Lea Valley Drift: paths, objects and the creation of urban narratives (original) (raw)
Routes as Spaces - Walking as a potential curatorial space
2022
There are many ways to walk; to stroll, to ramble, to trespass, to head somewhere specific or without direction, to meander, to get lost, to find one's way again. Whatever way one walks, the action of moving from one place to another can form a temporary space: A space that holds the capacity to exist within and move between both the public and private realms. Lucius Burckhardt’s theory of Strollology emerged in the 1980s in response to the privatisation of public spaces and the growth of global mobility. In Strollology, space is seen as a construct of perception, landscape is learnt and therefore, can be seen as a collective educational asset. If it is experienced too fast, details can be easily lost. Contemporary cultural landscapes are historically built upon various codes of access and exclusion. More and more often, selected artistic projects are offered as fast-paced experiences with a pseudo-public perception of open doors. If we take Burckhardt’s theory of Strollology and understand that constructing a space is a simple perception, is it possible to therefore perceive new, alternative spaces by mapping a fresh route to walk? Could these alternative spaces focus on re-connecting the private to the public and as Burckhardt hoped for through strollology, prioritise the process of slowing down? As an entry point into these larger questions, this text looks at a few key examples of collective walking projects that have created temporary cultural spaces. These examples are explored through a simultaneous formation of a lexicon of walking terms, which could potentially become the basis for a future language of a perceived walking space.
Introduction: ‘Travelling the Urban Space’
New Readings, 2000
n recent years literary critics have paid as much attention to the City as to travelling. By bringing together these two themes, this volume seeks to avoid the restrictions of both historicity and spatiality. For this reason, the papers of the seminar series 1998-99 cover a variety of urban spaces, travelled at different times. The cities visited range from New York to Rome, from London to Berlin, from Paris to Montreal and Salt Lake City. The times of travelling span the late nineteenth century to the 1920s and 1930s and the immediate postwar years to the 1970s. The papers highlight diversity by taking their examples from literature in English, French, German and Italian. At the same time, they share a concern with the historical construction of space-whether analysing fascist or decadent, naturalist or realist, modernist or feminist texts. Charles Burdett's paper analyses some of the numerous texts written during the Fascist period on the United States by authors such as Ciarlantini, Mario Soldati, Margherita Sarfatti and Emilio Cecchi and demonstrates the different connections such texts have with the politics of the time.
A Travellers' Sense of Place in the City
2019
It is widely assumed in both popular and scholarly imaginaries that Travellers, due to their 'nomadic mind-set' and non-sedentary uses of land, do not have a sense of place. This thesis presents an ethnographic account of an extra-legal camp in Southeast London, to argue that its Traveller inhabitants do have a sense of place, which is founded in the camp's environment and experientially significant sites throughout the city. The main suggestion is that the camp, its inhabitants, and their activities, along with significant parts of the city, are co-constitutionally involved in making a Travellers' sense of place. However, this is not selfcontained or produced by them alone, as their place-making activities are embroiled in the political, economic and legal environment of the city. This includes the threat and implementation of eviction by a local council, the redevelopment of the camp's environs, and other manifestations of the spatial-temporalities of late-liberal urban regeneration. The thesis makes this argument through focusing on the ways that place is made, sensed, and lived by the camp's Traveller inhabitants. It builds on practice-based approaches to place, centred on the notion of dwelling, but also critically departs from previous uses of this notion by demonstrating that 'dwelling' can occur in an intensely politicised and insalubrious environment. Therefore, I consider dwelling in the context of the power asymmetries of place and urban precarity, as well as how it is crucial to making a home-in-the-world. Depicting a family fiercely and desperately striving to hold onto place in the time-space of the late-liberal city, a situation that affords them little promise of a future, the thesis destabilises established understandings and analysis of Travellers' experience, in a contemporary context. Chapter one considers how men's skilled activity, building materials and machinery are involved in creative acts of correspondence, which coalesce to make the camp a liveable place for its inhabitants. The central suggestion is that, through making and inhabiting the camp, it also comes to make and inhabit those involved in such activities. However, the family's ability to structure their own world, by building themselves a place to live, is contingent on a range of socio-political constraints that subject them to infrastructural violence. Chapter two turns from the camp's built environment to examine women's caregiving and home-making practices. It considers women's haptic involvements with their caravans, suggesting that these activities are not simply practices of creative homemaking Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not
Urban Walking and The Spatial Hinge
Literary Geographies 9(2), 2023
This piece considers the potential of reworking the concept of the spatial hinge (Thurgill and Lovell 2019; Thurgill 2021) in the context of Rebecca Solnit's (2014: 212) interpretation of the psychogeographical 'theory of the Dérive.' It describes how an urban walking tour (Evans and Jones 2011) enabled a reframing of the hinge as an embodied venture into the unknown. The essay explores the value of walking practice for literary geographers and, through an engagement with emerging theory in this interdisciplinary approach, show how a literary text representing one place can be used to guide the mobile exploration of a different location. In this case I write about a public event experienced by nearly 40 people which formed part of a literary festival held in 2019. I start by referring to James Thurgill (2021: 153) as he defines the concept which underpins my analysis:
2020
Urban strolls allow to intercept the atmospheres of a space, mediating between the moving body and the context. With a situ- ationist approach, I carried out an exploration of the sprawlscape along the SS554, the urban motorway connecting Cagliari (Italy) and its surrounding centers. The contexts I met, a particular fusion of rural and urban, are considered marginal and degraded compared to the city, thus the choice of exploring on foot, driven by the difficulty that these spaces pose to walking and the possibilities it allows to explore spaces atmospherically. The stroll was integrated by a photoreport called « flat- shades » : photography is a useful medium to explore and interprete the atmosphere of a space, and it allows the (re)presentation and sharing of this personal perceived atmosphere.