Cultures and Settlements. Advances in Art and Urban Futures, Volume 3

By Dragica Potocnjak and Nicola Kirkham

This volume considers the making of settlement as a process of identity formation. Taking the position that a culture signifies a way of life, it asks how cultural frameworks inform patterns of settlement, and how the built environment, as process and design, conditions cultural production and reception. The disciplinary fields this intersects include architecture, urban design, sociology, cultural and human geography, cultural studies and critical theory. Contributors work in a range of such fields, in Europe and Latin America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781841508849

Book preview

Cultures and Settlements

Advances in Art and Urban Futures Volume 3

Edited by Malcolm Miles and Nicola Kirkham

First Published in 2003 by

Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 1DE, UK

First Published in USA in 2003 by

Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA

Copyright ©2003 Intellect Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdoni

Book and Cover Design: Joshua Beadon – Toucan

Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Set in Joanna

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84150-089-5

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd., Eastbourne.

Foreword

Marion Roberts

Introduction

Malcolm Miles

Contributors

Part One – Culture and Policy

Cultural Planning in East London

Graeme Evans

Culture and Commerce – European Culture Cities and Civic Distinction

Judith Kapferer

Low-income Housing and Community Participation in N E Brazil

Denise Morado Nascimento

Birmingham as a Cultural City

Tim Hall

Part Two – Place Identity

A New Script for the Lake District

Paul Usherwood

Candy Coated Chronotope – Spatial Representations of a Seaside Resort

Nicola Kirkham

Consumption and the Post-Industrial City – Nike Town

Friedrich von Bories

University Campus as Ghost City

Habil Jan Hartman

Part Three – Cultural Practices

Border as Dialectic/Alison Marchant

Judith Rugg

Icy Prospects

Liz Wells

Puppet Theatre & Child Rights

Cariad Astles

Lisbon Capital of Nothing

Mario Caeiro

Southall Project

Helen MacKeith

The Gift of Water

Jackie Brookner

Bibliography

The last decade of the twentieth century saw a revision in attitudes towards the city. The views that had characterised urban policy in the early and middle decades of the century were reversed towards a celebration of the traditions of European urbanism. The modernist project, with its programme for wholesale demolition, disdain for historic urban form and over-valuing of the free flow of space in the form of motorways and underpasses, high-rise towers and disconnected urban plazas, became discredited. Instead features of nineteenth-century urbanism were re-evaluated and set out as virtues to be emulated rather than as ills to be cured. High densities, mixed development, streets and squares were reclaimed as essential components of city culture. Anti-urbanism, which had formed such a major paradigm, not only in town planning, but also in other forms of literary and artistic expression, gradually gave way to a fascination with urban intensity and metropolitan culture. The city was cool, fashionable and edgy.

The notion of promoting the city as an entity, as a repository for a broader understanding of culture has been feeding into official bureaucracy, into government policy documents, programmes and projects. The European Union's City of Culture project, the Urban Task Force report, the Urban White Paper, the European cities networks, the New Urbanism movement in the USA, are each expressions of a reformulated, contemporary urbanism that seeks to re-found the virtues and values of traditional, continental European cities.

The latter years of the twentieth century also saw the end of the binary division between capitalism and the so-called socialism of the former Eastern bloc. In urban terms this cataclysmic change has left the cities of the former East with problems of a decaying infrastructure and vast areas of brownfield sites that housed now redundant industry. Yet the centres of these same cities often still have well-preserved historic cores that have been protected from the ravages of rampant land speculation and the incursion of the motor car. In terms of governance, attempts to combine the virtues of a laissez-faire market economy and a vision of fairness and social justice have provided the stimulus for a growth of 'third way politics' that has dominated the Anglo-Saxon world and mainstream European politics. At the local level this has resulted in a new willingness to experiment with different types of relationships and structures. In particular there has been a desire to incorporate ideas generated from protest movements in the 60s and 70s against modernist urbanism in the form of a 'bottom up' community politics.

This new politics has engendered a brave rhetoric of social inclusion, of neighbourhood management, of the virtues of the public realm. The vision is of pedestrian-friendly cities, planned into coherent neighbourhoods clustering aroundbustling city centres, in an orderly framework of routes, streets and squares, punctuated by spectacular landmark buildings. Civic consciousness and a strong local identity are expressed in built form, through the urban layout and in terms of local customs and cultural activities, food and, of course, the arts. Citizen engagement is welcomed, through the practice of consultation, in all aspects of governance, planning and creative expression. There is a renewed insistence on the importance of the public realm. The public realm is conceived as public space, in a notion of a visual representation of inclusion that can accommodate difference. Public art plays a role in the definition of the public realm, through flagship projects that proclaim the importance of a city in an international hierarchy and through more modest, community based projects that are aimed at integration. In addition, the public realm is imagined in terms of economic regeneration, positing an urban vitality that is based on lively public commerce, visible in the streets.

The vision is laudable but fragile. The sheer scale of contemporary economic units threatens to pull it apart. Major transnational companies operate beyond the boundaries of the nation state, with a total turnover that is larger than the GDP of some developing nations. These companies are driven by growth, by a requirement to provide ever-increasing profits for shareholders. Their commitment is to their balance sheet, not to the country in which they choose to locate, let alone the city region. The dynamic of uninterrupted growth seeks to annihilate competitors to form a global market for their goods.The interest of these corporations in identity is not the identity of the consumer but a desire for brand domination. The situation where local producers and businesses operate within their own markets with a commitment to their city region is gradually giving way to a more global, homogenised culture. This homogenisation has a visible impact on the city's streets as global brands jostle for advertising space and global chains dominate retailing activity.

Furthermore the raison d'être for a traditional practice of nineteenth-century urbanism has been eroded as cities become centres for consumption rather than production. Tourism and the hospitality industry are now major industries that are encouraged as a replacement for the loss of manufacturing industry. Cultural tourism forms an essential part of any local economic development officer's brief. Again the questions raised are those of identity and authenticity. If a city's culture has to be developed by the local municipality, sponsored by corporations and 'sold' to a world-wide audience, whose culture is it? The extent to which the local populations can have an influence on or draw benefit from investment in artistic activity becomes a key issue.

Cities are not, however, in decline. More people are coming to live in cities with an increase that ranges from a marginal growth in the centres of European cities to an explosion in urbanisation in the countries of the developing world. The 'information age' as as many commentators have elucidated, led not a vaporisation of the urban but its re-affirmation. A new global hierarchy of cities is being forged, with the second tier vying to gain a foothold. Cities have taken on a transformed role as information hubs and as centres for an élite business class. As the middle classes return to inner and central neighbourhoods new markets for urban culture are provided. Although gentrification brings in wealth and the refurbishment of the physical fabric of cities,new spaces of exclusion are formed, whether in the shape of the American Business Improvement District, now imported to Britain, or the gated development.

Uneven development is on the increase, both in terms of differences between rich and poor within counties and between richer and poorer nations. Many hundreds of thousands of economic migrants are now traversing the globe, desperate to seek a better quality of life.The nation state may have declined in importance but the legacy of past imperialism lives on. An influx of immigrants provides cities with a dynamic edge in economic terms as new small businesses are set up and job vacancies filled, but problems are posed in terms of forging new types of cultural representation. This question appeared to be purely rhetorical until 2001 when the growth of a far-right politics across Europe and the events of 9/11 in the USA have revealed the extent of peoples' fears.

In the face of these tensions the role of 'culture', 'settlement' and 'identity' within cities becomes of critical importance.This book is a contribution to a range of debates around such concepts and the complex processes they denote . It comes at a time of intense re-considerations, not least post-September 11th, but also as political agendas are increasingly set outside structures of representation.

The complaint that everywhere looks like everywhere else has literally been taken to the streets by the anti-globalization movement. Cultural producers, intermediaries and commentators have some key issues to address. Does identity accrue to the city, to the neighbourhood within it, or to its various populations? Does 'identity' suggest 'identical', is there a uniformity between or across places or people, or is identity to be cherished as that which is unique? What role can the state, business and enterprise play in the formation of identity? Citizen engagement has often been suggested as a method for producing an identity based both on place and population, uncorrupted by commercial gain, but how is this to be done when it is not part of a protest movement? How can different groups within the population, with uneven access to resources and power, be fairly represented in a public culture? How relevant is the city when real power resides somewhere else? These questions cannot be easily answered but a text that investigates current practices, with a clear perspective on the broader picture, is to be welcomed. The value of this set of essays is that they move beyond the prescriptions of the 1990's that, as has been suggested, had a tendency towards nostalgia and idealism. This book unflinchingly explores the challenges and possibilities that contemporary urban culture faces, from the level of the individual work to a responsive urban infrastructure.

Marion Roberts

University of Westminster,2002

The theme of this collection, originated by the City Cultures Research Unit at the University of Plymouth, is the mutual relation between cultures and patterns of settlement.

The term culture is used here in both the narrow sense of cultural production, as in the arts, and in the broader, anthropological sense to describe the countless everyday expressions of value and response to circumstances which collectively become a way of life. From the anthropological definition, it could seem that nothing is excluded from culture – and in a way that is the case – but the point is that people in different circumstances have different cultures, and the differences which emerge make cultural analysis an interesting process. A further concern, for this collection, is how the fields implied by culture’s two definitions interact. How, for instance, do artists use their specialist skills to lend visibility to the events and traces of everyday life which state the culture of a particular social group? Or, to what extent is that broader culture recognized by policy makers and planners as having an intricacy and depth equivalent to the (for them) more familiar field of the arts? How, since they are always contested, are cultural identities reconstructed, by whom and for whom?

Those are the kinds of question which run through the collection, approached in different ways by contributors drawn from backgrounds in both academic research – in architecture, cultural policy, cultural geography, cultural studies, and sociology - and arts practice. A majority of the chapters are revisions of papers given at seminars and conferences, some organised by the University of Plymouth (one of which was held at the University of Westminster, supported by the Landscape Research Group and British Sociological Association), and others at the University of Barcelona and at the Bauhaus University,Weimar. Other chapters were written specially for the book.

It is hoped the book will contribute to current debates on cities, at a time when cultural work is beginning to be seen by planners and policy makers as relevant to urban futures, but when, also, some of the implications of such work require further investigation. Marion Roberts, for example, notes, in her Foreword, that culture is increasingly co-opted to the planning agenda, while government rhetoric includes notions of social inclusion which may be addressed through various kinds of cultural work. But she sees, too, the fragility of some of the visions engendered, and argues that conflicts brought about by new forms of economic and social exclusion will be more effectively faced when cultural diversity is better understood.

Part One brings together four texts on cultural policy. As Graeme Evans demonstrates, programmes for urban renewal are not always aligned with the cultures of the areas affected, and produce a new kind of urban edge between zones of in-coming gentrification and areas of neglect. Judith Kapferer, from a perspective more based in city marketing, examines three cases of European Cultural Cities. Here, everyday consumption – as of local cooking – is part of the city’s national and international promotion in a race for inward investment, but tendsto the officially sanctioned rather than the grass roots: cuisine rather than food. Denise Morado Nascimento, in Brazil, questions the housing policies of states which ignore the role of non-privileged dwellers in the construction of settlements, looking to the favela (informal settlement) as a more sustainable form. Finally in this part, Tim Hall reviews writing on public art as a vehicle of civic identity, taking the case of Birmingham. He observes that monuments can be re-appropriated, though more conventional readings usually dominate.

Part Two considers place-identity, in various relations to consumption. Paul Usherwood argues that the English Lake District - long a preserve of walkers, and in the of past poets and cultural commentators earning their place to speak by arduous physical exercise – is now subject of a new script of consumption, in which finding the self is what is being consumed and marketed. Nicola Kirkham, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, interrogates Blackpool’s image as a seaside resort for different social classes. This is accomplished via analysis of the film Funny Bones, in which the worlds of Blackpool and Las Vegas are superimposed in the life of a small-time cabaret agent. Friedrich von Borries, in Berlin, reconsiders the place-construction, as niche marketing, of a global corporation. Using the lowest-key techniques, Nike invents a culture appropriating street-level expression. The marginal spaces of neighbourhood sports then become equivalents of prime advertising sites, and locations of globalized consumption.This exemplifies one of the claims made by Sharon Zukin in The Cultures of Cities (1995), that potential resistance is translated into the demand for jeans (or, here, trainers). Jan Hartman, finally, looks at the equally (but different) artificial town of the University campus –a neglected settlement type in a literature read largely by academics – which he sees as a ghost town, lacking the elements of sociation found in settlements of multi-functional use.

Part Three includes two commentaries on cases of visual culture, and four accounts by artists of their work. Judith Rugg critiques Alison Marchant’s projects Close to Home and Kingsland Road London – East, which transpose the domestic into public space, and the invisible into a realm of visibility. The outcome is a contestation of boundaries, and a sense that space is not only reproduced but also otherwise produced. Liz Wells is concerned with wilderness as a realm of imagination and belonging. She describes recent photographic works in Lapland, asking how artists from elsewhere might work with local cultures which are either marginalized, or buried now in archives. Cariad Astles writes about her experiences using puppetry in the participatory way of Forum Theatre, in Spain and Mali. Working with children, she initiated dialogues on children’s rights, noticing different kinds of response in the two countries. Mario Caeiro describes the project Capital do nada, a participatory intervention in Marvila, a social housing zone between the historic centre of Lisbon and the 1998 Expo site. Conditions there could be compared with those alluded to by Denise Morado, and the interventions made by artists draw attention to this (hitherto) white space on the map. Helen MacKeith documents a project undertaken for a local authority in a multi-ethnic area of west London. She is critical of the ability of the authority to see the project through, and wonders whether art may still, for some, be a convenient avoidance of responses which demand more complex and long-term understandings. Finally, a personal reflection by sculptor Jackie Brookner, whose studio in New York’s SoHo once had a view of the Twin Towers. Beginning with an account of making a work in Germany, she ponders mortality, and the artificiality of some of the boundaries, as between the insides and outsides of bodies, which are the props of civilization.

Cariad Astles is a puppeteer. She teaches in the theatre performance area, school of arts and humanities, University of Plymouth.

Friedrich von Bories is an architect and co-founder of rude architecture, an urban research and experimental design studio. He teaches in the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University, Berlin.

Jackie Brookner is an ecological artist who collaborates internationally with ecologists and earth scientists on water remediation/public art projects and teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York and Harvard University.

Mario Caeiro is an Urban Designer and cultural activist. He is president of Extramuros Associação Cultural para Cidade (Cultural Association for the City) and founder of água forte, a small press in Lisbon.

Professor Graeme Evans is Head of Research at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design at the London Institute, and author of 'Cultural Planning: An Urban Renaissance?', published by Routledge.

Tim Hall is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Gloucestershire. He is author of Urban Geography and has edited The Entrepreneurial City, The City Cultures Reader and Urban Futures: Critical Commentaries on Shaping the City.

Habil Jan Hartman is a Teaching Professor in the dept. of Philosophy and Bioethics at Jagiellonian University, Cracow.

Judith Kapferer is a professor in Sociology at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Nicola Kirkham is a Ph.D. student and research assistant in the City Cultures Research Unit, University of Plymouth.

Helen MacKeith is an artist based in London and co-founder of Fuller MacKeith Public Art & Design Partnership.

Malcolm Miles is Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Denise Morado Nascimento is a Ph.D. student at the Universidade Federal of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She teaches at the School of Architecture, Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Brazil.

Marion Roberts is subject-leader for urban design at the University of Westminster.

Judith Rugg is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Contextual Practice in the School of Art and Design, University of Plymouth.

Paul Usherwood is an art critic and historian teaching at Northumbria University. He has published widely in tne fields of nineteenth-century British art and contemporary art.

Liz Wells is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts, University of Plymouth, UK and has published widely on photography within Visual Culture.

Culture and Policy

The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand Italo Calvino Invisible Cities,1979 (p13)

In volume one of this series, Sally Morgan contrasts two Bristol characters - Protestant dissenter Sir William Wills, aka Baron Winterstoke of Blagdon, and tagger-graffiti artist ‘Lewis the True Baron’ (2000). Divided by a century, and at opposite ends of the socio-economic scale, both changed the urban landscape, illustrating how resistance to an urban order takes multiple forms: Baron Blagdon commissioned a statue of the radical Whig MP Edmund Burke for a prominent public space in the city, much to the affront of the Bristolian social elite. In the 1990s, graffiti by ‘Lewis the True Baron’ disrupted the city’s iconic landscape. Both engage with