In this paper, I will analyse some of the videos that were made at the occasion of the Welcome to My Place project, a collective video resource that started in February 2010 and where people can share the places that matter to them. In view of the videos and after some researches, I would like to propose a slightly different approach to the concept of non-place introduced by Marc Augé, and to the way places are appropriated. This paper is also intended to provide a short introduction to the philosophical notion of place and its main themes.

Spaces, places and non-places

A place is a meaningful location. According to John Agnew, it has a location (e.g. longitude and latitude), a locale (the material setting for social relations – e.g. walls, ground) and a ‘sense of place’. By sense of place, he means that the place is a space invested with meaning. In a slightly different formulation, Robert D. Sack defines a place as a “phenomenon that brings social and spatial together and in part produces them” (Source: “Place, a short introduction”, Tim Cresswell).

The sense of place is an elusive notion. We can however roughly describe it using the three following attributes:

-          The place’s identity, e.g. possibility to name the place

-          The social practices taking place, e.g. praying in a temple, selling in a market, eating in a restaurant

-           Traces of memory, e.g. literature, pictures about the place

(Source: Gamer theory, McKenzie Wark)

As an illustration, the following video introduces the history of the Westminster Reference Library in London. It shows that the building exists as a place thanks in part to the people who transmit its history. They participate in the preservation of the sense of place.

Marc Augé describes a non-place as a space that cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity. Highways and airports are examples of non-places. He goes further and describes how the sense of place is on the other hand simulated in historic towns, making places and non-places distinct and opposite (as a remark, binary oppositions form the basis of classificatory systems within cultures according to Claude Lévi-Strauss). It is a similar process to those described by postmodern writers such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. As Marc Augé puts it:

“Our towns have been turning into museums (e.g. restored, exposed and floodlit monuments, listed areas, pedestrian precincts) while at the same time bypasses, motorways, high-speed trains and one-way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger in them.”

“A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does and experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver [...] he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, and responds to the same entreaties.”

My argument is that non-places are much more frequent and rooted in human nature than Marc Augé suggests. This has direct consequences on how space is negotiated on a day to day basis. Transmission of identity, history and social practices is fragile. A sense of place relies either on a group of people assuring its continuity or on authoritative power, and is not necessary desired.

Places between sedentism and nomadism

Humans are incredibly adaptive and can accommodate very well either sedentism or nomadism. These two lifestyles are profoundly in us and even though we mostly have a sedentary life, our approach to space remains nomadic in many occasions.

Renting a house is a profoundly nomadic situation, either by choice or for pecuniary reasons. The rent is very often concluded without any knowledge of the history and identity of the house or flat. The sense of place is rarely transmitted from the landlord to the tenant, assuming the landlord has any sense of place for his property. Blocks of Victorian houses in London for example have surely a history, but unheard of by most of its inhabitants. They are furthermore easy to commoditise because of their very similar configuration.  Only their material structure influences the social practices of their inhabitants. One might argue that this material structure is informed by British tradition and in that sense transmits a persistent sense of place; because it forces inhabitants to manage their space in a certain way. I would however not give a disproportionate importance to this transmission and consider that these houses are mostly non-places, as functional and anonymous as an airport. In many cases, houses are not bequeathed anymore from one generation of a family to the other, and its sense of place is lost.

A difference between these places and non-places though is that inhabitants need to make them their home, and rapidly reinvent a brand new sense of place. The need to feel at home is described in details in La poétique de l’Espace by Gaston Bachelard. As he points out, this feeling could be reduced to the image of the hermit’s hut, the simplest expression of what being at home means. I think that we are all nomads. We all have this image of the hut in our imagination. We can make nearly every place our home, and move the next day. The sense of space is disposable. It is not an anomaly of modernity, but in human nature. Here is an example; few objects and a soundtrack are enough to generate a mobile and disposable sense of place.

For a nomad to appropriate a space, it might be faster to deal with a non-place in the first place. It avoids any complicated negotiations with a pre-existing identity. It is not always the best option however and I’m not advocating systematically anonymity. Dealing with a place and its pre-existing identity can also be helpful to invent or reinforce a narrative that the inhabitant can use to give meaning to his life. The place in this context is often the symbol of some support, like the house from the parents, or the car from the company.

I talked so far about houses, but the same process is observable in many other types of places: working places, places of celebrations, entire neighbourhoods.  In the following video, I wonder if the ‘cosmopolitan world’ mentioned by the owner of the café is not in fact a non-place. His strategy to provide an identity to his business is to rephrase cosmopolitanism with an Arabic sensitivity and décor. Place is maybe here a meeting place, as proposed by Doreen Massey: “each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations, an understanding that its character can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond” (Source: “Place, a short introduction”, Tim Cresswell).

In this video of the New Year celebration by the Kurdish community in Finsbury Park, the park is treated as a non-place so that the celebration of that other place, the Kurdistan can be fully experienced (read here an in-depth analysis of the park and its surrounding area).

An easy way to create a sense of place from a non-place is by using media. As you can see in the video below, film effects and a soundtrack instantly provide an identity to the parkland walk: an old-fashioned place to enjoy with friends.

In all these videos, the sense of place is created nearly from scratch by the occupiers, who prefer to treat the space as a non-place. That sense of place might be ephemeral or persistent depending on the intentions of the occupiers; it is their freedom to choose between nomadism and sedentism.

It remains that the overall and much contested trend is towards nomadism. It can be attributed to the phenomenon of ‘time-space compression’, “a term used to describe processes that seem to accelerate the experience of time and reduce the significance of distance” (Wikipedia). It is the direct consequence of trains, cars, airlines, television, and the internet. Information is instantaneous; the world is reduced to the in-flight map that indicates the position of the plane. Commuting is the norm and anyone who wants to ‘succeed’ in life has to move constantly.

Narrative architects

As explained in the previous chapter, people need non-places that are easy to appropriate. They need them because they might change of location in a couple of years, because they are already too busy managing their identity on the web or get a sense of authorship on their career. Places imposing a strong narrative are for most of us more appropriate for travels or visits, like the centre of Florence protected by the UNESCO. We are the product of freedom and the free market; legacy is a constraint, tradition is a reduction of choice.  However, non-places are not as blank as they look. Architects, urbanists, artists, politics, health and safety agencies, cultural agencies, all participate in the design of urban non-places and are what I call narrative architects, a term borrowed from Henry Jenkins (Source: Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche).

Childhood is fun and colourful; It is nice to go to work every day by bicycle; Streets are not to sleep in; I live in a place full of history. These statements portray an idyllic city. They form together a narrative of the ideal urban life. Narrative architects design elements in non-places that will evoke this story. The citizens will use these elements to reconstitute and internalize it.  The evocative elements are even expected a-priori in an all inclusive package of the modern city lifestyle. Non-places that include these elements tend to work better. Let me start with the example of the playground.

The designers of the playground didn’t write any story addressed to the children. But they knew that the concrete objects they designed for the playground will be associated with tales of mountains, castles and exotic adventures. They provided evocative elements that children can use to appropriate a very dry non-place, and transform it into a heterotopia. The concrete elements also provide a substitute for an unfenced environment perceived as not appropriate for children (and adults?) or requiring an unreasonable amount of surveillance.

Using the same logic, one juts need to put lines on a concrete ground to associate that space with football, and significantly alter its use. These evocative elements produce generic senses of place that are quick to internalize and convenient to use.

The American kitchen, British bathroom, Western or why not Japanese style living room are evocative elements that architect narrators uses to sequence the everyday storyline of their occupiers. Of course, you could imagine a house where you would take a shower in the living room, but most people prefer to stick with more common storyboards.

With these evocative elements in place, it is more difficult to divert from the prescribed user scenarios, to use a marketing term from mass production. But it is possible and people find unusual ways to appropriate their space. “People are able to resist the construction of expectations about practice through place by using places and their established meanings in subversive ways” (Source: Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche). Here is for example how wi-fi signals can be used to form an unexpected representation of the neighbourhood.

Politics of space

A sense of place reflects the values that are constantly negotiated and contested within a group. It might look intangible, especially in an urban environment where the landscape is a given for the nomad. In their willingness to pacify the space, local authorities take its control and by doing so erase the need for local communities to dialogue, which prevents any contestation and negotiation of public space, and de-facto its appropriation (see this study of the London N4 area I did in collaboration with the Transition Finsbury Park association).

The best way to put in evidence the relation between places, values and power is to imagine the destruction of places, or their disappearance from the map. Such an imaginary threat will help you list the people who would protest, their arguments, as well as the people who would agree with the destruction, and their counter-arguments. These two groups of people are the actors in the relation of power that maintain the existence of a place.

The place becomes a symbol of that balance of power and reinforces it. An evocative example is when the churches were higher than the town halls. In a period of time-space compression, the churches have not only to compete with the town halls, but with everything in every media. Spaces do not only compete between one another to capture the attention of people, and the sense they can give to them. They also need to compete with mobility. If they lose, they become non-places.

“Place is a form of fixed capital which exists in tension with other forms of capital. Political struggle over place often provide opportunities for resistance to the mobile forces at the origin of the time-space compression” (Source: “Place, a short introduction” by Tim Cresswell). The green movements such as transition towns want to valorise the local for its more sustainable qualities. Local communities want to preserve their neighbourhood and way of living. Fashionable slow food restaurants want to promote time and distinction at the opposite of ubiquitous fast-food chains. They are all part of a ‘militant particularism’ movement that fights a time-space compression often associated with capitalistic interests. It is in that sense a progressive movement. Another example is libraries. Here is a talk illustrating the values and relations of power at play.

On the other hand, militant particularism could be seen as a reactionary strategy to exclude outsiders. “Sentimentalized recovering of sanitized heritage sites” can marginalize people who are not part of that heritage. It can justify segregation by the “construction of a unproblematic identity” (Doreen Massey). This is what happens in gentrification that ‘restores’ old districts, houses, ‘historic’ canals and churches. It ‘rehabilitates’ a neighbourhood and its identity that former, poorer inhabitants didn’t appreciate enough. It is a justification for their necessary exile.

“Accompanying this production of sense of history and authenticity is a process of exclusion based on the identification of a threatening other beyond the walls of the town” (Source: “Place, a short introduction” by Tim Cresswell).

Conclusion

I have shown how much non-places are useful for the nomads we are and how easily we can produce a disposable sense of place for them. Non-places are not totally blank however and feature evocative elements designed by narrative architects. These evocative elements mediate the appropriation of space and our daily life. Whether or not places are more desirable than non-places is a question of values between nomadism and sedentism. The superiority of places over non-places is advocated for opposite reasons in progressive and reactionary rhetoric. For this reason, I don’t think it is wise to draw a conclusion using this dichotomy. I would for the time being just note how much the status of the place is controversial in contemporary culture.

References

• Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche, 2008
• Place, a short introduction, Tim Cresswell, 2004
• Non-places – An introduction to supermodernity, Marc Augé, 1995
• La poétique de l’espace, Gaston Bachelard, 1957
• In praise of shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki, 1933

Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.

“Concentration” (soundscape by hanstimm), see description here.

I have been inspired to work on the subject of verticality while reading the book ‘La poétique de l’Espace’ (The poetics of Space) by Gaston Bachelard, and more specifically this translated quotation:

“In addition to the lack of vertical intimate values, one needs to add the lack of cosmology in the houses of big cities. Houses are not there in nature anymore. Relations between home and space become tacit. Everything thereby becomes machine and private life leaks from everywhere.”

Houses and their phenomenology have been studied for a long time. Apartments and vertical buildings are more recent. They still have this image of being the second option, not the ‘real’ home. Reality from Hong Kong looks quite different. What is the imaginary of verticality?

My intuition was to start from the lift: a key component that differentiates vertical buildings from horizontal ones. The small room mediates verticality for its guests and is where its negotiation occurs. I could also have chosen the escalator, another important mediator of verticality in contemporary buildings. But its affiliation with stairs makes it somehow a less original feature, even though many things could be said about its cultural function. The lift has no precedent and reigns in spaces of verticality.

The lift is typically a small room in which guests cannot do anything else than to press on numbered buttons. It never has any seats and is thus not a place to stay; relaxing background music is sometimes played though. The lift might celebrate its own movement, and by extension the verticality of its building, by having large windows giving to its outside. But it denies most often its mobility and doesn’t feature any window. Which doesn’t prevent the image of the long and dark vertically corridor to appear mentally in the passenger’s mind (see the imaginary of the Disney’s Tower of Terror ride for example). The lift feels at the same time a private place, having mirrors that guests can use to check their appearance, and public, with surveillance cameras and the knowledge that everyone on the outside can check the lift’s movement. The ambiguity leads to well known sexual fantasies, breaking also the predictive and functional role of the room.

Through evolution of technology, the lift reduced to the maximum freedom of its passengers. They need to accept its rules if they don’t want to use the stairs. The lift decides who is next, when to open and close the doors, to go either up or down. This generates a lot of frustration and contempt, along with angry insults when the lift is slow to act on passengers requests. They generally accept the rules though because they believe that the lift has been programmed for the best of their interests. Even if they might sometimes doubt that it is intelligent enough to achieve the task.

The lift, and vertical buildings, can be perceived in three different ways closely related to social practices.

Lift as a teletransporter – verticality is a multi-dimensional space

The lift is a teletransporter. It connects a particular location on the ground to a space where people live in the same habitation at the same time, but without knowing the existence of one another. This is what I tried to convey in the following video that was made at my apartment building in Mong Kok, the area with the highest population density in the world (see here a map of teletransporters around the Olympic station, not far from Mong Kok).

“Antechamber” (soundscape by Geography)

This imaginary can only remain if habitants of the building have no significant contacts between one another. If they had, vertical distances between one another’s floor would break the multidimensional representation of space. They are living in the building because they greatly value the location of its entrance, not their neighbours. It might be justified and I don’t necessary make of neighbouring a virtue.

Another interesting aspect of this subjective representation is the emphasis on the ground location and not the verticality of the building, as illustrated in the “Concentration” video. What is the most fascinating in a skyscraper? Is it its height? Or is it the importance given to its location? Why thousands of people would want to be teleported everyday at the entrance door of a single building? While there are so many other geographical coordinates to choose from on earth? The massive appearance of a skyscraper is the material expression of the importance of its location. My video suggests that such a disproportionate interest in specific locations is due to a phenomenon of concentration, a door becomes highly desirable because of the importance given to doors next door. This remains true even when the original singularity becomes anecdotic, and when concentration in itself becomes the significance. The harbour of Hong Kong brought in financial institutions, employees, consumers and finally advertisers.

Lift as a carriage – verticality works just like horizontality

In this representation, the lift is a vertical carriage that goes from one door to another in a long vertical corridor. It doesn’t differ substantially from a horizontal corridor. The vertical building is one that is turned 90 degrees. A sense of proximity with neighbours is possible in this configuration, and all being in one single corridor provides a feeling of equality. But maybe vertically is not the best configuration then. The lift becomes an inconvenient means compared to simply walking to see a neighbour for example. Other considerations are at play: the ones explained in the previous and next chapters, and maybe additional benefits that verticality can bring to the community, such as wider park area (see the Unité d’habitation from Le Corbusier in Marseilles, a ‘vertical village’).

Escalators offer a compromise in a vertical place that doesn’t want to be. Take the huge Langham Place vertical shopping mall in Hong Kong. Its extensive use of escalators, some of the longest around, smoothes the visit that doesn’t need to be interrupted by lifts. The escalators make the place feel more like a horizontal one, more adapted to wandering and temptations.

Lift as a cable car – power in verticality

The lift is a cable car that makes it easy to climb distances sometimes higher than of mounts. Vertical buildings are inspired by human verticality. They allow an overview of a territory and its control. The higher you can see the more power you can exercise on the territory and its people. I’m not a big supporter of analogies between skyscrapers and the phallus; I think sexuality is the mirror of life and not the inverse. Human verticality and the desire of power are in my opinion better justification for vertical buildings.

At the difference of the mounts altitude that has been set once for all by nature, there are no limits for skyscrapers and engineering. You might think you are at the top, but you soon realise that it was only the top of one social group or class, and then new heights are being built every day. Higher standards for wealth and social status are being set, which paradoxically don’t increase the number of people who can see the uninterrupted horizon. In a funny argumentative twist, horizontal space becomes more valuable than vertical space: only matters the uninterrupted horizon you can see from your eyes, not what is below and above you.

I had the idea to incorporate video game elements in the next video after reading Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, and more specifically this quotation:

“A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there’s nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing.”

The video narrative also strangely reminds me the 80s animated series Cocoshaker by Jean-Charles Meunier, except that the next coconut palm is always higher!

“Elevation”

The Welcome to Finsbury Park project was co-organised with the Transition Finsbury Park association to engage the London N4 local communities with their neighbourhood. It consisted in a 2-month field investigation using videos and was concluded in March 2010 by a workshop and the co-creation of subjective maps (these two activities are documented in the following manuals). Here below is a review of the project and some conclusions, co-written by myself and James Thomson from the Transition Finsbury park association.

Transition Finsbury park, part of the Transition Towns Network, “intends to find ways of living that are based on localised food production, sustainable energy sources, lively local economies and an enlivened sense of community, rather than cheap and polluting oil”. The volunteer group is relatively new in the Finsbury Park area and was looking for new ways to engage with local communities. The Welcome to My Place project that was recently launched fit with that purpose and this is how we started to collaborate. We should also mention the great support we received from the Finsbury Park Homeless Families project, the Green Lens Studios and the Faith, Football and Falafel project.

The N4 area in London welcomes one of the most diverse set of communities in the UK: natives, Moroccans, Kurds, Somalis, Italians, artists, office workers, evangelists, Muslims, musicians and many more. Each of these communities has a different perception of what sustainability is about. Instead of hammering green vocabulary and precepts, the Transition Finsbury park association wanted to first listen to what local communities had to say about their direct environment. As they rightly pointed out, the idea of ‘sustainability’ is a pretty abstract concept – but growing vegetables in a garden speaks much more to people. The solution needs to start from them and be stated in their own words. Following the Welcome to My Place general concept, we asked people to film the places that matter to them in the N4 neighbourhood and to welcome the viewers to the places of their choice. We collected around 24 videos (visible here) that we used in a workshop held at Green Lens Studio’s. We screened the videos and draw subjective maps of the area as a way to reflect on the inhabitants’ perception of the neighbourhood.

Here are step-by-step manuals for those who would be interested in applying the same method in their area. From personal experience, this exercise gave us the opportunity to explore an urban area in a way we have never done before. Working with other people we discovered a rich and multi-layered environment which we might have struggled to imagine on our own. We would recommend anyone to take the time to go through a similar process in their vicinity.

Welcome to Finsbury Park: Review and Conclusions

By Christophe Bruchansky and James Thomson

1.     Meeting the people

It may be a nerve racking experience, but the best way to discover the places important that are important to people in the neighbourhood is to go up to them and ask them. It was not the most efficient method perhaps, in terms of the number of videos we collected, but it was the one that opened our perceptions up the most. We took a map of the N4 area and split it up into several parts for each volunteer to explore. Walking in the streets armed with leaflets, wondering who to get video contributions from – really forces you to look and explore what is around you and find out who your neighbours are.

To provide a perspective of the Finsbury Park area we have the Haringey artist community and the Florentina clothing village near Hermitage road, the Turkish restaurants on Green Lanes, the ubiquitous barber shops, the wealthy Crouch Hill streets, the Jewish community near the reservoirs, the mentally impaired centre, the schools, the churches, the Muslim community, the pubs, the Algerian café’s, library goers and so on. We tried to engage with these communities and discovered an area filled with different interests and preoccupations.

We contacted communities on the Internet too, where many forums focussing on the Finsbury Park area already exist: http://finsburypark.wordpress.com/, http://www.finsburyparkpeople.co.uk, http://www.stroudgreen.org. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Vimeo are other online hubs where we found people having an interest in the vicinity.

Using the local connections that the members of the Transition Finsbury Park association had already established turned out to be a very productive way of getting video contributions. We would like to point out however that even though most of the people we met didn’t participate in this specific project; meeting with them for the first time was one of the most valuable outcomes. Both in terms of shaping a more holistic perception of the area and in building new relationships, invaluable in the long term for different community groups hoping to work together in the future.

We have learnt how significant local community organisations can be to making projects like ours really happen.  If we wanted to convince individuals to participate, it was essential to first gain the support leaders in the community. Three of them responded enthusiastically to our call and greatly helped us throughout the project: The Finsbury Park Homeless Families project (see the Children chapter), the Faith, Football and Falafel project (see below) and Green Lens Studios (see the chapter on the mapping workshop).

When we presented our project to the North London Central Mosque, they directly thought of introducing us to the people from the Faith, Football and Falafel project; who had organized video workshops with members of the Muslim community to promote grass roots cultural dialogue. They are also behind the Vaudeville Court TV project, a socially engaged appropriation of the seemingly uncharacteristic Vaudeville Court building. The video below illustrates how much the representation of a place, and an entire neighbourhood, can be subverted and reshaped unexpectedly by its inhabitants, for example using Wi-Fi.

The same participants of the Faith, Football and Falafel project filmed cafés and restaurants in the Finsbury Park area. The videos give a true sense of the identity of these places. We were interested to hear that ‘cosmopolitan’ was included in at least two of the videos.

The N4 area is certainly cosmopolitan and highly transient in its population. Many people commute to and from The City during the week whilst at weekends a home game at the Emirates football stadium can completely change the areas dynamics. This makes the process of building a consistent identity quite a difficult one at least – but not impossible. One of us is also a ‘foreigner in transit’ and it’s quite rare to meet a person that was originally brought up in the borough.

In our interpretation the presence of this transient population has in many ways lead to a neighbourhood that is not as socially connected as it could be. In terms of identity, a number of local communities tend to stay in spaces where they can build their own references to identity. The area has its fair baggage of history though and we were fortunate to meet some of its story tellers. But there did seem to be a lack motivation or desire for staking claim to a piece of the areas identity. For an urban area loaded with identity and diversity, this attitude might not be such a bad thing for a population wanting to get on with business-as-usual in the short term. But it doesn’t help an association like Transition Finsbury Park to articulate a message based on the revalorisation of the locale. By motivating people to speak before the camera about place, there is a hope that a collective local identity can be galvanized in the near future.

2.     The many facets of Finsbury Park

In the middle of this non-negotiated facet landscape, the iconic Finsbury Park seemed to catalyse the beginnings of our dialogue. Despite its rich history (see Wikipedia), Finsbury Park may appear to lack a particular identity, and be viewed as a place of pure recreational functionality, ‘a green place in the middle of the traffic’. On the other hand, this is also a place whose identity has been shaped by the people that inhabit it and the stories and relationships which have been built upon it.

Finsbury Park inspires common feelings associated with most inner city green places: old-fashioned, made to be enjoyed with friends and family.

Timely events are organised in the park, like the Kurdish New Year celebrations in the middle of March. As suggested in this related paper, the park could be treated as a “non-place” in order to allow these types of events the expressive freedom they require.

These events play an important role in the vicinity. They offer one of the rare opportunities for interaction between local communities, and for practical discussions that are necessary in the organisation of the events. It could be said however that in their willingness to pacify space, local authorities erase the need for local communities to enter into real dialogue, which prevents any negotiation of public space.

What seems like a completely natural feature of the park, its birds for example, are taken care of by a warden officer. It is people like Les Pope who has lived in the area for over 20 years – who could take a leading role in the identity building process from within the park. However – because the service he provides is maintained by the local council, his fountain of knowledge appears lost to the local population.

3.     Children using the parks and playgrounds

It was great to have the opportunity to work with children on this project thanks to the support of the staff at the Finsbury Park Homeless Families project and the Parkwood primary school. A thorough and detailed outlay of the workshop can be found in our video workshop manual.

Children are well known for their inspiring and often pertinent contributions and so we were half expecting them to show us new and original places in the N4 area. But when asking the children which were the most important places for them, they nearly all replied saying that it was the playground and the two nearby parks: Finsbury Park and Clissold Park. While longer sessions may have lead to more original locations, green open space seemed to be the most natural answer. So, we took them to the parks and the playgrounds. We filmed what they had to show us. Afterwards we invited them to draw their places and we added the drawings in the videos

Their choice to film playgrounds and parks seems characteristic of the relationship people have with the N4 area. Beyond the numerous coffee shops, restaurants, bars and religious centres – the rest of public space is apparently perceived as purely a place of transit. Children are generally not allowed to explore the streets on by themselves and are kept in dedicated recreational spaces. These places appear to become something of a micro-neighbourhood for them. We both wondered what the result might have been if we had facilitated the same workshop in a rural environment – where children are possibly freer to explore their surroundings.

That being said, the children we worked with managed to symbolically recompose the outside, with its legends, quests and stories (read Christophe’s research here on how narrative elements play an important role in that process). The youth we worked with seemed to do this very well given the obstacles that seemed to stand between them and their local environment.

This analysis is closely related to movements that advocate the re-appropriation of public space (see this video created by the think tank Demos for example).

4.     Workshop

At the end of our call for video contributions, we organised a workshop at the Green Lens Studios, a photographic studio and project space that aims to connect creativity and sustainability. At this workshop we screened all of the films to provide local perspective and context. We then asked the eleven participants, all somehow related to the local area, to draw a series of ‘subjective maps’ of their neighbourhood. This was fun.

We used a series of techniques to facilitate the exercise – including rolling a dice to determine whose turn it was to draw a piece of the map – explained in our subjective maps workshop manual. They worked pretty well, and just like the creating the videos, the most interesting element of the process were the conversation between the participants.

We noticed quite soon into the workshop that the blank piece of paper we had provided the participants was less a source of confrontation than we had expected it to be. Instead the exercise turned out to be more about discovery and sharing of ideas. Participants didn’t know one another, nor did they recognise many of the places discussed by each other. There were some landmarks which emerged with consistency however, such as parks, streets and churches, but each seeming to tell their own subjective stories by way of graphical interpretation. It seemed useful for participants to exchange these stories, either to discover aspects of the area they didn’t know, or to confirm perceptions of places they had never had the occasion to express in a group.

Map 1: Finsbury Park Area: 23/03/2010

The resulting subjective maps look more like a mythological tale than of a contested space. A strange sense of place quickly emerged, parks populated by mythological animals contrast local shops and supermarkets – identified by their staple consumer products. A mythology made of dark secrets such as the street of the second-hand phone accessories (Blackstock Road) and the needles that once littered Finsbury Park before it’s clean up in the 90s. Looking at these maps you get the feeling that a at least a couple decades have been etched into these creations, punctuated here and there by the closing down and reopening of buildings – new and old identities overlaid.

Likewise the visual representation of ‘smell’ came as something of a shock – thick charcoal smog emanating from the underground tube network fills the park, London’s body odour. Also worthy of note is the considerable influence memorable events, specific to the area, played upon the subjective landscapes illustrated. Like the time the police heavy-handedly invaded black stock road – for better or worse – shown in Map 2. The map making process equally demonstrated our ability to define things that aren’t physically tangible. For example, the appearance of mythological labyrinths beneath the Finsbury Park Lake – perhaps representing ‘escape routes’ or gateways out of the city towards the romantic English Countryside. And while these maps are evidently effective in recording historical truths – they also show themselves to be revealing in their predictions of how the future may look in the local area. Map 1 demonstrates this well – showing the agricultural cultivation of local parks for food, and inner-city wind turbines painted purple. A tree also protrudes out of the roof of the Vaudeville Court housing terrace.

It is surprising to say that in creating the maps there were almost no disagreements within the two groups, when they did occur they were more about the geographical location of places than their actual presence or representation. Without an i-phone or ordnance survey map to hand though, our local geography did seem to suffer a little bit however – but most participants were quick to let go of their preconceived notions of accuracy. In fact this seemed to enable them to become more focused on their personal, subjective experience of the vicinity, rather than the coordinates which have attempted to define their own neighbourhoods in recent years.

Map 1: Finsbury Park Area: 23/03/2010

5.     Conclusions

Catalysing neighbourhood dialogue has remained at the heart of this project from the start, from collaborating to produce the first videos of the N4 area through to the creation of subjective maps. Commuter lifestyle, constant flux of populations, and pacification of the area by local authorities all made community dialogue almost non relevant it would seem. Cohabitation remains peaceful and everyone seems contempt to make sense of their own private space the way they want. But much of public space appears in the shape of ‘non-place’ transit functionality, that even children can’t or don’t take the time to discover. While the area is filled with pockets of rich cultural identity – it took considerable effort to open some of these doors to the rest of the community. We have the local charities and volunteer organisations in Finsbury Park to thank for the solid ground work which enabled that to happen.

As very well explained on the website of the Transition Town Network, many of the global challenges that are likely to affect us all in the near future need to be resolved locally. If cultural corridors remain as closed as they are, future strains on local resources over the next decade (such as our dependence on cheap oil for food production) may lead to insurmountable challenges. Mapping activities certainly seem to provide the individual and group alike, a sense of empowerment towards achieving these types of goals – many of which are being promoted by local grassroots organisation like Transition Finsbury Park.

Having gained a better understanding of the London N4 area after two months working on this project, we believe that in order to encourage people to think locally – you have to promote the value and cultural identity of the places in the vicinity. Perhaps the videos, drawings and maps that have been produced here could for example be exhibited publicly as part of a local celebration already planned. But crucial to this happening, it must be stressed, are the social figureheads and story tellers we have met on the way.

Mobilisation around environmental sustainability from all corners of Finsbury Park will not happen all of a sudden. Cultural corridors need to be actively prised open in due course. Creativity, play and self-expression could be the catalysts at the heart of these efforts.

Here are step-by-step manuals documenting the workshops that have been organized as part of the Welcome to My Place activities. They are all free and under a Creative Commons License. Please check more details about the licenses inside each document.

These manuals can be used as:

1. Tools to better understand the identity of a place or an area (in the context of an ethnographic study for example).
2. Introductions to a collective urban planning effort (e.g. design charrette) or in combination with a community mapping exercise (see for example http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk).
3. Introductions to video making and subjective maps.

Welcome to My Place – video workshop manual: This manual is based on the workshops organised in February 2010 for the Transition Finsbury Park association, and on individual contributions to the Welcome to My Place project. Participants are invited to choose places that are important to them, optionally within a defined perimeter, and to welcome viewers in videos no more than one minute long. Read here a review of how it went for us.

Welcome to My Place – subjective maps workshop manual: This manual is based on the March 2010 workshop organised for the Transition Finsbury Park association. Participants are invited to draw subjective maps of their neighbourhood and to discuss the area. Read here a review of how it went.

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