Urban re:passages

A city of dreams, Jerwood Un:place
A curation by Beatrice Jarvis

Un:Place
A multi disciplinary event exploring the city as artistic resource
In coordination with Un:place an exhibition curated by Beatrice Jarvis

Themes and points of departure:

This event made a platform to encourage connections between people and place through investigation, exploration, pilot projects and the arts. The city of London will effectively be a live laboratory for social and spatial research of urban space use developing from this research innovative and interactive future space use programmes.

This event was a spring board develop into a quarterly forum, designed as support network for emergent artists and researchers to share exchange and develop new ideas of the study of modern urbanity, this can potentially feed into a consultancy network for architects, planners and regeneration projects.

The Themes

• Culture and Urbanity, The city as cultural discourse
• Locality, nationality, London as home or desert,
• The role of choreography in city design
• The city as canvas
• Psychogeography as the new cartography
• Archiving the City
• Street Photography

Key rational for enquiry

• creative devolvement for use of urban fallow through photography and active community engagement
• investigation for productive community engagement with temporary use space use
• development of user based planning development schemes
• development of multidisciplinary exchange network for those using the city as inspiration and resource

The city has and will always remain a myriad of inspiration, which one can utilise to appropriate individual needs. The formation of a creative relationship between the city and the individual can take a multitude of forms, as simple as a considered decision and rationale for the use of a particular method of transport around the city. Such decision makes a substantial impact on the daily lived experience of the individual, allowing a specific outlook to develop towards the city. If driving an isolated ‘space wagon’, then the experience of the city will be isolated and non communal, with no use of street, no opportunity for interaction and observation of intervention. However if the city dweller walks through the streets, they will bump into people, exchange fleeting glances, perhaps engage in moments of conversation, be a part of a social structure, forming an active part of the living whole of the city.

Small daily routine decisions enable the individual to pattern a way of life in the city, deliberate consideration and experimentation with such decisions is essential to formulate a creative city experience. An active engagement between body, mind and city is seminal to the creation of future creative habitats.

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This was the first event of Urban Research Forum. For further information please contact urbanresearchforum@googlemail.com

This is for artists, architects, urban designers, cultural researchers, sociologists, anthropologists and all with an urban interest. This will start with quarterly seminars and a series of collaborative exhibitions and performances. I am keen that to create space for cross over collaboration and conversations which are free from constraint of departmentalization. I am keen to develop a platform that encourages debate, discussion and discourse and remains as open as possible. This forum will attempt to make a platform to encourage connections between people and place through investigation, exploration, pilot projects and the arts. We can aim to present solutions through experiment and plausibility studies to develop user based, public participation projects by means of a consultation process to enrich the meaning of architectural space. Collaboration, discourse and intellectual inquiry are seminal to this concept. The city of London will effectively be a live laboratory for social and spatial research of urban space use developing from this research innovative and interactive future space use programs.