Friday, 12 December 2003

Neighbourhood encounters

I'm very interested in encounters, from the few words exchanged by complete strangers at a bus-stop or between dog-walkers in the park, to coincidental meetings-up of old friends. Neighbourhood encounters are of course many and varied, from the serendipitous to the routine, but I never seem to catch them when I have a camera to hand. Which is probably just as well. But I just serendipitously encountered the rather handy website of the Image Library of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center which includes this nice example by photographer Dan Burden. If you're attracted to the site, I draw your attention to the usage guidelines.
kansas_outdoor_cafe.jpg

12 Dec 2003 23:46:48 | Neighbourhood relations

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Home Zones video Policy Press have just published Home Zones: the UK experience: a new video resource for community groups and professionals working on Home Zones projects in the UK The Children's Play Council, one of the partners together with Transport 2000, has been overhauling the Home Zones website. From the blurb about the video:  shows how the Home Zone idea has evolved;  draws on interviews with residents to show what it's like to develop and live in a Home Zone;  offers valuable insights into the practical challenges facing UK Home Zone projects and how to overcome them;  presents the views of urban design professionals on how Home Zones fit within urban regeneration;  examines how local authorities can take the lead in developing Home Zone projects. Includes a 40 minute version and a shorter, 12 minute version for public meetings. Price is £29.99 or £12.99 for individuals or community groups. I guess I'm hesitant about sending off for it because I find video such an unsatisfactory format - not very browsable, the content not easy to repackage. If anyone's got their hands on this already, just click on Comments below and let us know...
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'Residents don’t need signs' Can we develop a method of ‘reading neighbourhoods’? How exactly do you read the spatial and social signs when, say, someone takes you into their neighbourhood and shows you round, or when you visit a project or a community centre somewhere? Without thinking about it, we pick up information from things like the style and state of the housing, the number of people walking about, the presence of corner shops and shutters, and so on. So what if people could augment such spatial information with observations of their own, for the visitor to cull according to their needs and interests? All you may need is a mobile, or maybe not even that. These thoughts were sparked by a conversation with Giles Lane of Urban Tapestries, when I went to see him with David Wilcox. The Urban Tapestries project is looking at how people can associate place-based information of their own, with that place, using location-based wireless technologies. The Urban Tapestries blog carries some material about their recent public trial in north central London. We talked about how different content would be authored in different kinds of locality, which brought to mind a comment in Paul Carter's absorbing book, Repressed spaces: “Residents don’t need signs, only foreigners do… In this sense, all signs are signs of not belonging, of coming from somewhere else. Thus, logically, a city in whose streets signs cluster like bees is designed for strangers. It is constitutionally for the other.” And it's true, when you visit a marginalised neighbourhood, with no through-traffic cos there's no way through, and just a few incursions by, say, the utilities or delivery vans - there are few signs. The fewer signs, the fewer advertisements too of course, and so on. Hence the sharp distinctions between, say, a lively urban centre and a severed outer estate that may have begun to atrophy. But if you were picking up additional information about a place from material 'left' there for you, by others (both residents and visitors) - information that could be tailored to your interests or your gender or race or age or degree of mobility - that could alter significantly the ways in which we read neighbourhoods. It could alter the ways in which we behave, in terms of territoriality. Hopefully there will be opportunities with projects like Urban Tapestries to explore such implications from the point of view of people in low-income neighbourhoods. Reference: Carter, Paul. 2002. Repressed spaces: the poetics of agoraphobia. London: Reaktion Books.

Kevin Harris

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