Enjoy…

Me

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/graduate_students/d_jeevendrampillai

http://ucl.academia.edu/JeevaD

https://www.facebook.com/people/Jeeva-D/200902438

http://twitter.com/Jeeva_D

Affiliations

Adaptable Suburbs – I am one of three PhD students on this EPSRC funded project based out of The Barlett School of Graduate Studies at UCL.  A deeper understanding of suburbs is sought in particular looking at the relationship between the built environment and social life, I take a historical perspective to the emergence of networks of movement and the role of history and memory in place making by both people and stubborn materialities.  I use the skills of the team in bringing together architectural methods and approaches together with anthropological understandings.  Its all very exciting!

Great Blogs On Space Place Stuff…

http://www.spaceandculture.org/ – Journal and Weblog, it will make your brain hurt! Some really interesting debates from here and one of my favourites.

http://tjcresswell.wordpress.com/ varve – Tim Cresswell’s thoughts on place, mobility, landscape and poetry, always a pleasure to read.

http://matthewgandy.blogspot.com/ Matthew Gandy – prolific and gripping writer on cities, landscapes and nature.  Ecological dynamics of urban space the connection/co-mingling of bodies and place and the moving image are key themes.

In/Out 0f Place…Spectral Nonsensical…

http://www.placehacking.co.uk/ – Bradley Garret and crew go on their urban explorations blurring lines, breaking boundaries and turning the outside in.  Fun, full on and bursting with potential to make your thoughts go through worm holes.

http://transversalgeographies.org/ – the politics of it all, oh yeh that!

http://brianrosa.net/ – where are we…let Brian take a picture and….

http://colinlorne.com/ – The inside of buildings, yeh….

Geography

http://progressivegeographies.com/ if it’s not here….

Follow objects through space and time http://followthethings.com/Home.html ahh where material culture Anthropology, geography politics all meet (and it helps you do your shopping)

Anthropological

http://www.materialworldblog.com/ – based out of UCL anth Material culture group, what do materials do.. if you don’t know…..

http://savageminds.org/ – leading blog on matters Anth

http://altermodern.blogspot.com/ – reflexive and personal reflections on doing, being Anthropological.  Helps me think other people think “Eh?” sometimes too.

http://blog.theasa.org/ for Anthropologists that like to talk a lot (find one that doesn’t!)

Everyday

http://joemoransblog.blogspot.com/

Londonist

The Portas Review: An anthropological reading. 

Just this week [12.12.2011] celebrity retail analyst Mary Portas published UK government sponsored report entitled “The Portas Review: An independent review into the future of our high streets” outlining 28 key recommendations and suggesting ideas for the future of the UK high street.  The report has attracted a large amount of interest in the press and reflects wider discussions on high streets and the associated issues of ‘localness’ ‘community’ and an interesting collection of values, morals and ways of thinking about high streets and the social relations they engender.

Through my work with the Adaptable Suburbs team at UCL I have a keen interest in the historical development and changes in the spaces of the Suburbs and in particular the built environment of the ‘high street’ and its land uses.  The Portas Report provides a rich reading for an anthropologist interested in the phenomena of the high street and its associated notions of neighbourhood, its values etc. and in this post I pull out some of the ways in which I read the document.

My reading can be categorised into two sections, firstly the social values, morals and orderings of these spaces and associated practices and their entanglement with wider discourses of identity.  Secondly how this ordering is either maintained or restored in response to perceived threats through practical measures that reflect both a ordering of social and moral values and an ideological position that in could be referred to as post-political[i].

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Despite a number of declarative statements about the report not being about nostalgia there is a layering of a yearning to return to some notion of community, place, localness, perhaps not like days of ‘butcher baker and candle stick maker’ but to locally focused economy and specialist and personalised services.  From the outset the report declares that it is about ‘Our’ high street, that are ‘spaces which….people make their own’ (p46),  ‘people and place come first’ (p31) that there is some sense of public ownership in these spaces.  Portas invokes an idea that people are willing to ‘fight’ for, are enthusiastic about, and care for such spaces and that we have “sacrificed our communities for convenience” in light of internet and supermarket based shopping and service delivery, describing them as ‘key threats’. The report states that the high street is in a ‘dire state’ and that we have seen a loss of ‘street trust’, a sense of belonging and yet people care deeply for the high street and the appetite to fight for the high street is strong.  Throughout the report and surrounding publicity bodily metaphors are used frequently, the high street is said to need life ‘breathed’ into it and its heart putting back through ‘local people’ (p37, 44, 45).

Portas equates the shift in retail practices to a ‘radical and profound shift in our values’ (p13) and asserts the role of the high street in maintaining a sense of belonging, community and maintain social capital.  She asserts that the high street is about “so much more than shopping” (p44) and that the high street should serve community needs.

The above shows how such ideas of community here are based in a particular idea of place;- of the high street that maintains a sense of communal value and way of life that the place of the internet, the supermarket apparently cannot.  Local produce is valued for economic and ecological reasons relating to an idea of sustainability and stable socio-environmental systems and community needs and a ‘sense of belonging’ works through spaces that the high street is able to deliver.  Clearly the report is designed to preserve and boost the high street in its ability to maintain the work it does in these orderings and understanding of such categories.  Through a serious of re-thinking of the spatial practices the high street encourages supports and engenders and a number of bureaucratic measures Portas outlines 28 recommendations for the high streets.

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The report suggests a number of measures including setting up town teams that will run the high street ‘like a business’ and develop strategic local plans.  Local histories and pride are conceived as selling points and building blocks for a type of space different to the ‘general’ experience of the supermarket. She requests more considerate planning in regard to the perceived threats of out of town shopping centres and supermarkets and wants to free up parking spaces and empty buildings so that they can be used by small businesses and costumers without large bureaucratic or capital obstacles.  She talks with business like efficiency about social capital and how the civic pride and goodwill of local people of local people is essential to maintaining high streets.  She invokes the recent localism act in stressing that local people should have control of the recourses around them and encourages creative and community based use of spaces such as second floor building space and market halls.  Many of the recommendation follow case studies of best practice or exist elsewhere already but my aim here is not to run through them in terms of their effectiveness and impact but rather to reflect on them in regard to what they do in relation the above assertion of the way in which the high street is a conduit of categories of identity, neighbourhood and whose spaces engender a becoming of a particular place with its associated values.

These measures clearly aim to assert the high street as a place that needs to be maintained against a danger of their decline in the face of a threat of changing spatial practices born out of convenience.  The mechanism of doing that is a re-ordering of bureaucratic measures and policy to ensure that town centres become central to priorities, social relations and healthy community is premised here not only on particular spaces but on particular ways of managing spaces.  This management takes the form of shaping and influencing the retail practices and flows of capital which is seen as key to social relations and current understandings of positive social values.  The bodily metaphors indicate a relation to the spaces of the high street as something that holds life, has lungs and a heart and that people care about.  The resulting media responses may differ in their agreement on the minor issues of policy of such things as the category of betting shops to the large ideological differences that come about in discussions over ownership of community resources and the use of the localism act.

However anthropologically the report and the resulting attention demonstrates the extent to which social relations in everyday British life work around, through and with the spaces of the everyday such as the high street, the supermarket, the betting shop.  The ‘crisis’, the panic and decline in the state of the high street has resulted in considerable government resources and press attention with a ‘minster for shops’ a possibility and much debate occurring over what to do with the high street.  Few if any commentators have considered the impact of directing such resources to a form of social relation measured through such spaces and practices.  What are the historical conditions for these social relations, for ideas of localness and the social values that occur through these spaces.  What does it mean to maintain social relations through a strong correlation to retail practices, the high street and so on.  What might supermarkets, global flows of food, money and the internet do to these orderings and what might the range of possible futures be.

With a critical analysis of the changes in the spaces of the high street, the understandings of what the high street does in terms of social relations and a developed historical context it might be possible to not only to discuss what people might do maintain high streets or if we should have them at all but further to ask in what ways and through what spatial practices do we wish to construct our social relations.  We need to ask what the current ways of understanding social relations and where we place the emphasis for action and change does, but also who is it for and who is left out.  With such critical insights we may be better placed to develop understandings of social relations that move beyond reductionist ideas of ‘consumer society’, and readings of events such as the recent riots and the ‘decline’ of the High Street and postulate a position in which we might be able to discuss real ways to alternative and progressive futures in which our discussions around the spaces of our everyday social relations offer real progressive futures in how shape the spaces in which we live our social relations.

In the past week I have engaged in my regular life of my PhD research, chatted with friends, read the news, marched on a student rally against the introduction of fees into higher education and visited occupy london a number of times.  One thing that seems to stand out above all is the ways in which things are understood, that is the frame, the context of all action.  In this blog I will reflect a little on a few of the ways in which the ‘terms of debate’ were key in these events.

Firstly within my own work, an EPSRC funded project which looks at the relationship between the physical and social environments in the suburbs the question of scale and representation is an important one.  At one extreme, and I’ll be crude here for the point of a short blog, we have the notion of embodied, relational, subjective human space and the other we have the decentred, ‘objective’ systemic abstract space.  The first is similar to Ingold’s -(see lines 2007) notion of habitation where place comes to be seen as a point of convergence of many paths, lifelines that create an energy around a node, the latter is equated with Ingold’s notion of Occupation whereby place is seen a static bounded place that people are in, making the paths between them utilitarian movements as opposed to place forming movements.  Much has been made of the relative merits of either angle but my point here is that both are ways of representing space that work in very different ways.  Abstract space is useful for maps of a large scale and larger analysis of areas, whereas human space is more useful for person centred analysis, local embodied knowledge.   My point here is that scale is not just choice of representation, it is a choice of knowledge and as such it is, in some sense political.  So the project tries to have both types of representation but in doing so it must recognise the political implication of the representation, what does each one do, how does it de-limit the terms of knowledge. 

In a very real way this goes beyond representation, it is in a sense directly influencing the ways in which people act.  On both a traditional OS street map and in a mental map of a street, the street is represented.  However the various capacities of that street are drawn upon in very different ways.  For example the street in abstract space is a traffic node, it is a point from A to B.  It is a route.  This was used to demark the route of the Student protest.  The route map will show, in the annals of history, the realisation of the democratic right to march.  However what it does not show is the ‘terms’ of the march, the bodily experience and the effectiveness of the movement through the streets, that is the human space.   

I was a little late for the march (shame on me) and decided to join it from the front by cycling down the route in the wrong direction.  As I did I was confronted with empty streets and with almost as many police officers that could fit into every side street gap, every overhead bridge, as possible.  It was quite frankly odd.  I was being watched from every angle and the route was very strictly barricaded.  A to B was the only option available by force.  This was directly Foucauldian, the way in which I used my body changed, I felt vulnerable and I felt disempowered, rightly or wrongly.  Further the march had been preceded by the sanctioning of the use of rubber bullets ‘if needed’ and the sending of letters to those who had been on marches before and had their names taken by police (not necessarily charged http://www.fitwatch.org.uk/2011/11/08/dont-be-intimidated-see-you-on-the-streets/).

Now I don’t want to get into my moral position but these events are of direct relevance to academic geographers and anthropologists.  Here we can see directly the managing of the bodies of both the florescent clad police officers, the students as well as the office workers (perhaps representative of the normative users of space?).  Bodies as vessels of force over the struggle to use space, the streets, to perform an action, to behave in a certain way which reflects the contestation – the disjuncture’s – of power, of body politics, of conceived notions of the ‘right to the city’.  It seemed as though the demonstrators posed a real threat to the normative use of space, that needed managing, the ‘terms of debate’ are directly spatial here. It is the street and its use.  Further is it the discourse around the street. 

A recent suggestion that public sector workers should only strike for 15 minutes to avoid disruption to the public was recently tabled (but only to the press) by Francis Maude a government minister.  It seems that the idea is that protests should not disrupt, they should be made and then listened too and this is democracy.  However in recent times I would suggest that this is the problem.  Such marches have in the last 30 years, with a weakening role of trade unions and the move towards a post-political age (where consensus based arrangements to technical problems such as climate change have replaced a politics of radical alterity) have been largely ignored or ineffective.  That is a politics of antagonism where a radically different arrangement of social relations is conceived of has been wiped away from the realm of possibility.  In this situation Zizek claims it is almost easier to imagine the appocaliptic end of the world than radical alterity.  Further activists such as Arundahati Roy have suugested that if non-violent protest is not listened too in an active way, if there seems to be no discourse then violent action is the recourse and, she states this is the position of the Maoist fighters in India.  This is a serious issue.

“If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.” Arundahati Roy

So at the end of a slow, crowded march that stopped frequently in cold weather behind thick lines of police the end point was reached, the police surrounded the marches and let them filter out slowly in different directions.  Most people did leave as memories at a 9 hour kettle on a windy Westminster bridge were still raw for many.  I was asked by a TV crew if I thought the march was a success.  My answer was it depends on how you judge success, it shows that people can get together and express a view, a point of concern, a united voice on a particular issue.  Will it change the issue, I don’t think so.  For me, the failure of the anti-war marches pre-iraq invasion have signed the end to the effectiveness of such things but I hold hope. 

So I made my way to St Pauls to re-energise, and there I was given more hope.  I was tired, this is essentially an embodied experience, the police had made it hard, the march was not carnivalesque, family orientated or an engaging with the police as they have been in the past, this does not encourage wider participation at all.  It de-limits the effectiveness of ‘your right’ I needed energy.  Fortunately I was given some by Rage Against the Machine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZul_mSFczs) guitarist Tom Morello who played some songs for a lucky crowd. 

This made me think about the occupy movements static-ness.  It does not move, it’s a place of flow in that I am there sometimes and not there at others but the camp stays as an ‘occupied’ part of the city.  A space of persistent demonstration where people come and talk, re-energise and form links (via livestream, through face to face meetings or through association) with others, the so called 99%.  What this shows for me is the way in which ‘the right to the city’ is constantly contested and the fights over it take many forms, they are embodied, they are spatial and in flux with the various configurations of relations between bodies, power and space. 

Lots of people I have been talking to have different ideas of the camp, some state that it needs particular demands, some say it is not ‘particularly constructive’, others sympathise.  For me this blog sums up the various positions that can be taken on the situation and as such I shall not repeat them here other than to surmise that the blog suggest three positions, greater regulation of current system, a true free market or no capitalism at all.  Whilst we all have opinions on the future there seems to be wide recognition of crisis. 

From the talks at the camp a number of ideas where put forward and here I want to relate them to geography and anthropology so we can see how our disiplines effect the ‘terms of debate’.  Professor Danny Miller, of UCL Anthropology, rejected the ideas that our society had become ‘to much’ of something or other and rather that it had become the wrong sort of thing.  Specifically he rejected the notions of ‘over commodification’ and that we had in some way become to materialistic and asserted that in many ways societies are materialistic.  That is they work through materials, he cited the love and affection in looking for a Christmas gift was part of the exchange, in this way we work through materials.  He positioned the problem rather with financial systems that work with money that is the property of the workers in the form of pensions and such.  These notions are best explained such writers as Gordon Clark, and Michel Lewis but Miller asked what is speculative capital based on and who controls this?  For Miller the focus on the materiality of the situation and the power involved should reside in these questions and less so in the link to some idea of a ‘commodity free society’ as his research suggests that commodities are far from the symbols of de-humanising greed but often the conduits of human relations such as love and care.  Miller also stated the need for material, concrete, real examples of best practice citing Norway as an example of a string economy with a string welfare state at the scale of level and companies such as John Lewis and Waitrose as worker inclusive capitalism and a smaller level.  For Miller these concrete examples show a material realisation of best practice and demands can take the form of regulation to encourage such forms of social relation. 

On the Saturday [12/11/2011] David Harvey gave talk to a sizable crowd.  His talk noted the success of the appropriation of the public space as being one that is truly public space, one that is political and rejects its privatised legal status.  This he said was the fundamentals of the matter.  The terms of debate here rest on questions that generally end in ‘for whom?’.  This is Private land ‘for whom?’, This is a Crisis ‘for whom?’, austerity ‘for whom?’.  Harvey drew links between the inequality of wealth with the inequality of political power quoting Mark Twain who said of the US “we have the best congress money can buy’.  He stated that we need to stay and demand, link ourselves globally to movements in the rest of the world citing Chile, amongst others as strong campaigns.  He linked the shadow of Pinochet, Regan and Thatcher as casting us into a neo-liberal economic trajectory that needs to be reversed as the globe reaches a saturation point of growth.  He suggested a radical imagining of a 0 growth economy and that the camp should reflect the fact that it values humanity, love and ‘the festival of life’ as its terms of debate not the %growth rate fixation. 

In conclusion the events of the last week has shown how society always has ‘terms for the debates’ about the system of social relations it conceives of as just, positive and legitimate and those that are not.  These terms range from the forms of representation of space and phenomena used in de-limiting debate to the performance of bodies and power, legal and social status of place and the configuration of space itself, amongst others.  So the fact that I marched down a street on a map does not show the bodily emotional experience of this on the day, the energy I felt and the politics of this.  This energy was taken by the slow, stop start, cattle like march but returned in full by Tom Morello.  The legal status of St Pauls land does not represent the value inactions it is involved with in wider society and so on. 

Danny Miller’s talk explained how the talk of growth and the finance sector set the terms of debate when really if we ask where are these things, how does it work through the materiality of the world situation and what is the politics for this, perhaps then we can start to understand what to take nad what to leave from capitalism. 

David Harvey showed how the ‘terms of debate’ must be set in a way that shows clearly and relevantly what you consider important.  With this it is clear that why Mr Cameron considers the occupy movement ‘not particularly constructive’ it is perhaps because it is not trying to construct the same thing he is trying to construct.  Further the terms of debate are spatial, they link people globally through the effects of economic policy and locally through the fight for the ‘right to the city’.

So for geographers and anthropologists, (I consider myself a bit of both) there are many ways the things we consider is related to the very real politics of the above events.  Events that are fundamentally about the ways in which we structure and understand social relations.  We have a role here in opening up the ways of thinking about, and being in space and the association of the politics of social relations that work through it.  In doing so we can also move beyond debates of which type form of representation should be used, and recognise abstract and human space, occupation and habitation as forms of understanding that draw upon particular political capacities of space for particular ends.  In doing so we can reflexively select our tools to build a truly ‘human space’.  

Last night [26.10.2011] I made my way to St Pauls.  I felt it was important to show my support and be one of the numbers when I can.  I wish that I could spend more time there but like most of the 99% I have other commitments and lend my thankfulness to those who make the numbers in the occupation on our behalf.

I went specifically on this night to hear Doreen Massey talk, Massey a seminal professor of geography has written extensively on the idea of space, how space is used, experienced, contested and thereby, and relevantly in this setting political.  In her talk Massey outlines the ways in which the financial sector has grown in dominance over the last thirty years.  This, she explained really took off with the de-regulation of the stock market and increased privatisation of resources that occurred largely under a Thatcher government.  Since this time there has been both Labour and Conservative government yet both have overseen a political policy direction of this nature.  The road of privatisation and the influence of the financial sector now dominates all of the political life not only the UK but Europe, USA and most of the globe.

“The end of the socialist alternative, then, did not signify any renewal of democratic debate. Instead, it signified the reduction of democratic life to the management of local consequences of global economic necessity. The latter, in fact, was posited as a common condition which imposed the same solutions on both left and right. Consensus around these solutions became the supreme democratic value” (Rancière, 2004: 3–4).*

London is in many ways the centre of the migration of neoliberal ideology and policy into all walks of our life.  How is it that we have money for banks yet not schools, it is because the idea that one simply cannot fail now has become normal in the everyday policy making of those that call themselves politicians.  Massey states that politicians are scared of the financial sector; I’d say they are the financial sector or at least the representatives of an imagination that sees solutions and problems with which they occupy themselves as firmly located in the realm of managing neoliberal financial systems.  However I want not to rant on about the ‘inequality of it all’ but look to how we can start to move forward in all this and I think some of the clues came from what I saw at St Pauls last night.

Firstly Massey’s talk eloquently outlined the ways in which the material practices of everyday human existence have become abstract from the forces that condition such actions.  What do I mean, well simply put the speculation of financial markets on the trading of such things as the future price of coco that hasn’t even been grown yet seems very abstract to the point of ridiculousness.  It is almost impossible to actually trace such a financial trade to a material happening of some coco growing and a famer harvesting it (Although some try, see; followthethings.com).  However the effects of that trade are felt in very real ways through another abstraction that of value.

Value has many forms, economic, social, moral, cultural, emotional and so on.  What occurs through an economic transaction is in the economic sense the difference in value between the farmers work and price paid for the coco is the surplus and this is abstracted, extracted and traded ,this is financial profit.  However such an analysis alone largely ignores the other forms of value involved.  There is a moral value involved in the nature of the production, further there is an emotional cultural and social value to such things as attachments to land, job security, and small locally owned businesses.  These forms of value have been abstracted away from the material conditions of production so that the economic form is left.   This process of abstraction happens at such a scale that a London based bank worker, the shopper, the company manger, the cook have no way of understanding the complexity of the ways in which material processes flow from one form of abstraction to another.  How does labour translate to the commodity price, how does this feed into speculative trading and so on.

Ok so you’ve heard this before right?  The arguments are familiar to many now and I wish not to repeat them here but to suggest that perhaps this process of abstraction might suggest a way in which to move forward through a process of re-configuring the ways in which we conceive of the balance of the values involved.

At the St Pauls meeting I was approached by a member of the church who suggested that I (he meant the occupy movement) had made its point and that we should move on and further that I was inherently distrusting and disrespectful of the Dean of St Pauls.  There were a number of things going on here.  Firstly he had wrongly assumed I was the movement, that the movement was coherent and that I would somehow disseminate his opinion to the masses who thought like me.  However I was just one of many who just happened to walking past him at that time.  One of many people with an opinion on what to do about this or that specific situation (in this case about being outside St Pauls).  He was guilty of a moral and social abstraction here, he generalised, he sought a negative value, that of blocking a church and therefore limiting its capacity to develop economic value for the continuation of its aesthetic and moral value, and then defined me by it, (my opinions on the matter where never sought and are of little relevance to my point here).  This is key.  Just as he did here, we can take the abstraction of financial value and show that in its material reality such abstraction delimits the possibility of alternative action.  The farmer is at the mercy of economic value, such a privileging of tis form of value attaches no significance to other forms of value, such as quality of life.  This can be bought with the coins, which in the sense I understanding it here is a material transformation of the coco through a negation of value of that coco.  However these values and exchanges don’t line up, there is a disjuncture here, just as there is a disjuncture inherent in the idea that the progress of a booming financial sector will result in a more equal society evidence shows that we have been living in a increasingly divided country of rich and poor.  This has been felt specially, the north has felt the effects of a London centric financial based economy for years.  Graduates, whilst being educated nationally are most commonly employed in the South East.  Further recent policies have suggested that those unable to find work or afford local living conditions should move to a space they can afford.   However through material traces and reconfigurations it may be possible to highlight these disjuncture’s and further demand an opening of an imagination that seeks solutions outside of fixing a perceived minor malfunction of the neoliberal economic system, this is what governance is for.

However we have, as Massey states had an ‘invasion of the imagination’ in how to deal with such issues, the media and the politicians are now seeing only one way and that is the continuation of a neoliberal system, to tweak the machine, to fix the broken part (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw).  Yet such thinking abstracts the problem and fixes it away from the cause.  If such neoliberal systems abstract value in harmful and aggressive ways, we need to build a structure of social relations that means that the aggressive abstraction of any form of value (such as economic, or moral as in the case of my conversation/rant) does not impose and delimit the live of other forms of value.

Ok so what about the occupation.  Massey stated that “…the negotiation of space is an on-going social thing” and indeed St Pauls and the space around it has been radically transformed in the last two weeks.  The battle over it is more than legal or practical and any view of ‘legal right’ positions the law as a stable category, when it itself is an abstraction and fixing of morals that work for certain people in certain ways at certain times.  As Massey states “…we constitute space through our social relations…”.  The question is then not what sort of space do we want, but what form of social relations do we want and how does such spaces engender or delimit social relations.  The occupation has pulled on a different value that was always living in the realm of unmade potential in and around the city, the value of something else, of a different form of social relation, one that puts a value on the human experience of our economic systems on the ground.  This is very much an Occupation, it is taking a space and radically transforming what it is, what is done there and asserting a value that has long been ignored by the privileging of neoliberal systems of finance.

This is the material situation, the fight over this space is symbolic, and the noise of this space in its changes is heard all around the world.  The Occupation now tries to defend itself from abstractions of its image (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/25/occupy-london-tents-night), a undermining of its values and in doing so attempts to legitimatise its own value assertions.   The fight over space is in many ways the fighting of ideologies that manifest in material forms at all scales from the coco farm in South America to steeps St Pauls Cathedral via the stock exchange. The fight over this particular physical space outside St Pauls can be debated legally, economically morally not only taking opinions on how the space should be used but also creating the very space in itself.  As such we “create the space through our social relations”.  Further the sorts of spaces we have create us.

It is through the highlighting of the abstractions that we can start to re-open this invaded imagination, to carve spaces for new ways of doing things.  So how does this work on the ground.  Well the 99% all have different solutions; however most want a library, a school, a hospital.  Stating that we can’t have this without the banks is simply a privileging of one way of doing things over another.  This way is one that for social, ecological moral reasons cannot continue in its current form.  The occupy cause can seek out the material conditions of the privileging of the finance sector, the prominent ‘neoliberalism first’ ideas, at the local level manifest in the closed youth centre, the rise in student fees and so on.  Action can be taken, we needent wait for polotics to fall back into our way of thinking.  Write to your MP if you are unhappy, pester the newspaper, or if these things strike as petty drops in the ocean and in some way part of ‘the system’ then simply be radical.  Make alternative less radical, be demanding, force open the imagination and take what it is we need.  No longer can we see politics, finance, society, morals as separate things, they all work through the everyday materiality of all of us and as such we can re-configure the movement of value and the ways, in which we privilege one action over another to create a more equal future, equality upon which democracy depends.

The Labour Party’s crowning achievement is the death of politics. There’s nothing left to vote for (Noel Gallagher, Oasis rock star, The Independent 11 November 2006: 37).*

*Quotations taken from Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(3), 601-620.

The task of this post is not to tackle questions such as these but it worth considering their indistinct, ungraspable and malleable nature and how it is that such questions arise out of a need to understand the   ‘real’ qualities of terms that in themselves are abstract notions (society, place, space, local and community might be some others to be found in this project).  These abstract terms are formed, used and   understood in different ways by different people and groups for differing reasons which can then be interpreted again in different ways.

 In the introduction to his book The Social Logic of Space Bill Hillier claims that it is in the public spaces of cities where ideologies are generated and contested (see pp19-21).  Public space is then, in a sense, political in that it is an arena in which ideas and beliefs are made, contested and debated.  This is enabled through the permeability of the area and the high co-presence with others and the high number of encounters that  happen there, encounters which are relatively unplaced.  It is here where ideologies are made, created, debated and contested.  These public domains then become vocal in their communication with us, they involve    us in a dialogue over who ‘we’ are, ‘we’ being the community, the society, the nation and the self as individual situated in these multiplicious spatial dialogues.  This can be seen to contrast to the spaces of the domestic where the categories and terms of ‘being’ are fixed and re-affirmed by the users of the space.  These users are few, expected (usually owner or occupier and the invited) and policed.  Outside space is characterised by weak     barriers or permeability allowing movement and co-presence in which events that create dialogue and debate are generated.  Whereas domestic barriers that control and define the use of space are strong, they prevent un-   policed movement, co-presence of the unexpected or conflictual kind and aid in the re-affirming ideologies by the users of the space.

 If this is the case then a ‘suburb’ could be conceived of as a space in which co-presence is less intense than say a city centre.  The types of co-presence that will occur are to be understood by the character of the  neighbourhood, (as in the city = business workers, West End = tourists) and as such a definable character to the suburb could be built up (Brixton has its own character).  Suburbs, it could be said are also characterised by a higher amount of residential use.  As such co-presence and movement may be less resulting in fewer generative events.  In this sense a ‘suburb’ could be seen as sliding towards the more domestic elements of space, less a place of debating and contesting ideologies and more a place for affirming them at a local level (hence the ‘BE OUR GUEST’ painted on the rail bridge on the Brixton road as you enter Brixton).   Through an increase in the amount of social policing of the permeability of the space and through a build-up of the knowledge of social encounters that are likely in a space one can start to sense the increasingly local sense of a place.

I want to turn my back on the city and take the above idea further.  If suburbs allow less capacity for generative events then the rural would have even less still.  This is a domain in which contestation of ideologies does not occur explicitly (please note the huge body of work assessing landscape as text and representational by Dennis Cosgrove, Bruce Braun, William Cronan and work by phenomenologists  such as Chris Tilly and David Seamon on the affective aspects of landscape).  The actors (trees, lakes, grass, stones) here have to speak for themselves in the silence.  These actors then are non-human; they constitute our idea of being a non-human actor in a non-human environment.

It was with this thinking in mind then that I came to be made nauseous by the sight of unwanted, unloved and naked Christmas trees.  Scattered around the paths of Brixton’s residential streets they lay, at odd angles, slowly seeping life from their once green and decorated branches.

The origins of the Christmas tree are unclear but the tree has been seasonally brought into the home and decorated for hundreds of years.  Some say it is a celebration of the natural at the time of the winter solstice, certainly this is one reading that resonates with me others see it as an implicit part of the Christian celebration or perhaps just tradition.  Either way the tree has been invited, revered, celebrated and focused upon, the tree is a celebration of the ‘natural’ and the living elements of earth, of being in the middle of a cold dark season.  It was these thoughts then that the Christmas trees I saw lying around Brixton invoked a Sarterian sense of nausea.  The encounter was not unexpected (its January, people throw trees out), but there was an oddity in the way it conflated nature, human, domestic, public, private, revered, rejected, organic, concrete and urban and natural systems.  Further the marks of a felled stump, clear wood, fallen needles on hard concrete and the odd de-branched tree evoked the sense of movement.  The trees, usually static from seed to death, have felled early, collected, packaged, transported, bought and sold, they have moved and in doing so have been commoditised, personalised and bureaucratised.  The trees are a once annually co-presence that seems to disturb the spaces of usually dormant categories of definition, rural, natural, domestic, public.  Their co-presence and their being ‘in place’ and then ‘out of place’, their disturbances and agency interest me.  Their location, their timings and the subtleties can be explored, thought about and considered and it struck me that here might be a good place to do some exploring.  Perhaps other bloggers can suggest other aspects of co-presence they have encountered and their feelings on such meetings.  What agency do things such as graffiti, ruin, architectural abnormalities and other things have?  What feelings do they evoke, why do you not expect to see such things?  Perhaps the lack of presence is an issue for you, clean, ordered and safe? Too much so?  Post, blog away

References and Readings

Braun, B. & Castree, N. eds. (1998). Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London: Routledge.

Cronon, W. (1996) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co

Cosgrove, D, & Daniels, S. eds (1998) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Griffiths, S. and Vaughan, L. and Haklay, M. and Jones, C.E. (2008) The sustainable suburban high street: a review of themes and approaches. Geography Compass, 2 (4). pp. 1155-1188.

Vaughan, L. and Jones, C.E. and Griffiths, S. and Haklay, M. (2010) The spatial signature of suburban town centres. The Journal of Space Syntax, 1 (1). pp. 77-91. ISSN 20447507

Tilley, C. (1994)Y, A phenomenology of landscape : places, paths, and monuments, Berg.

eamon, D. (2007). A lived Hermeneutic of People and Place.