroy-in-order-to-replace (i.e. to create the new) underpins capitalism and its urban processes
4. 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.

Image Credit: Sculptor Matthew Simmonds, https://www.yellowtrace.com.au/matthew-simmonds-architectural-marble-carvings/

Riding out the catastrophe: reflections from SHU SPG’s ‘Changing Places #3: Sport & physical activity in catastrophic environments’ session, 3-11-22

“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’.

Jim and Jack’s book is published on 8 November 2022, and this discount code FLA22 (or FLA23 in 2023) can be used for purchase at Routledge’s site: https://www.routledge.com/Sport-and-Physical-Activity-in-Catastrophic-Environments/Cherrington-Black/p/book/9781032125411

Image Credit: Kevin Bingham

SHU Space & Place Group: ‘Changing Places #3: Sport & physical activity in catastrophic environments’, online event, 3-11-22

The Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group is delighted to announce that for the next event in our ‘Changing Places’ series we are hosting an online book launch for an exciting and timely new collection edited by Jim Cherrington and Jack Black, entitled Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments as part of Routledge’s ‘Research in Sport, Culture and Society’ series. 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. Our online book launch event will feature presentations from the editors and three of the contributors:

Jim Cherrington and Jack Black (Sheffield Hallam University)

Introduction. 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

Places are free, but must be booked via Eventbrite (see below for the link). Registered delegates will be emailed the event’s Zoom link 24 hours prior to the start of the event.

This edited collection addresses a clear gap in the literature, as to date, there is a paucity of scholarly research that directly examines the role of sport and physical activity in the experiences of individuals and communities who have lived through catastrophe (Thorpe, 2015). This is surprising, since the ability of individuals and communities to maintain healthy relationships with their surroundings– most notably, before, during and after catastrophe – is an important point of focus, posing a number of significant questions for sport and physical activity researchers (Rowe, 2020). Namely: What happens when our existing geographical, topographical, sociological and political coordinates are shattered because of war or poverty? How can sport and exercise help us to cope when faced with unprecedented levels of planetary change? Can, and if so how, does life go on in the wastelands left over from resource extraction, industrialisation and economic decay? And what are the consequences of global pandemics for the (physical and mental) health of those whose everyday activities, hobbies, interests and forms of labour are dependent on stable notions of identity, embodiment and place? Here, sport and physical activity may seem trivial to many. However, research on the recent Covid-19 pandemic has shown how involvement in physical cultures provides an important locus of support in times of hardship and pain, as well as an important mechanism for managing the embodied, cognitive, and structural ruptures that accompany unprecedented events.

In attempting to address this lacuna, this session will present a series of case studies from an edited collection entitled: ‘Sport and Physical Activity in Catastrophic Environments’, which will be published by Routledge on November 8th 2022. Key to this approach will be an investigation of both the negative (i.e. death, mental and physical health issues, human displacement) and positive (new social and political identities, increase in environmental awareness, personal growth) outcomes of a range of socio-cultural and political changes, specifically related to the ‘end’ of capitalism, socialisation, ‘nature’ and morality. By allowing for interdisciplinary contributions that are located at the juncture of sociology, geography, social psychology, political ecology, philosophy, and the arts, an analysis of how participants in sport and physical activity respond to the complexities of the environment will be provided. In so doing, the sessions will explore the cognitive and affective sensibilities used by both individuals and communities to experiment with new social, cultural and political identities as well as how these processes are adapted in times of chaos. In this way, we hope that the session will make a meaningful contribution to empirical analyses of sport, physical activity, and the environment, while also examining how such analyses might help in developing practical resilience strategies for those most affected by catastrophic change.

Copies of this book can be purchased directly from the Routledge website: https://www.routledge.com/Sport-and-Physical-Activity-in-Catastrophic-Environments/Cherrington-Black/p/book/9781032125411

Attendance is free – but you’ll need to book via the Eventbrite page:

Register on Eventbrite

Following old leads: exploring the cable-mountain, and why I can’t throw mine away

“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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Criddle, Cristina (2021) ‘EU rules to force USB-C chargers for all phones’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58665809, 23-9-22

European Parliament News (2022) ‘Deal on common charger: reducing hassle for consumers and curbing e-waste’, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220603IPR32196/deal-on-common-charger-reducing-hassle-for-consumers-and-curbing-e-waste, 7-6-22

Approaching the painted cannons of Lisboa

“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).

Restoring the Tufts Cannon

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).

English Heritage (2018) ‘Save our Cannons’ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about-us/search-news/save-our-cannons/ (press release, 29-3-2018)

Ferguson, Laura (2018) ‘A Thousand coats of paint: Restoring the Tufts cannon’, Tufts Now: https://now.tufts.edu/2018/09/05/thousand-coats-paint

Mobile Real Time News (2022) ‘Rainbow Pride paint scheme defaced on Mobile’s landmark cannon’ Alabama.com https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2022/06/rainbow-pride-paint-scheme-defaced-on-mobiles-landmark-cannon.html

Tate (n.d.) John Minton – Portuguese Cannon, Mazagan, Morocco (1953) – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/minton-portuguese-cannon-mazagan-morocco-t00159

Changing Places #1 & 2: reflections on our recent SHU Space & Place Group sessions

“…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

The Changing Campus #2: learning in place? (free SHU Space & Place Group online event, 2-4pm, 16 February 2022)

This event is the second in the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group’s 2022 series of events, running under the theme of ‘Changing Places’.

Our first two events are being curated jointly with the University’s Interdisciplinary Higher Education Research Cluster. Our first event (on 19 January 2022, see details here) explores how the experience of being ‘on campus’ is changing, due to changes in student expectations and the exigencies of Covid-19, and how this can be researched.

For our second online session, we have three presenters who are each concerned with investigating the constitutive role of socio-materiality and ‘thingly’ relations in forming and transforming the campus.

Our speakers for event #2 are:

Hiral Patel (Cardiff University)

Aligning learning and space – a tale of buildings, users and technologies

Learning approaches within higher education are continuously evolving and diverse. This is evident through changes in pedagogies, curriculum content and programme structures. University buildings are required to act in tandem and need to be continuously adapted. My research on adaptations of a library building over 50 years demonstrates the fluidity of the building in response to emerging technologies, pedagogical innovations and the creation of new library services. These observations demand a shift from thinking about learning spaces as fixed entities. Instead, conceiving buildings as socio-material practices highlight their constant state of flux and the ‘ontological politics’ (Mol, 1998) that surround them.

Such a conception has two implications. Firstly, we need to rethink the design and management of learning spaces that integrate different scales (a chair to the city) and sectors (work, living, cultural and learning). Secondly, we need to develop tools and capabilities to continuously align learning practices and learning spaces.

The talk will conclude with provocations for future learning spaces. These provocations emerge from the work of LE-DR Lab, which focuses on the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on university spaces.

Mol, A. (1998) ‘Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions’, The Sociological Review, 46, pp. 74–89. doi: 10.1111/1467-954X.46.s.5.

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.

James Corazzo & Layla Gharib (SHU)

Part of the furniture: encountering people and sofas in the design studio

Part of the furniture: a person or thing that has been somewhere so long as to seem a permanent, unquestioned, or invisible feature of the landscape.

The unquestioned things we shall be questioning in this talk are a pair of green sofas. Arranged in an L-shape around a coffee table and forming a small domestic looking space within a larger open-plan design studio at Sheffield Hallam University. At first glance, the sofas appear ordinary, invisible even. However, upon closer scrutiny, we begin to see the sofas as active participants in how teaching and learning practices unfold in the studio. We suspect these sofas are not innocent or invisible features in this educational setting but objects with power and significance that materialize different kinds of relations (Suchman 2005), different kinds of knowers and different ways of knowing. In an attempt to understand these sofas, we sat down with them, had a conversation with them and believe it or not, they spoke back…

Suchman, L. (2005) ‘Affiliative Objects’, The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory and Society Vol.12(3) pp.379—399

Image credit:

James Corazzo & Layla Gharib

Further information

Is available from the organiser, Luke Bennett (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk).

What’s behind the fence? – exploring dead land and empty buildings at the RGS-IBG 2021 Annual Conference (online session, Weds 1st Sept 2021)

“They came from everywhere… I fixed the fence, over and over I fixed the fence, but they kept on coming.”

– A lone, vulnerable security guard, 2017

As part of next week’s Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual international conference (which this year is running online: details here) I’m convening a double-session next Wednesday morning (1st September), comprising eight presentations, each considering the quiet and only-noticed-if-you-look human ecology of seemingly empty sites.

Contemporary cultural geographies of wastelands and ruin-sites tend to celebrate vacant spaces as a break from the ordering impulses of everyday normativities (Edensor 2005; DeSilvey & Edensor 2012). Keen to chronicle the ways in which wider human and more-than-human agencies are enabled in such sites, only incidental attention is ever given in these works to the continuation of a quiet custodianship of these sites by those who own, or who otherwise consider themselves responsible for them. Yet in a fleeting glimpse of a passing security guard patrol, coming across a patched perimeter fence or in the flickering of lighting served by a still-active electrical power supply, seemingly abandoned sites reveal themselves to be not quite as abandoned as they at first seemed.

This conference session will open-up an attentiveness to the subtle, ongoing ordering and management of such sites, and whether by their owners or by opportunistic appropriators. Taking a life-cycle approach, presenters will explore the stories and structures that have caused abandonment at both remote sites and those within the heart of otherwise active and occupied urban centres. They will tease out the logics of opportunistic appropriators (urban explorers, rough sleepers, ravers, artists, scrappers and scavengers), their notions of territoriality and of their own emergent normative codings devised for the shared use of abandoned places. The role of professional cultures and logics of urban set-aside and vacant site management will also be explored. In each case these readings of the motives, modes and meanings of vacancy will be attentive to the wider ecologies in which these sites and their actors are imbricated and of the important role of (positive or negative) place attachment in determining the speed at which a site is withdrawn from vacancy, or how it is maintained purposively in that state.

Here are the abstracts for our international array of presenters:

Session 1 – Experiencing and managing dead places (9.00 – 10.40 AM BST)

Ruins of (Post)Soviet Arctic: perceiving, coping with and commemorating abandoned sites

Maria GUNKO Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences / National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) [presenting]

Alla BOLOTOVA Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Helsinki, Finland); Elena BATUNOVA Politecnico di Milano (Milano, Italy) [non-presenting]

The Arctic is passing through different economic and political development stages which result in changing economic and social settings, as well as shifts in the cityscape dynamics (Sellheim et al., 2019). During state socialism in Russia, large-scale development of northern territories was due to the need for natural resources extraction with the establishment of control over a vast sparsely populated area (Josephson, 2014). The collapse of the system has led to a reduction of state support for industries, science and military activities causing a structural crisis in many Arctic cities outside oil and gas provinces. Abandoned and dilapidated buildings, industrial ruins, idle infrastructures, and marginalized spaces here remain “monuments” to the Soviet period indicating the changing trends. At the same time, these cities remain home to people with community bonds, sharing values, and place attachment (Bolotova, 2018). The aims of the current research are two-fold. First, we explore the perception of and strategies to cope with abandonment in the Russian Arctic. Second, we look at the examples of abandoned sites commemoration by their former residents. The empirical evidence for the study is drawn from Vorkuta – a conglomerate of urban settlements in the Komi republic. At its peak, it comprised 16 settlements built around 13 coal mines, currently less than a half of these settlements are still habitable having severely shrunk in size. The data were obtained from a comprehensive analysis of various sources, such as planning documents, archival materials, expert and in-depth interviews (in person and via Skype), as well as non-participant observations carried out in January 2019.

What’s the use? Rethinking urban vacancy amidst Dublin’s housing crisis

Kathleen STOKES & Cian O’CALLAGHAN, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

The results of the 2016 census found 183,312 vacant homes in Ireland, a figure that included around 30,000 vacant homes across the four Dublin local authorities. While the Central Statistics Office indicated that this figure was a static rather than long-term measure, the ensuing political storm equated vacant properties with empty homes that could be used to solve Dublin’s burgeoning homelessness crisis. Amidst Dublin’s housing and homeless crisis, calls for affordable housing and fairer property markets have paralleled growing attention in urban housing and land vacancy. A spate of policy measures targeting vacancy have testified to the increased visibility of the ‘problem’ of urban vacancy in the post-crisis period. However, policy objectives construct vacancy within a simple dichotomy between space either ‘in use’ or ‘not in use’, therefore reproducing normative understandings that fail to acknowledge that such sites are always active, in property market formation and subject to ongoing ordering and management. As a riposte to these conceptualisations, this paper puts policy objectives and key measurements of urban vacancy in Dublin into dialogue with the critical literature on vacancy in urban and cultural geography (Ferreri & Vasudevan, 2019; Kitchin et al., 2014). We reflect on the limitations of normative understandings of urban vacant space in revealing the role of vacancy in capitalist cities and suggest that more critical assessments can unearth a multitude of urban processes pertaining to the ordering and management of such sites. This paper draws upon ongoing research in Dublin, which investigates underlying factors contributing to urban vacancy and questions how urban vacancy is identified, categorised and measured.

Empty buildings in the re-making: The case of the Hochhausscheiben A-E in Halle-Neustadt, Germany

Hendrikje ALPERMANN, Université de Lausanne (Switzerland)

Four of the five high-rise slabs Hochhausscheiben A-E in the centre of Halle-Neustadt are empty. And this for over 20 years. Between 2003 and 2016, the shrinking city of Halle reduced vacancy in Halle-Neustadt by half through demolition, enabled through the national program Stadtumbau Ost (Stadt Halle (Saale) 2017). In contrast to many other buildings in Halle-Neustadt in the beginning of the 2000s, the high-rise slabs were not chosen for demolition, but for endurance. But how can their endurance be ensured in the context of a shrinking city? While the buildings have been increasingly dilapidated since they have been abandoned in the late 1990s, a number of practices and relationships have prevented them from being demolished or renovated and contributed to their continuous life between life and death. Against what has been written on ruins in recent academic literature, the high-rises do not stand for a site of disruption (Buchli, 2013; DeSilvey; Endensor, 2012) or “the end of the world” (Pohl, 2020), but rather for a series of promised of renovations and postponed renovations. This turn towards practices and endurance allows us to reflect on techno-political modes of organizing urban change and emptiness. It will lead us to ask how agency and responsibility are distributed and enacted.

In Praise of Shutters: Hidden activity within Neepsend, Sheffield

Charlene Cross, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

This presentation takes inspiration from the 1933 Japanese aesthetic essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’ by Junichiro Tanizaki, who made a case for accepting transience, flaws, patina, and shadows within in the built environment. ‘In Praise of Shutters’ draws attention to the shutters and fences of several ’empty’ buildings in Neepsend, Sheffield, to challenge the preconception that these are inert spaces. The images presented form part of a land use study that initially focused upon inert urban spaces, such as wastelands or seemingly empty buildings. However, as the study has progressed, no truly inert spaces have been found to date. Using narratology and a series of photographs taken in Neepsend between July 2020 and the present day, these images of physical boundaries entice curiosity within the onlooker. If the building is not derelict, what’s behind the fence? Walking past a warehouse, the shutters are up and metal work is underway. People heading to the food court across the road, which is made of shipping containers, pause to peep in. The next day, the shutters are down. To those not in the know, will they view the patina of the signage as an aesthetic remnant of the long forgotten past, rather than a marker that provides testament to their long established presence in the area?

Session 2 – Empty sites, re-use, utopia and other potentiality (11.00 – 12.40PM BST)

Rethinking Utopia: The Search for ‘Topias’ in the Paris Catacombs

Kevin BINGHAM, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

Although the idea once had great influence, utopias have proven themselves to be unattainable. Therefore, rather than viewing utopia as an actual destination this paper will argue that belief in the existence of special places of perfection has been replaced by a faith in leisure. As it will be argued, it is the activity of ‘urbex’ that can turn ruins, abandoned places and vacant sites into something similar, albeit temporarily. With this is mind, the paper continues by drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk and Tony Blackshaw to accentuate the point that the good life is about inventing oneself through a process of self-creation that has been referred to as anthropotechnics. To unpack this standpoint, the paper examines how a group of urban explorers – people who explore man-made spaces that are generally inaccessible to the wider public – find various substitutes for utopia in the subterranean space of the Paris catacombs. As it is argued, forms of leisure such as ‘urbex’ emerge as ‘primary spheres’ of anthropotechnics that instigate the formation of intertwining and interpenetrating ‘topias’ which have been referred to here as ‘reterotopia’, ‘heterotopia’ and ‘scotopia’. Viewed independently of one another, these ‘topias’ refer to the way urban explorers’ experiment with space nostalgically, compensatorily and in a way that incites the five basic senses. As the paper reveals, each ‘topia’ plays an important part in allowing people to discover performativity, locate a sense of collective consciousness, feel intense pleasures and pains, and, above all, experience the euphoria of freedom.

“The dead are tugging at our backs”: exploring migrant life among the headstones of an abandoned cemetery in Tangier

Maria HAGAN, University of Cambridge (UK)

Renewed and intensified criminalisation of sub-Saharan Africans in the northern Moroccan borderlands since 2018 has made their spaces of shelter precarious and their access to accommodation, particularly in cities of the north, a perpetual struggle. Those seeking passage to Europe increasingly resort to life in concealed, abandoned urban spaces. This paper explores the socio-material ecologies of an abandoned Muslim graveyard in Tangier overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar and serving as a primary space of life for a group of young Cameroonian men. Drawing on 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the community in 2019 & 2020, this paper discusses how, concealed and lawless, this abandoned and decaying urban space operated as a rare negotiated space of presence and sociability for the community. Detailing practices of shelter construction between the headstones, the routine destruction of that shelter by authorities, and processes of camp reconstruction and renegotiation attempted by the graveyard’s inhabitants, the paper proposes an analysis of the liveliness of a deathscape in a context of urban hostility against the migrant body. It traces how the appropriation of this undesirable territory affected the men’s self-perception and influenced their space-claiming practices elsewhere; namely the establishment of a cemetery camp in another Moroccan city.

Fortifying the empty ruin: the nightwatchman, the artists, the trespassers and their antagonisms

Luke BENNETT Sheffield Hallam University (UK) [presenting];
Hayden LORIMER, Edward HOLLIS and Ruth OLDEN of University of Edinburgh (UK) [non-presenting]

The cabin is for use by the nightwatchman,
…who is employed by the security firm,
…that is contracted by the small arts company,
…to protect the now fortified ruin of the former seminary,
…which it hopes to take off the hands of the church,
…who desperately want shot of the whole damned place themselves,
…because of recreational trespass and the liabilities arising,
if only a viable model for transferring ownership can ever be found.

This is the premise for an illustrated piece of performed storytelling, and the predicament that it explores. The modern architectural ruin at its centre is a place of competing claims, and complex social dynamics created by the securitization of property. Lately, it has operated antagonistically, existing as an aggressive milieu. The presentation delves into the ruin’s complex relational ecology, introducing its protagonists, affects, spaces, encounters and events. Ultimately, its chief concern is with the architecture of lives as much as it is the lives of architecture. In particular, the presentation will focus upon how the precarious minimum-wage lifeworld of the nightwatchman, and his embodied relationship to this abandoned site, is both more elaborate and more sculpted by the active concerns of others who rarely appear in person on-site, than we might readily assume. The presentation reports on part of the collaborators’ 2017-2019 Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland funded study of attempts to manage and reactivate the modernist ruins of St Peter’s Seminary, Kilmahew, a few miles west of Glasgow. Bennett will present drawing upon Olden’s fieldwork, Lorimer and Hollis’ writings upon the site and Bennett’s reflections on the pressure of anxieties about vacant site ownership.

The elephant in the room?: a facilitated discussion about absent owners

Carolyn GIBBESON, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)

To what extent does scholarship on vacancy include an exploration of the motives and meaning-making of owners and their professional agents? Where mentioned do site owners only ever appear as cyphers for capital, striped of any attentiveness to their emotional labour? Does attempting to give analytical space or voice to owners and their motivations for vacancy risk loss of a Critical and/or progressive edge? This contribution will facilitate a discussion of these questions, by reflecting on the Session’s nine papers. It will open with a short presentation in which I will draw on my former experiences of working in the real estate sector as a property manager responsible for a variety of property types including vacant sites, and on my more recent doctoral research into the awkward interaction of developers’ and heritage professionals’ differing world-views and practice-logics. Through this I will consider how different groups of people within the built environment and academic sectors view each other to ask why owners are usually ignored despite their control over a site. I will then invite discussion on whether (and if so, how) a greater attentiveness to owner perspectives could augment studies of vacancy, and also tease out the particular difficulties that lie ahead for anyone trying to research owners’ creation and/or toleration of vacancy, whether as profit-maximising landbanking or for more prosaic reasons.

Image credit: Author’s photograph, St Peter’s Seminary, Kilmahew, Cardross, Scotland, Oct 2017.