S T R E E T Signs Spring 2009

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CUCR Occasional paper series

Brian W. ALLEYNE Personal Narrative and Activism: a bio-ethnography of "Life Experience with Britain"

Michael STONE Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Progress William (Lez)HENRY Projecting the 'Natural': Language and Citizenship in Outernational Culture

Mette ANDERSSON The Situated Politics of Recognition: Ethnic Minority, Youth and Indentity Work.

Colin KING Play the White Man:The Theatre of Racialised Performance in the Institutions of Soccer

Les BACK,Tim CRABBE, John SOLOMOS Lions, Black Skins and Reggae Gyals

Larry LOHMANN Ethnic Discrimination in "Global" Conservation

Andrew BARRY Motor ecology: the political chemistry of urban air

Ben LOOKER Exhibiting Imperial London: Empire and City in late Victorian and Edwardian guidebooks

Margarita ARAGON Brown Youth, Black Fashion and a White Riot, 2007

Zygmunt BAUMAN City of Fears, City of Hopes Vikki BELL Show and tell: passing, narrative and Tony Morrison's Jazz Eva BERGLUND Legacies of Empire and Spatial Divides: new and old challanges for Environmentalists in the UK Tine BLOM Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor:The Question of Evil, Suffering and Freedom of Will in Totalitarian Regimes Bridget BYRNE How English am I? Ben CARRINGTON Race,Representation and the Sporting Body Stephen DOBSON The Urban Pedagogy of Walter Benjamin: lessons for the 21st Century Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 Ben GIDLEY The proletarian other: Charles Booth and the politics of representation Paul GILROY The status of difference: from epidermalisation to nanopolitics

Centre For Urban and Commun i t y R e s e a rc h Phone: +44 (0) 20 7919 7390 Goldsmiths College University of London New Cross London SE146NW

S t r e e t

Centre for Urban and Community Research

Hiroki OGASAWARA Performing Sectarianism:Terror, Spectacle and Urban Myth in Glasgow Football Cultures Garry ROBSON Class, criminality and embodied consciousness: Charlie Richardson and a South East London Habitus Flemming RØGILDS Charlie Nielsen's Journey:Wandering through Multicultural Landscapes Fran TONKISS The 'marketisation' of urban government: private finance and urban policy Danielle TURNEY The language of anti-racism in social work: towards a deconstructuve reading Gordon WALKER and Karen BICKERSTAFF Polluting the poor: an emerging environmental justice agenda for the UK? Louisa THOMSON The Respect Drive: the Politics of Young People and Community please refer to www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr for downloads and further information.

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7383 Email: [email protected] .uk Website: www.gold.ac .uk www.goldsmiths.ac .uk/cucr

S i g n s

Spring 2009

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MA IN CULTURE, GLOBALISATION AND THE CITY The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) The Urban Globe?

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION by Caroline Knowles The Political economy of the monument by Aida Sánchez Religion in Inner City Oslo by Mette Andersson Kettering Road by Sayed Hasan Sueno de despierto en un mundo que se desvanece... by Karla Berrens Open-Up photogrpahic project by Gonzalo Osmos Borderlands by Caroline Knowles and Sylvia Meichsner Romans,Trains and Star Trek by Michael Edema Leary Street Photography and Social Research: Brick Lane Re-Visited by Charlotte Bates, Adrian Harris, Isaac Marrero Guillamon, Jo Sanderson-Mann, Craig Owen, Lisa Mckenzie and Sireita Mullings-Lawrence Why is it so easy to place art and regeneration in the same sentence by Sophie Risner In hiding, on display by Helena Holgersson Home Sweet Home (Not) by Emma Jackson Tourism, Inbetweeness and Teotihuacán by Jeremy Clouser What is British? by Michael Wayne Plant Environment: urbanisation and biodiversity by Peter Coles Work/Space: a visual exploration by Yael Gerson Ugalde Strandline: beachcombing on the Greenwich Peninsula by Melissa Bliss Balkanising Taxonomy by Nela Milic Signs of the City by Alison Rooke Signs of the City: Photogrpahic Workshop by Campbellworks Landmarks of cut, gaze and fiction for a Distant Landscape by Soledad Garcia on the photographs of Sanchiyo Nishimura The Invisible man,The Invisible City Exhibition by Kimberly Keith

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REVIEWS The Politics of Hope by Will Davis Too Far South Exhibition review by Paul Halliday Seeing the Invisible Noir: Dirty Pretty Things by Michael Edema Leary Vital Signs conference by Alex Rhys-Taylor and Charlotte Bates This Is Not A Gateway Festival (TINAG) by David Kendall Urban Edge Workshops at CUCR

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edited by

Caroline Knowles Emma Jackson Britt Hatzius Ben Gidley

photograph on front cover by Britt Hatzius

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Our world is moving from being a global village to an urban globe. One of the big challenges of the 21st Century is how to understand the social organisation of contemporary urban life. The MA in Culture, Globalisation and the City gives you the theoretical and practical tools to make sense of cities like London, Los Angeles, Nairobi or Tokyo. The course examines a range of issues from the economics of the global city to the politics of graffiti writing. These include analysing Urban Youth Cultures, Literary and Political Milieux, the Political Economy of the City, Science and the Technology of Urban Life, Urban

Multiculture, Hybridity and Racism and the Spatial Politics of Gender and Sexuality. A multi-disciplinary approach is applied that draws on Sociology, Cultural Geography, Cultural Studies, Politics and Social Policy. The MA is dedicated to turning students into active researchers, critics and writers. The programme consists of 3 core courses, dissertation and a choice of options. It can be followed either full-time or part-time. ESRC funding for one UK resident is currently under review and may not be available next year. Next available entry point: October 2009.

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The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) Introducing the MA Structure The MA in Photography and Urban Cultures has been developed in response to the increasing interests in urban theory and the visual representation and investigation of urban life and the physical environments of the city.

A combination of written and practical work to include a research dissertation and a portfolio of photographs and final exhibition. It can be followed either full-time or parttime. Next available entry point: October 2009.

Who is it for?

The MA is run by the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), a national and international leader in research on urban and community life. CUCR is multidisciplinary and focuses on issues such as citizenship and cosmopolitanism; social exclusion and cultures of racism; sport, popular culture and music; regeneration and wealth creation; issues of crime and community safety; technology and new patterns of digital culture.

Photographers, visual artists and media practitioners, as well as those with a background in social sciences, interested in exploring the creative interplay between cultural research, urban studies and photographic practice. You should have a degree or equivalent in a relevant area.

MPhil / PhD in Visual Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London Our programme offers you the opportunity to combine written sociological argument with film, sound, or photographic material.We provide researchers the space in which to re-think both the conduct and form of contemporary social research, in a college environment animated by visual arts and design.The Visual Sociology programme builds on the success of our MA in Photography and Urban Cultures and contributes to Goldsmiths’ leading position internationally in visual research and analysis

media components of the thesis will form an integrated whole.The use of multimedia will enhance and evidence your analysis, interpretation and understanding of social phenomena.The written component of the thesis will engage with multi-media components and be set within a substantive research topic and its wider social context. Your practice will be supported by a programme of audiovisual training workshops as well as expert superision in your chosen area of resaerch.

You will carry out research in an area that interests you and prepare a written thesis in combination with a video, a soundpiece or a series of photographs.Written and multi-

To find out more, contact: Professor Caroline Knowles, [email protected] or Bridget Ward (secretary), [email protected]

Further information and how to apply: UK and EU students: Admissions Office, telephone 020 7919 7060 (direct line), fax 020 7717 2240 or e-mail [email protected]; Overseas (non EU) students: International Office, telephone 020 7919 7700 (direct line), fax 020 7919 7704 or e-mail [email protected]; For further information about the Centre: Please call 020 7919 7390; e-mail [email protected] or visit www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/

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Introduction

by Caroline Knowles, Professor of Sociology, Head of Centre, CUCR Like the rest of the country CUCR lives in interesting times. Established in 1994 it has had just one head of centre, Professor Michael Keith. Michael has just moved to Oxford to become head of the ESRC COMPASS Centre for the study of migration. Congratulations to Michael. We all wish you well in your new job. Michael's relentless energy and ideas have made the centre what it is today: a place of high quality urban scholarship with grassroots impact through local government, community and activist intervention. Michael is a passionate urbanist whose scholarship and enthusiasm for London, and more recently Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, rubs-off on those around him. Whether he is leading students along Brick Lane at 6am or showing them the view from Canary Wharf, his intellectual and political passion for East London is infectious. He set up the Rich Mix Centre in Shoreditch and for a time ran Tower Hamlets council, all the while teaching, supervising his PhD students and running the Centre. Few academics make such a difference in people's lives. He's a hard act to follow and we will miss him. CUCR has become a 'soft' research and specialist postgraduate teaching centre within the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths. Old autonomies offer new collaboration.There are new and exciting developments are underway at CUCR as well as a shift in focus. We are developing our research in the constitution and (dis)organisation of city life, the built and the social fabric of cities, with a stronger lean towards the cultural and the visual. Core intellectual concerns are: circulations of people and objects; non-cities; activist and other urban interventions from Deptford to Jakarta; communities, difference and social inequalities; and the relationship between art, activist intervention and urban theory. September saw the inauguration of the CUCR gallery when the first of a series of urban photography exhibitions was hung in the stairwell of Laurie Grove Baths. Santiago Escobar's Invisible Man: The Invisible City was curated by Kimberly Keith. Santiago is a Colombian architect and former soldier. He plays with scale to create new urban space.The result is a visual version of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Kimberly is a talented curator as well as a CUCRbased PhD student. We plan to further capitalise on the wealth of photographic talent drawn by our MA in Photography and Urban Culture by holding further exhibitions throughout 2009 and 2010. Drop in to Laurie Grove Baths if you are in the Deptford area. We hold 'coffee morning discussions' every other Monday at 10am. We are in the process of launching Urban Edge our new workshop series. This is aimed at urban scholars, photographers and filmmakers who want to develop new visual and other analytic skills and inventive methods of urban investigation. Current workshops include Peter Coles' Islands and Corridors: The Urban Biosphere (28th February and March 1st) and Santiago Escobar's One-to-

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Seventy-Two (23rd and 24th January 2009), see the website, booking essential and places are limited. Future workshops include collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery led by Alison Rooke The Art of Social Practice: a Dialogue and AbduMaliq Simone's Urban Intervention: Exploratory Work with Community Residents in Kinshasa and Jakarta. Further workshops will be announced throughout 2009 and 2010. We continue our collaboration with Deptford.TV, an online open source archive of collaborative film-making which documents urban change in Deptford, South London. This Autumn D.TV's Adnan Hadzi and CUCR's Ben Gidley worked with Goldsmiths MA Screen Documentary students to make three short films on the area's black history (featuring Les Back and Lez Henry). These were premiered in Deptford Town Hall as part of Black History Month, sponsored by CUCR with the Goldsmiths Media Department and the Centre for the study of Global Media and Democracy.They were followed by a screening of Small Fry Films' Shelf Life, a short film made by CUCR graduate Glen Mottishead and then a Talkaoke event hosted by The People Speak. We have a long-term commitment to developing research strategies for the arts to demonstrate their value in social regeneration. Our innovative arts/social science collaborative projects, such as the Sci-Dentity project, the Beyond The Numbers Game project and the Signs of the City project, using digital photography to allow young Europeans to engage with urbanism, are all part of this commitment.The Creative Impact project, developed by Ben Gidley and Alison Rooke in partnership with dance and music conservatoire Trinity Laban, focuses on the role of performing arts in urban regeneration. December 2008 saw the launch at Laban of our research report. The Creative Impact project has led to new collaboration with the London Thames Gateway Dance Partnership. Alison Rooke and Ben Gidley are also working with the Serpentine Gallery on the Skills Exchange project, looking at how artists can work with communities - in this case, older London residents. Artists involved in this project are Markus Miessen,Tom Hunter, Marcus Coates and Barby Asante. Following last year’s successful Urban Encounters Conference we are pleased to announce a second one day international conference, planned for mid June. This will involve collaboration between CUCR, Photofusion and Tate Britain. Again, watch the website for developments. Welcome to visiting scholars. Helena Holgersson is visiting from the University of Gothenburg, Carle Andre Espeland from the University of Bergen, Aida Sanchez de Serdio Martin from the University of Barcelona, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani from New York, Santiago Escobar from Colombia and, more locally, Simon Rowe who is developing new projects in the Deptford area and beyond. Finally, I would like to say how delighted I am to be CUCR's new director. Difficult times provide new challenge for us all and I look forward to our collective future and new areas of collaboration. Happy 2009!

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The political economy of the monument: history, memory, neutralisation Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín (Barcelona. Primavera Sound music festival. May, 2008) Grabbing my beer firmly, I stood for a while looking at the ground for clues. There should be a slab somewhere. People walked past me on their way to the next concert. I could hear as much French and English spoken as Spanish or Catalan around me. My visual field had a clear limit drawn by the areas covered by the floodlights. Beyond that, it was dark night. Stages and tents blocked other references within this lit area, and of course, there was the incessant flow of the multitude that eventually swept me away to the stage where Lightspeed Champion were playing the first notes. OK, I thought, maybe next year. * * * When Barcelona was elected in 1986 to host the Olympic Games of 1992 the local government had already realised that the city must turn to culture and tourism in order to survive the crisis of its productive economy (Balibrea, 2001). After the international staging of a city (and a country) completely modernised and democratic during the Olympics, Barcelona found itself in a complex situation within the marketing of global cities, since it didn't achieve any relevant position as a financial centre and the industrial economy was being dismantled at a pace. But it quickly managed to become one of the most popular destinations for tourism through the refurbishment of the city centre; thanks to a heritage, cultural scene and life-style that the Olympics helped promote internationally. This cultural turn is a common dynamic in other European cities with a rich historical past (both cultural and industrial) that need to position themselves in the global market of urban identities in a post-industrial scenario (Balibrea 2004, Kwon 1997). In this immaterial economy of symbolic values, material pasts play a key role. The built environment becomes both a backdrop for urban life and an investment in terms of the tourist economy. But at the same time it must be considered an ideological battlefield in which opposing visions of meaning and history clash. As Balibrea (2007) says, “the built environment is a historical creature. […] The conditions for survival of all and every one of these built environments depend on their being considered productive in the present”. Whose memory gets to be preserved and whose doesn't? And at the service of who is it preserved? page 2

These are questions seldom asked, but very materially answered in every urban regeneration project. Thus the city as it appears in tourist guides is sprinkled with buildings by Gaudí (along with trendy clothes shops, and chic restaurants decorated with second hand or cutting edge design furniture). There is a politics of public memory materialised in urban space that selects which buildings deserve to be listed and promoted as heritage and which have fallen into ‘functional obsolescence’. The material past of the bourgeoisie is easily preserved in the form of internationally well-known Art Nouveau buildings such as La Pedrera, La Sagrada Familia or the Casa Batlló. But the working classes find it more difficult to make their way into the lists of heritage. Not only do their ‘monuments’ fall out of the city centre and of tourist tours, but they are also more likely to be diagnosed as obsolete, and so they are erased unless transformed into sanitised receptacles for culture or archaeological props emptied of history and conflict (Balibrea 2001, Delgado 2007).

This selective memory is not a malfunction of the ‘proper’ way memory should work. Rather the opposite. In order for a place of memory to exist, there needs to be a massive production of oblivion. Delgado pairs both terms arguing that they are inseparable: “Memory is also a colossal forgetting machine, an extraordinary amnesic device that erases all the elements that could be considered superfluous, dysfunctional or contradictory in relation to the given

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ideological goals” (2007: 123). Moreover, the production of a common narrative in terms of historical memory is a totalising device whereby public memory is domesticised and unified, neutralising the conflict inherent in all historical processes. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of memorialisation of public space is the monument.This is also a profoundly ambivalent political object. In the context of a country that lived under a dictatorship for almost 40 years (1939-1975), and in which the revision of the democratic transition and issues of historical memory are right now the centre of a heated political and legal debate, monuments are just the tip of the iceberg - but a very significant tip indeed. After years of silencing certain groups and fights, a new impulse for their being written back into history has come from political, cultural and academic fronts. Monuments then mean the possibility of making publicly visible and acknowledging a sometimes haunting past. Citizens might now have the opportunity to get to know and celebrate (or meditate on) events and people that were erased or forgotten in history, for social or political reasons. But at the same time the monument freezes and unifies memory. Citing Delgado again: “Rather than something that remembers the past, the monument is something that allows us to cancel it, deny it, annihilate it. [...] The monument is neither synchronic nor diachronic, but purely anachronic, as it represents a-historicity itself” (Ibid: 94). What's more, the erecting of monuments usually goes along with the disappearance of the actual object of the monument itself. One specific area of Barcelona where these processes are notorious is El Poble Nou. Situated in the southeast of the city, it has a long history as a working-class neighbourhood in which numerous fights took place during the 19th and 20th centuries. From the late 1980's it has undergone a profound social, urban and economic transformation that hasn't always been respectful of the memory of the place nor, perhaps more importantly, its present inhabitants (Gdaniec 2000, Marrero 2003). Two examples of monumentalisation emerge in this context. The first one is related to the industrial heritage of the area. Can Ricart was a 19th century industrial complex still in use in which some small industrial businesses and arts organisations co-existed. By 2004 Can Ricart was facing a dramatic transformation or even total demolition due to the implementation of the Plan 22@, whose aim is the transformation or relocation of industries working in

the area to give way to new ‘clean’ cultural and technological industries. This opened a wide debate as to what was to be done with the industrial buildings. A diverse group of agents had different visions about its future: owners of small industries who were forced to move, their employees, neighbours, artists, academics, architects and cultural activists had irreducible differences among themselves. The variety of nuances of this discussion was great but, for the sake of a synthesis, two of them may be seen as fundamental: on the one hand there was a defence of the actual diversity of uses (both industrial and cultural), and on the other the argument was for the preservation of the building as an example of working-class heritage. For a moment there was even talk about the possibility of its being transformed into a museum of labour - a turn of the events, which given the circumstances, couldn't have been more ironic. Now Can Ricart is an enormous ruin and in the future will probably host a museum of languages.

The second example of monumentalisation is connected with the memory of the Civil War and immediate post-war period. The Forum Park that was built for that invention called Universal Forum of Cultures 2004 stands just over the waste ground known as Camp de la Bota where 1,704 political prisoners or detainees were shot between 1939 and 1952 as a result of the Francoist repression. The urban transformation of the site for the Forum started without any consideration of this fact, and some civic pressure was necessary in order to get the spot marked by a monument remembering those murdered in that place. It remains to be seen whether this was the best way of honouring their memory in the middle of an area used mainly for cultural events, fairs and festivals. More critical ways of confronting this historic event have been attempted by page 3

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the arts field by constructing an ongoing public archive of those murdered, and reactivating the memory of their living relatives by bringing them to talk about their experience of political repression. * * * (Barcelona. Forum Park. August, 2008) I had already walked around the Forum Building twice and still couldn't figure out where it could be. This time the sunlight flattened everything into a blinding pale yellowish grey, except for the Forum Building, which outstood as blue, incongruous and nonnegotiable as ever. I ventured a little farther, beyond the place where the fences had enclosed and signalled the limit of the Primavera Sound Festival last spring. This was terra incognita. Nothing other than concerts had ever drawn me to this bleak park. On a Sunday morning it was deserted but for a few families with children scattered in the playground or having lunch sitting on the concrete benches. I spotted the unmistakable sign: a bronze monolith standing in the middle of the cement surface. I walked towards it with my camera ready. I took a couple of pictures that showed the whole monument. I got closer. A little girl rode her bicycle over a flat lump on the ground next to the monolith. That must be it. I reached the base and looked down: the bronze plaque read in Catalan: To all the people who were shot in this place, and to all the victims of the Civil War and the post-war period (1936-1952): Let the joy be resumed in my years without erasing any scar of my soul. Oh Father of the night, the sea and the silence, I want peace but I do not want oblivion. (Màrius Torres, 1942) Camp de la Bota, 1992 I took the pictures I needed for the lecture and walked away thinking about the subtle readjustments of history operated by monument inscriptions: a little imprecision as to the number of the dead, a little generalisation of the object, a little poetisation of the event - plus a huge tombstone of concrete and a deserted park around it. But maybe general neglect is better than being an object of a new tourist-bus route on post-war nostalgia.

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References: Balibrea, Mari Paz (2001) Urbanism, Culture and the Postindustrial City: Challenging the 'Barcelona Model'. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. 2:2 (p.187-210.) Balibrea, Mari Paz (2004) Barcelona: del modelo a la marca. Desacuerdos. Sobre arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado Español [Online] http://www.arteleku.net/desacuerdos/index.jsp?PAR=p&ID=1193

Balibrea, Mari Paz (2007) Strategies of Remembrance: Branding the new Barcelona.Tourisic urbanism - Between local and global. Holcim Forum For Sustainable Construction. (p. 1-10)

Delgado, Manuel (2007) La ciudad mentirosa. Fraude y miseria del “modelo Barcelona”. Madrid: Los libros de la catarata. Gdaniec, Cordula (2000) Cultural industries, Information Technology and the Regeneration of Post-industrial Urban Landscapes. Poblenou in Barcelona - A virtual city? GeoJournal, nº 50 (p. 378-387) Kwon, Miwon (1997) Public Art and Urban Identities. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policy [Online]

Marrero, Isaac (2003) ¿Del Manchester catalán al Soho barcelonés? La renovación del barrio del Poblenou en Barcelona y la cuestión de la vivienda. Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales. Vol. VII, núm. 146(137), Universidad de Barcelona. [Online]

Marrero, Isaac (2008) Fragmentos de una fábrica en desmontaje.Terciarización, lucha social y patrimonio en Can Ricart, Barcelona. PhD dissertation. University of Barcelona. Marrero, Isaac; Guillermo Beluzo and Roberto Garcia (2007) Fragmentos de una fábrica en desmontaje (DVD).

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Religion in Inner City Oslo Mette Anderson The Norwegian team in the NORFACE-funded project The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission have interviewed young Muslims, Christians and nonbelievers in the Grønland area of Oslo about their relationship to faith. Grønland is located in inner-city Oslo East. From the mid 1800s the area was central in the industrialisation of the city, being an entrance port to Oslo for new workers from the countryside. From the late 1960s the area has been an entrance port for immigrants and refugees to Oslo and to Norway. Grønland is located close to the main railway station in Oslo, a hot spot for traffic as well as for drug dealing. For this, and for other reasons, the area has for long been rumoured to be a ‘dangerous place’.The area also houses the Oslo police headquarters and a large prison. Until the mid 1990s when gentrification increasingly took hold, Grønland was (in line with its history from the 1800s) one of the cheapest places to live in central Oslo, and therefore attractive to immigrants and refugees. Today, the area is commonly seen as the multiethnic area of central Oslo, located as it is close to the central railway station and the main street in the city centre. 44% of the inhabitants are first or second generation immigrants, and white Norwegian children are a small minority group in most primary schools. Earlier, names like ‘little Karachi’ and ‘little Pakistan’ were frequently used to identify the area. Whereas Pakistanis tended to dominate until recently, Somalis are now the dominant group. The criminal image of the area has increasingly been associated with immigration, and a central association is ethnic minority drug import and ‘immigrant youth gangs’.The last, and the most relevant association in regard to our project, relates to religion, and especially to the visibility of religion in the area.

Islamic Cultural Centre

World Islamic Mission, Central Jam-e Mosque

Visible religion Grønland is the place for purpose-built mosques in Norway: Among many mosques in warehouses and ordinary buildings, the area houses three purpose-built mosques: One from the 1990s, one from 2006 and one about to be opened in December 2008. World Islamic Mission, Central Jamaat-E-Ahl-E-Sunnat Mosque

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Other signs of Muslim presence in the area are Muslim clothing in the streets, halal-signs in restaurants and shops, and a newly built shopping centre, owned by one of Oslo's white building-moguls. The shopping centre is called Grønland Bazar and is built in traditional Arabic architectural style. Although most Pakistanis nowadays have moved out of Grønland to eastern suburbs, Pakistanis are dominant in the boards of the purpose-built mosques in the area. Two of these are associated with the Pakistani Barelwi-tradition, and one with the Deobandi tradition. In Norway religious organisations are supported by the Norwegian state according to the number of members, creating a situation of competition for new members. In a religion not associated with formal membership, the state support per member system makes mosques (as well as other religious congregations) creative when it comes to member recruitment. In one of the Oslo mosques, for example, free funeral services seemed to be a means to attract potential members to this Mosque. Another interesting finding is how the mosques lived up to the Norwegian State requirement that religious organisations should be open to everyone, and not restricted to particular ethnic groups. In the largest Oslo Mosque, the Central Jamaat-E-Ahl-E-Sunnat, which also is the biggest mosque in Scandinavia, ornaments, carpets and furniture was collected from most Islamic corecountries in the world. Thus, the architecture of this mosque - apart from referring to the globality of the Islamic Ummah - also reflects the Norwegian policy to include everyone in civil society organisations, including religious ones. Grønland also houses two Protestant churches, one Catholic church and several smaller congregations related to Pentacostalism and evangelism. The main Protestant church is rather large and visible in the main street of the area, while the Catholic Church is smaller and located away from the main street. When our informants (aged 18-25) are shown images of the Protestant church, many associate it with times passed, elderly church-goers, and with loneliness. Such images come up among Muslims and non-believers, as well as among some Christians. Interviews with clerics from this church confirm this finding, pointing to few church-goers in ordinary services and to the need to create special services in order to attract the young. page 6

The image of the Catholic Church is less well known by the majority of informants. Among Catholic informants the church was associated with many people, with (too) few ornaments (as compared to another Catholic church in Oslo) and with people of many different ethnic origins. In Oslo, Poles are now the major churchgoing group, but Vietnamese, Singhalese, Tamil and people with Latin and South American backgrounds are also among the major users. On Sundays the church arranges several services in different languages. Thus, whereas both Catholic churches and Mosques are associated with liveliness and crowds, Protestant churches are, especially among Muslims and the nonreligious, associated with loneliness and few members.

Religious change and transmission Although a large majority of Norwegians are members of the Protestant state church, Norway is among the most secularised countries in Europe. Only 5,5% of the population go regularly to church, and the country hosts a large member-based Humanist association offering alternative ceremonies for baptising (nameday), confirmation and funerals. The young nonbelievers in our sample give valuable information about the image of different religions in the large non-believer segment of the Norwegian population. A dominant image in this group is that faith had gradually vanished with their grandparents' generation, and that their own parents largely held secular values. This informant group (most of them with relatively high cultural capital) seem to be more generously attuned to religion when the religion in question is a minority religion in Norway. Their attitudes towards mainstream Protestantism thus, are typically more negative than their attitudes toward Islam and Catholicism. In spite of their criticism of practises often associated with Islam, such as forced marriages and female circumscription, they hold nuanced views of the relationship between patriarchy, culture and religion, and are trained in avoiding easy, essentialist, interpretations of Islam. The interviews with Muslims and Christians reflect a trend noted in other literature about religious change, namely an increasing tendency for young people to switch prayer house and religious communities. Among the young Muslims, quite a few argue that they go to

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the Mosque their friends go to, and some of our Christian informants have been members of many different congregations in the course of the last few years. For many in this group, moving into Oslo was a major point of change when it came to congregational switching. A second trend in the Oslo material is the tendency for some young Christians and Muslims to see each other as in a common situation vis-à-vis secular society. Such a trend is facilitated and upheld by the various interfaith group initiatives developed in Norway, and specifically in this area. Other findings from these interviews is that some second generation Muslims see Islam's position as having moved from ‘Islam in Norway’ towards ‘Norwegian Islam’.They are concerned with providing good Norwegian Muslim role models who could appeal to youth in their own generation. In regard to religious transmission both informant groups reveal that their parents have been most important in teaching them about religion. Most are brought up in religious families and have learnt about faith and religion from childhood onwards. In some cases faith was revitalized as a consequence of serious illness and death in close family. For young Muslims the ideal of being a ‘practising Muslim’ following the five pillars of Islam is strong. We find some evidence of a complex relation between ethnicity and religion in the area in spite of everyone's insistence that “our mosque is open to everyone”.There are also tendencies to an individualised approach to Islam where a personal faith relationship between believer and God prevails. Whereas the young Muslims seem confident in their faith and in their identity as Muslims, several young Christians seem more reluctant to show off their religious identity in public space. In a secular society like Norway, the chance to being exposed as a ‘personal Christian’ is a potential risk in interaction with others outside of religious arenas. For the Muslims, however, religious identity is not associated with risk in the same sense. They are concerned with not being seeing as terrorists or Islamists, and are aware that their religious identity seems to be ‘read off’ their non-whiteness in inter-ethnic as well as intraethnic interaction. Used to being seen as Others, ‘immigrants, ‘Pakistanis’ or ‘Somalis’, their religious identity seem to be associated with a positive

difference that for many carries a responsibility to be good role models of Norwegian Islam. One of our informants, a young woman raised in a small place in Southern Norway by Pakistani parents, tells of her ‘journey through herself’ as she moves through Oslo. Walking through the main street from the Royal Castle towards the Central Railway Station she feels completely Norwegian. Passing the Railway station and entering the area of Grønland she feels her Pakistani and Muslim identity. To her, and to other informants, Grønland has a specific standing as the ethnic and religious minority symbolic space in Norway. This symbolic space is to some associated with the increased status of Islam in Norway.To others, it brings associations to violence and criminality and the need to bring young people back to religion. And to a third group, most notably white secular Norwegians with leftist sympathies, Grønland is seen as an interesting place where religion and urban multiculture meets a traditional working class culture creating a vibrant glocal space.

The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission research project was conducted in three different cities: London (Finsbury Park), Hamburg (St.Georg) and Oslo (Grønland) by three different teams: CUCR, Goldsmiths University (Dr. Roger Hewitt, Dr. Caroline Knowles,Vicky Skitftou, Britt Hatzius); Institute for Comparative and Multicultural Studies, University of Hamburg (Prof. Ingrid Gogolin, Ben Hintze, Johannes Bucher; IMER, University of Bergen (Dr. Mette Andersson, Anders Vassenden). For further information please refer to: www.relemerge.org/project_02

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Kettering Road Sayed Hasan Kettering Road means something to me because I've worked there for several years. I have become part of a cast of everyday characters who perform their daily routines in and around the street: continuously shifting between states of voyeurism and participation. My gaze is camouflaged by my everyday disguise enabling me to watch the world undisturbed in a state of reverie, while simultaneously plotting multiple courses of action needed to navigate corporeal space. I can tell you that the post man will pull up in his van at one o' clock with a cigarillo in his mouth. In the afternoon Saff the dog will run up and down the opposing green, chasing after a ball her owner hurls from a red catapult. When I buy a paper or bottle of water from the news agents I slowly exit the shop allowing room for the usual small talk, on weather or trade. On the street I recognise a passer by, we smile, say hello, shake hands. A car beeps as it goes past. I react with an outstretched arm, sometimes the wrong person waves, but absorbs the error in their stride. Time and circumstance has allowed me to identify certain patterns in human activity along Kettering Road, but the unpredictability of everyday life is another aspect that characterises the street. The unfamiliar takes different forms, in the shape of unknown stranger/s, to aleatory situations that reveal unexpected qualities in the people you presume to know. The Kettering Road I belong to skips to the transient beat of human traffic, which moves in all directions. Repetitious cycles of daily, weekly , monthly activity, one way journeys; it all seem ephemeral as time dissipates the illusion of permanence. Carrying my camera and background on to Kettering Road, I pitched up a make shift street studio and waited for people to walk by. ”Can I take your photo?” was the usual and most direct approach. Some people stopped, others chose to walk on. A photographic interpretation of life on Kettering Road was always going to be limited, the absence and inclusivity of the portraiture reflects the imperfection of my everyday experiences. The Kettering Road Project was funded by Arts Council England.

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Wendy

Mathew

Courtney

Adriana and girls

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SUEÑO DESPIERTO EN UN MUNDO QUE SE DESVANECE… Karla Berrens Lost in the city, looking for inspiration... trying to escape from the surrounding blocks, tall uniform block... making my life a grey reality, same grey as the buildings walls... The words get lost in the labyrinth buildings create. Cosmopolitan cities seem to forget that some of their inner architectural characteristics are not thought to eliminate ghettoisation. In London there are massive constructions of council estates that give birth to a sub-city. The latter have their own rules, their social structure, their own business organisation and development. These architectures create ghettos of people, maybe oppressed, maybe trapped. Often regarded as 'pariahs', never classified as such. their feeling in the city is more than complex. Nevertheless those constructions are frequently a creative nest of alternative ways of expressing this felt disregard, this alienation.

Hip-hop has, for a long time already, been putting rhythm to the daily routine of some of the people living in those conurbations. Noglobal hip-hop songs talk about feeling trapped in a world that is unreal, created in between fiction happiness and freedom and an asphalt hard reality. Their songs reflect upon the struggle of the working class and the conflict between the urban landscape and property speculation. They talk about their city, Madrid, but also about many other cities such as L.A., London, and Tijuana where they find patterns of labyrinth, block constructions where it seems as if people were left to their own fate, from the hoodies to the concert halls, their hip-hop gives a strong and informed insight to some areas of the city that remains unknown to most.Through their songs they depict their reality, finding familiar areas in Madrid, but also in unknown cities as they have a strange sensation of recognition of the articulation of certain areas, hip-hop might be disregarded by some but it provides its listener with a surprising analysis of the urban landscape.

www.myspace.com/noglobalmc

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Open-Up photographic project Gonzalo Osmos I engage in acts of dérive and detourments following in the fashion of the French Situationist International. I engage in performances of situations by engaging l´étranger of the periphery to participate in my photographic project. Open Up is characterized by the encounter, interplay and co-presence of both the photographer and the sitter. In other words, one can argue that my portraits stand as documents or ‘proof’ of my empathic performance as a photographer and inter-subjective encounters with strangers. For example, the strangers I am encountering do not have time to verify the integrity and honesty of my photographic project.Thus, my credibility mainly relies on my own performance, expressive repertoire, and my capacity to establish empathy with people in a short period of time. Erving Goffman referenced this progression from disbelief to - belief. From the initial cynicism towards the capacity to establish trust. Thus securing an adequate level of rapport is important in a short span is crucial. Gestures of spontaneity in my own performance with

people, help to 'open up' and reveal some facts and ‘something true’ about their inner-self (e.g. what is the happiest memory of your life?). For instance, the openness of Johnny is articulated when he states that the happiest memory of his life was when he won the first amateur boxing. Or the drama student - Lincoln when he states that he found out that Jesus is alive and that he loves him or for liberal physicist Andreas when he realised that there is no god. My photographic project aims to reveal the ephemeral private identities of the stranger, the complex textures of social distinctions of travellers in a public place. I would like to think that my portraits capture the dualist essential inner quality of the subject against their objective living body. I see my project as an effort towards capturing matter (flesh and bones) and spirit (feelings and mind). To paraphrase the photographer Robert Frank, I just want to capture the strange humanity of the moment. www.olmosphoto.com

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Borderlands Caroline Knowles and Sylvia Meichsner

Borderlands, the strips of territory where nation states intersect, are often side-lined in urban studies in favour of more stylish cities with signature buildings designed by leading architects like Dubai, Shanghai and Barcelona. And yet borderlands are crucial corridors of activity, reflecting and composing life on both sides and providing information about how the world is organised. Disjunctions between states are sometimes radical and sometimes less obvious. The border between Zimbabwe and Botswana, for example, is hard to distinguish. It is not heavily fortified and at a cursory glance the scenery looks the same on both sides. Botswana looks prosperous; Zimbabwe is visibly ground into the dirt. In places the border is simply marked by increased movement, as refugees pour out of Zimbabwe. Other borderlands generate more social and political tension. Compare the US-Canada border, for example, to the US-Mexico border. The US approach to its affluent Northern neighbour is more

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relaxed, even post 9-11, than to its poorer neighbour to the South. The US-Mexico border is almost 2,000 miles long. It stretches from the Pacific border town of Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico. Between 1950 and 1980 it was one of the fastest growing urban areas on the continent. It is now a 'border metropolis' supporting ten million US and Mexican citizens for whom it is a sphere of daily urban/non-urban interaction (Herzog, 1990). A mix of cities and non-city spaces, towns and open country, the US-Mexico borderland is composed in the activities and things that circulate it; circuits of goods and people, shifted in particular geopolitical circumstances. The borderland is literally fabricated in these activities: trodden by the feet and tyre marks of those who pass back and forth across the border with their bundles; by the haulage trucks loaded with goods that straddle it from the special manufacturing zones under the regulatory gaze of NAFTA.

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This particular borderland is more than a place of intersection between neighbouring nation states. It is a global fault-line between North and South.This border sustains a $26,000 gap in GDP - $30,000 in the US and $4,000 in Mexico. Perhaps one of the biggest income differentials of any border, it acts like a magnet drawing Mexicans and other Central Americans from places like El Salvador who see Mexico as a bridge to a new life in the US. This differential between incomes and the lifestyles they support generates the activities of this borderland between worlds. The US-Mexico borderland is a staging post in the circularities of North South migration.There are guest houses, provisions stores, brothels, orphanages and 'travel guides' who generate and navigate a shifting matrix of routes North: at a price. Each year between 4000,000 and one million undocumented Mexican migrants slip over the border. In 2005 alone 1.2 million were apprehended by the US border patrol, which estimates that it catches perhaps one in five would-be migrants en-route to a new life in the US (1). Migrants are successful in crossing the border: six to twelve million undocumented migrants live in the US, the majority of them Mexican (2). At night fall Mexicans can be seen running for the border, carrying only water bottles and toothbrushes, in places where security is considered weaker than others. In 2007 alone 383 people died trying to migrate to the US: mostly they died of thirst or hypothermia as well as more lethal applications of US border security (3). But still Mexicans make it to the other side on trains, in the trunks of cars and trucks, through tunnels, over walls and on foot. The US response is a new geography of national defences that adds a layer of activity to the borderland. These involve checkpoints and barriers, strengthened border patrols, night vision goggles, land cruisers, foot patrols, motion sensors, stadium lighting. Would be migrants caught by the authorities are digitally photographed and finger printed. Where state action weakens local vigilantes organise their own patrols: a militarization of citizenship. Texas and California now have 80 miles of federally enforced barriers and fences at strategic points along the border. Operation Gatekeeper sealed the border around San Diego with 14 miles of fencing and stadium lighting. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee proposed two parallel steel and wire fences from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific coast. It would cost $2 billion to fence the entire border in concrete (4). This militarization of borderlands resonates with other spheres of US global influence in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the hidden processes in which US agents observe, and

maybe even direct, torture in Saudi, Moroccan and Syrian prisons: all (flexible) extensions of US borders. The US-Mexico border is less well fortified than the wall separating Israel and Palestine; but only just. Technologies of separation are ever-evolving. Migrant response to this militarised matrix of control is inventive. Since 9-11 forty tunnels have been discovered in the San Diego-Tijuana area alone. Some were as much as half a mile long and sixty to eight feet deep. There are tunnels with concrete floors that are wired with electricity: testament to an 'impossible politics of separation’ (Weizman, 2007), ingenuity and enterprise. ‘Migration is a huge business.The same countries that expel are also accomplices in the network of human trafficking. It is the human trafficking network that becomes rich particularly in the expelling countries; they become rich at the cost of crossing people. They are so corrupt the migration officers, the army, the bodies of security….It is a network of complicities that take advantage of the situation….Its terrible what they charge them, four thousand dollars, three thousand dollars for crossing them. So if they cross fifty within one month you can imagine how much…And there are very good traffickers who tell the person “You give me five thousand dollars and you'll be in the states tomorrow” and so it is. [Anonymous View from the South: an employee in a religious orphanage near Tijuana]. Borderlands, particularly this one, are densely rich sites for urban exploration. What kinds of security and defence are practiced? Who crosses them and on what terms? By what means do they cross? What risks are taken? What rewards are possible? What circumstances generate their circulation back and forth? What forms of business do borderlands sustain? What forms of architecture are possible? What kinds of urban planning and regulation? And whom do they serve? References: Herzog, Lawrence A. (1990) Where North Meets South. City Space and Politics on the US-Mexico Border, University of Texas Press. Weizman, Eyal (2007) Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation, London :Verso p144,161 (1) Global Security.Org 'Homeland Security' 2008 'The Great Wall of Mexico' (2) Time.Com 'Special Report 'The New Frontier' Terry McCartney 'The Coyote's Game' Narco, Arizona. (3) Time.Com 'Special Report 'The New Frontier' Terry McCartney 'The Coyote's Game' Narco, Arizona (4) Global Security.Org 'Homeland Security' 2008 'The Great Wall of Mexico'.This website is linked with the Israel Security Fence.

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Romans, Trains and Star Trek: Contesting the Production of Castlefield Space Michael Edema Leary “There should be no cause for surprise when a spacerelated issue spurs collaboration (often denounced on that basis by party politicians) between very different kinds of people, between those who 'react'… and 'liberals' or 'radicals'… Such coalitions around some particular counter-project or counter plan, promoting a counter-space in opposition to the one embedded in the strategies of power, occur all over the world…” (Lefebvre 1991: 380) A public inquiry into a proposal by Peel Holdings (owner of the Trafford Centre and the Manchester Ship Canal) for a 117 unit apartment complex at Jackson's Wharf in the Castlefield conservation area was held in November 2008.Thousands of Mancunians oppose the plans as do several local councillors and web campaigns such as the one by Pride of Manchester. Given Manchester's reputation as an iconic entrepreneurial city (Leary 2008) it is no surprise that this was the first scheme in the city centre to be rejected by the council's planners in 5 years. The scheme by Manchester architect Ian Simpson, of Urbis fame, has been dubbed by Manchester wags the Star Trek development because of its futuristic design (Linton 2008). The outcome is awaited eagerly. In 1999 Castlefield was placed on the UK's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Castlefield is the site of a Roman fort dating from 79AD. Castlefield is the area in Manchester, the world's first modern industrial city, where the industrial revolution started. It was here that Britain's first true canal terminated: the Bridgewater canal opened in 1763, bringing coal from the 3rd Duke's mines in Worsley to the burgeoning cotton mills of Ancoats and Chorlton-onMedlock, an area castigated for its degrading squalor by Engels in his 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England. The world's first intercity passenger railway followed in 1830 locating its terminus at Liverpool Road Station in Castlefield. Having carried out PhD research focused on Castlefield for the last four years it is evident that the contestation of space regarding the Jackson Wharf housing proposal is similar to that which happened in the 1970s when the city council wanted to redevelop Castlefield for housing and in the 1980/90s when the Central Manchester Development Corporation wanted to do the same.

1980s Roman Gate - inventing heritage

Barge and the Viaduct - Canal heritage and leisure

The Rocket Simulacrum Symbol of 1980s Heritage Dominance

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In the 1970 and 80s reimagining Castlefield as a heritage space was a Lefebvrian counter-project championed by amenity societies in alliance with the Greater Manchester Council (Leary forthcoming) in opposition to the embedded power of the Manchester City Council and British Rail (a major Castlefield landowner). Heritage representations of Castlefield space triumphed in 1983 when the hugely successful Museum of Science and Industry open in the converted Liverpool Road Station buildings in 1983. By then the heritage industry as a vehicle for post industrial city reimaging was in full swing (Lowenthal 1998 and Wright 2003). The heritage dominated understanding of Castlefield went largely unchallenged in the 1990s (Degen 2008), exemplified by this breathless Lonely Planet eulogy: “Castlefield has now been redeveloped into an Urban Heritage Park.Aside from the huge science museum, the big draw here is the Castlefield Basin. The Bridgewater Canal runs through it; in summertime thousands of people amble about the place and patronise its fine pubs and trendy restaurants.” (Lonely Planet 2007 www.lonelyplanet.com/) But now the struggle to impose a new meaning and future for Castlefield has resurfaced as it did in the 1970s. Today the heritage representation of Castlefield space is under threat precisely because it became too narrowly focused on Romans, canals, railways and warehouses: ignoring crucial aspects of the area's complex histories. The area has a much richer history including: elegant Georgian housing, working class housing, gritty industry (the abattoir) and a rather exuberant but riotous and short lived 19th century annual fair. This was reinvented for a brief time in the 1980s with the popular Castlefield funfair, street markets and festivals: local Lefebvrian spaces of representation. But the most important part of Castlefield's history is the link with the Transatlantic Trade in West African peoples. Manchester textiles were traded for abducted West African peoples who were later enslaved. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company was funded partly from the proceeds of the Transatlantic Trade (Williams 1944).The statue in Lincoln Square with its inscription of thanks from Abraham Lincoln for the support of Manchester workers during the 1860s cotton famine is just about

the only recognition in the city of the links between Castlefield and European colonial enslavement spatial practices. The silence on this aspect of Castlefield's past is deafening. If the building is approved it will end Castlefield's tentative status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Peel Holdings, a Manchester company founded in 1920 by the descendents of Sir Robert Peel, made enormous profits in the last property boom. Hopefully, it will not get through the appeal, but even if it does it is unlikely to go ahead in the present financial climate. When funding is available things will have moved on. In the meantime the site should be donated to the city as public open space with a maintenance trust fund attached. If the building is approved it should be subject to a legal planning agreement for the maintenance in perpetuity of the significant public spaces of Castlefield. If long silenced Castlefield histories are to be heard, and its heritage revalorised for the 21st century, a political coalition of difference will be required, first to defeat the wholly inappropriate Jackson's Wharf scheme, then to embrace the area with the arms of heritage inclusivity. If you want to follow the struggle for Castlefield or join in, see the websites of Pride of Manchester, Eye Witness in Manchester and Manchester Confidential.

References: Degen, M. 2008, Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester, Routledge, London. Leary, M.E. (forthcoming) "Of Potato, Shrine and Vendetta, Liverpool Road Station and the Production of Castlefield, Manchester: Applying Henri Lefebvre's Spatial Triad" Leary, M.E. 2008, "Gin and Tonic or Oil and Water: The Entrepreneurial City and Sustainable Managerial Regeneration in Manchester", Local Economy, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 222-233. Lefebvre, H. 1991, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford (first published in 1974 as La production de l'espace). Linton, D. 2008 (5 June), "'Star Trek' flats go to appeal", Manchester Evening News. Williams, E. 1994 [1944], Capitalism and Slavery, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Wright, P. 2003 (13 September), "Restoration tragedy: The heritage industry is now so powerful that it is impossible to criticise, let alone demolish, old buildings".

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Street Photography and Social Research: Brick Lane Re-Visited Charlotte Bates On 29 June 2008 fourteen postgraduate students met in Brick Lane, East London. The group came from universities across the UK and brought together students from a variety of disciplines, all with an interest in the visual. Paying homage to the About the Streets project conducted by staff and students at Goldsmiths, University of London and Croydon College in 2001, we set up two 4x5 large format cameras in the midst of the market in Brick Lane and invited people to have their portrait taken while doing their Sunday shopping. Individuals took their turn before the lens and the ensuing photographs created a visual narrative of metropolitan life. The day offered a valuable opportunity to both create and engage in a sociological event.The spectacle of the large Victorian cameras on the streets and the intricate process of setting up for a portrait became an enactment of doing research, through which we were able to discuss how photographs can be made instead of taken, and how the act of making them can reveal stories and reflect the changing urban landscape. Here, some of the participants offer glimpses of the day, showing what they brought to the workshop and what they took from it, and telling how cameras and portraits were negotiated and stories unfolded, questioning the spectacle that we created and commenting on the culture of Brick Lane. Thanks to the British Sociological Association for their financial support, and to Les Back, Paul Halliday, Caroline Knowles, Antonio Genco, Simon Rowe, Manuel Vazquez and Jane Offerman for their involvement and support without which this workshop would not have been possible.

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Reflections by Adrian Harris Working with the Medium Format Camera was harder than I imagined simply because many people seemed reluctant to be involved. Several factors contributed to this. Because we'd set up at the less 'trendy' end of the street, there were mostly locals going about their business, many of whom had English as a second language. We also chose to be on a side street, so weren't as noticeable to passers-by. While we achieved our intention to minimize obstructive disruption and be more in the community, this made interaction harder. We always had to go out and invite people, rather than them being drawn by curiosity to us. The time it took to make a photograph had some advantages in that it gave us time to interact but we did lose people who were waiting for their turn. I occasionally felt a hint of impatience from our portrait subjects as light levels were measured, lens cocked, light re-checked, and then the whole process repeated as we made a second exposure to be sure we had a good image. Wandering the street asking people more casually if I could ‘take a photograph’ with my digital camera was much easier. The immediacy of the encounter meant I didn't need to interact so much as with the medium format equipment, but the option was always there and occasionally I took the opportunity to chat. I used my usual documentary photographer approach: Ask if it's ok, chat a bit, then back off to make the image, though I'd take one shot straight away if they were posing. Usually I'd sit back for a while until, half forgotten, I could make a more 'natural' image. After a few shots of

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random people I found 'interesting' I felt the need to structure my approach more, so decided to photograph stallholders. This felt more satisfying as I began to see patterns and relationships between the layout of the stalls, the goods they sold and the stallholders themselves.

Notes from Behind the Scenes by Isaac Marrero Guillamón This sequence attempts to 'bring into the picture' one of the things I found most interesting about the workshop: the relationship between the in-frame and the off-frame. The large format Polaroids provided by themselves a very limited output of the dynamics involved in their production. Putting one of them next to a shot/counter-shot of the 'making of' was a simple way of introducing various key issues. First of all, the three-image sequence points at the weight of the machinery and the labour needed to operate it.Taking a picture with a 4x5 camera is a fairly complex procedure; it is far from immediate. Each task (framing, focusing, light metering, loading film, shooting) requires a certain time and, most importantly, reinscribes the technology involved in the process. What's been, to a great extent, effaced by digital photography the large format camera brings back. We somehow rediscovered the intricacies of measuring an ever changing light, framing and focusing an upsidedown and not so clear image, and using Polaroid film. For all that to happen a number of agreements had to be reached: On the one hand, the collaboration between us went further than sharing the technical tasks: first of all we had to decide about location (this or that side of the street?), framing (full, American?), depth of field (maximum, minimum?) and who we wanted to photograph (a certain 'kind', everyone who wants to be photographed?). These decisions shaped the basic structure of the pictures and represented, to a certain degree at least, our intentions as photographers. On the other hand, we had to negotiate with the people to be photographed: we had to tell them about the project, they had to give us consent and sign a form.

I think, however, that we lacked the time to engage in a true collaboration between the photographers and the photographed. In fact, I would have liked the distinction between the former and the latter to be irrelevant. I would have liked to agree upon the camera's location and framing, maybe give the shutter to the photographee. In my opinion, engaging in a more extensive process of cooperation would be relevant both for making street portraits and producing images with a larger potential for research. If we were able to truly alter our perspective and expectations in the process of negotiating a portrait I think we would be one step further towards images that represent the kind of encounter we were interested in.

Ghosts of Brick Lane by Jo Sanderson-Mann I have chosen this image because it shows passers by in Brick Lane, people moving, perhaps with a suitcase, it is not possible to see them clearly. My aim was to listen to people's stories. I took photos, I talked to people, but I did not really get to know them - the encounters were transitory. In fact I was a tourist in Brick Lane. To attend the workshop, me, my husband and my son travelled down to London and stayed overnight, and we saw the sights on Saturday. On Sunday while I was in Brick Lane my husband and son carried on sight seeing. I felt that there was a parallel between what they were doing and what I was doing in Brick Lane. It was perhaps not a coincidence that I was drawn to photograph people who were also tourists, people who did not live there. Brick Lane was a spectacle, something strange and unfamiliar, and my presence there was a one-off, perhaps theirs was too. The photos I took were of people who were there for pleasure, there was a strong sense of having a ‘day out’, and each time I took a photo it was an encounter with two foreigners, them and me.

Once there was someone before the camera, ready to have her or his portrait taken, the situation became a sort of social event.The old, big, heavy camera sat on a tripod surrounded by a team of photographers produced interest and expectation among passers by. Conversations emerged.The taking of photographs was starting to become making. page 17

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What I learnt from my team mates and from my mistakes by Craig Owen Beccy seemed to have a skill for weaving in and out of the rush of human traffic filtering up, down and across Brick Lane. She skipped from one side of the street to another in order to investigate and photograph someone or something that interested her. I saw Beccy talk to and subsequently photograph a smart looking old man who was standing in a doorway smoking roll ups. I also listened to Beccy engage in cheeky banter with two self identifying 'Del Boys' who proudly proclaimed they had been selling carpets from the same stall on Brick Lane for 15 years. Introducing the purpose of our project, showing these people the LCD screen to allow them to view the photos and inviting them to talk about their experiences of Brick Lane, Beccy was able to develop positive relationships that enabled us to later return with the Victorian camera and photograph these men again. I was thoroughly impressed with how social and fun Beccy had made urban photography appear.

Polaroid Portraits

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In comparison, my experiences were rather dire.When passed the digital SLR camera my first concerns were: “How do I wear the camera strap, how do I hold the camera, what do I do with all these buttons and how do I possibly get comfortable?” Seeing the exasperated look on face my other team mate Charlotte came over and provided some much needed assistance. With encouragement I approached two young men who were sat casually on their Jamie Oliver style mopeds. Dressed in ultra trendy clothes and flaunting highly styled haircuts I was sure they would make good subjects for a photo. I introduced myself and almost immediately dropped into the conversation a disclaimer about my lack of skill with the camera. The lesson I have drawn from these experiences is that the skill and experience the researcher has with particular methods has significant implications for their identity as a researcher and for the processes through which the research is crafted. Finally, visiting Brick Lane has shown me that if I wish to improve my skills as an urban ethnographer I must continue to learn in practice and by practice.

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Small Stories by Lisa Mckenzie

Who is the photographer? by Sireita Mullings - Lawrence

The first two guys we met were Billy and his friend Mick who were sat on a doorstep. As soon as I saw them I knew I wanted to chat with them. Mick was probably in his sixties and was looking dapper wearing a cream safari suit, cravat, and matching hat, with a pair of good leather oxford brogues which he told me he'd bought from an old shoe shop round the corner called Blackmans, one of the few shops still on Brick Lane from the 1960's. Mick was proud that he was a real 'Eastender' and had been coming to Brick Lane market every Sunday since he was a kid. His friend Billy was from Glasgow and was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and bright red plastic glasses. They were both hanging out on the market and lived in a hostel close by.When we took the picture Billy really posed and enjoyed the attention, whilst Mick sat unassuming on the step 'in his finest'.

There is something interesting about the multiple authorship of a photograph. Indecisive as to its importance, the question of who is the photographer became apparent whilst a participant of the Street Photography and Social Research workshop held in Brick Lane. Having formed our groups, one digital camera per group with the exception of a few people who brought their own cameras we set off to document life in Brick Lane.The way our group worked to compose, capture and create the images was as though we were a team who had worked previously for an extended period of time. Each person fell into roll, sharing methods and ideas. Ensuring each suggestion was considered and each member given the chance to exchange positions experiencing what another would do to assist in image creation.There are some key silent sounds in the orchestration of an image.When we read the final product we often don't hear the verbal making of the picture.

There was a wonderful woman called Dorothy who told us she was 76. When we asked if we could take her picture she was delighted. She wanted to show off her earrings which were purple flowered diamantes, and she told us that she had matched her whole outfit around those earrings. She was wearing a lovely purple flowered dress and matching necklace, and was off to a tea dance. Dorothy told us that she went to tea dances every Sunday on the bus and had always liked to dance - 'in her younger days' she had danced at the Lyceum, Astoria, and Café de Paris, but they had all closed now. She said that people had often asked to take her picture at the tea dances but had rarely sent them on to her as they promised. These stories may seem unimportant even trivial to some, but these are the typical small stories that were recounted to us that day, they were literal snapshots of life, lives that few are interested in, unless as researchers we are studying the effects of poverty, or family breakdown, or how gender and culture interrelates, or some other wider and important issue we need everyday people's interpretation of. How often do we just talk to people without wanting to make some inferences on the bigger picture? What I took from that day is how important small stories are. I agree with Les Back in his book The Art of Listening that urban sociology is about getting out, meeting people, and engaging in everyday life.

“Excuse me do you mind if we take a quick picture of you?” “Look at the look on his face…we need to get a shot!” “Do you mind if we stand over here so that the sun is behind us?” “Those cookies look nice.”…“More like artificial, lets take a photo!” “Could you stand right there so we could just take your picture?” “What about them do you think they will mind?” “Yea you can take my photo if you want…will social services see my face?” “I'm gonna grab that bloke with the strange hat?” “Ahh aint that sweet, let's grab that couple over there and ask them if they will have us take their photo?!?”

Nuances of creatorship can be heard amongst the utterances of the photography team on the pursuit for interesting life in Brick Lane. In a non specific order we would often use the walk, look, listen and shoot tools, collectively making suggestions about interesting people or situations. In many instances subjects helped to construct the photograph as they offered themselves for photographing or made reference to things they too found interesting. The act of photographing seems to present, reinforce and question; interests, personalities, the obscure, the familiar, the other, the sadness, the painfulness, the likes and dislikes. Seen through a collection of viewpoints and various frames of reference leaving the images to capture our gaze whilst making an enquiry into, “who is the photographer?” page 19

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Why is it so easy to place art and regeneration in the same sentence? Sophie Risner The Gorbals district on the south bank of the river Clyde is an area of mixed Irish Catholic Jewish decent. Predominantly working class, it has long had a reputation for being a slum area. It has suffered several different attempts at clearance, with the most notable happening in 1866 by the City Improvement Trust.This was then overshadowed by a 1960s rebuild, which, like many enclaves of urban regeneration, saw the tried and tested mark of modernism scalding the Gorbals district with concrete high rises designed by Sir Basil Spence. In its wake an area feverish with crime and keen for re-management emerged. The Spence tower blocks were removed in 1993 with further demolitions arriving in 1994. Any remaining high rises were either re-clad or refurbished with most of the surviving victorian terraces reconfigured and surrounded with new builds. Art has found a place in amongst this last phase of regeneration as a signifier of the new dawn of city re-management. More and more art in the public realm is becoming inextricably linked to the reality of contemporary regeneration, something that governmental procedure is not totally unaware of. Most London local authorities have a by-line on art in the public realm within their unitary development plan (Local Area Framework) and with new strategies such as Percent for Art becoming popular schemes for city management. Between developers and local authorities it has now become very clear that art is part and parcel of the formation of new space from the old. From 1999 to 2005, The Artworks Programme commissioned 20 artists to produce work within the Gorbals district, leaning on the pre-existing Spence architecture as well as taking inspiration from its history and previously demolished buildings. Like the MUF art strategy currently being played out on the Greenwich Peninsula, The Artworks Programme used a moment of urban change to surface art production. Pioneered by artist collective Heisenberg consisting of artists Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz The Artworks Programme's website alone extensively understands the all-encompassing approach needed for such an integrated relationship to be built between artists, community, building, developer and council. It isn't an easy relationship, and often finds confusion over cohesion. The debate is how can art remain truly autonomous when shifted into the spectrum of regeneration? Within the Gorbals strategy is the page 20

project of Amanada Currie. Inspired by the 1975 mayoral project of Ravio Puusemp in which the artist managed to become successfully elected as mayor of Rosendale, New York, a small town of 1,500 Puusemp implemented radical water supply and sewage changes as well as uniting the community through collective participation. He eventually resigned on completion of the project - a move which saw the community upset, yet impressed, with his work. Puusemp's tale is not one of few. Many times before has art come into play with bureaucratic change. Currie on the other hand had no qualms about admitting her incentive. Her interests in The Artworks Programme website are listed as ‘viewing public art as an ideal platform’, simply a way to communicate ideas stretching beyond the usual gallery protocol. The use of the word public in any shape is always problematic. Currie’s work presupposes a public and the realms with which she determines her art interactions into a community setting. Curries project looked at building an orchard or allotment with the community of Gorbals. Unlike some of the more aesthetic interventions that found their way into The Artworks Programme, the allotment project by Currie looked at crafting something more indelible - the cohesion of community through a collaborative effort. Working with the community from design, to final completion and then to nurture and growth, Currie looked at how she can truly be useful to this particular moment of regeneration. This could be seen as a curious move, the alignment of artistic practice against social practice has, since the minimalist understanding of institutional critique become a very well trodden path.What is truly at stake when comprehending such a close connection between practice and community? In her 2006 take on Claes Oldenburgs I am for an art, the artist Carey Young mimicks Oldenburgs sentiments with her own understanding of her practice “I am for an art that does not aspire to be a cure for alienated humanity...” I am for an art...(after Claes Oldenburg) (Carey Young 2006) By placing Young's stance on her own art production next to the Currie allotment project a very contemporary idiom begins to shine through - that of arts awkward relationship with societal concerns.

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Young's stance would not have her helping a community to build a thriving allotment, yet Currie’s decision to manifest a discipline from this involvement loosens art’s own ability to form an active critique and remain completely autonomous. The tricky objective is that Currie actively sought to place arts position as social healer, as almost a social worker. Her project is not strictly functional in terms of defining an objective reality on the process of regeneration under way in the Gorbals district, yet it serves to function as a coming together of the community. In essence art by-passes critique and finds itself as a state of mending and repairing. By seeking to distance herself from the information that her practice concerns,Young attempts to form a more thorough discussion with what it is exactl, that comes from building a social relationship or social practice. This is not to discredit Currie. In context both ideas are interesting as they shift the role of art into a new dimension and make for a different attack on the understanding of social space. To bring this to a more current relevance it can be seen that the recent regeneration of the Greenwich Peninsula finds a community-centric art involvement in place from the outset. Dancing on the Peninsula which was held on July the 10th this year, looked to combine choreography from Temujin Gill, a local dancer in residence, and over fifty local children from the Millennium and Halstow Primary Schools. This work boasts site specificity and explores current themes of sustainability, regeneration and the natural and built environment. In a bid to re-surface this through Currie’s exploration, there is a tried and tested navigation of understanding site, collaboration with local people and discussion on the very terms at play. Art in this case has come to serve as signifier for regeneration. Whilst Rachel Whiteread’s House, 1993/94 was criticized for aesthetically being too close-to-the-bone in terms of art being a signifier of regeneration. A mere 14 years later and art (found in the public realm) has become almost only about regeneration .

outside of the institutional framework. Risk thus becomes shredded in time. Does an outside project have to baer resemblance to the outside space it inhabits or can a different pattern arise, re-defining how art negotiates the tricky terms of regeneration? What can be justified from these various integrated practices is that art as a moment of critical practice of the concept of urban regeneration is still an incisive product with which to develop a discourse on the very subject of regeneration. 'In the end, I contend that conflict, far from the ruin of democratic public space, is the condition of its existence' (Rosalyn Deutsche Evictions: Art and Spacial Politics 1996) Both Currie and Young look towards establishing modes of operation with democratic public space.The very nature of democratic space makes for both a physical and theoretical realm that looks more and more towards art as a negotiator of critical best practice. This can only be a good thing in terms of relinquishing art from the bowels of institutional production. Whilst it comprehends art’s growing importance within the public realm, it also clarifies it as one of the more challenging ways with which to vocalize the conflict that arises when going about the problem of regeneration in the public sector. Deutsche goes on to look at how this is beneficial, while legitimating urban conditions as inevitable. Less does art find itself the demon of the public realm but more the public realm demonizes itself. A critical shift that sits positively for art’s future inclusion in such a fruitful debate.

This has changed art’s place within the spectrum of the public sphere and made for a different approach to practice; collaboration here becomes key to defining the local area. Consultation and obvious relationship building between artist, site and community tragically become all too important when crafting projects page 21

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In hiding, on display Helena Holgersson And there we were, on bar stools in the display window of his favourite café inside Nordstan, a shopping centre in Göteborg, the second largest city in Sweden, laughing. Looking back I realize that when I had called him on his mobile phone the week before to ask him if he wanted to take a walk with me at a place of his choice, I was expecting him to bring me to some part of Bergjön, the neighbourhood were he had been staying during the year when he had been at risk of being deported. In the interview that I did with him back then, in a small room at a local voluntary organisation, he had told me that he would rather not leave this area. In the map that he drew of ‘his Göteborg’ on this occation ‘hem’ [home] was the central node. Despite this he regularly travelled throughout large parts of Göteborg. In order to raise money for the rent he collected empty tins along the tramlines together with his parents and his younger sister. “I think I'd rather not be seen”, he told me, “but I have to”. Most of the places he included in his map are tram stops.The exceptions are ‘kyrkan’ [the church], ‘biblioteket’ [the library] and ‘Ica’ [a grocery store], which are all located at a walking-distance from the family's apartment. A few weeks before our meeting at the café I had

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received a joyful text message from him simply saying “HI! WE'VE GOT OUR RESIDENCE PERMIT!”. Consequently, when I contacted him about the walk I was very curious about how he would relate to Bergsjön now that he did not have to hide from the police anymore. In my PhD thesis I look at how noncitizenship is articulated in urban space. However, he immediately suggested that we would meet up at Drottingtorget, a square right next to the central station, and then go somewhere for a coffee. When I arrived he was already there, waiting at the newsstand. I spotted him from a long distance away.As I came closer I noticed that he was wearing new glasses. Chatting, we started to walk towards what he described as his favourite café, which turned out to be located well into Nordstan. He preferred the seats in the display window he told me,“so that you can watch the people passing by”, and we sat down there, doing just that. Soon we found ourselves just smiling though. How could we not? The symbolism of it all was overwhelming.

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‘Home Sweet Home (Not)’ Emma Jackson [From a project looking at place and belonging in the lives of young homeless people.] We sit in a circle on the floor around the map that has been backed on white paper. The map is of London, 'Eastenders!' is the first reaction of a few of the young people. They seem unsure about what they are supposed to do. Me saying “Draw a map of your London”, doesn't seem to be helping. I explain that first we are going to draw our own maps, especially thinking about safety and danger and then plot those personal maps on the big communal map. Kirsty takes a post-it note, writes 'Swag' on it and sticks it on Clapham Common. More silence. I start to worry, but then people begin drawing. Marcos scribbles North,West, East, South on his paper and writes 'Crackheads' on East, 'Over gangster' on West, 'Dickheads' on North. But then he starts to write on the big map 'Smoking spot' in Regents Park, he marks a hostel he used to live in. Nicola also draws North, East, South and West on the edges of her paper but carefully. She then fills it in. NW1 is her 'adopted home' the first place she came to when she moved to London. In the middle is central (Soho and Oxford Street) at the bottom is Victoria and a picture of a house with a chimney and smoke coming out of it 'where I live'. East London is marked 'Weave' (she used to get her hair done there). Kelly says she can't draw and that this exercise is making her feel 'disabled'. She removes herself from the group. I think she has abandoned the task but actually she sits away from the group with another worker and draws a neat map of the bus route that goes from her house to the youth centre. She names all the tube stops, Holloway Prison and churches. She lines the route with trees and bins (“because you always get bins next to bus stops don't you?”). She is keen to take home 'the original' but allows me to take a copy. She won't even let me take the map to the photocopier on my own, 'It's my work. I'm an artist.' Marie also takes herself away from the group and comes back with a map of Victoria. Copying her map onto the big map, she labels Victoria 'a peaceful place' and adds “I got lost [the first time] I tried to find Victoria”. She draws in the Channel 4 building, shops and churches naming 'Costcutters', 'Tesco', 'Pizza' and 'Greggs'. She also draws buses naming them by their number and destination.

Kirsty's map points out places from her past, relating to drugs and the arrests of her friends, she elaborates on the post-it note comment, Clapham Common is 'Swag Endz - bad experiences happn'd there'. Saba says she is too new in London to do the exercise, I say she should just put down the places that she knows. She draws a very faint map of her hostel, Euston and the youth centre. Between the hostel and youth centre is a figure, signifying that she walks between the two. These tentative markings of a newcomer are drawn so faintly that someone writes over them by accident. Nicola on the other hand, draws all over the big map pointing out a good Portuguese café here and a place to get cheap piercings there. Others recall stories that happened in places. “On Notting Hill Carnival Day me and Kirsty had to stop at the toilets at Liverpool street coz I had a bad tummy”. Kelly comments that she hates Camden because she once saw a man with horns there. She adds to the map “I hate Camden coz of men with horns”.Those who draw all over the map contrast with Michael who takes great care in finding 4 points in South London. He marks them with stars and then joins them up. When asked what it means he replies 'my territory'. The maps when put together rub each other up the wrong way. Someone has scribbled over the Arsenal ground 'Lidl' which is corrected by John who proclaims it 'the best football team in Britain'. There is much consternation over the labelling of East London, especially Hackney. The map only extends so far and arrows have to be written off to the side to other places, Rochester prison, Kent, Enfield. Both fun and painful experiences are marked on the map and the difficult relationship between feelings of territory and dislocation is summed up in someone's comment, an arrow pointing to somewhere in East London reading 'Home Sweet Home (not)!'

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Tourism, Inbetweeness and Teotihuacán Jeremy Clouser

The desire to explore and have new experiences is a prime motivation for traveling to new countries and immersing oneself in a different culture. Being a tourist, places one in an in-between situation. As our world becomes more and more homogenized we are told to seek out the 'real' of a particular place. This is amply demonstrated by TV shows like No Reservations by Anthony Bourdain, where eating how the locals eat allows you to identify yourself as a local(1). However, without truly understanding the language or being aware of unspoken cultural indicators, a two week holiday somewhere, will always leave one floating in limbo between wanting to be a genuine member of a particular culture, and the impossibility of full page 24

acceptance.This inbetweeness can often lead to absurd situations and a rather tragicomedy exocitization of the 'other', as is aptly shown in the 'Dani' photographic project by Susan Meiselas (2). For me, this inbetween feeling is heightened when visiting a designated tourist destination, especially ancient ruins. To truly say that you've been to Rome, it is assumed that you will have paid the obligatory visit to the Coliseum. What would your friends say if you went to Athens and you didn't visit the Parthenon? The layers of the palimpsest at these destinations can be overwhelming and visiting these sites does help one get a sense of history and to put that history into a

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present-day context. But doesn't an almost blind visit to these sites only enhance that nagging feeling of inbetweenness? Like Greece and Italy, Mexico is a country with a plethora of ancient sites, with many of them once playing host to thriving metropolises. Alas, today, these once mighty cities have been reduced to (or built up to be) carefully preserved ruins and primarily tourist attractions or places of archaeological research. An example one such place is the ancient Aztec city of Teotihuacán. Teotihuacán, along with the Zócalo (Mexico City's central Plaza), and Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul, are all obligatory tourist destinations for visitors (3). After visiting these destinations 2 or 3 times whilst playing host I start to ask my self questions.What role does the ancient play in contemporary society? What does it mean to visit these spaces? How am I to behave in a place as old as this? What can I learn from being here? Like most things in life, one's answers are based on an individual perspective shaped by lifelong formal and informal learning. I try to find answers to these questions by allowing myself to be transported back in time and imagining people going about their daily business; cooking, praying or, perhaps, procreating. However, my envisioning of the past is continually influenced by the way that I'm reading the space (4). It is extremely difficult for me to get past my recognition that the place where I find myself standing was once an urban center that could resemble a contemporary city in complexity, yet it is has taken on a completely different form, exuding a cemetery-like calm that which makes me feel hushed and reverent for times past and the people who had their hearts ripped out while alive to appease various gods. As to figuring out how to behave, like most social situations, the guesswork is taken care of by observing others in close proximity and following their lead (Goffman, 1990). One is rarely alone in these spaces, there are always other tourists, hawkers of souvenirs and park officials.We are given plenty of opportunity to gather clues to combine with our knowledge of previous experiences in order to act appropriately. One's behavior is further modified by signs and strategically places barriers guiding movements and actions. The message is; stay on the path and enjoy yourself responsibility. By being aware of these things, modernity keeps creeping into my imaginings of times past. It is in this constant mixing of history and the contemporary from which this series of photos emerges.

In the photographic images I made, my focus was drawn time and again to a modern necessity, the rubbish bin. The fact that no matter where we are, we are continually producing waste (and waste that will be around for generations to come) is something that is a striking contrast with an ancient society whose 'lifestyle' (and waste) was essentially 'organic'. This dichotomy is where the inbetweeness of travel and tourism lies and it lends itself perfectly to photography's ability to record and memorialize the 'real' of a particular time and place. As an Australian/U.S. citizen who has now been living in Mexico City for over three years, this inbetweeness has become internalized and is something that I deal with on a daily basis. But above all, perhaps the most important thing I've learned is that after seeing the juxtaposition of grand pyramids and seemingly inconsequential rubbish bins our contemporary society needs to create societal remnants that will be as celebrated as those left behind by the Aztecs and other ancient civilizations.

References: Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Penguin Books: New York, 1990. (1) In each episode, the former chef, Anthony Bourdain, chooses a country that he thinks would be interesting to visit. In the beginning, he seemingly knows little about these countries, and he proceeds to explore the culture through the food of the 'common' person and in the process gaining an understanding of what that country is 'really' like. www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Anthony_Bourdain (2) “In this subjective, fragmentary history, Meiselas draws from the experiences of missionaries, colonists, anthropologists and modern-day ecotourists, all of whom have come to the Dani's Baliem Valley [Papua New Guinea] and transformed the conditions under which they live.The ambiguous relations between power and representation - whether in the form of Dutch colonial patrol notes from the 1930s, the sensationalized media accounts of the survivors of a downed U.S. army plane in "Shangri-La" from the 1940s or a tourist's snapshots from the 1990s - become visible in Meiselas's book, through both the contradictions and unexpected continuities of the gathered materials.” Quote taken from the book's synoposis. store.magnumphotos.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&pr oducts_id=2029 (3) This is evidenced by the number of photos of visiting performers, celebrities, dignitaries and/or politicians that are taken in these places and that appear in the social pages of the local newspapers. (4) This could be put another way, “through the prism of my Goldsmiths education”.

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What is British? Michael Wayne Plant

The What is British? Project arose out of a desire to explore identities found and encountered within a limited urban area. From a sociological point of view I wanted to explore in photographs notions of British identity. However to do this on a scale that is economically feasible and practical would not be possible within that time frame and financial resources that were available to me. I decided that by limiting the area to within approximately one mile of the Rotherhithe tunnel in the East End of London, this would give me an area that was both economically, culturally and ethnically diverse enough that it would allow me to make a start in examining contemporary British identities. While notions of identity have far ranging consequences for the individual, recent postmodern conceptions of identity have implications for all members of societies globally. Post-modern interpretations of how the ‘other’ is seen within societies (Sardar, 1998) and boundaries that are created and maintained, all affect how differing identities are perceived. London is a city that has undergone rapid change from an industrial city at the centre of a global empire in the nineteenth century, to the current global city as defined by Sassen (Sassen, 2001) which de-industrialised while becoming a global hub for the finance and banking industries. The East End of London has been at the centre of this change; developments have dramatically altered the area’s urban environment. Using photography to study various identities can help define who has access to the many varieties of urban space available within an area.While some people get to choose their identity, others have their identities forced on them by their circumstances (Bauman, 2004:38) We live in a society where community has been under threat by a process of individualization (Beck/ Beck-Bernsheim, 2001) leading us to assert our own individual identities. This renders our common sense of community redundant. With identities becoming surrogates of community (Bauman, 2001:151), the possibility of overcoming communal or social misfortune gets negated as individual trouble or strife. Photography, by its nature, looks at the

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particular, a specific person, event or place. As an artist, I work using photography to explore the social landscape using a documentary style that explores notions of identity. By creating imagery that retains the person within the landscape and social setting, it is possible to understand more of the sociological context within which the subject lives. Supplying visual clues to their identities are not only what they are wearing, their accessories, or hairstyles but also their ethnicity and their physiognomy. This then makes it possible to use these outward signifiers to allow us to make assumptions about identities. My photographs are influenced by the work of Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand, William Eggleston and Paul Graham, photographers who chose to use photography as a means of personal exploration of their social milieu. The project What is British? is currently ongoing.There will be an exhibition in April 2009 at Departure Gallery (http://www.depart.in/). References: Sardar, Ziauddin (1998) Postmodernism and the other. London: Pluto Press. Sassen, Saskia (2001) The global city; New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2004: 38) Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich & Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth (2001) Individualization. London: Sage Bauman, Zygmunt (2001: 151) The individualised society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Worlds apart

Outside Lehman Bros

How to walk though a street

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Environment: urbanisation and biodiversity Bringing a hotspot in from the cold Peter Coles Cape Town explores new ways to conserve its unique floral heritage in the face of exploding poverty and urban sprawl Behind the romantic names of some of Cape Town's 'townships' (suburbs for non-white populations under apartheid) poverty and violent crime are rife. Softsounding Lavender Hill is not somewhere a white Capetonian is likely to set foot - and certainly not a place he or she would want to get lost at night.Yet, a few hundred metres away, down a surprisingly quiet, tidy street is the Rondevlei Nature Reserve. Once inside the gate, a haven of tranquil beauty opens up. A kingfisher dives off a tall reed; pelicans, spoonbills and pink flamingos mass on the banks of a vlei (lake), and, as night falls, a couple of hippos rise like submarines to wallow and graze. “I'd come here with my granny for the weekend,” says my guide. Cape Town has become a city of sharp contrasts like this, where 'urban' and 'natural' worlds often coincide - or collide. Table Mountain, the spiritual and physical heart of the city, is slap in the middle of business and up-market residential areas. Yet it is home to Fynbos (pronounced fain-boss), a unique vegetation, and the main component of the Cape Floristic Kingdom - the world's richest, and geographically smallest, floral kingdom (plants confined to a geographical area). Some 9600 species can be found in an area the size of Portugal, 70% of them endemic (found nowhere else), while 1406 are listed in the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Red Data book of endangered species. The mountain's 57 km2 alone boasts about 1500 species. Just for comparison, one of the five other floral kingdoms - the Boreal Kingdom comprises the whole of the northern hemisphere. The proximity of what some claim is the world's hottest plant biodiversity 'hotspot' to an urban area poses obvious conservation problems, especially given Cape Town's open access policy to its national park which means no fences and few pay points. But these 'urban nature' conservation challenges are multiplied many times over by an explosion of economic migrants from the rural Eastern Cape in search of jobs, arriving at a rate of about 45,000 every three months. Under apartheid, black Africans were not allowed to live in central Cape Town and were page 28

confined to townships on the urban edge. Since the late 1980s, though, almost a million (mostly Xhosa people) have settled on the city's outskirts, many in the township of Khayelitsha. These vast slums of tiny houses and tin shacks stretch as far as the eye can see, across the fragile dunes and seasonal wetlands of Cape Flats. In some areas, over half the adults are unemployed, while more than 35% are infected with HIV/AIDS. But the Cape Flats is also part of the Cape Floristic Kingdom, and has a rare, lowland kind of Fynbos, with perhaps the world's highest concentration of endangered plants.Yet, to the new arrivals, it looks like 'scrubland' - an ideal place to put up a makeshift home. “How do you look after biodiversity in a context of extreme poverty, where local communities have little history of involvement in conservation?” asks Tanya Goldman, Project Manager of Cape Flats Nature, a partnership project between the City of Cape Town, the National Botanical Institute, the Table Mountain Fund, and the Botanical Society of South Africa. “This was the challenge for our project.” One response, she explains, is the City of Cape Town's Integrated Metropolitan Environment Policy (IMEP), adopted in 2001, according to which “there doesn't have to be a choice between environment or people. You can protect the environment in a way that supports peoples' needs.” At the heart of the IMEP is a Biodiversity Strategy, implemented through a network of 261 areas that should preserve a minimum

Khayaletscha

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of Cape Town's unique biodiversity. These sites range in size from traffic islands a few metres square, to whole stretches of coastal dunes - many are on the Cape Flats. For the moment, Cape Flats Nature is concentrating on four experimental sites among these. One of them, the 37-hectare Edith Stephens Wetland Park, surrounded by poor townships, is a modest start, but a success all the same.“The City has started to get the message that they won't find support for conservation in the Cape Flats by fencing people out,” says Tanya Goldman. “Sustainable conservation management has to win the hearts, involvement and understanding of the surrounding communities.” Two of the other three pilot sites are more of a challenge, though. Both the Wolfgat Nature Reserve and Macassar Dunes are isolated no-go areas, sandwiched between Khayelitsha and deserted beaches. Spectacularly beautiful, and studded with arum lilies, they are also where gangsters dump their victims, and are being encroached on relentlessly.

While Cape Flats Nature is working with traditional healers at Macassar Dunes to grow medicinal plants between the shacks and the dunes - to act as a buffer against further sprawl, Brett Myrdal, Manager of Table Mountain National Park has a more controversial proposition - housing. He wants to see “a middle class community from the townships overlooking the coastal area, and thus providing protection through line-of-sight.” But he says,“environmentalists don't see housing as part of a conservation solution.They see it as a threat.” In the end, though, both may be right. Across on the north side of the city, luxury houses costing up to 3 million Rand ($400,000) jostle for an unspoiled view over the beautiful coast and dunes around the Blaauwberg Conservation Area (BCA).The City planning department forecasts that 500,000 people, of all income brackets, will be living around the BCA in the next 20 years or so.

Isoetes' last stand The Edith Stephens Wetland Park, just outside Cape Town, is a humble 37-hectare patch of land bounded on two sides by roads, and a township bursting at the seams, on the third.At the heart of the park is a 3.7 hectare patch of seasonal wetland, donated to the city's Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens by an eccentric patron in the 1950's. It is the only surviving habitat on the planet for a kind of fern, Isoetes capensis. “The first response by conservationists,” says Zwai Peter, the Park's communication officer, “was to fence it off to keep people out. But fencing is ideal material for informal housing. It wouldn't have lasted two days.” Rather than keep local people out, he explains, they looked for ways to get them involved in conservation in ways that were meaningful to them.“We turned the question round,” he says,“asking: what are the social challenges that we can relate to biodiversity?” Employment was an obvious starting place. So, after painstaking consultation with local people, the project recruited youth from the surrounding townships to clear the park of alien invasive species. An old farmhouse was turned into an environmental education centre. A bird-watching hide was built, and children encouraged to help monitor the birds, rather than hunt them. A medicinal garden has been planted with help from traditional healers, featuring plants that can be found locally.There's even a picnic site, although alcohol is not allowed. “This used to be a dump site, and a place gangs would meet,” says Zwai Peter.“Now it is a place of tranquillity and recreation. Local people realise they don't have to spend money to go to Table Mountain to see nature.” With 300 visitors a week,” he says, “we're winning the battle; but we should be getting more.”

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Work/Space: a visual exploration Yael Gerson Ugalde

It is perhaps not rare for anyone writing to experience what is called 'writers block', which our 'trusted' Wikipedia defines as a 'phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity'. As a PhD student in the process of 'writing up', this is an ever present phenomenon. Recently, I announced such a 'block' via Facebook, and got all sorts of helpful advise: go for a run, have a cup of tea, get some fresh air, and so on. All of them involved me tearing myself away from my desk. But how could I? I should at least pretend that I was working, even though I was secretly procrastinating [on Facebook], catching up on the latest episodes of Gossip Girl (it's all research), and emailing other equally bored people stuck at work in their offices. In fact, the architecture of 'my' office, allows me to give the appearance of hard work-not least because of the piles of books and papers I have all around me (oh yes, the symbol of the academic), but also because Warmington Tower, which houses the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, used to be a residential building (halls of residence to be precise) which now, as offices, have become a series of isolated boxes connected by a small hallway. It resembles the 'traditional' corridor offices. But the great thing about WT is its view. And in the midst of my writers block, unable to watch Gossip Girl for fear of being caught by Hannah (my office-mate), I looked out the window. In an email conversation with a friend, I asked him about his workplace. Seeing as he has a rather confidential job, I imagined work spaces where these secretive and very important tasks would take place. As it turns out, it was not a Bond film. But this got me thinking about the intersection of work and space; about the ways in which we construct our workplace (through objects, photographs, plants) and how the office space creates a working experience (through its architecture). I remember walking along the South Bank in London where many of the offices at street are very 'open plan'. Here, it is no longer open plan just within the office, but to the rest of London.Their walls are made of glass, and as I gleefully pass those offices, I smile to myself. It's not me in there… working, but I see myself in many of those office

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spaces. In a sense then, as Joe Moran describes, the office describes both a building and a particular work culture. So how do people live those workspaces in their everyday? What kinds of relationships do we have with them? As I sit and write these lines from my office in Warmington Tower - the tallest building in Goldsmiths College - the howling wind distracts me. I feel quite lucky for having one of the best views from 'the tower'. I can see most of the London landmarks, from the emerging 'cheese grater' to Battersea Power Station. But I could also tell you that from my window I have the best view of Sainsbury's, Currys and Tops Tiles by New Cross Gate Station. Do I look at the distance because of some romanticized idea of inspiration, or is it a work/space that I have constructed? Henri Lefebvre holds that ‘social space is a social product - the space produced in a certain manner serves as a tool of thought and action. It is not only a means of production but also a means of control, and hence of domination/power’ and that every society produces its own space. We are constantly (re)defining our spaces and laying out our spatial politics through the mundane su/objects of daily life. As we become more interconnected, both as subjects with objects, but also globally, workspace throughout the world has become increasingly standardized; it is subsumed into a global corporate culture thereby creating a tension between globalised sameness and local inequality. Is there a way in which we can read this tension? In sharing similar office spaces (physical and cultural) do we create a different space through our everyday practices? I wanted to see how people understand and construct their work/space. For this, I sent an email to some friends, asking them to send me a picture of their work/space: the framing was open to them; and they could add any comments about the kind of work they do, their workplace and so on.The idea was to collate images from different kinds of work/space and see whether we could map a homogenous office that becomes (or is becoming) through our everyday presence resulting in an appropriation of that space.

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The first response arrived 35 minutes after sending the original email. Somehow, I don't know the person who sent me this picture. Yes, I emailed J, and yes, I must have had at some point some correspondence with J (we are at least on the same mailing list), but I didn't know who J was.This may sound irrelevant, but upon reading the caption to his image, I wasn't sure whether J was being sarcastic or honest. Here are his picture and caption:

note, whilst I am very grateful to all who took time out and sent me their pictures, I couldn't help but feel a sense of idleness which this project interrupted. “The everyday exists as a kind of 'residual deposit' that lags behind the more glamorous,accelerated experiences of contemporary society” -Henri Lefebvre.

Tom y Al, Graphico, Designo, Notting Hill

“This is view from my desk.Top floor in Clerkenwell EC1. I work for one of the worlds largest branding consultancies and open space and outdoor light is essential within the creative business, gives you ability to think freely!” -James As you can see from the image, although the office space fits into to the 'open plan' design, it doesn't seem to me to be an 'open space', nor does it seem to let in much 'outdoor light'. I don't know J, but from reading his words and seeing his workspace, I have begun to create an image of the kind of work/space in creative consultancy in London. There is a MacBook ('creative'), Mr.T and a red Double Decker bus, a dataroller, an 'ideas board', empty cups and classes, and even some Marmite.This office space has slowly been occupied by the mundane and bit by bit we make the office 'ours'.

Martin’s office

Here are a few more images for you. I have kept the images as they were sent. Rather than translating their spaces, I felt it best to show their framing and their work/space as they constructed them. On a personal And last but not least: my office!

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Strandline - beachcombing on the Greenwich Peninsula Melissa Bliss On 27 September 2008 people came down to the foreshore on Greenwich Peninsula to beachcomb after the high autumn tides. They arranged their finds on the sands - by colour, shape or to create a picture: This was Strandline, my collaborative art project. From the high tide at noon until 6pm we encouraged people onto the foreshore to beachcomb. There was plenty of debris washed up onto the shore from the high autumn tides.We created displays of our findings in marked-out areas on the sand which would last for the day then be carried away on the evening tide. We found glass, pottery, bones, plastic, plants and wood, some recent, some centuries old, and as we collected we talked. Most people lived locally. Some had been onto the foreshore before, some not.The foreshore is an inbetween area - people are often unsure if they are allowed onto it. At the Strandline site there is a waist high railing but gaps at either end.The sands are often used by people to walk dogs or look out over the river. Lydia, a young girl, and her family made a face with an aerosol can for a nose, chalk pebbles for eyes and vegetation for hair. Sophie arranges objects in rows by colour - a pantone chart of debris. Jes creates glasshenge, an array of glass fragments standing upright in the sand. Earlier in the week Jol, a local man, had created a sculpture on the sands nearby, from debris washed up on the shore. Looking like a marlin, the curved back of the fish echoeds that of the Dome in the distance.

My land or your land Strandline's site is a microcosm of the complex relations along the Thames. The riverbed and foreshore to the high water mark is owned by the Port of London Authority [PLA] which was given it in

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1857 by the Crown after a long-running dispute with the City of London over the tidal river. The riverside walkway - part of the Thames Path national trail - is owned by English Partnerships, a regeneration public body - which acquired 120 hectares of the peninsula in 1997. The shore from the high water mark to the riverside walkway has uncertain ownership but has been claimed by Greenwich Yacht Club. Ownership and rights over the foreshore in Britain have long been fought over.The Crown owns the sea bed up to the high water mark, with a few historical exceptions. People have some common law rights to access and to collect bait and fish but this is often disputed by private landowners. On the peninsula, English Partnership's redevelopment led to the creation of a riverside path for pedestrians and cyclists around the whole peninsula from Greenwich in the west to the Thames Barrier. The riverside walkway is well managed, with landscaping and benches.You can walk past large sculptures by Richard Wilson and Anthony Gormley. Public access to the foreshore itself, however, has been denied, except of the slipway accesible by vehicles on the west side. On my last visit a group of Romanian men were filling a van with scrap metal washed up by the tide. Otherwise, it is all fenced off. Strandline was part of Art in the Open - four artists creating new work outdoors on the Greenwich Peninsula, commissioned by Stream (formerly known as Independent Photography). It was part of Stream's response to the Cultural Olympiad, the 2012 Olympics' four year arts programme. Stream produces public and collaborative arts, working with artists to create projects which are location specific and respond to the characteristics of a place. Stream has its roots in the community media movement of the 1970s and has been through several name changes and relaunches since then. It is based on the Greenwich Peninsula and works across the borough of Greenwich.. Melissa Bliss (livingcinema.org); streamarts.org.uk; artintheopen.wordpress.com.

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Balkanising Taxonomy Nela Milic 'Memories, whether individual or collective, are not static and frozen in time, but are alive, rooted in the present as much as in the past, and linked to aspirations as much as social experience.' N. Sadig Al-Ali (2007), Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present

Context This symposium/exhibition aimed to interrogate notions of Balkan identity, and trouble the impulse to create a stable taxonomic account of the Eastern European subject. Through the construction of protective preservation chambers (light-safe boxes sewn out of black felt), fetishized Balkans can only be encountered through a small peephole.Also, photographs of Balkan people are placed in glass jars, to ensure that they are not physically handled by the viewing public. The voyeuristic impulse hidden behind the project of preservation is exposed, where the boxes and jars claim to protect the objects from light and decay, but instead contribute to widening the gap between the (Western) self and (Balkan) other. The labels which accompanied the garments and photographs contain a mixture of factual and imagined information, once more calling into question the taxonomic urge, and highlighting the problematic process at work behind studying and representing the other. Through the methods of conservation employed in this project, which intensify the relationship between the merging of scientific and absurd classification practices, the curators hoped to contribute visually to the already vast field of study which questions the space from which the Balkan subject is formed.

Exhibition narrative This exhibition poses many questions in relation to the impulse to collect Balkan artefacts.The collector subject is mediating the relationship between East and West by manipulating the framework within which the textiles are presented, and hence directs the dialogue and tension between two worlds. In this dichotomy, however, the curator can expose the paradigm s/he works from as a positionality, but also as a fragile space within which the objects are captured. Her/his narrative is formed by grouping, and by creating an identity of Balkanness, recognisable nowadays by conflicts. The impulse to taxonomize is justified by questioning the impulsiveness of others and is constructed as a binary - archiving against chaotic existence. In this argument, wild Balkan objects play the role of the other. If the audience is led through the understanding of this via labelling, division and distance, they are not engaging with the objects in an active and creative way. Curators are interpreting the objects as violated by navigation and want to put their perception on an equal footing with the choosers and the viewers, so the misconceptions of the Balkans do not continue. They believe that the desire of the collector to protect against decay is often wrapped up in the fear of the other and s/he expresses that by trying to contain, to tame the objects, but that disables her/himself from understanding them. The process of classification, however comforting, cannot last.The nature of objects on show is inherent. They live through the cultures they were formed in, and as that society progresses, transforming itself into various shapes, they start to slip out from the domestic environment into the public realm. If classified, they become invisible and the slippage incomprehensible, but if left to live as they are, they might provide more than data: a snippet of history. www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/balkanising-taxonomy page 33

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Signs of the City: Young People's Photographic Imaginary of the European Metropolis Alison Rooke London Conference Report The Signs of the City conference took place at the Goethe Institute, in Kensington, London on the 4th October 2008. This one day event organised by CUCR in partnership with urban dialogues bought together students, educationalists, artists, practitioners and academics working in the area of cultural education, media and pedagogy, visual arts, urban studies, languages and European studies to explore a cross-disciplinary perspective on participatory arts practice with a particular focus on young people's urban culture. The conference, together with an exhibition at Watermans arts centre in West London marked the end of the eighteen month long London Signs of the City project. It was part of a month long series of conferences and exhibitions in four participating cities: Berlin, London, Sofia and Barcelona. After introductions by Karl Pfeiffer (Goethe Institute London) and Uta Staiger (urban dialogues) Michael Keith (CUCR) opened up the conference with a keynote address which set the scene for the day. Michael’s paper discussed how cities are changing so rapidly in a global process of re-invention that the city can become a stranger to itself. In this context photography offers the possibility of mediating the relationship between urban practices of visioning and re-invention and the ways in which we inhabit cities at the level of everyday routine praxis. Multi- media participatory arts projects such as Signs of the City use this possibility of photography to investigate the ways young people inhabit and imagine their place in cities today. This in turn tells us about young peoples sense of, place, of neighbourhood and their 'right to the city. Michael discussed how the project works to disrupt the deceptively simple stories of young people, identity and contemporary urbanism circulating today. At its best the project displays the sort of Relational Aesthetics identified with Bourriaud, a theorist who, in foregrounding the interplay of urbanism, curation and aesthetics has opened up arts practice in the last decade.

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The first panel of the day on Young People, Cities and Citizenship included a paper by Ben Gidley from CUCR entitled Young citizens: local inflections of the global. This paper, based on a series of research projects conducted at CUCR, some of which used visual and media-based methods, explored emerging forms of multiculture among young people in urban South London. Ben discussed how these forms are shaped by global cultural corporate culture while at the same time being intensely local, rooted in neighbourhoods - they are simultaneously hybrid and creole. Graham Jeffrey from the School of Media, Languages and Music at the University of the West of Scotland's paper offered some reflections on his extensive work on the discourses of learning and inclusion in informal performing arts projects with young people. Graham set out many of the strengths of participatory arts, the ways that they are profoundly social and often validating to young people and placing their voices in a wider social context. Graham's paper was followed by a presentation by Mónica Segura Márquez, a Berlinbased artist who ran several workshops in Berlin as part of the Signs of the City Project. Monica presented a short film which illustrated some of the central motifs in her work which aims to offer a process whereby young people learn to see the city through fresh eyes, discover aspects of the city that they pass over in their daily routines. After lunch the discussion turned to visualising contemporary urbanism. In a session chaired by Rudolf Netzelmann (from Zukunftsbau/urban dialogues, Berlin), Gillian Rose, a leading theorist in visual methodologies, gave a paper entitled Photographs of/as Urban Identity which questioned some of the assumptions about photograph’s creators that are often employed by social scientists. Fiona Fieber, from Space media in Hackney, London, reflected on her experience as Head of Collaborations at Space media which was founded in May 1968. Fiona reflected on the organisation’s development and its current place in the in the changing cultural landscape of collaborative and participatory arts, and the spatial changes to

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Hackney as an Olympic borough. Alison Rooke from CUCR discussed the challenges presented by Evaluating the Signs of the City project, reflecting on the ways in which the process of engagement is as significant as the images produced and the projects legacy, the Citipix web platform. She then discussed the photographs produced in the project and the ways in which the images are understood as semiotics, art and sociological statements. The final session focused on participative arts practice. The session was chaired by Britt Hatzius an artists and member of CUCR. The first paper was by Aida Sanchez from the University of Barcelona entitled The Politics of Collaboration in Signs of the City - the challenge is the asset. It examined some of the relational and organisational aspects of collaborative arts project such as Signs of the City.This paper placed the project in the broader context of cultural policies aimed at the creation of concensus and symbolic identification with notions of 'citizenship' or 'community'. Aida examined some of the negotiations, debates and tensions that characterise collaborative projects. Rather than see these as flaws, she discussed the ways that these are at the core of such projects and therefore need to be part of the way such projects are represented and evaluated. Douglas Nicholson, one of the artists who ran one of the Signs of the City workshops in Hackney, London gave a paper Participatory Photographic Methods. He discussed the diverse settings he has carried out such work in and the ways that photography can be used in areas as varied as health, heritage and community development. Melissa Bliss, also a London artist, presented her work which uses mobile devices in youth arts projects such as Signs of the City, BBC Blast and FreqOut . Considered together the mix of panellists, their different disciplinary approaches together, with engaging questions from the floor led to a stimulating day where artists, academics and educationalists together considered some of the dilemmas and opportunities raised by participative and collaborative arts practice and the social and political contexts in which this kind of work takes place. These discussions included the extent to which projects are participative or collaborative and the balance of power in deciding where participation

begins and ends. Also, the requirements of funders and the social contexts in which such practices are currently being commissioned and the ways in which participatory photography connects matters of aesthetics, lived experience and social processes. The conference was a welcome opportunity to come together to discuss the ethical, political, pedagogical and aesthetic dimensions of socially engaged photographic practice across a variety of sites. To conclude, engaging projects such as Signs of the City speak to our understanding of young peoples conditions of inhabiting the contemporary metropolis in language mediated by the visual practises and performances of the photographic. In Berlin, Barcelona, London and Sofia artists worked with young people through the medium of the photograph and in many ways curated both their neighbourhoods and representations of the city at large.The signs of the city they produced are more complex than those found in simplistic geographical tropes of the city as a playground, a site of danger or governmentality. In this way the project provided powerful axes through which the research project intervened in urban form, identity and space mediated by very different experiments in photographic practice. Conventional tropes of the four cities were reconfigured by these alternative curations; the hidden disclosed, the visible reconfigured. Thanks to Michael Keith for his input into this article. The conference has received generous support from the Delegation to the United Kingdom of the Government of Catalonia and the Institute Ramon Llull. It has also been supported by the Catalan Institute for the Cultural Industries (ICIC) in London, and the Spanish Embassy London. Signs of the City was initiated by Berlin-based youth art organization urban dialogues (www.urbandialogues.de). It has been carried out with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, the Capital Cultural Fund Berlin, the Institute of Culture of the City of Barcelona, the British Council Berlin, the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, and SONY. It works in collaboration with the Goethe-Institutes in Sofia, Barcelona and London.

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Signs of the City: Photographic Workshop Campbell works Campbell Works is the collaboration between artists Neil Taylor and Harriet Murray. Since 1997 Taylor and Murray's practice has extended to include curating an exhibition program at their artist run gallery and project space in East London, initiating new participatory art projects and creating collaborations with artists, scientists, local authorities, and other organization.They encompass an eclectic attitude to cross-disciplinary approaches, placing value on the experience, process and risk taking involved in collaborative projects. For Signs of the City they ran a workshop at the Wilhelm-Von-Turk-Schule (School) for children with varying degrees of hearing and speaking impairment in Potsdam near Berlin in April 2008. (www.campbellworks.org)

The project kicked off at the Arts and Education Lab (AEL) in autumn 2007 at the House of Cultures of the World (HKW) in Berlin. It was an exciting three days with a packed programme of presentations, open debate, speed dating and intellectual duelling. The emphasis was for all participating artists, technicians, directors and facilitators to meet and get to know each other through developing key issues involved within the project. Many hours were spent discussing different aspects of the project from ethical and international legal issues to the projects technical implementation. We collectively explored the function of the public website (www.citipix.net) and its usability for the young photographers. The question hanging was how, in a relatively short period of time, could you maximise the creative output of a group of individuals that you have never met before, while at the same time ensuring that the experience be meaningful and not just an exercise in speed teaching and photo extraction. We were given the opportunity to determine our own framework for delivery and through the A&E lab we developed the embryo of an idea. By exploring the inherent core values within the project that lay beyond the pictorial surface of the website, we asked what was the inner heart of the project that excited us? Assuming that one of the aims of Signs of the City was to take a snapshot of city life seen through the eyes of Europe's youth, then, as many different representatives should be included as possible. The range of participating countries was as good as the finance would allow and the groups seemed fairly diverse in their catchments. But none included young people with a recognised disability. page 36

We discussed the possibility with the initiators of the project Urban Dialogues of including deaf participants, intrigued by the idea of working with a group that may potentially have a very different relationship or unique experience with the city environment. Following on from research undertaken for a previous Campbell Works project titled MindMine, (2006), we wanted to explore how perceptions can vary for the hearing impaired, and which if any of the other senses are enhanced to take on the role of the missing sensory input. Hearing is part of our communication system along with sight, so, do deaf people see the world differently? And what in the urban landscape attracts their attention? Do they see details and notice more incidental moments that get missed through the audio clutter of our cities?

Our methodology Our approach was to try and explore the possibility of communicating largely through pictures and actions. With the projects focus on photography we were interested in creating an approach that would allow the participants a rewind from digital technologies back to the birth of photography, the aim being to inform their thinking by creating a dialogue between the photographer and the instrument of image capture. In order to retain mobility we developed a portable darkroom that can be transported and erected almost anywhere, and used to develop large format black and white images in the 'field'.

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The Workshop The 15 students were very quick on the uptake and eager to engage in the project. Using fundamental analogue principles, they constructed large format pinhole cameras from found cardboard boxes. With a digital camera in one hand and their pinhole camera in the other they set out to explore their surroundings. As they began returning to the darkroom 'base camp' they learnt how to develop and fix their images. In the glowing red darkness of the developing tent, the pinhole negatives were transformed into positive composite images. The students began overlaying cut paper stencils onto their negatives, immediately creating new signage and narratives. We were also able to create a wonderful juxtaposition of technologies by attaching a GPS device to the cardboard cameras to log and map the 'globally positioned situations' of the pinhole exposures.

Examining their results they assessed the pros and cons of 150 years of technological advancement as they struggled with long exposure times and cardboard camera shake. It quickly became apparent that their focus was largely on portraiture, photographing each other within familiar surroundings.We realised that for them, and perhaps all teenagers, the most immediate and interesting subjects are friends. There was also an element of hesitation. To walk around the city or stand in a public space next to a strange cardboard box and not feel self-conscious is hard. You have to be very keen or oblivious not to be mildly embarrassed, and for a group of young people who do not generally want to draw attention to themselves there were issues for some, about the spectacle of an often extremely long exposure and being seen carrying the cardboard cameras. The participating photographers were as mixed in their creative interests and skills as any group of 15 teenagers. But, the emotional perceptions and speed at which the students gathered information from their surroundings seemed significantly faster than those of us who rely on our ears, and their ability to assimilate learning was impressive. Many of our projects involve the creation of disorientating environments, and during these workshops the students' reliance on their visual communication systems was severely hampered when they worked within the darkroom tent. This loss of communication systems, both verbal and visual, strangely created an atmosphere of calm, a kind of 'lost at sea' feeling for all involved. As artists we were working within a communicative environment that was alien to us, and now, the participants were experiencing it too. By removing the ability to communicate through conventional channels, they were forced to learn from each other's actions and encouraged to take risks even if it meant making mistakes. By dissolving the conversational communication systems, including signing, the framework allowed for the creation of new imagery within an experimental platform, where practical activity became the form of communication. The imagery the photographers produced is beautiful, compelling and ethereal, and their upload selection will remain as a legacy to the project, and easily speak for itself, but we hope a deeper legacy is left in the students ability to question, learn from and act on their actions and imaginations, as they did during the five days we had the pleasure to be with them. page 37

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Landmarks of cut, gaze and fiction for a Distant Landscape: On the photographs of Sachiyo Nishimura Soledad García

Selecting three different city sceneries within distant vision and condensed through a breadth of natural landscape, Sachiyo Nishimura seems to portray the apparent uniform and familiar urban topography. At first glance, the photographs evidently contain references to the city features; nevertheless the recognition of the specific locations remains partial. Time becomes essential not only for the identification of the diverse pieces, but also for the detection of repetition, the condition of iteration and the spatial activation through discreet measurements and continual extensions. In a panoramic view, the nine photograph pieces of Sachiyo Nishimura reveal the constant and exact

If London City Airport, Ventanas and Docklands, the three initial photographs of this Distant Landscape have something in common, it is the archetype of nonplaces. As the anthropologist Marc Augé once described, “the space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude”(Augé, 1995). Addressing states of impersonality and sameness, the complete nine pieces puzzle organized by Nishimura seem to reinforce the notion of non-places to gloomy excess. Nevertheless, while signs and urban structures are replicated, juxtaposed and extended to an overabundance of miniature forms and shapes, the sober natural landscape draws our ubiquitous concentration. Mediated by the attraction of the punctum the photographs reveal the play of motion between the close and distant gaze; the parallel differences and the decisive fictional territory suspended on the purity of its surroundings. page 38

interruption visibly in its intercalate format, exposing the first explicit traces of her cutting system. The second and implicit trace regards the several horizontal, vertical and oblique grids acting as landmarks that indicate the complex construction of the entire landscape. Both outside and inner cuttingsconform to the logic of multiple manipulations based on a meticulous programme of reconstruction. Under the processes of overlapping, addition and the effects of mirror image, the initial unification of the photographs are displaced as fragments, the scales are altered, and the surfaces retouched in maximum grey saturation, leaving the impression of an excessive flat city un-inhabited.

One of the crucial elements explored in the series of photographs regards the sources of tension: the layers of intersections and the reiterative oppositions. Yet more than a system of coordinates, the different landmarks - grids, signs and urban structures subtly emphasized not a real mapping, but the construction of fiction. Some questions arise. Why persist with the effects of illusion? Is it the only residue of non-places´ spaces? What kind of game might appear on the interference between pieces of non-places and its construction towards fiction? Rather than a simple tautology, Distant Landscape keeps an ambivalent position; a puzzle that still can be prolonged in an unlimited projection. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthology of Supermodernity, Pubilshed by Verso. Sachiyo Nishimura Photography: www.snishimura.com

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The Invisible Man, The Invisible City On the photographs of Santiago Escobar Kimberly Keith The reflection in my photos is the invisible layer that divides the real from the unreal, war from peace. Is the reflection in the mirror, in the image and in the question: which is the image? Who is the subject? Where is the hope?... Santiago Escobar Reflection has multiple meanings and interpretations an image thrown back, as if from a mirror that is either literal or metaphorical; a correspondence to something because of its influence, such as a rise in consciousness resulting from the contemplation of injustice, perhaps symbolically depicted through photography; or a deep thought, and the ideas and expressions that spring forth from it. The work of Santiago Escobar encompasses each aspect of reflection described above. The photographs selected for The Invisible Man, The Invisible City exhibition come from a body of work that has been evolving over a five year period. Escobar has spent time in reflection upon the circumstances of his native Colombia, the state of affairs in the cities and in the countryside, and the nature of space and place in his adopted city of London. Each image on display contains symbols which create metaphors about the condition of the city and its, often unintended, inhabitants. The toy soldiers represent guerrillas, paramilitary groups and army forces that have caused the displacement of millions from rural areas of Colombia into the cities; for the displaced person, they are a symbol of power and aggression as well as a

Move-on, Lond-on

potent reminder of all that was lost in their enforced flight to the metropolis. Plastic toy soldiers evoke notions of play and present an allusion to the idea that war, whether based in the cocaine fields of Colombia or in the desert of Iraq, is just a game to those who move the pieces around the board. The miniature army assembles on an escalator in a tube station to symbolize the violence inherent in the daily waves of chaos contained within that very station. A reflection on these symbols gives way to an exploration of the uncanny, whereby familiar and unfamiliar elements of the metaphor cause discomfort on the part of the viewer; yet rather than rejecting the object, the viewer is encouraged to engage with the material on a deeper level. This is due to Escobar's literal use of reflection on the surface of his photographs - which are so glossy that the viewer becomes an element within the image - and due to his minimalist distillation of the figurative elements of each composition, which both accentuates what is present and enhances the negative space in each photograph. Provocative imagery encourages the viewer to make meaning from the object based on their own subjectivity and has the potential to create change within the individual. The uncanny, in concert with literal and figurative reflection, compels the viewer to decipher the layers of meaning inherent in Escobar's work. An exploration for which they will be richly rewarded.

Abajo del Mar encima el Amor

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REVIEWS The Politics of Hope Will Davis “Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness”. So concluded Max Weber in his famous lecture, Politics as a Vocation, given in Munich in 1918. Weber harboured political ambitions, but with slogans like that it is perhaps unsurprising that they were somewhat under-fulfilled. “While we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes we can”. So concluded a very different speech in Chicago, ninety years later, from a rather more successful politician. How should sociology respond to the phenomenon of hope, especially where it manifests itself politically? This was the question posed at a Friday evening seminar at Goldsmiths with Ruth Levitas and Les Back, The Politics of Hope. Whether it was the fortunate coincidence of the seminar occurring days after Obama's victory, or the intriguingly expansive title (quite aside from the venerable speakers!), the event drew an impressively large and engaged audience. The Obama victory was never far from either speaker's presentation or the discussion that followed. It transpired that they had been planning such an event for some time, and it was never intended as a response to the American elections.And yet that now-iconic image of Obama's face in red, blue and cream, above the letters HOPE, inevitably flashed up on the screen more than once. Ruth Levitas contends that sociology has allowed its political and moral agenda to become submerged, and it needs to be brought to the surface once more. It is inadequate to leave hope as some metaphysical or psychological entity, free of content or political reason. What do we hope for, she asks? Sociology must rediscover its political agenda. For Levitas, at least, this involves the resuscitation of socialist utopian politics (New Labour came off particularly badly from her presentation). The alliance between sociology and utopian politics is a comfortable one as far as Levitas is concerned. Both share common traits - a holistic social vision, a normative programme and institutional specificity.

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Les Back's concerns are somewhat different. He talked about the possibility for an 'ethnography of hope' to uncover the practices and objects that carry hope in the present. Back introduced the all-important distinction between hope and optimism, whereby hope is cognisant of the damaged nature of the world, while optimism operates blindly. He referenced Gramsci here, for whom hope transcended the opposition between optimism and pessimism. My mind is pessimistic but my will is optimistic, wrote Gramsci. What neither speaker seemed to accept was the form of hope that we are familiar with from the Frankfurt School, who in turn were mindful of Weber's “polar night of icy darkness and hardness”. Adorno and Horkheimer's famous proclamation “the task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past” is a deeply pessimistic one, but still a hopeful one. Enlightenment (a word, incidentally, that was not used once during the seminar) lies both very far behind us and very far ahead of us. For Back especially, an ethnography of hope would aim to challenge this tragic historicity, and root utopia firmly in the present and everyday. The Obama victory is real and it is now, and represents a challenge to sociological fatalism. But what struck me, as the discussion was unfolding, was that the temporality of Obama's hope bears some resemblance to the dialectical 'hopeless hope' of the Frankfurt School. Was it not the hopes of America's founders that Obama was pledging to honour? But when? The riddle of America - Enlightenment's 'practical experiment' - is that the distinction between hope and optimism becomes invisible. Are the moon-landings a cause for hope or for optimism? Perhaps Obama's genius, like the best Presidents before him, is to fuse the two concepts together. But it would take a particularly pragmatist variant of European sociology to follow him down this path. Collapsing hope into technological optimism will not do, but nor will allowing it to become divorced from politics altogether. The challenge posed by The Politics of Hope seminar is to conceive of hope that is neither pragmatist nor tragic, but political and critical. For Levitas this would involve greater clarity of political demands. For Back, it requires more sensitivity to the everyday practices and materiality of lived hope. “Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us”, but there is every reason for sociologists to take hope seriously nevertheless.

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Too Far South Exhibition Review Paul Halliday For the last four years graduating students on the MA Photography and Urban Cultures have insisted on having a collective exhibition, based on a theme and a venue of their choice. This year, the group returned to the APT Gallery in Deptford, an engaging space with a history of supporting local, international and emerging artists. When I use the term 'insisted', I use it in the sense that the momentum for the show always comes from within the student body itself, rather than Goldsmiths academics. We were and are, of course, delighted to support the show and consider the event to be an important rite of passage and defining moment within the student experience of studying urban photography at the college. The exhibition is not assessed as a constituent part of the MA, but rather reflects how course members work collectively in the pursuit of extracurricular curatorial experience, public engagement, and the imperative that flows in the blood of many artists - the need to 'put stuff out there' - in order to receive critical feedback and increase awareness of their work. Around 400 people attended the opening, and over 1000 people came to see the exhibition.

imaginations; and for our former head of CUCR Michael Keith whom we lose to Oxford University. Of Michael, it is no exaggeration to say that had he not run the extra mile (or marathon) over the development, validation and resourcing of this programme; conversations between artists, photographers and urbanists, may have still been ongoing in London cafes about just how wonderful it would be to set up an interdisciplinary programme in photography and urban cultures. Instead, thanks in large measure to the vision and engagement of some key urban researchers and theorists, we have the real thing.

It is an understatement to observe that colleagues at CUCR have provided a level of intellectual and practical support that directly contributed to the programme being developed and established as a global first. The course is certainly not an 'easy option' for any graduate photographer, artist or social scientist to undertake, combining as it does, urban and social theory, interdisciplinary studies and the possibility of immersive visual practice. What we can now reflect on, seven years down the line since the course started, is that many of our graduates have gone on to win major international visual arts prizes including The Jerwood, Bloomberg (this year's recipient is Manual Vasquez) and Saatchi awards. Other graduates have progressed onto doctoral programmes at Goldsmiths and other leading universities, or are now running BA photography programmes in the UK or in their countries of origin. Some follow entirely unexpected routes that draw on their programme experiences. In other words, the programme is making an impact and raising key questions about how interdisciplinary programmes might best work. I would like to thank all of the exhibition participants for having been such a positive and hard-working group this year; for the Goldsmiths MFA Curating team for their creativity, vision and perseverance; my departmental colleagues for their sociological and administrative

Curator Wiebke Gronemeyer and Paul Halliday at the Too Far South exhibition seminar. Photo Credit: Manuel Vasquez

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Seeing the Invisible Noir: Dirty Pretty Things Michael Edema Leary

Three disparate yet related things happened in November 2008 that suggest it is apposite to revisit a film that was controversial when released but which provides a sophisticated reading of London in the early 21st century. First, Dirty Pretty Things (Frears 2002) was aired on Channel 4. Second, ID cards started to be issued to overseas nationals and airport workers. Third, London Mayor Boris Johnson called for an amnesty for all British migrants working illegally. Soon after the film was released the frenzied moral panic about asylum seekers was peaking, until knocked off the tabloid agenda by the Iraq war. The film was controversial when released and still provokes strong positive and negative reactions. It weaves together with great aplomb complex elements of the material, imagined, live, surveiled and (immigration) policed city. The inner London location filming adds credibility which counters the somewhat implausible, though tense and engaging plot. Cinema has long influenced our perception of the modern city even to the extent of producing the city (Clarke 1997 and Shiels & Fitzmaurice 2001). Many reviews of Dirty Pretty Things have been written but I want to concentrate, first on some misconceptions and then on its neo noir (Schwartz 2005) credentials, which affect the manner in which it portrays divergent yet proximate aspects of the city big condition in a globalised neo liberal political economy. Many reviewers (including some who should know better, e.g. Bradshaw 2002) talk of the main characters (the moralistic Nigerian Okwe and his friend/girlfriend Turkish pretty virginal Senay) in derogatory terms as 'illegal immigrants'. They are not and even if they are, the term 'undocumented migrant' is less loaded and does not pander so much to prejudice. They are both refugees seeking political asylum under the Geneva Convention and Okwe the Nigerian doctor in particular, clearly has a good case. If his story is to be believed, and his integrity is at times overpowering, he faces mortal danger if repatriated. A moral point of the whole plot points to the injustice of those seeking asylum not being allowed to work whilst their case is under consideration. It's the material need for food and shelter which drags them into the sordid and dangerous underbelly of London. The fictitious Baltic Hotel is not seedy, as some reviewers state. It is clearly, even for viewers who not know London, in a smart district and is an elegant, plush place with a Ritz lookalike (Russian) doorman. For those who know London it could be one of the many upmarket hotels in Westminster, Kensington or Chelsea. The hotel is in fact in the vicinity of Whitehall (photo).The plush upmarket quality of the hotel combined with the flash Mercedes driving affluence of Señor Juan, a shift manager, is page 42

juxtaposed with the poverty, desperation and squalor in other city districts. Its subdued relaxing lighting (the hotel reception area is actually Wandsworth town hall) contrasts jarringly with the over lit shops, hospital pharmacy and the ghostly dimness of the mortuary. Some reviewers are confused by the film's title or think it relates simply to Okwe and his Turkish friend/girlfriend - the pretty - counterpoised against the obnoxious crooked and dirty Señor Juan. It certainly refers to the comment by Juan that, “They come to hotels in the night to do dirty things. And in the morning, it's our job to make things look pretty again”. Historians of the city will note the 21st century visual aesthetic twist of the 19th century modernist imperative to scrub the dirty city clean. The dark dirty timbre of the film is lifted skilfully by Frears and scriptwriter Steven Knight's periodic insertion of humour, as when after one harrowing incident Juliet jokes,“What a pair! The virgin and the whore.” A macabre visual joke has Juan carrying an organ transport case that is revealed to contain exquisite expensive truffles. Far from being saintly or innocent, Stephen Frears and Steven Knight along with superb performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou, Sophie Okonedo (Juliet, the pretty exuberant sex worker) and Sergi López (of Señor Juan) imbue a noir good/bad ambivalence in all the main characters. Okwe sinks to the depraved level Señor Juan, who runs a, human organs for sale racket, when he finally performs an operation in the hotel. Juan, though grotesquely contemptible, does after all provide access to employment for distressed people in genuine need.The title then is a play on the traditional noir dark/light, good/evil motif inherent in the same character/city (Naremore 2008). The film is not full of the dominant noir elements: chiaroscuro lighting, heavy black shadow, especially across faces, reflection, Venetian blinds and naturalistic night filming. Nor does the film contain a true femme fatal, although the leading female characters, sex worker and refugee, are far from passive victims. That said, one of the defining moments of the film, when Okwe agrees to do the operation, has his face half drenched in heavy black shadow that could be straight out of the 1940s. The moment captures all the anxious ambivalence of a character tortured by the knowledge of his ultimate moral compromise, it captures too the ambivalence of the city that coerces the fall from grace of even the morally strong: a fall that results not just from the insidious temptations of Juan but also the necessity to protect Senay. Dirty Pretty Things is in the mould of such neo noir classics as Chinatown and more recently Sin City which reveal the all pervading corruption of the city and how

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those trapped there survive ultimately through moral and bodily compromise. The multicultural London of Dirty Pretty Things is located in an environmentally degraded London of: street markets (Ridley Road market in Dalston E8), high rise social housing blocks, overcrowded NHS hospitals, decrepit malfunctioning bedsits, incredibly brightly lit all night shops, textile sweatshops and Chinatown, where “the immigration police dare not go”.These locales provide relatively safe haven for all kinds of overseas newcomers trapped by a political economy that squeezes them between paranoid state bureaucracy and exploitative markets and individuals. The 'no work rule' means that Senay is hounded continually by the ‘immigration police’ - the sinister Immigration Enforcement Directive. Frears is too good a director to depict the immigration ramifications in an overly sentimental or one sided way. There is active resistance, self help and mutual support within the unlikely networks of newcomer and Londoner but society's prejudice comes to the aid of the characters too. Okwe knows and navigates the city with ease. His intimate knowledge of the city resembles that of the classic noir detectives (e.g. in The Big Sleep and Kiss Me Deadly). His street knowledge is due to his day time taxi driving (the office is a real taxi cab office in Southwark Street SE1). At crucial moments, like the noir detective, Okwe is rendered invisible or simply acceptable, by the preconceptions of mainstream society. In a hospital scene he must acquire drugs for the unfortunate victim of botched surgery. He does so through the simple devise of donning a green overall, accessing the hospital pharmacy with ease, mop in hand: i.e. Blacks are cleaners. Another preoccupation of film noir surfaces in Dirty Pretty Things: entering and leaving the city, most noticeable in: The Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past, the neo noir A Rage in Harlem and sci noir Blade Runner.The big noir city corrupts the newcomer inexorably, often fatally. If the protagonist is

lucky the magnet that attracts, also repels before complete disaster entails.The tragedy for the refugee is that they can't leave the city, it provides for their basic needs. To leave is often to invite rural danger and deprivation, most shockingly evident in the recent Morecombe Bay cockle pickers' drowning. That Okwe and Senay manage to leave the city, tearing apart their nascent love affair is tragic, that their leaving is resourced by their capitulation to the forces of evil, resisted at first, speaks to the power of the city. Dirty Pretty Things achieves what all good cinematic city flicks should. It confirms the audience's city knowledges, allowing us some comfort in the cinema seat, but simultaneously it has us squirming by challenges our preconceptions, making visible that which is unseen or ignored. Dirty Pretty Things is powerful, tragi/comic and compelling city story telling: not as unremittingly grim and humourless as Eastern Promises, where the despicable lurks behind the elegant Georgian façade, nor as seamlessly complex as Crash (2004).That film ends with the release from a white van of a group of pitiful Chinese workers trafficked into Los Angeles; mirroring the rhetorical question put by Okwe's friend, the intelligent sardonic British Chinese mortuary assistant. Referring to an unidentified Chinese male corpse he wonders, “maybe he's from the back of a truck?” ID cards for 'foreign' nationals signal the British state's simplistic understanding about where danger lies in the city. Johnson's call for an amnesty reflects the London's appetite for cheap manual labour; resistance within the Conservative Party highlights the political dilemma. Dirty Pretty Things continues the cinematic city compulsion to the see the intricacies of the material imagined city. References Bradshaw, P. 2002 (13 December), "Dirty Pretty Things", The Guardian Clarke, D. (ed) 1997,The Cinematic City, Routledge, London. Naremore, J. 2008, More than night: film noir in its contexts, University of California Press, Berkeley. Schwartz, R. 2005, Neo-Noir: From Psycho to Collateral, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD. Shiel, M. & Fitzmaurice,A. (eds) 2001, Cinema and the City: film and urban societies in a global context, Blackwell, Oxford.

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An impromptu review of the Vital Signs conference Alex Rhys-Taylor and Charlotte Bates The context: Alex and Charlotte attended the Vital Signs: Researching Real Life conference in Manchester where they both presented papers on their current work. The following review of the conference is a conversation recorded while sat on a train, waiting for it to depart from Manchester back to London. Given that they had already missed the train they were supposed to get, and that the next train got cancelled (leaving two trains worth of people crammed onto one) the conversation was recorded by two weary sociologists in a cramped environment surrounded by irritable people.The effects of these conditions, however, were to a degree mitigated by ready mixed cans of gin and tonic.

Charlotte:What was the reference she made?

Charlotte: So, Vital Signs!

Charlotte: Do you want to talk about things?

Alex: I was resonating so hard I thought I might shatter. Anita Wilson, she might have been my favourite presenter in the entire conference, with “Is that Escape your wearing miss? A synaesthetic approach to researching everyday prison life.”

Alex: Things were a really big part of this conference, weren't they?

Charlotte: I think you'd better tell us about the Radox and the toothpaste.

Charlotte:Yes, there were a lot of things.

Alex: Well Anita's research, it seems to be a lifelong project actually, is conducted in prisons, and the research she was presenting at the conference was a result of observations she had made about the way prisoners scent their cells upon arrival in prison, to de-prisonify their cell. One of the methods they use is to fill a basin with hot water and Radox and paste it all over the walls, another guy got loads of tubs of Daz washing detergent and placed them all around his room, and someone else put magic scented trees on his hot water pipes. Now, what I think is interesting, is that she said it was to create a homely space and to remind people of home, but quite often they used products that they would never use at home. It was a very uniform technique that they used across different prisons, and the products the prisoners used depended on the availability and affordability of certain products within prisons. So in a sense, the prisoners were creating a new institutional smell.

Alex: Vital Signs.

Alex: Tim Ingold's Things. Tim gave the first plenary paper and it was based around a shift in his thinking from 'objects' to 'things...' 'things' being a coming together and 'meshwork' of other 'things'. Tim talked about the etymology of the word 'thing,' which he said was originally, in Scandinavian languages, conceived of as a gathering, or a 'happening.' Then he related 'things' to his re-working of the Deleuzian concept, A Body Without Organs (BWO) which he had reformed as The Environment Without Objects (EWO). He drew a big spider diagram to represent it on a white board. It was magnificent, but it would have been better if he'd got the black board he apparently requested. But it was still fantastic; it was really good to hear him talk about relatively novel concepts in such an old-school fashion. I also very much liked Carol Smart's Reflections on methods: Contemporary challenges for sociological approaches. I respond very well to calls to do more thick description and her call to make the data do the talking, because its something I feel comfortable doing. Its good to hear someone asking for more of that, especially because its something I think I can do. page 44

Alex: She quoted a long excerpt from Young & Wilmot, Kinship and Family in East London. It was the very first sociological monograph I ever read, when I was doing my A-Level in sociology, and it was all about Bethnal Green. Then maybe 5 or 6 years after I read that, I moved to Bethnal Green, and now I'm doing an ethnography in the same streets, and in the thick descriptive style that was being commended. So that resonated a lot with me. Charlotte:There was definitely resonance.

Charlotte:Yes, she also said that different prisons had different scents, for example she could recognise which prison a letter had been sent from by sniffing it. Alex:What else?

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Charlotte: I was quite impressed to see so many examples of research projects being produced as installations, there's maybe a new movement towards installations as a research output. Dawn Lyon produced an exhibition within the space of the site she had researched, and Tahera Aziz is making an interactive sound piece of the Stephen Lawrence case. Alex:Yeah, why do you think that is? And what are the benefits of doing that are over writing a paper? Why do an installation? Charlotte:Well, I don't think that it's a case of benefits over writing. But I think the use of sensory methods naturally leads to different forms of representation. Alex: Or presentation? There's something there about not simply representing, but trying to create something new. Charlotte:Yes, definitely. Alex:There was also lots of stuff about literary writing, it was great to hear so many people talking about that and caring about that. I think Les [Back] summed up the relationship between literary styles and sociology well when he said that he thinks of himself as a writer first and foremost. Charlotte: Yes, we just have to be careful not to contribute to that big pile of books and journals that never get read and aren't written to be loved. Alex:What else did you like? Charlotte: I liked Therese Richardson's Lives lived with the dead, re-thinking the meaning of vital signs and real lives. Her presentation was about how a husband or wife keeps the memory of their partner alive after their death. I really liked the way that she was able to identify the ways that non-physical things are embodied in everyday practices. I think there is a lot to be said for the characterisation of objects and materiality more generally, and in way too I liked the simplicity of the idea, it's a really basic human thing that people live with. I also particularly enjoyed Mariam Fraser's presentation in the same session. Alex:Yes, that was really good, and I'm still thinking it through… What about your session? What happened? Charlotte:Well, my session was called Visual knowledge, visual ethics. Jon Prosser raised some very salient and pragmatic points about the ethics of visual research,

which really apply to all research I think, not just the visual. Its funny, people get really scared of visual methods, but in fact their reactions point out the inherent flaws in our attitude and approach to anonymity in research more generally, its just that the visual makes what we do a bit more obvious. We had a really nice discussion about the traces of identity that are always left, no matter what measures of anonymity you take, and also about some of the techniques currently out there, for example pixilation and black out bars, that are used to hide peoples identities in photographs, and how they can be incredibly criminalising and disturbing. In fact, bodies can be far more identifiable and personal than faces, and these techniques can be quite harmful I think. What happened in your session? Alex: Ok, I'll tell you about Katherine Davis', Knocking on doors: Recruitment and enrichment in a qualitative interview based study. She was talking about how she went around knocking on people's doors to recruit people for her Resemblances project. First of all, we shared something in common in that we both really enjoy our ethnography. I personally feel guilty about it but she doesn't feel guilty at all, but anyway… the smell of cut grass was really prevalent in the middle class areas, while the smell of tarmac and the lack of grass was really prevalent in other areas. She got a really good sense of the demographic she was working with and the different types of people, just through the sensoria in which her respondents lived. She probably has a far richer idea of her sample than you would ever get from picking someone out of an electoral register or out of a phone book. It's weird that this type of knowledge about study participants is a novelty, it shouldn't be a novelty. We could do with that degree of connection with our respondents in social science in general I think. Charlotte: So those were a few tiny highlights from the programme. How was the experience? Alex: Experience. Somebody mentioned the etymology of experience at the beginning of the conference didn't they? And Mariam followed it up... What does it mean again? Outside trial, trial outside? I can't remember. But it was really good. I found it edifying, and enriching, and motivating, and also very reassuring, in that there's lots of other people out their tackling the same 'things,' as I am. In a way, that makes me feel less special than before, but I think that there is something to be said for the new solidarity I have found. Have you finished that G&T?

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This Is Not A Gateway Festival, October 2008 David Kendall Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield established This is Not A Gateway in 2007. Their aim in the words of the founders is to address “the urgent and identified needs confronting current and future cities- namely the need to generate and elevate knowledge about cities from 'the ground up', from emerging practitioners and those often outside of urban circuits”. TINAG is developing an online archive of work created by emerging Architects, Artists, Curators, Designers, Filmmakers, Researchers, and Writers. The organisation holds bi-monthly salons, produces publications, and an annual festival. The first TINAG Festival was held on the 24th, 25th, and 26th October 2008 in Dalston, East London. I attended and participated in this event, as part of A Line is There to be Broken, an exhibition of photographic work with Tristan Fennell and Gesche Würfel and was present at exhibitions, seminars, and workshops over the weekend. Highlights of the festival include Micro Finance and the City. A discussion with Fair Finance, an organisation operating in London working with people excluded from the banking system. This organisation wants challenge existing attitudes towards debt and is exploring how to reintroduce people into the financial system in a socially responsible way. Working with clients to start for example new businesses by offering flexibility, a debt advice service, and practical financial solutions. Hilary Powell's Salon De Refuses Olympique continued debates that surround the development of the 2012 Olympics and their influence on the regeneration of East London. I listened to panelists Emma Dwyer, Public Works, Jim Thorp, and Gesche Würfel discuss and present photographic, archeological, and curatorial projects exploring and influencing the process of change in the east of the city. I also enjoyed and was impressed by Hilary's and Dan Edelstyn's Optimistic Immigrants, which attracted a large, crowd on Sunday night and provided young immigrants-filmmakers a platform to screen their work to new audiences. Alex Haw brought together a group of panelists to discuss the ethics and use of CCTV in cities. The symposium Surveying Surveillance put forward arguments for and against the use of video surveillance. It was refreshing to hear voices in favor of CCTV state why they consider it a positive page 46

aspect of contemporary life. This discussion was informative and educational, asking critical questions, exploring codes of practice, and how these rules affect social and spatial implications of this technology. Dalston is another part of London that is undergoing structural change. Redevelopment of the area by Transport for London and Hackney Council will dramatically alter the visual appearance of the area. Winston Whitters film Save our Heritage, documents how people in Dalston grouped together to oppose Hackney Council's and Transport for London's plans to demolish buildings that local people wanted to retain and reuse within the area. The film follows the successes and failures of activists to influence and change council planning decisions and documents the refusal of the authorities to acknowledge the viewpoints of residents. Collaborating with the organisation, OPEN Dalston.Whitter's film provides a visual record of an ongoing process of redevelopment and conflict in the area. Illustrating that 'regeneration' may not always produce a dialogue for positive change. The reconstruction of urban landscapes is a procedure that should be questioned and always open to critical debate. The programme also contained a number of DIY discussions around the themes of the 'legalities of organising', publishing ideas and the 'art of making space' (which considered how creative professionals have established their practices and constructed or reused workspaces in cities). These workshops attracted an international audience of creative practitioners, many living and working in London. I was impressed by the enthusiasm of those who attended to share experiences and knowledge. Each of these discussions provided a practical platform, for conversation and debate, allowing individuals and groups in London to engage and meet other practitioners outside of academic networks. I look forward to ongoing dialogue and the development and success of next year's festival.There were many other events discussing artistic, social, theoretical, and ethical issues included the festival. Links to all projects, exhibitions, workshops and publications can be found at: www.thisisnotagateway.net

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For all news, events, seminars and conferences organized by the CUCR please refer to webiste: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/html/news.html page 47

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List of contributors to this issue, spring 2009:

Anderson, Mette Bates,Charlotte Berrens, Karla Campbell Works Clouser, Jeremy Coles, Peter Davies,Will Escobar, Santiago Garcia, Soledad Gerson,Yael Gidley, Ben Halliday, Paul Harris, Adrian Hasan, Sayed Holgersson, Helena Jackson, Emma Jones, Rachel Kendall, David Keith, Kimberly Knowles, Caroline Leary, Michael Edema Marrero Guillamón, Isaac McKenzie, Lisa Meichsner, Sylvia Milic, Nela Mullings-Lawrence, Sireita Olmo, Gonzalo Owen, Craig Rhys-Taylor, Alex Risner, Sophie Rooke, Alison Sánchez de Serdio Martín, Aida Sanderson-Mann, Jo

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Professor of Sociology, Bergen University PhD student, Visual Sociology PhD student, Visual Sociology Neil Taylor and Harriet Murray, artists Graduate MA Photography and Urban Cultures, CUCR Visiting Research Fellow, CUCR PhD student Sociology, CUCR Graduate MA Photography and Urban Cultures MFA Curating, Goldsmiths University PhD Sociology Researcher and lecturer at CUCR Course convenor of MA Photography and Urban Cultures PhD Theology and Religious Studies, University of Winchester MA Photography and Urban Cultures, CUCR PhD Sociology, Gothenburg University PhD Sociology, CUCR PhD Visual Sociology MA Photography and Urban Cultures, CUCR PhD Sociology, CUCR Professor of Sociology, Head of CUCR PhD student at CUCR, Lecturer at London Southbank University PhD Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat de Barcelona PhD Sociology, University of Nottingham PhD Sociology PhD Visual Sociology PhD Visual Sociology Graduate MA Photography and Urban Cultures, CUCR PhD Social Psychology, University of Bath PhD Sociology, CUCR MFA Curating, Goldsmiths University Researcher and lecturer at CUCR University of Barcelona currently research fellow at CUCR PhD Health and Social Care,The Open University

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MA IN CULTURE, GLOBALISATION AND THE CITY The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) The Urban Globe?

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION by Caroline Knowles The Political economy of the monument by Aida Sánchez Religion in Inner City Oslo by Mette Andersson Kettering Road by Sayed Hasan Sueno de despierto en un mundo que se desvanece... by Karla Berrens Open-Up photogrpahic project by Gonzalo Osmos Borderlands by Caroline Knowles and Sylvia Meichsner Romans,Trains and Star Trek by Michael Edema Leary Street Photography and Social Research: Brick Lane Re-Visited by Charlotte Bates, Adrian Harris, Isaac Marrero Guillamon, Jo Sanderson-Mann, Craig Owen, Lisa Mckenzie and Sireita Mullings-Lawrence Why is it so easy to place art and regeneration in the same sentence by Sophie Risner In hiding, on display by Helena Holgersson Home Sweet Home (Not) by Emma Jackson Tourism, Inbetweeness and Teotihuacán by Jeremy Clouser What is British? by Michael Wayne Plant Environment: urbanisation and biodiversity by Peter Coles Work/Space: a visual exploration by Yael Gerson Ugalde Strandline: beachcombing on the Greenwich Peninsula by Melissa Bliss Balkanising Taxonomy by Nela Milic Signs of the City by Alison Rooke Signs of the City: Photogrpahic Workshop by Campbellworks Landmarks of cut, gaze and fiction for a Distant Landscape by Soledad Garcia on the photographs of Sanchiyo Nishimura The Invisible man,The Invisible City Exhibition by Kimberly Keith

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REVIEWS The Politics of Hope by Will Davis Too Far South Exhibition review by Paul Halliday Seeing the Invisible Noir: Dirty Pretty Things by Michael Edema Leary Vital Signs conference by Alex Rhys-Taylor and Charlotte Bates This Is Not A Gateway Festival (TINAG) by David Kendall Urban Edge Workshops at CUCR

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edited by

Caroline Knowles Emma Jackson Britt Hatzius Ben Gidley

photograph on front cover by Britt Hatzius

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Our world is moving from being a global village to an urban globe. One of the big challenges of the 21st Century is how to understand the social organisation of contemporary urban life. The MA in Culture, Globalisation and the City gives you the theoretical and practical tools to make sense of cities like London, Los Angeles, Nairobi or Tokyo. The course examines a range of issues from the economics of the global city to the politics of graffiti writing. These include analysing Urban Youth Cultures, Literary and Political Milieux, the Political Economy of the City, Science and the Technology of Urban Life, Urban

Multiculture, Hybridity and Racism and the Spatial Politics of Gender and Sexuality. A multi-disciplinary approach is applied that draws on Sociology, Cultural Geography, Cultural Studies, Politics and Social Policy. The MA is dedicated to turning students into active researchers, critics and writers. The programme consists of 3 core courses, dissertation and a choice of options. It can be followed either full-time or part-time. ESRC funding for one UK resident is currently under review and may not be available next year. Next available entry point: October 2009.

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The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) Introducing the MA Structure The MA in Photography and Urban Cultures has been developed in response to the increasing interests in urban theory and the visual representation and investigation of urban life and the physical environments of the city.

A combination of written and practical work to include a research dissertation and a portfolio of photographs and final exhibition. It can be followed either full-time or parttime. Next available entry point: October 2009.

Who is it for?

The MA is run by the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), a national and international leader in research on urban and community life. CUCR is multidisciplinary and focuses on issues such as citizenship and cosmopolitanism; social exclusion and cultures of racism; sport, popular culture and music; regeneration and wealth creation; issues of crime and community safety; technology and new patterns of digital culture.

Photographers, visual artists and media practitioners, as well as those with a background in social sciences, interested in exploring the creative interplay between cultural research, urban studies and photographic practice. You should have a degree or equivalent in a relevant area.

MPhil / PhD in Visual Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London Our programme offers you the opportunity to combine written sociological argument with film, sound, or photographic material.We provide researchers the space in which to re-think both the conduct and form of contemporary social research, in a college environment animated by visual arts and design.The Visual Sociology programme builds on the success of our MA in Photography and Urban Cultures and contributes to Goldsmiths’ leading position internationally in visual research and analysis

media components of the thesis will form an integrated whole.The use of multimedia will enhance and evidence your analysis, interpretation and understanding of social phenomena.The written component of the thesis will engage with multi-media components and be set within a substantive research topic and its wider social context. Your practice will be supported by a programme of audiovisual training workshops as well as expert superision in your chosen area of resaerch.

You will carry out research in an area that interests you and prepare a written thesis in combination with a video, a soundpiece or a series of photographs.Written and multi-

To find out more, contact: Professor Caroline Knowles, [email protected] or Bridget Ward (secretary), [email protected]

Further information and how to apply: UK and EU students: Admissions Office, telephone 020 7919 7060 (direct line), fax 020 7717 2240 or e-mail [email protected]; Overseas (non EU) students: International Office, telephone 020 7919 7700 (direct line), fax 020 7919 7704 or e-mail [email protected]; For further information about the Centre: Please call 020 7919 7390; e-mail [email protected] or visit www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/

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CUCR Occasional paper series

Brian W. ALLEYNE Personal Narrative and Activism: a bio-ethnography of "Life Experience with Britain"

Michael STONE Social Housing in the UK and US: Evolution, Issues and Progress William (Lez)HENRY Projecting the 'Natural': Language and Citizenship in Outernational Culture

Mette ANDERSSON The Situated Politics of Recognition: Ethnic Minority, Youth and Indentity Work.

Colin KING Play the White Man:The Theatre of Racialised Performance in the Institutions of Soccer

Les BACK,Tim CRABBE, John SOLOMOS Lions, Black Skins and Reggae Gyals

Larry LOHMANN Ethnic Discrimination in "Global" Conservation

Andrew BARRY Motor ecology: the political chemistry of urban air

Ben LOOKER Exhibiting Imperial London: Empire and City in late Victorian and Edwardian guidebooks

Margarita ARAGON Brown Youth, Black Fashion and a White Riot, 2007

Zygmunt BAUMAN City of Fears, City of Hopes Vikki BELL Show and tell: passing, narrative and Tony Morrison's Jazz Eva BERGLUND Legacies of Empire and Spatial Divides: new and old challanges for Environmentalists in the UK Tine BLOM Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor:The Question of Evil, Suffering and Freedom of Will in Totalitarian Regimes Bridget BYRNE How English am I? Ben CARRINGTON Race,Representation and the Sporting Body Stephen DOBSON The Urban Pedagogy of Walter Benjamin: lessons for the 21st Century Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 Ben GIDLEY The proletarian other: Charles Booth and the politics of representation Paul GILROY The status of difference: from epidermalisation to nanopolitics

Centre For Urban and Commun i t y R e s e a rc h Phone: +44 (0) 20 7919 7390 Goldsmiths College University of London New Cross London SE146NW

S t r e e t

Centre for Urban and Community Research

Hiroki OGASAWARA Performing Sectarianism:Terror, Spectacle and Urban Myth in Glasgow Football Cultures Garry ROBSON Class, criminality and embodied consciousness: Charlie Richardson and a South East London Habitus Flemming RØGILDS Charlie Nielsen's Journey:Wandering through Multicultural Landscapes Fran TONKISS The 'marketisation' of urban government: private finance and urban policy Danielle TURNEY The language of anti-racism in social work: towards a deconstructuve reading Gordon WALKER and Karen BICKERSTAFF Polluting the poor: an emerging environmental justice agenda for the UK? Louisa THOMSON The Respect Drive: the Politics of Young People and Community please refer to www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr for downloads and further information.

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7919 7383 Email: [email protected] .uk Website: www.gold.ac .uk www.goldsmiths.ac .uk/cucr

S i g n s

Spring 2009