City Planning – ‘City provision for every want & need’
At six thirty on the morning of 17th October 2010 I cautiously tied and positioned around a city centre signpost the first of twenty public order notices. For the next two and a half hours I purposefully walked the streets of Nottingham adding an additional nineteen. For the most part City Planning was successfully completed that day...and duly relieved that no member of the public or a person in authority had accosted me; although my actions had been clocked by several...at one location (TME6619M) a hotel worker had stood outside the main entrance to a hotel inhaling an early cigarette...he looked at me (with some suspicion?) as I photographed the notice. I walked away from the location, turned the corner back onto St James Terrace and stood out of sight. I waited for no more than several seconds before returning to the corner and to peer back towards the place where my notice had been positioned...the man with the cigarette stood reading the notice...I speculated as to what he could be thinking...he read the official notice...the car park (directly in front of him) would be turned into a giant aquarium for one hundred thousand fish.
At six thirty on the morning of 17th October 2010 I cautiously tied and positioned around a city centre signpost the first of twenty public order notices. For the next two and a half hours I purposefully walked the streets of Nottingham adding an additional nineteen. For the most part City Planning was successfully completed that day...and duly relieved that no member of the public or a person in authority had accosted me; although my actions had been clocked by several...at one location (TME6619M) a hotel worker had stood outside the main entrance to a hotel inhaling an early cigarette...he looked at me (with some suspicion?) as I photographed the notice. I walked away from the location, turned the corner back onto St James Terrace and stood out of sight. I waited for no more than several seconds before returning to the corner and to peer back towards the place where my notice had been positioned...the man with the cigarette stood reading the notice...I speculated as to what he could be thinking...he read the official notice...the car park (directly in front of him) would be turned into a giant aquarium for one hundred thousand fish.
The following text has been written for a subsidiary City Planning project –an archive box; a A3 box lined with felt which includes within facsimiles of the 20 public notices, twenty documentary photographs, a series of plans and maps and a 20 page booklet containing the text.
The origins of this project return seven years previous. Whilst walking up the steep incline known as ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ in the Derbyshire peak district, I saw on my assent several public notices, one read, ‘During lamming keep your dog on a lead’ and the other, ‘keep to the path’. I contemplated an idea; that of adding to their number a temporary sign of my own.
My proposal was to be a simple one and principally, my public order notice would inform walkers of an intention to build. My addition in the landscape would cater for all those walkers who were looking for both, ‘an experience with nature and (at the end of a strenuous walk) a cafe…with a comfortable place to rest’; whilst offering spectacular views from the highest peak in the area (not dissimilar to the £8.4 million Snowdon experience 1). My notice would announce planning had been granted for a coffee house to be built upon the summit of Kinder Scout.
The order would carry a simple description of the constructed building and the text would also incorporate a series of understated pieces of information, the smallness of the description belittling the impact of the development upon the surrounding landscape. In a single sentence I suggest the number of walkers the coffee house would be catering for (160 place settings), how many toilets there would be (six urinals & two cubicles for the men, six cubicles for women, a disabled WC facility, a separate baby changing room)…and additionally what size the gift/craft shop would be (80 sq meters). Finally the order would state that a single track road would be constructed to service the café. These scant facts would be cocooned within some impenetrable (or simply mind numbingly dull) planning jargon… in addition to the language the aesthetic look of official notices appealed to me. The necessary terminology incorporated was important; firstly I thought that a notice that contained a dense text would not be read by most walkers. Secondly, any person having stumbled upon the order and commenced to read it could possibly become enraged; yet at that moment they would be defenseless to respond with any immediacy. The reader would be for all intent and purpose out in the cold…in the moment the most they could possibly do would be to rip down the order…the vandalism and the destruction of the public notice would do little to halt progress. This was all speculative mind games on my part and furthermore it had occurred to me that no one would truly read the order. This solitary thought held much appeal...on this instance I did nothing to bring the notice idea to fruition. The City Planning project had been in part inspired by the popularity of the walk...Jacobs Ladder is a climb that has altered significantly since I first hiked it some twenty years previous.
In October 2009 I undertook some rudimentary ‘field work’ for this proposition and the two works once located achieved what I had set out to do…The presentation of an artwork in a public space without negating specific attention seeking (during or after installation) and an avoidance of unnecessary trouble. City Planning notices once installed were available for all to view…and located in the ‘every day’…the works were a provocation upon the built environment and divert with much liberty, relationships between history and the future City.
My interest in City Planning included the re-imagining of place, through the relocating, the demolishing and the rebuilding of a city. Each of the works related to a specific location (identified through the field work) and once prepared the notice was placed in situ. After the notice has been tied around a post or an alternative upright, for example a tree, the artist did not remove the works. The works however would degrade over time and could have been removed by factors beyond my control 2
‘City Planning’ is an agent that has an inter-spliced art aesthetic; it is a work that is positioned within the territory of the urban street artist…undercover and illicit, whilst adopting (for all intent and purpose) a form that is overtly official and therefore, sanctioned. The works situated in the city are counterfeits. These replications are benign subversions of authoritative design. These Items are openly placed in the city and give notice to the public at large.
The project explores the possibility of the evolution of the City in context and in relation to historical references. The popularity of Camillo Sitte’s principles was for a return to open planning, for free circulation and assembly. In contrast, routes for ‘communication’, housing and road systems for the future utopian City as defined by Idelfonso Cerdá y Suner incorporated grid-like streets and box like buildings3. The contemporaneous Urban City may require it to be self-sustaining and to be filled with an abundance of nature…my City alterations were to be mindful to the aforementioned.
City Planning’s pivotal foundation is belayed in the concept of an individual’s entitlement to exercise personal expression…by route of an assessment that one can explore the parameters of cultural freedom autonomously 4... this self observation and the undertaking of this project is a protest...and in an egotistical and freethinking sense one is anti-everything. The work is a purge of everything...yet it seeks to rise! The rebuild is a continuing belief in evolution...even if; at moments in time it appears that slowness has taken a firm hold 5. City Planning is not about the total deconstruction and destruction of a City but a partial one...and it is perhaps (on paper) easier to start creating a City anew than to alter an existing one. The Ville Contemporaine (The Contemporary City) had been an idea conceived by Le Corbusier in 1922; his City consisted of a group of sixty- story cruciform skyscrapers behind curtain walls of glass, this vision of the transparent or open City reminded me of Zamyatin’s utopian city 6. At the heart of the Le Corbusier City there would be a transportation centre...I wondered if these were to be places where the human would eventually become prostrate to the will of the City and the life blood which flowed through her veins was viscous 7…it was in the 1920’s and the dawning of the modern communication age. Robert Hughes spoke of Le Corbusier's city planning "...the car would abolish the human street, and possibly the human foot. Some people would have airplanes too. The one thing no one would have is a place to bump into each other, walk the dog, strut, one of the hundred random things that people do ... being random was loathed by Le Corbusier ... its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement to the omnipresent architect."8 It is possible we may be entering a post machine world…the petrol driven world? City Planning embarks upon this by symbolically casting out the car and forcing it to go underground. The Future City could be less inert and less functional, a city that is not full of banal shopping landmarks (is this possibly how we navigate our cities…from one retail branded reference point to the next?) A future City will not be a utopian Disneyland…an artificially created ‘Safe City’ or a ‘Degenerate Utopia 9…yet, it is not a place of fear…a fear artificially manifest…for as long as the human condition retains ‘fear’ as an abstract and as a real and continual presence, then any future City will naturally hold fear within…dark corners are abound and fear gives places and people an edge… Guy Debord describes a city as an, ‘environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions…10’ is this in some measure about the psychology of a City…a psychology not designed, pre-programmed, planned…or contained? …and shall The City always be made up of individuals who are not programmed as the ant or the bee? ‘Reality’ and our perceptions of ‘reality’ are not the same…the map is not the territory…everybody has their own map of the world11.
Any new build in a future City and our relationship within it ought to be wholly positive and should we need reminding, almost all malevolence encountered is not due to the actual architecture 11 but derives from those who operate from within and act upon those who are called to use it…is it possible that a future map of a city could be a purely an emotional one? Maybe an emotional map is digital, continually updated, drawn by each and every individuals experiences…pre planning and zoning increasingly becomes a thing of the past…the City is a personal model, shared and experienced increasingly in the virtual 12.
The City (for an expectant future) will be increasingly rooted in both personal and common experience (where upon the foothills of Kinder Scout, the personal experience has been reduced). Cities far from being in decline or at the point of collapse as implied by the Urbanite Peter Hall 13 I think Cities will increasingly become places where urbanism thrives and that these places will be populated with neighborhoods made prosperous by creative human inhabitation. The Urban City will contain an increasing number of micro-economies...perhaps it is a retreat away from the shopping mall and a return to the small corner shop…the family shop 14 and where living accommodation is located above the premises. At street level there would be a return to open street colonnades where the pedestrian could walk only partially protected from the elements; the Contemporary City works with nature and climate lest we forget.
The City as an entity seeks to cater for every need...for those who live within, those who work in the city and those who visit for pleasure…the City is considered as a ‘work as play’ environment, a place where activity and passions are aroused. The City foremost is a place for the inhabitants and increasingly gives an impression of being self sustaining…in terms of the everyday 15. The City however encourages a significant increase in the presence of the rural…authentic farmers markets trading in local and regional produce which has an emphasis on seasonal availability…this signifies a decline in the reliance of convenience processed food stuffs. City Planning begins to approximate a Garden City 16…it aspires to all that is utopian and is a contemporaneous thorn in the side of the dystopian vision. Mikhail Okhitovich coined the term ‘Disurbanism’17 and he suggested that there would be the abandonment of the metropolis in favor of a defuse network of ‘Green Cities’. City Planning far from giving up on the City creates spaces for the Green inhabitation.18
The idea of permanence within the City is partially removed so that architecture can either grow or be removed when a buildings purpose is either no longer required or it becomes obsolete of its required function…modular buildings are simply taken apart and reconfigured…we simply acknowledge that buildings have a natural life expectancy and future change is afforded by the stability of land values…this is in the future and the majority of changes in City Planning continues to focus upon both the redevelopment of existing sites or the construction of new architecture…the City remains in transition; it is not at a point where one could even remotely call it a utopian environment. The City being considered here may not have reached a rational, one which approaches a Marx, Engel’s or a Saint-Simon concept; nor is it Brasilia or a Cumbernauld or a Pruitt-Igoe 19.
City Planning begins to question the idea of sustainability and social exclusion within the City...the disinherited have specific buildings dedicated to exclusion…one could say these buildings are the centers of authority and are dedicated to maintaining the system...a citizen is called upon only to enter them when ordered to do so at the exclusion of everyone else...such buildings seek to maintain the discrepancy and by changing the nature of these environments one may begin to radically alter society. The City is not ‘Character Building’… it seeks not to condition people or to raise and educate model citizens, however it introduces environments for the possibility of personal transformation which can nurture social transformation. The inhabitants of the City are not a product of some form of ‘Walden Two’20 condition; however the populaces remain agents for change, in the City protest becomes part of the new scenery and discipline through the individual is maintained.
My action transforms a private art and positions it within the public space; with the possibility of public engagement thereafter…the encounter for the public with the work is subtle (this is due to the nature/appearance of the work). Once a personal encounter is established with the impostor, the ideas behind the work become investigative…to be surveyed by the individual…each notice begins to shape a larger grand narrative, an all-encompassing plan for the redesign of a City. It is possible to begin to form a relationship with the idea of redesign in context to actual city planning…not necessarily organically but forcibly…by an individual or through an authoritative constitution. The conceit is for a city to have a coherent form…the city to be used for a grand scheme…is this in conflict to the organic nature of a City?
Notes
1. The new RIBA Award-winning £8.4 million visitor centre Hafod Eryri, designed by Ray Hole Architects in conjunction with Arup and built by Carillion, was officially opened on 12 June 2009
2. I wrote in 2009 that this was unpredictable, natural and foreseen.
3. See The Seduction of Place, Joseph Rykwert. Oxford University Press. (2000)
4. (The connections with walking and thereafter, the possibility being left hanging; suspended from a fraying rope are avowed)…I hoped the project would not have got me arrested! And Belaying refers to a variety of techniques used in climbing to exert friction on a climbing rope so that a falling climber does not fall very far…where is my sound justification for executing this project…would I need a defense lawyer…and in difficulty could one muster Art world support? …you will be discovering and faltering on your own!
5. Perhaps this time!
6. Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin wrote the 1921 novel ‘We’ a story of dystopian future.
7. (Are cities feminine?) …and the blood is oil …crude, refined, petrol or aviation fuel…and I would exclaim that airports (sometimes they have been referred to as small Cities) have become anti-human environments, no man’s land…joyless and certainly all the romance has been removed from the flying experience.
8. In his series ‘The Shock of the New’ Hughes's television series focuses on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. Robert Hughes, (born 1938) is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker.
9. Disneyland, which can be understood as a “supposedly happy, harmonious, and non-conflictual space set aside from the ‘real’ world ‘outside’ in such a way as to soothe and mollify, to entertain, to invent history and to cultivate a nostalgia for some mythical past, to perpetuate the fetish of commodity culture rather than to critique it. Disneyland eliminates the troubles of actual travel by assembling the rest of the world, properly sanitized and mythologized, into one place of pure fantasy containing multiple spatial orders.” David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 165, 167. (2000)
10. Guy Ernest Debord (1931 - 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist (graphic texts) and founding member of the groups Lettrist International (was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957, who provide the link between Isidore Isou's Letterist group and the Situationist International).
11. In the future when we gather together let us remind ourselves of our individualism. ‘The Structure of Magic I’ (1975) Richard Bandler & John Grinder. Richard Wayne Bandler (born 1950) is an American author and trainer in alternative psychology and self-help. He is best known as the co-inventor (with John Grinder) of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a collection of concepts and techniques intended to understand and change human behavior patterns.
12. Malevolent architecture …there are daunting exceptions, super ‘max’ prisons, houses of correction and rehabilitation, courts of Law…imposing public buildings of authority… built for exclusion, secrecy and privacy.) …this begins to read like a controlling force…where an individual’s condition is monitored and feeds back into a network which reveals the health of a City.
13. Peter Hall (2003)“You sometimes hear the argument that cities have no future at all. Some experts predict the “Death of Distance”: a world in which the traditional distance-deterrence effects, embodied in every locational model, diminish to zero and the entire world becomes a frictionless plain on which it is perfectly easy to locate any activity anywhere.” “The End of the City? The Report of My Death was an Exaggeration.” City 7(2), 141-152. ‘Death of Distance’ 1999
14. The family shop…the word family is used to represent something which is uniquely individual.
15. The cultivation of fresh produce, the processing of food stuffs, methods of food production and the recycling of materials and waste.
16. …it does contain many spaces and water features
17. Mikhail Okhitovich was a Bolshevik sociologist, town planner and Constructivist architectural theorist, most famous for his 'Disurbanist' proposals of 1929-30.
18. before offering a source of optimism; I am at first reminded at this point of the HG Wells dying Earth novella ‘The Time Machine’; however instead of ‘vertical differences’ as explored in the novel between the two tribes of Man Noah’s brood and the Troglodyte (there were possibly two tribes that survived the flood) …the Morlocks living a troglodytic existence below ground (perhaps an equivalent vision of dystopian Cities in the future…no go zones…full of obscurity, a machine inferno, diseased and cankerous?) and the apparent perfection of the Eloi, (bounded by nature in superabundance and living in a garden of paradise?)…there is perhaps a mere horizontal alteration in the reading…people abandon cities and return to work the land…I believe the city will have a future…and existence that is not born out compulsory frugality…I think this is in opposition to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 phrase The End of History.
19. Pruitt-Igoe: an award-winning 1955 project in St. Louis, which achieved notoriety by being blown up 17 years after it, was built. That day, the demolition preserved for posterity on film, it became an instant symbol of all that was perceived as wrong with urban renewal, not merely in the United States but in the world at large. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, p. 256.
20. Walden Two is a science fiction novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner and first published in 1948. The author describes an experimental community named Walden Two. The community is located in a rural area and "has nearly a thousand members." The members are portrayed as happy, productive, and creative. The community encourages its members "to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement" and to have "a constantly experimental attitude toward everything".
The origins of this project return seven years previous. Whilst walking up the steep incline known as ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ in the Derbyshire peak district, I saw on my assent several public notices, one read, ‘During lamming keep your dog on a lead’ and the other, ‘keep to the path’. I contemplated an idea; that of adding to their number a temporary sign of my own.
My proposal was to be a simple one and principally, my public order notice would inform walkers of an intention to build. My addition in the landscape would cater for all those walkers who were looking for both, ‘an experience with nature and (at the end of a strenuous walk) a cafe…with a comfortable place to rest’; whilst offering spectacular views from the highest peak in the area (not dissimilar to the £8.4 million Snowdon experience 1). My notice would announce planning had been granted for a coffee house to be built upon the summit of Kinder Scout.
The order would carry a simple description of the constructed building and the text would also incorporate a series of understated pieces of information, the smallness of the description belittling the impact of the development upon the surrounding landscape. In a single sentence I suggest the number of walkers the coffee house would be catering for (160 place settings), how many toilets there would be (six urinals & two cubicles for the men, six cubicles for women, a disabled WC facility, a separate baby changing room)…and additionally what size the gift/craft shop would be (80 sq meters). Finally the order would state that a single track road would be constructed to service the café. These scant facts would be cocooned within some impenetrable (or simply mind numbingly dull) planning jargon… in addition to the language the aesthetic look of official notices appealed to me. The necessary terminology incorporated was important; firstly I thought that a notice that contained a dense text would not be read by most walkers. Secondly, any person having stumbled upon the order and commenced to read it could possibly become enraged; yet at that moment they would be defenseless to respond with any immediacy. The reader would be for all intent and purpose out in the cold…in the moment the most they could possibly do would be to rip down the order…the vandalism and the destruction of the public notice would do little to halt progress. This was all speculative mind games on my part and furthermore it had occurred to me that no one would truly read the order. This solitary thought held much appeal...on this instance I did nothing to bring the notice idea to fruition. The City Planning project had been in part inspired by the popularity of the walk...Jacobs Ladder is a climb that has altered significantly since I first hiked it some twenty years previous.
In October 2009 I undertook some rudimentary ‘field work’ for this proposition and the two works once located achieved what I had set out to do…The presentation of an artwork in a public space without negating specific attention seeking (during or after installation) and an avoidance of unnecessary trouble. City Planning notices once installed were available for all to view…and located in the ‘every day’…the works were a provocation upon the built environment and divert with much liberty, relationships between history and the future City.
My interest in City Planning included the re-imagining of place, through the relocating, the demolishing and the rebuilding of a city. Each of the works related to a specific location (identified through the field work) and once prepared the notice was placed in situ. After the notice has been tied around a post or an alternative upright, for example a tree, the artist did not remove the works. The works however would degrade over time and could have been removed by factors beyond my control 2
‘City Planning’ is an agent that has an inter-spliced art aesthetic; it is a work that is positioned within the territory of the urban street artist…undercover and illicit, whilst adopting (for all intent and purpose) a form that is overtly official and therefore, sanctioned. The works situated in the city are counterfeits. These replications are benign subversions of authoritative design. These Items are openly placed in the city and give notice to the public at large.
The project explores the possibility of the evolution of the City in context and in relation to historical references. The popularity of Camillo Sitte’s principles was for a return to open planning, for free circulation and assembly. In contrast, routes for ‘communication’, housing and road systems for the future utopian City as defined by Idelfonso Cerdá y Suner incorporated grid-like streets and box like buildings3. The contemporaneous Urban City may require it to be self-sustaining and to be filled with an abundance of nature…my City alterations were to be mindful to the aforementioned.
City Planning’s pivotal foundation is belayed in the concept of an individual’s entitlement to exercise personal expression…by route of an assessment that one can explore the parameters of cultural freedom autonomously 4... this self observation and the undertaking of this project is a protest...and in an egotistical and freethinking sense one is anti-everything. The work is a purge of everything...yet it seeks to rise! The rebuild is a continuing belief in evolution...even if; at moments in time it appears that slowness has taken a firm hold 5. City Planning is not about the total deconstruction and destruction of a City but a partial one...and it is perhaps (on paper) easier to start creating a City anew than to alter an existing one. The Ville Contemporaine (The Contemporary City) had been an idea conceived by Le Corbusier in 1922; his City consisted of a group of sixty- story cruciform skyscrapers behind curtain walls of glass, this vision of the transparent or open City reminded me of Zamyatin’s utopian city 6. At the heart of the Le Corbusier City there would be a transportation centre...I wondered if these were to be places where the human would eventually become prostrate to the will of the City and the life blood which flowed through her veins was viscous 7…it was in the 1920’s and the dawning of the modern communication age. Robert Hughes spoke of Le Corbusier's city planning "...the car would abolish the human street, and possibly the human foot. Some people would have airplanes too. The one thing no one would have is a place to bump into each other, walk the dog, strut, one of the hundred random things that people do ... being random was loathed by Le Corbusier ... its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement to the omnipresent architect."8 It is possible we may be entering a post machine world…the petrol driven world? City Planning embarks upon this by symbolically casting out the car and forcing it to go underground. The Future City could be less inert and less functional, a city that is not full of banal shopping landmarks (is this possibly how we navigate our cities…from one retail branded reference point to the next?) A future City will not be a utopian Disneyland…an artificially created ‘Safe City’ or a ‘Degenerate Utopia 9…yet, it is not a place of fear…a fear artificially manifest…for as long as the human condition retains ‘fear’ as an abstract and as a real and continual presence, then any future City will naturally hold fear within…dark corners are abound and fear gives places and people an edge… Guy Debord describes a city as an, ‘environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions…10’ is this in some measure about the psychology of a City…a psychology not designed, pre-programmed, planned…or contained? …and shall The City always be made up of individuals who are not programmed as the ant or the bee? ‘Reality’ and our perceptions of ‘reality’ are not the same…the map is not the territory…everybody has their own map of the world11.
Any new build in a future City and our relationship within it ought to be wholly positive and should we need reminding, almost all malevolence encountered is not due to the actual architecture 11 but derives from those who operate from within and act upon those who are called to use it…is it possible that a future map of a city could be a purely an emotional one? Maybe an emotional map is digital, continually updated, drawn by each and every individuals experiences…pre planning and zoning increasingly becomes a thing of the past…the City is a personal model, shared and experienced increasingly in the virtual 12.
The City (for an expectant future) will be increasingly rooted in both personal and common experience (where upon the foothills of Kinder Scout, the personal experience has been reduced). Cities far from being in decline or at the point of collapse as implied by the Urbanite Peter Hall 13 I think Cities will increasingly become places where urbanism thrives and that these places will be populated with neighborhoods made prosperous by creative human inhabitation. The Urban City will contain an increasing number of micro-economies...perhaps it is a retreat away from the shopping mall and a return to the small corner shop…the family shop 14 and where living accommodation is located above the premises. At street level there would be a return to open street colonnades where the pedestrian could walk only partially protected from the elements; the Contemporary City works with nature and climate lest we forget.
The City as an entity seeks to cater for every need...for those who live within, those who work in the city and those who visit for pleasure…the City is considered as a ‘work as play’ environment, a place where activity and passions are aroused. The City foremost is a place for the inhabitants and increasingly gives an impression of being self sustaining…in terms of the everyday 15. The City however encourages a significant increase in the presence of the rural…authentic farmers markets trading in local and regional produce which has an emphasis on seasonal availability…this signifies a decline in the reliance of convenience processed food stuffs. City Planning begins to approximate a Garden City 16…it aspires to all that is utopian and is a contemporaneous thorn in the side of the dystopian vision. Mikhail Okhitovich coined the term ‘Disurbanism’17 and he suggested that there would be the abandonment of the metropolis in favor of a defuse network of ‘Green Cities’. City Planning far from giving up on the City creates spaces for the Green inhabitation.18
The idea of permanence within the City is partially removed so that architecture can either grow or be removed when a buildings purpose is either no longer required or it becomes obsolete of its required function…modular buildings are simply taken apart and reconfigured…we simply acknowledge that buildings have a natural life expectancy and future change is afforded by the stability of land values…this is in the future and the majority of changes in City Planning continues to focus upon both the redevelopment of existing sites or the construction of new architecture…the City remains in transition; it is not at a point where one could even remotely call it a utopian environment. The City being considered here may not have reached a rational, one which approaches a Marx, Engel’s or a Saint-Simon concept; nor is it Brasilia or a Cumbernauld or a Pruitt-Igoe 19.
City Planning begins to question the idea of sustainability and social exclusion within the City...the disinherited have specific buildings dedicated to exclusion…one could say these buildings are the centers of authority and are dedicated to maintaining the system...a citizen is called upon only to enter them when ordered to do so at the exclusion of everyone else...such buildings seek to maintain the discrepancy and by changing the nature of these environments one may begin to radically alter society. The City is not ‘Character Building’… it seeks not to condition people or to raise and educate model citizens, however it introduces environments for the possibility of personal transformation which can nurture social transformation. The inhabitants of the City are not a product of some form of ‘Walden Two’20 condition; however the populaces remain agents for change, in the City protest becomes part of the new scenery and discipline through the individual is maintained.
My action transforms a private art and positions it within the public space; with the possibility of public engagement thereafter…the encounter for the public with the work is subtle (this is due to the nature/appearance of the work). Once a personal encounter is established with the impostor, the ideas behind the work become investigative…to be surveyed by the individual…each notice begins to shape a larger grand narrative, an all-encompassing plan for the redesign of a City. It is possible to begin to form a relationship with the idea of redesign in context to actual city planning…not necessarily organically but forcibly…by an individual or through an authoritative constitution. The conceit is for a city to have a coherent form…the city to be used for a grand scheme…is this in conflict to the organic nature of a City?
Notes
1. The new RIBA Award-winning £8.4 million visitor centre Hafod Eryri, designed by Ray Hole Architects in conjunction with Arup and built by Carillion, was officially opened on 12 June 2009
2. I wrote in 2009 that this was unpredictable, natural and foreseen.
3. See The Seduction of Place, Joseph Rykwert. Oxford University Press. (2000)
4. (The connections with walking and thereafter, the possibility being left hanging; suspended from a fraying rope are avowed)…I hoped the project would not have got me arrested! And Belaying refers to a variety of techniques used in climbing to exert friction on a climbing rope so that a falling climber does not fall very far…where is my sound justification for executing this project…would I need a defense lawyer…and in difficulty could one muster Art world support? …you will be discovering and faltering on your own!
5. Perhaps this time!
6. Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin wrote the 1921 novel ‘We’ a story of dystopian future.
7. (Are cities feminine?) …and the blood is oil …crude, refined, petrol or aviation fuel…and I would exclaim that airports (sometimes they have been referred to as small Cities) have become anti-human environments, no man’s land…joyless and certainly all the romance has been removed from the flying experience.
8. In his series ‘The Shock of the New’ Hughes's television series focuses on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. Robert Hughes, (born 1938) is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker.
9. Disneyland, which can be understood as a “supposedly happy, harmonious, and non-conflictual space set aside from the ‘real’ world ‘outside’ in such a way as to soothe and mollify, to entertain, to invent history and to cultivate a nostalgia for some mythical past, to perpetuate the fetish of commodity culture rather than to critique it. Disneyland eliminates the troubles of actual travel by assembling the rest of the world, properly sanitized and mythologized, into one place of pure fantasy containing multiple spatial orders.” David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 165, 167. (2000)
10. Guy Ernest Debord (1931 - 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist (graphic texts) and founding member of the groups Lettrist International (was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957, who provide the link between Isidore Isou's Letterist group and the Situationist International).
11. In the future when we gather together let us remind ourselves of our individualism. ‘The Structure of Magic I’ (1975) Richard Bandler & John Grinder. Richard Wayne Bandler (born 1950) is an American author and trainer in alternative psychology and self-help. He is best known as the co-inventor (with John Grinder) of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a collection of concepts and techniques intended to understand and change human behavior patterns.
12. Malevolent architecture …there are daunting exceptions, super ‘max’ prisons, houses of correction and rehabilitation, courts of Law…imposing public buildings of authority… built for exclusion, secrecy and privacy.) …this begins to read like a controlling force…where an individual’s condition is monitored and feeds back into a network which reveals the health of a City.
13. Peter Hall (2003)“You sometimes hear the argument that cities have no future at all. Some experts predict the “Death of Distance”: a world in which the traditional distance-deterrence effects, embodied in every locational model, diminish to zero and the entire world becomes a frictionless plain on which it is perfectly easy to locate any activity anywhere.” “The End of the City? The Report of My Death was an Exaggeration.” City 7(2), 141-152. ‘Death of Distance’ 1999
14. The family shop…the word family is used to represent something which is uniquely individual.
15. The cultivation of fresh produce, the processing of food stuffs, methods of food production and the recycling of materials and waste.
16. …it does contain many spaces and water features
17. Mikhail Okhitovich was a Bolshevik sociologist, town planner and Constructivist architectural theorist, most famous for his 'Disurbanist' proposals of 1929-30.
18. before offering a source of optimism; I am at first reminded at this point of the HG Wells dying Earth novella ‘The Time Machine’; however instead of ‘vertical differences’ as explored in the novel between the two tribes of Man Noah’s brood and the Troglodyte (there were possibly two tribes that survived the flood) …the Morlocks living a troglodytic existence below ground (perhaps an equivalent vision of dystopian Cities in the future…no go zones…full of obscurity, a machine inferno, diseased and cankerous?) and the apparent perfection of the Eloi, (bounded by nature in superabundance and living in a garden of paradise?)…there is perhaps a mere horizontal alteration in the reading…people abandon cities and return to work the land…I believe the city will have a future…and existence that is not born out compulsory frugality…I think this is in opposition to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 phrase The End of History.
19. Pruitt-Igoe: an award-winning 1955 project in St. Louis, which achieved notoriety by being blown up 17 years after it, was built. That day, the demolition preserved for posterity on film, it became an instant symbol of all that was perceived as wrong with urban renewal, not merely in the United States but in the world at large. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, p. 256.
20. Walden Two is a science fiction novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner and first published in 1948. The author describes an experimental community named Walden Two. The community is located in a rural area and "has nearly a thousand members." The members are portrayed as happy, productive, and creative. The community encourages its members "to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement" and to have "a constantly experimental attitude toward everything".
City Planning was installed in the Exhibition, 'Wildflowers' (see installation images under, 'wildflowers')