photo-elicitation and the sensory experiencing of urban design

I’ve rather belatedly realised that a paper I have co-authored with Monica Degen is now available online.

The paper is called ‘The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory’ and it’s online at Urban Studies here.

Its abstract says: “Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the design features of those environments. Drawing from empirical analysis based on surveys, ethnographic ‘walk-alongs’ and photo-elicitation interviews, we argue that distinct senses of place do depend on the sensory experiencing of built environments. However, that experiencing is significantly mediated in two ways. First, it is mediated by bodily mobility: in particular, the walking practices specific to a particular built environment. Secondly, sensory experiences are intimately intertwined with perceptual memories that mediate the present moment of experience in various ways: by multiplying, judging and dulling the sensory encounter. In conclusion, it is argued that work on sensory urban experiencing needs to address more fully the diversity and paradoxes produced by different forms of mobility through, and perceptual memories of, built environments.”

The paper uses a visual research method – photo-elicitation interviews – but in writing my bits of it, I was actually most interested in how people’s very ordinary, everyday memories of how familiar places used to look and be different – in the past, in their memories – work as a screen that mediates their perception of those places in the present.  I think that’s one reason that asking people to talk about the photographs they’ve taken of those places often seems to generate talk that has very little to do with the actual photograph.  In a way, it’s the differences between how people see things, and what photographs show, that generates the interesting talk in photo-elicitation interviews.

One of the case studies discussed in the paper is the town of Bedford, and here are some postcards from a series for that town, designed by Kristina Bullen, that perhaps evoke something of that screening effect of memories.

a building, two photographs, some maps and a city. oh and some missiles.

I had a weird moment while I was browsing the Guardian website last week.  I followed the headline ‘London rooftops to carry missiles during Olympic Games’.   The Ministry of Defence has decided to site a launchpad for ‘high velocity missiles’ on the water tower of a building that is now called the Bow Quarter, near the Olympic Park, apparently.  According to the Guardian, the missiles ‘travel at more than three times the speed of sound, have a range of 5km and use a system of three dart-like projectiles to allow multiple hits on a target. Ten soldiers will be on duty at all times to guard and operate the missiles if needed to bring down a fast-moving jet or helicopter attack’.  Local residents are complaining about the lack of consultation, and have apparently looked the missiles up on Google (as you would) to find that they leave a lot of debris behind them and don’t therefore seem very suitable for use in cities…

Putting all that aside, the rooftops in question are ones I was very familiar with thirty years ago when I was researching my undergraduate dissertation.  The ‘Bow Quarter’ was originally a factory for making Bryant and May matches; it employed several hundred local women in very poor conditions, until the women went on strike in 1888.  That strike heralded the emergence of mass trade unionism in the UK.  About a hundred years later, I was studying the strike for my dissertation, and as I lived in London then I thought I’d go and take a look at the factory.  When I got there, I discovered it was in the process of being converted into flats; the entrance buildings had already been sandblasted, so there is pretty much the same photo as the one the Guardian in my dissertation too. Because of course I photographed the building when I was there.

Perhaps it was the pointlessness of taking a photograph as an illustration of a building that in the late 1980s was so radically changed from its use in the 1880s, via technology that had barely been invented when the building was designed, that spurred my later scepticism about using photographs in academic work without thinking quite carefully about what they’re supposed to be doing there.  (On further reflection, though, the photo did of course serve a purpose other than illustration – it proved to my dissertation supervisors that I was keen enough to investigate the actual site of the strike – so perhaps that snap also presages my interest in what photos do rather than necessarily what they show.)

What a place, though, that building.  From factory and birthplace of mass trade unionism, to gated community, to rocket launchpad… there must be some sort of symbolism there, of London’s trajectory as a world city.

Oh, and for anyone interested in maps as a visual research method (yes maps, an oddly neglected visual research method), for my dissertation I mapped where the strikers lived, and from the clustered residential pattern that emerged I argued that their collective strength rested as much on their experience of neighbourhood networks as it did on workplace solidarity.  A version later appeared in an atlas, even: see Rose G (1995) ‘The Strike at Bryant and May’s Match Factory, East London, July 1888′, in Charlesworth, A and Southall, H (es) The Atlas of Industrial Protest, Macmillan, pp.99-104.

the slide show as visual method

There was an interesting event in London last weekend, part of the Waste of the World research project, where I found out about a series of slideshows that are part of the project and can be found on YouTube here.  They’re all slightly different in format; the one below, for example, occasionally has a text slide inserted among all the photographs, while others have captions on each image.

 

 

Watching them reminded me of another slideshow, made by Trond Waage, a visual anthropologist at the University of Tromso, called Struggle for a Living – you can see it here.  This slideshow pushes more at what a slideshow can do.  It has a soundtrack – a voice-over and some ambient sound – as well as a few simple zooms into still images.  It also has a very powerful sense of rhythm, as the duration of the still images lengthens or shortens and the pace of the slideshow slows down or speeds up.  This is very effective in conveying a sense of urban everyday spaces – in this case, the town of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon – and Trond says that the process of working with images was also an effective way to negotiate understanding between himself and the protagonist of the slideshow, Bakary.

As well as its visual content, then, it seems that its rhythm, its ability to incorporate text that can be read, and its soundtrack, are the distinctive features of a slideshow – a medium that’s worth more attention than it’s so far received, particularly for those of us who don’t have the time to hone our filmmaking skills but still want something more than the photo-essay format.

architectural atmospheres

I’m in the process of starting a new research project with Monica Degen and Clare Melhuish, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.  We’re looking at how architects are using digital visualising technologies when they design buildings, but also in their pitches to clients and in the branding of their studios; we’re particularly interested to find out if these new technologies are integral to the affective feel of architectural practices.  You can find out more information about the project here.

holiday discoveries number 2: the paintings of Michele Catti

I visited the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palermo this summer.  The gallery itself was founded in 1910 and was originally housed in a gallery in the city’s Politeama theatre; it was relocated and re-opened in 2006 in the Complesso Monumentale di Sant’Anna.  Its new home is stunning: the mostly seventeenth century buildings have been renovated beautifully and the collection now hangs in a series of lovely spaces.

The story of its relocation is itself an interesting one – it was part of the regeneration of Palermo’s city centre in the first decade of the twenty-first century that’s been discussed by Ola Söderström, Debora Fimiani, Maurizio Giambalvo and Simone Lucido in their book Urban Cosmographies.

And the collection was interesting too.  It was pretty refreshing to visit a self-styled gallery of ‘modern’ art and not to see a single canvas by Monet or Renoir, Picasso or Braque, and to experience instead an assertively local version of the modern being celebrated; good to be reminded that ‘modern’ in 1910 meant something very different from what we now take for granted as modern; intriguing to see Symbolist canvases next to neo-realist social critique and society portraits, with a Futurist awaiting in the next room.

There are lots of fascinating things about the collection then, many of which I couldn’t fathom because the gallery guide sticks resolutely to a  very traditional connoisseur-like approach to the pictures, which was pretty frustrating (though the translator of the explanatory panels in each room deserves an award for capturing both the density and exuberance of written Italian while also writing perfect English).  In connoisseur mode, then, my discovery was a painter called Michele Catti.  I can’t find out much about him – he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry – other than he was born in 1855 and died in 1914.  But there are some stunning canvases by him in the gallery.  My absolute favourites were the very large and very small urban scenes.  A bit like Caillebotte (I did try to stop making comparisions with the French canon, really), but much more obscure and intriguing.

The light and the air in these paintings saturate the buildings and streets and people, making everything somehow absolutely recognisable as a particular place and time – he seems to have liked autumn especially, fading light and falling leaves and rain – but with no detail.  Rather strange and very beautiful.

holiday discoveries number 1: The City and The City

I don’t work when I’m on holiday, but this year some of my holiday reading really resonated with one of my ever-increasing list of ‘papers I’ll never get around to writing’.  The reading was a novel called The City and The City by China Mieville, and the paper’s title is ‘on not confusing the spatial with the visual’.

In brief, it seems to me that a lot of theorising around the visual and the spatial assume that the spatial is always visible: you can see spaces.  Plus a lot of writing on the visual in geographical social sciences tends to assume that the visual field allows only two possibilities, of  visibility or invisibility.  I think that the visual and the spatial overlap (or not) in many more complex and interesting ways than those two assumptions allow.  There all sorts of kinds of ways in which things enter the visible; and there are many spaces that can’t be seen; and there are also registers of ambiguous or ambivalent visibility which might, for example, be thought of as the performance of a kind of visual process of disavowal.

Mieville’s novel is a fantastic riff on some of those possibilities.  It’s a kind of detective story, set in a city – or two.  The cities occupy the same physical space (what Mieville calls ‘grosstopology’), but citizens of one city do not – are not allowed to, learn not to – see the people and buildings that belong to the other.  Except that they do, not (quite).  And that there are spaces where the two cities are so tightly entangled that space is ‘cross-hatched’.  And that crossing from one city to another – ‘breaching’ – both occurs but is also, sometimes, punished with disappearance.  It’s a fantastic story with a lot more going on in it than reflections on visuality and spatiality of course (thankyou, China), but the conceit of ‘unseeing’, seeing what you do not see – in Besźel, for example, which is (one of) the city(s), “in the mirror of the car I saw Mr Geary watch a passing truck.  I unsaw it because it was in Ul Qoma” – is a paradox I love, fully sufficient to at least some of the complex and contradictory interlockings of the visual and the spatial.

a question for film as a way of analysing social issues

I’ve been invited to an event on Monday 23 May at Queen Mary, University of London.  It’s part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that uses film to create an understanding of the transformations and continuities in how migrants manage their health.  The research participants are from Nigeria, Poland and the Indian diaspora; all now live in south London; some are recently arrived and some have lived there a long while.  The research team are Isabel Dyck and Iliena Ortega-Alcazar at Queen Mary and Marta Rabikowska and Matthew Hawkins from the University of East London.  The team are going to screen a first cut of the film and there’s going to be lots of discussion about health, migration, and using film as a method to explore those issues.

Well, I’ve never been involved in making a film, and health geography is not my field!  But their project reminded me of another film made a long time ago, in Poplar in east London.  I found it when I was doing some research in Tower Hamlets Local History Library in the mid-1980s.  I was trying to find out about Poplar’s local council, several of whom were sent to gaol in 1921 for spending all the local rates on the relief of the local poor rather than sending what they should have done to other local authorities like the London County Council.  The very helpful librarian there brought me a videocassette (remember them?), saying that he thought I might be interested in it – and I was – part of the film had news footage of the councillors parading through enthusiastic crowds on their way to prison in 1921.

Councillor Minnie Lansbury on her way to Holloway Prison in 1921. Note the film cameras in the background.

But I also got very interested in the film itself.  Made around 1973, distributed by an outfit called Liberation Films and called Fly a Flag for Poplar, I never managed to find out very much about who exactly had made it.   But it’s a fascinating film and raises some interesting issues about making films and about the relation between the people who make them and the people who are pictured in them.

Now, there are all sorts of heated debates about the ethics of filmmakers representing other people, particularly poor people living in difficult conditions.  The East End of London in particular has a long history of journalists, photographers, filmmakers and artists all creating sensationalist images of what in the late nineteenth century was often called ‘darkest London’.  What Fly a Flag for Poplar tried to do, though, was to make a film as a call to social activism in what was (and to an extent remains) a very poor area of London.  They wanted to get people in Poplar campaigning for their rights.  Hence they showed that newsreel film of an earlier struggle for social justice in Poplar, as an inspiration for efforts in the early 1970s to improve social conditions in the area.

What the film also showed, though, was the importance of the places that the film showed, and the importance of the place where it was itself shown.  The film pictures its own making; you can see people lugging around bulky video cameras with huge battery packs slung over their shoulder, meeting people, talking and filming as they went.  And the film also filmed its own premiere: in a big church in Poplar, which was packed with a huge and excited crowd watching, listening, commenting, catcalling and at the end of the screening bursting with talk and discussion and planning.

So, while what the film showed and told is important, just as striking to me is the attention it pays to the conditions of its own production (or at least some of them – there are no discussions of the editing process, for example), and the emphasis it places on its screening and its audiencing.

And it’s the last point I think I’ll emphasise on Monday.  A film is not just its images; it’s not just a cultural text.  It’s also a product, that’s made in particular ways, and screened in specific places to particular kinds of audience.  For a film like Fly a Flag, that hopes to provoke social activism, those contexts of production and audiencing are crucial parts of how the film works.  Which raises a question: what sorts of social practice should a film of social analysis incorporate into its screenings?

(A postscript – Fly a Flag for Poplar is now listed on the British Film Institute’s Film and TV database, where the people involved in its production are listed.)

looking at cities

You can hear me talk about visual technologies and cities in the nineteenth century, in a podcast currently on The Open University’s OpenLearn site.

One of the questions I want to use this blog to think about is – if  the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century saw all sorts of visualising technologies used to make cities visible in more-or-less ‘realistic ways’, what’s happening now to how cities are represented and experienced?  If cities like Chicago are inhabited by Batman, and Paris folds up in a film like Inception, and New York regularly gets destroyed by zombies, tidal waves and ice sheets, do we think about cities differently now?  Do we live in them differently?

And what about the proliferation of images of cities now made by tourists and family snappers and bloggers?  How do they shape how cities are lived and understood?  Do they offer different ways of seeing urban spaces?

And finally, it seems to me that domestic sorts of pictures are entering city spaces more and more often.  We carry our family albums on our mobile phones, and we see family snaps displayed on subway walls after acts of violence.  Are domestic ways of seeing infiltrating urban spaces?

How do we see cities now?