Urban re:passages

Urban Research Forum:

I have set up this platform as a means of creating regular and progressive conversations and dialogues of a specific cross disciplinary nature to encourage a fruitful series of research based exhibitions, performances, events and to encourage an ‘open space’ focus towards developing a new infrastructure for both my own practice and all those involved.

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 implement a concept that will be free from the traditional boundaries and stereotypes that exist in academia and general nature of pratice.

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.

For further information regarding Urban Research Forum please contact urbanresearchforum@googlemail.com

The first event for Urban Research Forum happened at Jerwood Space in May 09. This was a one day seminar exploring the use of city as creative stimulus, with talks from Dr Bob Jarvis, Town Planner, LSBU, Alex Hamilton, Santiago Escobar, Architect and Photographer, Jack Rickards, Artist and Researcher, Imogen Lee, MRES Historian chaired by Damien Arnold, Journalist: Architects Journal. There were talks from all Un:Place Artists at Jerwood Space; Ilona Sagar, Seecum Cheung, Benjamin Bailey, Inzajeano Latif, Dana Macpherson and Alice Williams. The day took the form of more formal presentations, followed by an off site creative urban response workshop and concluding in an open discussion steered by 5 key note questions.

For a detailed synopsis of the day please click attachments on this site: it can then be downloaded.