Ammon Beyerle

Hey am!

Thanks for invite – its great to be in the loop and know what you’re up to!  Hope you’re enjoying this project and getting some good feedback!

I’d love to come but unfortunately won’t be able to make it, I was away last weekend, and work every day until 5pm, so won’t get a chance to come and have a look. 

Hope it goes well, and hope you’re good.  We must catch up soon!!
Kathe

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Hello (please feel free to forward),

Hello (please feel free to forward),

Response to Claire Bishop (before reading Kestler)

This is my own response to Claire Bishop’s article The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents, in Artforum, 2006, p179-185. 

See her original article and Kestler's response here:

http://onedaysculpture.org.nz/assets/images/reading/Bishop%20_%20Kester.pdf

http://danm.ucsc.edu/~lkelley/wiki_docs/bishop.pdf

http://www.artforum.com/html/issues/200602/new

I wrote it immediately after a long a slow read and although wish to start by qualifying it by recognising my own degree of naïveté in the field of research, I am struck with how much more intimately I understand what it is to practice in these ways than she, even though I have only been doing it for a few years. Her article has interesting questions to pose to open up theoretical debate, but has almost nothing to say relevant to the practicing itself and her statements about its constitution as a discipline are misleading, if not directly in contrast to the majority of various substantive conceptions of the truth held by the participants in the various projects I have been a part of, including myself.

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My initial take on this is relatively clear. Although it is academically unacceptable, I would start by stating that Bishop is an enemy of the practice I am investigating. She is not an enemy because she invites more critique, but an enemy because she in a hegemonic fashion introduces a must definition to the judgement of works, and reinstates the importance of judgement.

It is my understanding that the question of judgement of worth / value is in itself different to that of critique, and this difficult distinction is in many ways the fundamental question of these practices. These practices, instead of carrying preconceived definitions of judgement and value build foundation in the projects and as such the projects have their own autonomy. This is an autonomy not from the world, but from a privileged and impassionate eye of the disconnected critic, or a lineage of projects in a broad field that would dictate methods more appropriate to the field than the project itself. Indeed, finding the values inherent in a project are often the key aims of these collaborative projects, not in a consensual (also consenting) fashion but in sense of a materialisation, as a performing or practicing of those values through discourse. The values are diversified, expressed and made specific to that place and each person in conversation. A critical reflection of the project does not discuss the smartness of the project to communicate and consider these values for a general audience, but describes the how the project specifically interacted with the material of the site – place in an artful / architectural fashion. This of course invites a ambiguous relationship, as artful / architectural is not a neutral definition in itself, however it is this definition that links the project to the general audience, not the value of the project. Judgement thus needs to set up its own criteria embedded in the project, and be beholden to that alone. This autonomy becomes the value of the work generally.

My second issue with the article is the assertive placement of analysis and examples. Bishop almost relegates the reader to an uncritical position that is at the whim of the author’s internal judgements. This is yet another reflection of the previous point. Bishop in her very manipulative assertions does exactly what she critiques uncritical artists from doing: hiding the judgements and values and assuming common understanding and politic of the reader. Bishop’s analysis seems to be going to a predetermined place, which is especially evident in her comments about the role of the work in this realm being necessarily about ‘self-sacrifice’, having an ethics of ‘authorial renunciation’ or minimalisation of them, necessarily ‘anticapitalist’ in tendency, or ‘less nuanced’. These are examples of her summation of the projects in an assertive manner rather than taking on particularities of the projects themselves. Her summation is purposeful rather than critically analytical. Although this may be only one way of approaching a critique of work, she neither lays out this methodology, justifies it (ie in search of or for a reason?) nor tempers it with a more complex understanding (‘nuanced’?) that might identify certain aspects as fitting her analysis and others unfitting. Her judgement is assertively complete is this way, from the outset, and therefore a fundamental contradiction occurs in which she devalues the art of the artists in question in favour of her own de-authoring. These projects, at least the ones I have been involved in, are fundamentally authored, and usually in multiple ways that respond to, support and contradict her assertions. Deller’s work is an example of this, I would read through the lines that the ‘point’ of the work was indeed this uncomfortable play of contradictions that could only be at best experienced, rather than resolved. To use her own words against her: “Untangling this knot – or ignoring it by seeking more concrete ends for art – is slightly to miss the point, since the aesthetic is, according to Rancière, the ability to think contradiction: the productive contradiction of art’s relationship to social change, characterized precisely by that tension between faith in art’s autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come.” p183

It seems to me that Bishop is exceedingly uncomfortable with what she actually espouses as she throughout hides the values of her arguments, and fails to use the same judgments in any deep way on the projects she espouses.

My third issue with this article is her messy use of ‘ethics’ and morals. Ethics is very difficult and has an involved discourse which I would not even fain to be an expert in. I do however know of a very vigorous debate that puts these terms in an interesting field discourse that is extremely productive (and destructive) – Nietzsche – Genealogy of Morals? Habermas / Rawls? Of these participatory / social art projects this complex question of what is moral-ethical is often openly part of the production of the project and thus, would (if she had have read the construction of value rhetoric in an analysis I am suggesting) in fact add to her argument that these projects are valuable by their ethical-moral dimension. Here I am saying the question of what is moral and what is ethical is included in many participatory projects and often the conversation of what as a substantive context for the project must be first conceived before the work can be judged or indeed understood. Yes; these projects are valuable because they see themselves as ethical-moral in constitution, but now let us, as Bishop suggests look critique them, to remove their ethical-moral discourse is to remove them from their ‘life’ dimension, that she also proposes is so important. (Is this a more appropriate way towards a discourse on aesthetics? Not subsumed by an ethic-moral but considering of it?) Indeed antinomy is an aim, but then a concerted effort to understand and substantially engage with the projects should be the first part of any critique of them as practices that constitute a discipline.

Here is a sound-bite version of my PhD Thesis: in 3 minutes!

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My PhD is in the faculty of art and design and I am looking at architecture and participation.

More specifically what the PhD is interested in is conflict as a productive force in the design process.

Why is this important?

Conflict is something that allows us to have real engagements which are passionate and embracing it allows us to have connections between people that are meaningful.

Participation as a field is relatively undeveloped in architecture, with much more development in disciplines of philosophy and sociology, especially political science, urban design and planning, and also in art practice installation art and performance art.

There are many projects in participation but they are limited in theoretical development or connection to a comprehensive understanding of a broad research field.

What I think that understanding about participation more in architecture allows us to do, is to build much more meaningful spaces and environments that are related to people. And by actually incorporating the conflicts that really do occur in everyday life we can make spaces that people want to be in because it belongs to them and they actually feel like it fits their needs. In a bigger way it develops our ways of thinking about public space as lots of little private spaces that overlap and conflict with one another.

As you can see here, this is a one page example from a case study of one of the office fit-out projects we designed and this is one day when we were designing a petal table in a shared office space. We spent one day, that is, we had a timeline, - one of the key principles I’m learning from these collaboration processes and the community was involved face to face working with one another on a project. That actually gave them contact and it gave the decisions we made legitimacy. We built this 1:1 prototype which meant that you actually test something physically, but is means also that you put something forward which is meaningful, which gets away from the conflicts to see if it actually works. And finally we actually got people at the end of the day to cut them and actually make these, powertools and all, which was a really great celebration of the efficiency, us all seeing the final success we had with one another and real time produces legitimacy of that making process and interaction with had together.

The core tools that you need for this is conversation, good food, coloured pencils, scissors and glue, and maybe big patience and perseverance.

This is a very difficult field, often very messy, and it poses a lot of tricky questions for architecture

Over the next two years I’m going to design another few minor and major case studies, to try to find better ways to work and think in this way and more importantly, to communicate what actually happens.

In architecture we often think the point is to be experts that solve conflicts when in fact we should be trying to facilitate people doing it themselves.

A

Your Civic Beauty: Piazzas, Plazas and Placemaking for the masses

Why do we and, why have we always gathered in particular sites?

Can these sites be determine artificially or do we en masse decide where we wish to meet?

“For the masses”

I’ve always had a deep ideological problem with this term, it assumes a type of feeding process to a starving swarm of beings who can’t fend for themselves, because they have become too massive, too amorphous and abstract to care about their own selves.

I’m suspicious because it sounds like a blame game, a virtual projection of what’s happening on the ground.

Why gathering here?

When I first think of gathering in a particular site, I think of Louis Mumford’s famous duo of city seeding. Container and Magnet. 1961. We gathered IN this place to make this city because it could hold us, it was the container to store our produce and supplies, but also our families and memories. I think of the medieval walled city as a holding pen, inside is safe, outside is not. Yes; this is a romanticised idea of home that is politically problematic, but it serves as a good metaphor. The other is the Magnet. We gathered AT this place out of habit and attraction. It had good sunlight, fresh water, opportunity for survival and exchange, we made pilgrimages to the same place each year to commemorate or communicate. A simple example could be the shrine. Here we came to meditate, to think, to make an offering. I think these metaphors for gathering are useful. We still, I see, gather IN and AT places.

This ‘place’ stuff is something deeply psychological or spiritual. Territory is fundamentally part of who we are, it makes and is made by our identity. In design theory there has been a lot of talk about nomads and monads, but in the end of the day there is a certain identification that occurs where it be a spot or a route, a world is made specific, it is socialised and personalised, it is marked. From a philosophical standpoint this explains our fascination with the concept, but doesn’t quite cut it as an everyday reason.

OK, close your eyes....

Think of one of your favourite places or a particular moment in your life. It can be everyday.

My thesis is that most of you probably thought of a location in which had a personal story or stories. I think it is highly likely that placemaking in many ways is about making stories. It would seem to me that if you want a place to be more meaningful, you have to increase the opportunity for stories to be made there. I think that we like having things we can identify with around us, and as such we go to, and (go back to) places in which we have (and can make) stories IN and AT.

We are slugs, creatures that leave a trace in the world, and the more creative (enterprising) amongst us get others to pay us to do it! We make our mark in the world to identify it with us and to identify ourselves in it. Socio-spatial communion. For me this is a missing depth to be explored in the concept of ‘community’.

Perhaps under this concept of placemaking – the communion of the spatial and the social – we could see the piazza – plaza as a social mark writ large. As gathering places for many people, they are bulwarks against a tide of loss of space to leave a mark, and their size conjures a masse of empowerment that could resist the scale of systematisation and synthesis that is occurring in our mega cities. Big plazas and piazzas are bulwarks for democracy. They can contain and attract both meaningful creation, and resistance.

I think Melbourne needs more meaningful squares IN the city, especially AT the places that matter.

Planning (especially in Melbourne) has been fraught for over a decade. Residents now have neither the possibility nor inclination to meaningfully leave a mark, to participate in how the city is made. Public consultation today is relegated to objections and or advertising - placation. The American Planning Association whose catch cry is currently “making great communities happen” is a strong advocate of public participation. A key principle of a vital democracy  is ‘meaningful’ participation.

Indeed, over time I see a radical disempowerment of public participation in making public space has occurred in Melbourne.

Can these sites be determined (designed) artificially?

“Docklands” anyone?

The common retort is ‘it still needs time’, but many sense that something fundamentally went awry that we are still struggling to ‘fix’ it.

Yes; I think they can, but the process in which these sites are determined needs to be fundamentally open to individuals and communities to leave a traces. If it is to be a place - a location that is meaningful - then people need to be involved in the making of stories there.

Monuments and icons do this to some extent as they imbue collective meaning or leave interpretation for it in abstraction, but I don’t think we need a city of spikey faceted things or just high level political or popular memories. What about the personal and everyday? What about the little people. What about ‘me’, I and ‘us’?

The work of Gilbert locally is a good example of the desire that still exists for places that mean something to people to be created. Developers know it. Big architects know it. Council knows it. Whether or not they are addressing a capability that exists on the ground, I’d prefer to leave that to our discussion.

If our cities are just made up of the big voices, and always others’ say, then we will one by one feel alienated by it.

The starting point for participatory design is that all situations in which design interrogates are existing, functioning and thick. The process of engagement thus needs to delve into, to build relationship with, understand and manage environmental affects and propose. Indeed, products of participatory architecture are propositions, they are prototypes for implementation, adaption and rejection. In a process of prototypical proposition, there is no object, but a set of intersubjective relationships with and without the architecture. The product of architecture must meet with identified and latent systems of everyday life, and necessarily be defined by it contingently. The question becomes not how is the architecture occupied, but how does the architecture occupy, and what does that occupation do? The intervention of architecture thus becomes an actor in a field of relationships, taking on relational types – aggressor /defender, container / magnet, agonist / antagonist / ally.

It needs to be conceived that architecture can function as an objectified space, or similarly an occupied space with its own set of atmospheric conditions and effects. Undertaking architecture necessarily creates a particular interior, a position which brings about identities and conceptions of environments. The practice of architecture is as much a device for finding-out as it is a communication, or social communion.

Without a sense of prejudice, the binary inside/outside provides a theoretical mechanism of control, be in at least prototypical in nature. The proposal, and making of the proposal presents an opportunity to synthesise, construct a reality, to build. The occupation of that proposal, as an interior sets up the possibility for home base, be it a place to leave from, retreat to, avoid, work in or relax in, it is a constructed place of meaning and being.

A less-participatory design process preconceives an interior as a given before investigation. It assumes a situation and summarily the environmental conditions which are ‘in’-terior and thus, which are ‘out’ – ‘ext’-terior. Its purposes are more predefined, and thus, outcomes are controlled. The context of a less-participatory design process is transcendental, evident in the self referential conditions for its innovation, be they stakeholder limited (with defined interests and ‘needs analysis’) or in closed indexical positioning within the architectural-establishment. The latter condition is generally considered award-worthy architecture, the former, ‘engineering’ and best-practice delivery (with associated systematised processes and assessment critieria). A less-participatory design process conjures its control a priori. A simple metaphor for a less-participatory design process is the petri dish. The petri dish is a controlled paradigm, its relationships are necessarily transcendental only. This could relate to ‘high-theory’, with strong axioms and generalised rules. The architecture is the specimen of the process; the site is the specimen of inquiry, with a controlled laboratory established first-hand. This has obvious benefits in terms of budgeting, planning, risk management and time constraints. It is a laboratory of control, aim, method, outcome. The world is outside with a definable distinction to an inanimate inside.

A maximum-participatory design process does not preconceive an interior. Assumptions are formulated in the undertaking of the project and can continually change, the environmental conditions develop and are absolutely contingent, both as situation and effect; exterior becomes both what has not yet occurred, or what has already occurred. Synthesis is left for present situation or theoretical steps forward. The context of participatory design process is always in the world, transcendentality only occurs in terms of temporary lapses in time (like the charette, the prototype, the incubator, the test,  the workshop), evident in the need to develop shared principles and necessitate their constant review, need to defined values and purpose, whilst conditions for creativity are rarely closed – ideas can come from anywhere and anyone at any time. Indeed, there is a transparent relationship between the development of a product, and the production of ideas (unlike the less-participatory counterpart).  This can be difficult and tiring at times, though it necessitates a depth of contingency that only breeds more and more relevance – or shall we say ‘situation’. Solutions come from anywhere, they are of different scale and grandeur depending on the situation, may they be interpersonal, physical, time or task orientated, or even fleeting, hyperspecific and procedural. A simple metaphor is the ecology. Imagine a wetland with a thousand organisms, large and small, upstream and downstream, chemical processes from contamination to production, categorisation of different parts and interdependent relationships, weather comes in and the scientist (architect) is a contaminating alien. The control of the ecology is without the architect, and the relationships within it are infinitely explorable and alive. Interventions in this ecology bring about wicked problems, theoretical propositions can only be ‘low theory’ – particularly contingent, and with no promise of inter-operability or translation beyond the system. To understand one must poke, squat down and look, watch, push in or pull out. The world is everywhere. Any sense of exterior can only be the philosophical antithesis of this way of working, but even this is a contingent paradigm. All action in this fundamentally ‘inside’ is ‘part of’ and contingent.

[The following is the written part of my paper from The Right to the City Symposium, 9 April, 2010.  

This presentation also served as a wrap up of critical practice, comparing some of the work I have been involved in as a member of Urban Village Melbourne UVM

I have excluded many of the original images]

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"Failures and successes of community building in public space"

(Image: Ammon Beyerle) 

Mid last year I begun a PhD at Monash University Art and Design, in Architecture (Supervisors Karen Burns, Shane Murray and ext Darko Radovic). The topic of my inquiry is Architecture and Participation: processes and potentials of participation in the design of sustainable little urban ecologies.

I’m a quarter way through my first literature review.

(Image composition: Ammon Beyerle)

One book, Architecture and Participation, edited by Peter Blundell-Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till in 2005 brings together papers inspired by a lecture series at the University of Sheffield in 2002. It provides a relatively recent theorization of the current field of participatory design in architecture. Seminal papers such as Arnstein 1969, De Carlo 1969 and Albrecht in 1988 are either heavily cited or actual chapters. My reading finds the majority of contentions set up in antagonism with modernism and form-aesthetic approaches to architectural production. It includes some diversity of examples, yet the focus of participatory design still revolves around:

1/ The authentic occupation of architecture by ‘the user’

2/ The decision-making process – conflict and consensus, community engagement and consultation

I’d offer, that my research, and the failed, successful practice of Urban Village Melbourne contributes a third focus, hopefully you can discover it in this paper.

I think I first meditated on this discovery through reading Jonathan Hill’s edited book, also from the Sheffield / Bartlett school: Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User 1998. Two characters stood out:

-       Yves Klein an active, 1960s artist who, though his life, pioneered performance art; and

-       Jane Rendell, the author of the final, chapter 13: “Doing It, (Un)Doing It, (Over)Doing It Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse”

(Image: Ammon Beyerle)

A fuzzy title for this paper could be:

“Participatory pluralism and Being-in-the-same-World!”

(See www.urbanvillagemelbourne.net)

Some of the afterthoughts on this paper (and probably this conference) might speak aggressively against where planning is at in Australia.

Go with it.

On the main, what is happening in planning (our urban design industry) is a far cry from where this paper, and I’m guessing the next speakers on this panel squat. 

It doesn’t mean we are all wrong.

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When in 1967 Henri Lefebvre, wrote Right to the City, the republic of France was 100 years and the double process of urbanisation and industrialisation was in full swing. The city was eating the country and urban society was being segregated and valuated by bureaucratic systems productive of capitalism. To combat a housing crisis HLMs – large public housing projects were constructed for the working class to inhabit. These perfect habitats were instant suburbs where women and children would doze, waiting for their husbands and fathers to return, exhausted and mindless after the daily grind, far far away in the city. 

The city was no longer an urbanity of people.

(Image: Ammon Beyerle)

Lefebvre’s “ephemeral utopia” was one of the working class, a city assembled by everyday life, rather than the ruling aristocracy and new bourgeoisie. The centre of decision making should be in the city, (on the street we would say)and no-one other than the momentary philosopher would have the right to strategize, solve, integrate or conceive as whole, the form and history of this city. Indeed, synthesis was an act of everyday life and history of the city. The city was not a product but oeuvre (corpus, body of work, life’s work, craft, or work of art in the collective sense…)

This is Urban Village Melbourne (UVM):

(Images: Urban Village Melbourne)

I reflect upon almost 2 years as a member of Urban Village Melbourne, a small group of artists, designers and social workers, and what emerges is an appreciation of what happened, the afterstory, the historocité of a knowing but kind eye. The group has become many other things now, and the products only seem as fleeting objects in both broken and ongoing social relationships that have developed and developed, not only within the group, but with all that we came in contact with.

(Ammon Beyerle, abstract submitted to The Right to the City Symposium, February 2011)

What I found most difficult in preparing this paper was conceptually trying to bridge the gap between specimen and cosmos. I suggested in my abstract that the breakdown of Urban Village Melbourne was a microcosm of the dearth of participation in making public spaces in Melbourne.

I thought that the fights and heavy bureacratisation of our incorporated not-for-profit association mirrored not-for-profit tax law, the incorporations act of consumer affairs Victoria,

and the requirement for event permits and traffic management plans to occupy public space in the City of Melbourne.

In early 2010 we actually made an application to the City of Melbourne to loiter, sit and read a book, lie down, nap and think, play a guitar, stare at the sky, draw a picture, kiss a friend and hold hands in Bullens Lane, just off Chinatown.

What ensued was a bureaucratic choke order and a traffic management plan at $45 per day of occupation.

This is the project for Bullens Lane, China Town, Melbourne:

(See Urban Parklands Project, project co-leader Richard Bruch)

(Images: Urban Village Melbourne)

It may be obvious to you all here, but the difficulty I was having in analyzing what went wrong, and remarking that there was so many similarities between what is happening in the public space of urban society and a group of young friends, was that I saw them as separate. (Please bear with me here in this abstract moment.) Our actions were In-the-same-World as the city. Although simple, when I finally bridged this gap, the process of reconstructing relationships became both insightful relatively easy.

Our projects suffered a vicious cycle of active participation and aggressive apathy. Understandably, this disintegrated the legitimacy of our structure, principles and leadership, the purpose of each project and active participation of the members. Even our statement of purpose fell into amnesia.

This is the project for Cathedral Place - Chapter House Lane, St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne

Some images from public talks "Art and Social Space" (Architects for Peace, Words@blg50) and "Guerilla Architecture" (Process@Loop), 2010:

(Images: Architects For Peace and Process)

I would say that Urban Village Melbourne was about developing and practicing active citizenry. We saw the ever-enveloping will to commercially activate public spaces as a systematized conspiracy against urbanity. We combated this through resistance, namely art, imagination and creativity, sociality and human relationships, communication and identification. In reflection I’d also add the tactic of creating “ephemeral-experimental utopias”… Thinking naively that we were designers, architects, fixers, practitioners, we forgot we were In-the-same-World, and retreated our impulse to citizenry. We strategized, we planned and projected balanced solutions and Rothmann project logs, limiting and facilitating factors, internal stakeholder group and external stakeholder group. We forgot that we were also doing this for ourselves: active citizens of Melbourne.

This is an excerpt from our regular newsletter, The Bulle[n]tin, 2010:

Michelle Emma James, the second and final Urban Village Melbourne president, my partner both in life and business, wrote the following just after a difficult AGM of conflict and a fresh committee regrouping. I think it is poignant here:

At our first committee meeting on 4 June 2010 we started off with an exercise called Mapping our Asse(t)s, […] we discussed our interests within UVM, what we would like to contribute to UVM, and what connections we have outside UVM. […]

The idea of an asset-based approach is to think about the strength of an individual, an organisation, a community […] that already exists and to build on that. […] It is opposed to the traditional needs-based approach that focuses on the problems and negative aspects of a community or organisation that need to be 'fixed'. It allows people to think beyond labels such as 'disadvantaged' or 'homeless' (or in our case 'president', 'vice president', 'secretary', 'treasurer' or 'ordinary member') to achieve things that are more in line with what they are passionate about and/or want to contribute. (Jim Dier's book called Neighbor Power (Michael O'Hanlon + City of Yarra))

We are using this as one of the tools to work out what we want to achieve for the year, see where people's interests are beyond their 'roles' and finding out what assets and connections we can mine which might otherwise go underutilised. But of course, a map is only a map - we've also been spending time to get to know each other by having ice-skating trips, early morning coffees, and we're looking forward to our first UVM drinking session for this year at Bar Nothing this Friday night! We are very excited to be the 2010-2011 Committee, […] MJ 9/7/10

In trying to understand these practices, in particular an obsession with resolution of conflict, I turned to Chantal Mouffe. She wrote Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Ernesto Laclau in 1985 (which I haven’t read yet). What I have read more of, are her papers 1999-2001 that present a model of agonistic pluralism as a way forward in Democratic theory. She points out the difference between politics and the political (great lessons for anyone wishing to practice creatively in public space) and seeks to unlock the impass between Habermasian and Rawlsian conceptions of Democratic decision-making processes. Mouffe does does not develop procedural automata or necessitate a separation of private and public realms, nor does she remove passion from participatory citizenry.

She suggests that conflicting stakeholders who recognize each other can see each other as agonistic adversaries rather than antagonistic enemies. Indeed, the Democratic Paradox, and I would suggest here from our previous friend Lefebvre: the urban problem, comes from its very constitution, system and process.  Democracy and the City are idealized to resolve conflict, to bring people together into integrated harmony in a balance of democratic sovereignty and liberal institutions. But these things can’t come to any harmony, and hence (my reading) a need to negotiated coexistence, complexity and pluralism – could we call this urbanity?

“When the city operates as an open system – incorporating porosity of territory, narrative indeterminacy and incomplete form – it becomes democratic not in a legal sense, but as physical experience. In the past, thinking about democracy focused on issues of formal governance; today it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation which have everything to do with the physical city and its design.”

(Richard Sennett, 2008, “The Open City")

(Urban Village Melbourne, image by Max Milne, see 'Holes in the Wall')

What the value of this work is, is the identification of antagonisms (aka potential agonistic relationships) and the simple creation of space for negotiation to occur: (aka face to face communication). The complexity of this idea was beyond the comprehension of our young group of friends in Urban Village Melbourne (and probably me too), evidenced in our persistent desire to design solutions or focus on formalized outcomes. Stepping back, the lunch only becomes a horizon (an ephemeral utopia?), under which many other wonderful things are free to happen unseen, subaltern, under the radar.

This is the timeline we presented to The City of Melbourne to acquit our Community Services Grant project for Chapter House Lane, 31 March, 2011

Lefebvre in the final chapter of Right to the City, his 8th point:

“For the working class, rejected from the centres towards the peripheries, dispossessed of the city, expropriated thus from the best outcomes of its activity, this right has a particular bearing and significance. It represents for it at one and the same time a means and an end, a way and a horizon: but this virtual action of the working class also represents the general interests of civilization and the particular interests of all social groups of ‘inhabitants’, for whom integration and participation become obsessional without making their obsession effective.”

(Henri Lefebvre, 1967, Right to the City)

Please: I hope this can go with you as an optimistic and en-lightening paper, may only be it a call to some anarchy of humble actions. Notwithstanding, I’d suggest that are we to think about, maintain and develop our sense of the city, and thereby I mean rights to the city as oeuvre, we might realise that active participation in its making is paramount, and the will to perfect integration is not.

Ammon Beyerle, Sydney, 9 April, 2011