Nr, 2 February 2000
Waterfronts of Art
ART FOR SOCIAL FACILITATION
Nr, 2 February 2000
VISTAS OF THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY
Malcolm Miles (Oxford Brookes University)
INTRODUCTION
Waterfront development has become a sign for the post-industrial city. Cases such as Baltimore’s Harbor District, London Docklands, Cardiff Bay, and Barcelona’s Port Vell represent the transformation of districts of industrial decline into areas of new prosperity, as redundant industrial buildings are re-coded as sites of culture. But if the post-industrial city is a post-modern site of abundance, its benefits are unevenly distributed; centres of affluence construct margins of deprivation. Just as public art lent a veneer of cultural value to urban development in the 1980s, so the re-coding of industrial buildings as sites of culture in the ’90s contributes to a continuing aestheticisation of the city which affirms a dominant spatial order. What strategies, then, are appropriate for art in post-industrial cities?
CONTEXT: SIGNS OF POST-MODERNITY
In the travel section of USA Today, in May 1999, it was reported that stations on the Paris Metro are perfumed ‘with a musk- citrus-floral scent called Madeleine’. Hotels in Las Vegas are well into the game, with coconut butter in the lobby at the Mirage, and lavender-sage at the Bellagio. Mark Peltier, co-founder of the company AromaSys which supplies the scents adds ‘We don’t do subliminal scents, you notice’ (Grossman, 1999). Yet the association made between scent and place is not always direct: the coconut-citrus-spice-vanilla of the Mandalay may complement its Indonesian-style decor (though this, too, is a sign for an artificial world, explicitly not a site in the geographical Indonesia); but musk-citrus-floral has no necessary association to the allegorical (or Proustian) Madeleine, and the column lists other affinities such as bakery smells in shopping malls (where no bread is baked), and jasmine and rosemary in the furniture departments of large stores. These signs are disconnected from their sources - as mediated scents rather than produced smells, their purpose is to conjure dreams of lifestyle and consumption.
The model of a division of signifiers from signifieds was elaborated by Roland Barthes in the 1970s; for Barthes it emphasises the ideological determination of meanings, always plural and contended within systems of difference (Barthes, 1982). The semiotic model was avidly absorbed, also, by the creative staff of advertising agencies, as a separation of image from product enabling anything to be marketed through association with anything else. The scents, then, are signifiers floating in a territory far away from bread and scented gardens. In a similar kind of juxtaposition, in spaces such as Battery Park City or London’s Broadgate, modernist art signifies affluence, whilst at La Défense it is national identity which is lent the universality of cultural value. Similarly, waterside vistas have come to denote an affluent lifestyle in developments such as London Docklands and Port Vell, contrary to the histories of toil and struggle which clearance of such sites renders no longer visible. In the postmodern surface-world of the post-industrial city, then, things are as they seem, the critical idea that they might be not as they seem being banished to a past of modern naivety.
The disruption of an easy relation of signifier to signified, however, upsets other certainties of modern thought, including the relation of (signifying) cause and (given, or signified) effect. One application of this rupture is to question the assumption of modernist planning and architecture that a new society might be engineered through design. To an extent, this utopianism was already shattered by the rise of fascism and emergence of critical theory (in the work of the Frankfurt School); but this did not prevent post-war planners and designers from assuming that, for instance, the design of social housing would be instrumental in the creation of a new and more socially just society. The failure of this utopia is demonstrated by Edward Robbins in a study of the Thamesmead development in south-east London (Robbins, 1996). Thamesmead is not a high-rise estate, but includes much high-density low-rise housing and open space. Robbins concludes, however, that the high degree of functionalisation of space in Thamesmead derives from a professional ideology in which the poor are seen as unable to organise their own lives, so that design is privileged over occupation, architectural form over social process. An ordering of space (and life) is thus handed down to the poor, relocated from homes re-designated as slums, in a project the underlying aim of which is to produce a disciplined public. But Thamesmead has not transformed the poor into middle-class citizens, and the spaces of the South Bank are co-opted by skateboarders as well as the cultural elite. Contradictory outcomes, it appears, can be co-present, as the concert-going elite file past the homeless on their way home.
Sociologist David Byrne argues that in the post-modern ‘dual city’, modern, linear causality and post-modern chaotic urban theory (which references chaos theory in science, and is an extended intricacy rather than a lack of connection between event and aftermath) can be integrated in what he terms a ‘post-postmodern programme’ (Byrne, 1997:51). In other words, layering Byrne’s ideas on Barthes’, cause does not lead to given effect, but, also, it does not not do so. Byrne adopts a ‘butterfly attractor’ model, in which the outcome of any urban policy can take opposing forms. His aim, though, is to reclaim a possibility for intervention through what he terms a ‘taxonomy of possible urban futures’ which assists urban policy to modify the direction of development for the public good (Byrne, 1997:60), whilst recognising that outcomes cannot be predicted and that a meandering path - the ‘drunkard’s walk’ to Birmingham via Beechey Head - is also likely. He summarises his position as follows:
"What this means is agency. It is precisely the human capacity to imagine and seek to construct a future which is so crucial to understanding the potential of trajectories within a complex world. Of course, this does not guide us towards ‘blueprints’, towards the imposition of centrally designed plans ... neither does it leave us with only the market as a method of information processing and decision making. Instead, a participatory democracy has the capacity for collective realisation of urban ... futures." (Byrne, 1997:67)
For artists, at least for a reconstituted and re-politicised avant-garde (if there is one), this offers a strategy of intervention through, for instance, the creation of transparency in the urban process, drawing attention to the divorce of signifiers from signifieds, and the ideological construction of meaning in place, in urban development. Engagement, then, means working in the crevices of the dominant city, understanding the processes of re-coding which characterise the post-industrial urban landscape.
RE-CODING THE CITY
The re-use of redundant commercial and industrial spaces for cultural purposes (which then re-code their environs as cultural districts) is a frequently encountered element in urban development programmes, in keeping with a symbolic economy of culture, heritage, fashion and tourism through which cities are re-presented in a context of globalisation. Examples include the Tate Galleries at Albert Dock in Liverpool and Bankside in London; the Arnolfini in Bristol; and the Baltic flour mill in Gateshead - all waterside locations. On a slightly different model, Castlefield in Manchester has been re-coded as a culture and leisure quarter, with bars and clubs occupying canal-side ex-industrial buildings [1]; and Temple Bar in Dublin as an arts quarter by the Liffey.
Such sites are promoted through ersatz place-identity, co-opting selective local histories, whilst conforming to global, market-led patterns of development. And it is in sites such as Docklands that the post-industrial city of re-coded sites of culture and the global city of trans-national financial service industries, which drives most urban development, are contiguous. The global city is composed of enclaves, within cities such as New York, Frankfurt, London and Tokyo, linked more closely to each other by 24- hour information super-highways than to adjacent geographical neighbourhoods which they construct as margins. The enclaves of post-industrial cities are linked by less formal networks, through assumptions of cultural capital and the internationalism of affluence. Collectively, the museums and marinas, and the designer-bars, restaurants for new or exotic cuisines, health clubs, boutiques and florists denote an aesthetic environment, extending the model of gentrification (in which culture played a key role) which affected neighbourhoods such as SoHo in New York in the 1980s [2]. But the diverse publics of a city do not have equal access to the new abundance, nor do they mix with each other. Jon Bird notes that lofts in London Docklands were screened from sight of nearby social housing by ‘... all the contradictory signifiers of uneven development’ such as rebuilt picturesque dock walls, and the façades of offending council estates renovated (Bird, 1993:125). And Rosalyn Deutsche, like Sharon Zukin, has written on the divisiveness of urban development in New York and its link to a rising rate of eviction (Deutsche, 1991a; 1991b). But, if advocacy for cultural re-use of redundant buildings, or for ‘creative’ cities [3], is advocacy for a dualism of wealth and deprivation, is it possible for art to reclaim the right to the city for all its publics [4]?
AESTHETICS AND ART-INTERVENTION
The development of strategies for art in post-industrial cities faces three difficulties: the separation of art from everyday life which underpins the association of culture with affluence in an aestheticisation of cities; the uncertainty of linear sequences of cause and effect, and failure of the modernist project to engineer a better society through design; and the need to reconstruct ideas of place and community within postmodern discourses.
Herbert Marcuse traces the separation of art from ordinary life to Aristotle’s privileging of the philosophical knowledge of beauty, leisure and peace over the useful knowledge of business and war (Marcuse, 1972:88-9). In his early writing he sees this as affirmative in bourgeois society of a realm of culture - in which compensation is found for the contradictions of the mechanisms of exchange - set apart from the realm of actuality in which such contradictions are produced. Like the hollowness of consumption, compensation in the form of a beauty elsewhere (like a joy just departed) appeases but does not change. In his later writing, however, despairing that radical social change is imminent, Marcuse sees art’s autonomy as a critical distance enabling a rupture of the surfaces of the dominant reality (Marcuse, 1978). The question for art is whether autonomy can be integrated with embeddedness in everyday life, to counteract the co-option of culture as a remote signifier of the affluent society.
This is a very different project from the creation of place-identity of conventional public art, such as Richard Leicester’s Cincinnati Gateway (1988). Whilst place-making followed the model of designing spaces which condition behaviour [5], the unpredictability of outcomes, and a right to the city which includes participation in the determination of the concept of the city which buildings articulate (Lefebvre, 1996; Zukin, 1996), suggest a model of agency in which publics are enabled to produce their own spaces. This includes the association of meanings with place, and readings of the city which are not dependent on the visible. Similarly, the project of agency as advanced by Byrne goes beyond complicity in the re-coding of city centres as cultural districts (in Birmingham masking the construction of a central business district on the Burgess concentric ring model) [6]. As a strategy for art, agency offers a more interesting route than confrontation, the prospects for which are seen from road protest to be limited (though not without effect and generating a distinctive culture, but doing so by direct action not by art) [7]. But, if art is to create a new transparency in the urban process, giving form to dreams of reclamation, not only is an understanding of the operations of capital which produce the post-industrial city required, but also a re-thinking of the notion of community.
Perhaps there are three problems: to subvert the re-coding of the city from within the language of signs; to construct models of practice which involve the participation of diverse publics with professionals, in a forum in which art ceases to be linked to authorship; and to recognise the fluidity of patterns of sociation in a post-industrial city, which render notions of community linked to place as obsolete.
The free floating of signs allows endless appropriation; Zukin writes that the culture industries are agents for a new language of difference: ‘... a coded means of discrimination, an undertone to the dominant discourse of democratization’ when styles which emerge in street culture are appropriated by mass media as ‘images of cool’ and claims for social justice are in turn re-directed as ‘a coherent demand for jeans’ (Zukin, 1995:9). Is it possible, then, for art to work in the other direction, subverting the codes of the mass media and consumption from within? The work of Barbara Kruger suggests so; as in a different way does that of the Docklands Community Poster Project, using digital imaging to tell an alternative history of the development.
Similarly, new models of art practice, termed new genre public art (Lacy, 1995), involve the participation of publics in processes which do not aim to produce permanent or object-based art. An example is the work of Mierle Ukeles with the New York Sanitation Department, including the projected Flow City (at the pier where New York’s waste is loaded into barges to be taken to a landfill site on Statten Island), which reminds New Yorkers of their production of waste at levels which are unsustainable. Another category of new art practice is the reclamation of sites damaged by industrial pollution, such as Mel Chin’s Revival Field in Minneapolis (1989). This used hyper-accumulator plants such as maize, in a circular field within a toxic waste dump, to draw out toxins from the soil; the toxins, such as cadmium and zinc, could be reclaimed by incineration of the plants after harvest. In Pittsburgh, another, larger reclamation initiative begun in 1996 - the Nine Mile Run Greenway project - is co-ordinated by the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Pittsburgh is a post-industrial city with two new art museums in redundant industrial and commercial buildings; parts of its have been waterside reclaimed for jogging and cycling trails. Artists Bob Bingham, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto at the Studio act as negotiators and facilitators between city authorities, citizens’ groups, developers and other professionals, seeking to reclaim part of a 230-acre site of steel industry slag as a post-industrial landscape - defined as integrating public space with a zone of protected bio-diversity. Along the stream bed vegetation is quite lush, and the valley was identified in 1910 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr as ‘the most striking opportunity’ to create a public park. The Greenway project combines practical measures, such as the spraying of a mulch containing nutrients and grass seeds on the steeper slopes to green them (for aesthetic effect, as a way to encourage people to value the site), with workshops through which citizens can gain information and engage with professionals and developers on equal terms, using the methods of action planning. The project has no predetermined plan for the site, though it seeks to create through broad participation a design which can be implemented by the city, the developers and other professionals in due course. This development is not natural, in that to return the site to its pre-slag condition is not an option; like all managed land, the post-industrial landscape will emerge from the juxtaposition of a set of conditions and a series of interventions, reflecting Byrne’s idea cited above that participatory democracy has a capacity to realise collectively imagined futures.
The Greenway project works through existing citizens’ groups and channels to a range of loosely and tightly constituted communities. But the problem remains as to how notions of community are reconstructed in cities when groups of people are no longer linked by common roots to geographical site [8]. Planner Leonie Sandercock sees narratives of community as nostalgic, arguing that:
"In the light of processes of globalization ... processes which are remapping social relations and giving rise to unprecedentedly complex senses of place and belonging, earlier meanings of ‘community’ begin to seem naive, if not dangerous". (Sandercock, 1998:191)
She cites Richard Sennett’s discussion in The Uses of Disorder (1970) of myths of community as reinforcements of the values of white suburbia, and notes that narratives of belonging repress difference. As a model of a sanitised re-invention of community, she gives Celebration, the Disney town in Florida designed, as she quotes, ‘to look and feel like a Norman Rockwell painting’ (Sandercock, 1998:194 citing Katz, 1997:9). Celebration is totalitarian in its regulation of life by design, down to details such as the colour of curtains (white or beige) and type of shrubbery. Dean MacCannell points out that the design of houses eliminates privacy and enables surveillance by drawing a sight-line from the front to the back door, in answer to ‘a nostalgia for central authority that penetrates the most intimate details of life’ (MacCannell, 1999:113). Sandercock contrasts the conformity of Celebration with its white picket fences to ‘communities of resistance’ in more deprived areas, but concludes that both state- directed and locally driven planning have transformative and repressive aspects which need to be seen in an unresolvable tension. Further: ‘What the new cultural politics of difference signifies is that the modernist norm of a homogenous public has become unacceptable’ (Sandercock, 1998:197). Perhaps it is precisely with such tensions, rather than with easy or nostalgic (and often anti-urban) notions of place and community, that artists now need to work.
NOTES:
1. Jan Verwijnen claims that cultural quarters offer a way beyond the restrictions of enclaved development and require new processes of urban planning (Verwijnen, 1998). Monica Degen, however, in an unpublished paper to the British Sociological Association’s working group of public spaces, at the University of Westminster (19 June 1999) argues that Castlefield, a case of such a cultural quarter, represents the same kind of divisive aestheticisation of the city as the gentrification of SoHo. Degen further argues that the redevelopment of Barcelona reflects adherence to a northern European model of the clean city, as in the design of new buildings without the balconies from which, traditionally, washing and birdcages are hung, these seen as signs of a (messy) Latin city. 2. Sharon Zukin links the characterization of SoHo as an arts district with its gentrification (Zukin, 1982), notes the appearance of art galleries in disused store-fronts in central Manhattan as a precursor of increasing property values (Zukin, 1995:6), and observes connections between property development and membership of the boards of cultural institutions (Zukin, 1995:118- 122).
3. See, for example, Landry and Bianchini (1995).
4. The idea of a ‘right to the city’ is derived from Lefebvre - see Lefebvre 1996:63-181. See also Wilson, 1991:10 on women’s right to the city.
5. Selwood argues that such claims are usually too vague to be demonstrable, and that the reception of projects by publics is not part of the agenda for commissioning agencies (Selwood, 1995).
6. Research in Birmingham shows that public investment in projects such as Centenary Square has produced only low-paid, short-term and insecure employment whilst access to the new cultural facilities is restricted to residents of outlying areas, and resources for the infra-structures of housing, transport and education were diverted into the scheme (Loftman and Nevin, 1998).
7. See McKay (1996); Jordan and Lent (1999); and Wall (1999). Byrne also alludes to ecology in his final two paragraphs, suggesting that there are real limits to, for example, reliance on car-borne transport (Byrne, 1997:69).
8. See Albrow (1997): ‘In the last thirty years transformations of industrial organization in the advanced societies, accompanied by the acceptance of the ideas of post-industrialism and post-modernity, mean that the problem-setting for community analysis has shifted. In the last decade globalization theory has brought issues of time, space and territorial organization into the centre of the frame of argument. We have to look again at the way social relations are tied to place and re-examine issues of locality and culture.’ (Albrow, 1997:43)
REFERENCES:
Albrow M (1997) ‘Travelling Beyond Local Cultures: Socioscapes in a Global City’, in Eade (ed) (1997) pp37-55
Barthes R (1982) Empire of Signs, New York, Hill & Wang
Bird J (1993) ‘Dystopia on the Thames’ in Bird et al (1993) pp120-135.
Bird J, Curtis B, Putnam T, Robertson G, Tickner L (eds) (1993) Mapping the Futures London, Routledge
Byrne D (1997) ‘Chaotic Places or Complex Places? - cities in a post-industrial era’, in (eds) Westwood and Williams (1997) pp50-70
Copjec J and Sorkin M (1999) Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, London, Verso
Deutsche R (1991a) ‘Uneven Development: public art in New York City’, in Ghirardo (1991) pp157-219
Deutsche R (1991b) ‘Alternative Space’ in Wallis (ed) 1991, pp45-66
Eade J (ed) (1997) Living the Global City, London, Routledge
Ghirardo D (ed) (1991) Out of Site, Seattle, Bay Press
Grossman C L (1999) ‘USA Turns up Nose at Subway Scents’ USA Today, 28 May p9D
Hall T and Hubbard P (1998) The Entrepreneurial City, Chichester, Wiley
Jordan T and Lent A (1999) Storming the Millennium: the New Politics of Change, London, Lawrence & Wishart
Katz I (1997) ‘White Picket Fantasia’, The Age, 13 Jan.
King A (ed) (1996) Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis, London, Macmillan
Lacy S (1995) Mapping the Terrain, Seattle (WA), Bay Press
Landry C and Bianchini F (1995) The Creative City, London, Comedia Landry C, Greene L, Matarasso F, and Bianchini F (1996) The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal Through Cultural Activity, Stroud, Comedia
Lefebvre H (1996) Writings on Cities (trans. Kofman and Lebas), Oxford, Blackwell
Loftman P and Nevin B (1998) ‘Pro-growth Local Economic Development Strategies: Civic Promotion and Local Needs in Britain’s Second City, 1981-96', in Hall and Hubbard (eds) (1998) pp129-148
MacCannell D (1999) ‘New Urbanism and its Discontents’, in (eds) Copjec and Sorkin, 1999, pp106-128
McKay G (1996) Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, London, Verso
Marcuse H (1972) Negations, Harmondsworth, Penguin
Marcuse H (1978) The Aesthetic Dimension, Boston, Beacon Press
Robbins E (1996) ‘Thinking space / seeing space: Thamesmead revisited’, Urban Design International, vol 1, #3, pp283-291
Sandercock L (1998) Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities, Chichester, Wiley
Sassen S (1991) The Global City, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press
Selwood S (1995) The Benefits of Public Art, London, Policy Studies Institute
Verwijnen J (1998) ‘The Creative City’s New Field Condition’, paper to ELIA conference, Helsinki, 1998, published at www.ub.es/escult/jan (1999)
Wall D (1999) Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement, London, Routledge
Wallis B (ed) (1991) If You Lived Here, Seattle, Bay Press
Westwood S and Williams J (eds) (1997) Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, London, Routledge
Wilson E (1991) The Sphinx in the City, Berkeley (CA), University of California Press
Zukin S (1982) Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, Baltimore (MD), Johns Hopkins University Press
Zukin S (1995) The Cultures of Cities, Oxford Blackwell
Zukin S (1996) ‘Space and Symbols in an Age of Decline’ in King (ed) (1995) pp43-59
Nr, 2 February 2000
Here and Nowhere.The Making of Urban Space
Jan Verwijnen
UIAH. Helsinki
My interest is in the conscious role of space and time or of geography and history in contemporary urban development, particularly in the generation of urban projects. Can urban development be seen in relationship to form and thus to urban projects that are shaping and being shaped by contemporary culture? I would like to draw attention to a shift of attitude in a series of urban projects within the field of architecture and urbanism based on a ‘more fluid and kaleidoscopic socio-economic landscape’ that is characterised by programmatic indeterminacy and instability. This parallels a shift in society: The fragmenting of centralised flows of power towards the power of flows induced by networks that become the dominant social morphology (Castells 1996). I then introduce the notion of a material culture based on object form and the production and consumption of form through complex processes of negotiation. This negotiation of form is increasingly a conscious process on the level of configuration, a conceptual and diagrammatic level within the design process between the virtual and the real that allows interaction and participation. This in turn refers to the notion of the deleuzian abstract machines in cultural and historical processes and evolution in general. Geography has created GIS (Geographical Information Systems), a digital tool with which we within the diagrammatic process of configuration can create any map and map anything, an interface for participatory action. What is the historical equivalent of this tool, which are the generative engines of change over time and how are they configured?
Urban development
My account of contemporary European urban development and its planning reality is pessimistic towards its future potential. The increased competition between European cities has lead to a new paradox: the more competition the cities confront from the outside, the smoother they must operate on the inside. Cities can no longer afford a freewheeling situation, but need to harness their internal resources. Urban policies become both the instrument itself and act as the showcase of this effort. A dynamic urban policy becomes part of the image of a city and acts as a catalyst for its symbolic economy. (Barcelona, Rotterdam, Glasgow)
Once economic restructuring challenges the European city, planning becomes perhaps inevitable, but in a completely new way. Otherwise a city centre will decay and most economic activities will move to the periphery of the ringroads. Planning will in this case mean mobilising private capital through public-private partnerships. In order to successfully do this a city needs a whole set of new instruments to carry out such a mission. Successfully operating models of large projects in different cities (e.g. Lille, Rotterdam) show that these cities have tried to adopt themselves to this new reality. Within this new reality the traditional masterplans have lost their power. They still provide a legal framework concerning land-use, but fail to give a vision for the city, nor are they concrete enough to give precise guidelines for designing the necessary quality of the public spaces or do they have the flexibility to incorporate programmatic changes.
Instead of an all embracing master plan, newer planning documents have emerged that tend to split between those that deal with a vision for the city as a whole including its position in the region and so called large scale strategic projects that translate that vision. The new type of city plan that deals with the current renewal and economic restructuring of cities accepts the fragmentary nature of this undertaking. It usually starts with the relation between the city and the region and further deals with the integration of a city's policy sectors. The plans may initially be more or less independent of programmatic aspects and only provide spatial potential. This independence of program results from the different perspective that these type of plans represent: they depart from the question how the development of a city could be directed along lines of infrastructure to create development corridors given the increasing importance of private investment in real estate.
If architects are going to participate in the mobile, often immaterial, shaping forces of the contemporary city, they must embrace both an ethics and a practice of motion. This involves the assumption that the classical models of pure, static, essentialised, timeless form and structure are no longer adequate to describe the contemporary city and the activities that it supports. … Studies of motion have historically gravitated to those techniques that can manage complex information smoothly, allowing the study of temporal flow. At this moment, certain computer programs seem obvious as the sites for the study of motion. This interest in computation is not for the mechanisation of design, but rather a new medium in which designers can reconceptualise old problems in new ways. (Lynn 1997: 54).
Urban Field Conditions
The difficulty planning and architecture are increasingly facing is the urban ‘field condition’ generated by the flows of goods, money, people and information. Allen (1997) introduces the term ‘field conditions’ in relation to movements in art and technology as:
"an intuition of a shift from object to field in recent theoretical and visual practices. In its most complex manifestation, this concept refers to mathematical field theory, to non-linear dynamics and computer simulations of evolutionary change. It parallels a shift in recent technologies from analogue object to digital field. … The infrastructural elements of the modern city, by their nature linked together in open-ended networks, offer another example of field conditions in the urban context." (Allen 1997:24)
Understanding the city as a field means accepting it being in a state of continual flux and continuous change. Aesthetic processes flow through the urban field and are carried by bodies of people in the form of fashion, but also influence the form of urban space, where these people meet – the cafés, squares etc. Such a field phenomenon is defined by simple local conditions and is in fact relatively indifferent to overall form and extent of the city. Global movements such as de-industrialisation or new information and communication structures determine the forces in a local field, but the actors on the spot behave according to local conditions such as habits, tradition and consensus. Increasingly these actors that have become critical about their environment want to be directly involved in planning the development of their district.
Under field conditions architecture and planning have to shift their attention from the traditional top-down forms of control and begin to investigate more fluid bottom-up approaches (Allen 1997). Although it is evident that urban planning and particularly architecture have had great difficulties in adequately addressing the complexities of urban life there is little evidence that the discipline is adapting itself to the new field condition. Similarly Lynn (1997) points to a different architecture that must be conceptualised and modelled within an urban field. The urban field is understood as dynamic and characterised by forces rather than forms. To an architect, urban questions have usually simply been questions of large-scale form or fabric. Instead of form, patterns of organisation are to be addressed on the urban scale.
"It is necessary that architects begin to design using dynamic simulation systems of urban forces and fields" (Lynn 1997: 55).
In this context Allen asks: "How to engage all the complexity and indeterminacy of the city through the methods of a discipline so committed to control, separation and unitary thinking? We thrive in cities exactly because they are places of the unexpected, products of a complex order emerging over time" (Allen 1997: 30).
Allen suggests that architecture and planning need to recognise the limits of their ability to order the city, and that they learn from complex self-regulating orders already present in the field of the city. With growing recognition of the urban field architectural objects tend to loose their traditional form and design process - we move from the one toward the many, from objects to fields.
Material Culture and the Negotiation of Form
For understanding the process that generates object form we need a short excursion into the notion of material culture. The quantitative rise in the industrial production and mass distribution of material goods over the past century has led to a growth of material culture to the point where material culture based on object form is the culture of the our contemporary society and dominates the relationship between people and goods (things, products, objects and spaces). Firstly, more things are produced; secondly, more of social life is produced in a thing-like form. In Material Culture and Mass Consumption Miller (1987) develops a theory of culture concerned with the relationship between the human subject and the external world based on philosophical studies of the subject-object duality and its resolution in a dynamic process of becoming. Material culture is the totality of what people do with objects, why they buy them and how form and fashion contribute to the making, the social construction, of everyday life. Through material culture object form becomes a process of negotiation between production and consumption. Human subjects actively engage with the object world, transforming, moulding and creating it through their intellectual and practical efforts. Thus in working on the world, individuals and societies recreate it in relation to their needs – their subjectivity, their meanings for the world. These needs take material form, in the objects and spaces being produced. The world of things is really culture in its objective form, it is the form that humans have given the world through their mental and material practices; at the same time, human needs themselves evolve and take shape through the kinds of things, objects, goods available (Slater 1997).
A major shortcoming of many theories of the concept of culture is that they identify culture with a set of objects, such as the arts in themselves, rather than seeing it as an evaluation of the relationship through which objects are constituted as social forms and social spaces. Culture is always a process and is never reducible to either its object or its subject form. For this reason the evaluation should always be of a dynamic relationship of people and objects, never of mere things. (Miller 1987).
In their book The End of Organised Capitalism Lash and Urry argue that the contemporary audience is sensitised to the reception of such cultural objects and forms because of a ‘semiotics of everyday life’ in which the boundary between the cultural and life, between the image and the real, is more than ever transgressed. (Lash and Urry 1987).
Here the contemporary design process of urban and architectural space introduces the diagram as an intermediary level for the negotiation of form as an abstract model between the virtual and the real. The variables in a diagram may include both formal and programmatic configurations: space and event, force and resistance, density, distribution, and direction. Multiple functions and action over time are implicit in the diagram. The configurations it develops are subject to continual modification. A diagram is therefore not a thing in itself but a description of potential relationships among elements, not only an abstract model of the way things behave in the world but a map of possible worlds.
In this context I would like to introduce a scheme that represents the design process as a diagonal movement from immaterial thoughts to the production of matter. It identifies three levels of design knowledge and praxis that have a specific relation with each other. My hypothesis is that for design to be relevant for praxis it is necessary to connect all three levels. • a level of analysis and theory, • a conceptual level between the virtual and the real that operates with diagrams as a sort of professional shorthand and that for different reasons (group work, participation) increasingly is developing an own life (generative diagrams, templates etc.) • a level of final form in which the things or products present themselves in their material form. This has for a great deal been linked to categories of style and therefor art history.
Increasingly new professional practice is characterised by providing solutions through mediating between municipal bureaucracies or production (distribution) systems and the participation of new groupings of actors in the design process. This type of mediating seems to provoke an intermediary level of operation, in which the analysed data are interpreted and transformed before becoming solutions or form. Increasingly open-ended solutions and templates are demanded. The practice of architecture today, for example, must "negotiate a field in which the actual and the virtual assume ever more complex configurations: a field in which diagrams matter" (Allen 1988). He further states: "A diagrammatic practice…. locates itself between the actual and the virtual, and foregrounds architecture’s transactional character. It works in the midst of architecture’s constant interface with human activity, and its own internal negotiations of actual and virtual." (Ibid.)
Gilles Deleuze described the virtual organisation of the diagram as an ‘abstract machine’. Other than Foucault, for whom the plan for the Panopticum prison is "the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form" and represents the spatial organisation of a specific form of state power and discipline, Deleuze is interested in the diagram as an abstract machine that makes no "distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content. …The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 141-142). Thus Kwinter argues that the diagram operates primarily in time, i.e. abstract machines manifest their materiality rather in time than in space.
Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) is such a diagrammatic account of the products of historical processes which are bottom-up and guided by system generating processes. He explores the history of urban economics since the Middle Ages and relates it to flows of matter and energy that generate form through particular ‘abstract machines’. An understanding of this type of generation of form is crucial for the making of contemporary space and it is perhaps here that history has role to play.
Bibliography
Allen, Stan (1997). From Object to Field. In Architecture after Geometry, Architectural Design, Vol 67, No 5/6 May-June 1997. London: Academy Editions.
Castells, Manuel (1996). The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
De Landa, Manuel (1997). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kelly, Kevin (1994). Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines. London: Fourth Estate.
Kelly, Kevin (1997). New Roles for the New Economy: Twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world. Wired 5.09, September 1997.
Lash, Scott and Urry, John (1987). The End of Organised Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lash, Scott (1994). Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community. In Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernisation. Cambridge: Polity.
Lash, Scott and Urry, John (1994). Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage.
Lynn, Greg (1997). An Advanced Form of Movement. In Architecture after Geometry, Architectural Design, Vol 67, No 5/6 May-June 1997. London: Academy Editions.
Miller, Daniel (1987). Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
Slater, Don (1997). Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Notes
1.- In her book The Cultures of Cities Sharon Zukin draws attention to the new symbolic economy of culture for cities: "As a set of architectural themes, it plays a leading role in urban redevelopment strategies based on historic preservation or local ‘heritage’. With the disappearance of local manufacturing industries and periodic crises in government and finance, culture is more and more the business of cities – the basis of their tourist attractions and their unique, competitive edge. The growth of cultural consumption (of art, food, fashion, music, tourism) and the industries that cater to it fuels the city’s symbolic economy, its visible ability to produce both symbols and space." (Zukin 1995: 1-2)
2.- The electronic integration of all communication modes from the typographic to the multimedia particularly consists of (fashion) images and signs. People are increasingly able to monitor and evaluate these images as well as place themselves within the world, both historically and geographically. The more that societies modernise, the greater the ability of knowablgeable subjects to reflect upon their social conditions of existence. Lash (1994) characterises this as ‘reflexive modernisation’. In a world of ever-faster change and growing abstraction the process of reflexivity opens up possibilities for the recasting of meaning in work and in leisure and for the heterogenisation and complexity of space and everyday life. Confronted with the increasing cultural content of flows reflexivity becomes aesthetic - a notion for which Lash and Urry argue in their book Economies of Signs and Space (1994).
3.- Field conditions are bottom-up phenomena: defined not by overarching geometrical schemas, but by intricate local connections. Overall shape and extent of the parts are highly fluid. Form matters, but not so much the forms of things as the forms between things. (Allen 1997: 24).
4 When everything is connected to everything else in a distributed network, things are happening at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from interdependent acts done locally, and not from central command. (Kelly 1994: 469)
5 Self-organised order in evolutionary systems occurs if the rules of the game are composed from bottom up. Interacting forces at the bottom level will change the rules as the game progresses. Systems balance themselves by learning and adapting already present in the field of the city. With growing recognition of the urban field architectural objects tend to loose their traditional form and design process - we move from the one toward the many, from objects to fields.
Nr, 2 February 2000
Pedro Brandao - Vanda Vilela
Urban Design and public art - portuguese perspectives
In Portugal there are some signs of changing of atitudes regarding cities. These changes are happening by reason of economic and social changes, of State functions, of lifestyle expectations and, at technical level, by changing in perceptions about plan-design relations.
It is now obvious that urban anarchy is no longer controlled by countermeasures of more and more plans, neither by defense measures regarding heritage or environmental values…
Several factors are pointing to upgrading public space as a important design area. As it frequently happens with us, hazarous factors have also helped in that direction: the fire of Chiado area in Lisbon some years ago, due to a public space intervention by an amateur that didn´t allow the firefighting vehicles to pass by.
Since some recent years, urban festivals have included art interventions and propositions of upgrading public environment. The Metro company led a policy of caring it´s own public space (it was awarded the National Design Award for basing it´s image on a strategy of public art in the station spaces). But it was with EXPO'98 that Public Spaces became a popular subject regarding city debate, with Public Art gaining an exemplary and demonstrative value.
In this text we'll evaluate this process and describe a specific example.
Diagnosis of public spaces in Portugal
1. The time of absolute priority to basic neads such as roads and housing, starts to be somehow overpassed
2. Cities are now competing, at international and at national level, using public space as a charismatical and representative function 3. There's a new pattern of social expectations, due to the new political and economical space of EU that arised terms of comparision regarding quality of life
4. To several parteners, such as profissionals, companies and institutions, public space is no longer seen as the result of urbanizing operations or road network
But less promissing aspects must also be considered:
5. Bad quality of spaces that limit public spaces (architecture, resulting spaces in the margin of road scheems, voids) still are everywere;
6 Degradation of existenting public space in old urban areas, due to changing in traditional uses or bad maintainance leads to abandoned and vandalised efects ;
7. Most of interventions criating new public space is of bad quality and inexpressiveness (dead ends, highways, parking lots...) ;
8 The impact of car infrastructure: elimination of useful pedestrian and free space, more distance, barriers, uneguality between those who are and those who aren't car owners;
9 Agressiveness and lack of space identification criates poor socialization habits and little social sofistication of life interactions in exterior activities;
10 Comunication and advertising devices in growing quantity, have not only a polutting inpact but represent privatization of a colective property _ sight ;
Glorious days of Expo 98
Controverse about Expo'98 before it happened was conducted over the theme "how the money is spended" and not "how to build a city" that the event should have motivated. However today it is commonly agreed that regarding the poor quality we are getting with public spaces in the rest of Lisbon what happened in Expo public spaces is still the best show case in town.
I recall some of the elements of success
A dockyard as the center place - Expo most protagonist public space had a contraditory program in a big non-walkable open space that gave to everything a meaning surplus _ water.
Boundaries between different designers _ playground _ and the established rules by Manuel Salgado's masterplan, cultivated a methodologie of partenership between different criators Foreign architects, Shermayev's ceramic tiles ("azulejos") in Oceanary walls and Calatrava's roof for his railway station inspired in Lisbon trees, contextualised their cosmopolitan looks.
Gomes da Silva and Fernanda Fragateiro, portuguese landscaper and scultor, redraw traditional disciplinary limits of the arts of gardening with no concessions to decoration
Siza Vieira, most famous portuguese architect and traditional pavement design with the new "calçadas" interpertations by young artists, gave visual expression to national identity.
From design's point fo view
Design's point of view in the questions of public space is frequently limited to urban furniture and signs, by the handing of functional or comunicational artefacts into a preexisting environment. Today this role is updated to more sistemic ideas about the city, that doesn't result from an adition of items.
Today design calls for a global aproach and its contribution is not based only on new products but also on comunicative and environmental performance, integrating interdisciplinary inputs from architecture to landscaping and public art.
We can say that the ideia of recentering a promotion strategy of design, in a user led basis results from Design Centers exprience, for many years triing with very little success to motivate industries to offer new products.
Not that manufacturing companies don´t want de sign inputs but because very often they don´t dominate user's expectations, they are mainly answering to demands from other companies and institutions that, with a more direct contact with the final consumer, really determinate design features. Design user oriented requires mechanisms of relation with the final destination (either directly or by means of representatives or interperters).
It's with this frame in mind that recently Portuguese design Center has lounched, together with Barcelona Centro de Disseny and the Universites of Lisboa and Barcelona, a postgraduate course in Urban Design, on a interdisciplinary perspective.
Globalisation and local condition
Portugal has become in recent years a very oppened country. The easiest diffusion of models, accessibility and mobility, has brought signs of an ever-increasing "global landscape" - simplification (resulting in a restricted, ever-present range of components), reduction (elimination of specific or "typical"), standardisation (referring to a model, repeatable), dislocation (indifferent to the context, virtual).
But the idea of the landscape as something to be conserved and reducible to a museological conception, is very strong in our cultural environment. It promotes an idea of landscape heritage that must be preserved even when it serves no purpose nor sustains a human activity anthropologically linked to the landscape.
The roots of the conservative and protectionist position in relation to the landscape and the role of art, design or architecture in city are very often simple fear, a reaction to the unknown.
New landscapes come into being in spaces like service areas, shopping malls or airports - they are intermodal, energetic, standardised - sometimes without a past or neighbourhoods. These places are perhaps a future tipology of public spaces.
But even if they seem aggressive and inhuman as the new landscapes we can proudly integrate them in the new man-made patrimony which is offered to us by design, architecture, landscaping, art, and see how contemporary trends in these fields trie to give a meaning to the places of our lives.
"Observatory", a public art expereance by Vanda Vilela
In the cultural and artistic background we refered, oportunities for public art, although growing are not so many for young artists. Lisbonm's festival was, during some years, such an oportunity. Vanda Vilela presented her project for "Observatory" in 97, one year before EXPO. It was intended to face the river at a spot where children come to play, and at the same time express allusions to sea travel and appeal for interaction.
Temporarily placed near the Tagus river during the city festival of 1997, purchased by Lisbon City Hall and now located at the Urban Park "Moinhos de Santana" (now very vandalizaed), the "OBSERVATORY" is a public art object... It's iconografy can be associated with concepts like "river", "watch box", "ropes":
"Tower, Watch, Ship
As a place one can look out of, an observation room, it is a gap through which one can select and direct a magnified look, window, watch-box, trap door. The terrace is a platform accessed through difficult vertical ladders, where a rope awaits us to be woven."
"River Bank, Beach, Square
In front of National Rope Factory, the straight riverbank draws like a square the limestone slope. During one month, on wheels, the object was placed in different spots of the square with different orientations, facing the river. The hills of the opposite side of the bank exhibit, here and there, some green patches."
The fruition of this work is the possibility that it offers to observe in a different manner, being a sort of tower that enables new ways of feeling public spaces.
To enter one can choose between the door, too small for an adult, or the ladder-like wall up to the terrace to interweave the rope in a rudimentary weaving machine, and come back down through the trap door to the bench on which the observer may seat.
The inside allows the framing of different perspectives using the watch box or the pivot windows and depending on the object's orientation.
On the pivot windows one can read "Observe the river from the river" and "Weave ropes with other knots". The game of interpreting the unexpected presence of a new object, at the same time odd and familiar .
The side walls hold four panels on each side, showing photos suggesting an imaginary voyage of the object through different places of Lisbon river bank.
The "OBSERVATORY" has 2,40m x 1,80m x 3,50m and is build of African "Kambala" and "Sucupira" wood. It is assembled at the carpenter's shop and has a polished finishing. Then it may be moved to different locations.
This object may have multiples, i.e. it is possible to produce other copies adapted to other local or temporal cir cumstances. As it holds graphic and local related poetical elements and because it is a moveable and fun object, allowing inter-action with the user, other cities, near Lisbon, have already shown interest in similar work, for its characteristics make it suitable for placement in public spaces of distinct nature, announcing events, memorials or projects.
" It is like a watchtower without being so, a tower without a castle, a topsail without a ship. Finally it is an object between sculpture and outfit design and between an installation and the enjoyment of a children's playground." (João Pinharanda, Público 25.06.97)
Nr, 2 February 2000
The Presence of Absence in Contemporary Art Practice in the Public Realm
Carole-Anne Davies
Director. CBAT (Cardiff Bay Arts Trust) South Wales, UK
A year ago this week, like a lucky (or unlucky) child coming of age, I inherited CBAT an organisation with a considerable reputation for object based art in the public realm.
A decade of environmental improvements, school playground enhancements and stand alone works implemented under a Percent for Art mechanism within the constraints of complex funding and expectation my colleague Wiard Sterk described earlier, and subject to the need to fulfil an agenda of tangible transformation.
Within the context of regeneration the current discourse in public art is attached to, surrounds and is obsessed by the object, the monument. War memorials, commemorative gardens, pocket parks, the physical transformation of public space and the use of artists in ‘urban regeneration’. This is hardly surprising given the generic pedigree of art in the public realm stemming from Sienna, Florence, Milan and other great cities where the Medici’s, d’Este’s and Borgia’s formed the original and most formidable Development Corporations of them all.
We the administrators, curators and commissioners, make strong claims in defence of our objects and monuments - they engender ownership, cultural identity, they bring about enfranchisement through cultural capital and empowerment. And above all we please the developers, investors and regenerators with tangible products they can endorse as good value for money and support of the arts and cultural economy. We feed their rhetoric in support of claims that a civilised, stimulating environment engenders and supports a civilised community of fine and upstanding citizens. Moreover we strengthen these claims with our proof that the objects and parks must be successful because they are not damaged or wilfully vandalised. But we never question whether this is truly due to a strong sense of ownership or sheer indifference, after all the transformation of urban space in Britain forms the ultimate irony. We do not permit the selling of birds, skating, extensive street performance and many other spontaneous public use of space.
The current discourse and our involvement and therefore perpetuation of it, fails to acknowledge the necessity for absence, for a little less permanent monumentalism in the public realm, and for the need perhaps to step out of the self perpetuating cycle of grants, lottery bids, project funding, millennium commissions and regional regeneration, before we are wholly responsible for a generation of civic artists perfecting a nifty line in memorials, street furniture and Quayside seating - two for the price of one!
What of our attention to those artists whose work is overwhelmingly relevant to the contemporary public sphere, yet does not centre on objects, or permanent interventions of the traditionally recognised kind. Let us examine a few and see how they fair in the brave new world of regeneration, access and public partnership. Let us look at the different ‘publics’ they engage in these non-works and anti-monuments. Melanie Jackson - Lathyard, CBAT 1998
Slide 1 - Land of Cokaygne at Ffotogallery, Cardiff
Melanie Jackson work with CBAT involves the investigation, exposure and re-presentation of powerful fictions, converted over time to apparently unquestionable truths.
Jackson’s Llathyard project responded to a geographical area around Cardiff Bay, loosely adhering to the line of the River Rhumney, one of the three rivers flowing towards the Severn Estuary near Cardiff Bay. The work involved curating and implementing a city wide outdoor exhibition of significant images, placed at Ad sites in standard bus shelters, the production of multiple postcards and of banners by school children, carrying their own message.
The presence of advertisements and other promotional imagery both overt and subliminal has rapidly increased. In all our cities we are surrounded by proclamations to consume, visit, purchase and possess. The sophistication of the imagery is testament to the increasing visual literacy of the ‘public’ and the dialogue between marketeer and consumer.
In Cardiff at the time of the project and since, there exist a number of advertisements for the city itself, which reveal a more specific position - one of transformation, industrial reform and urban regeneration. They call attention to an atmosphere of transition in ‘Europe’s youngest capital’ and issue a mantra of development, of progress. Many of you will be familiar with this mantra as it was especially effective during the transformation of ‘España’ in the event of the Olympic games 1992.
For Lathyard images commissioned from eighteen artists including Melanie, were inserted at sites bordering the waterfront development area, residential areas on the edges of the bay and at points along specific historical or cultural routes. The images were to reflect the artist’s interest in the public and private aspects life, to perhaps make something private public, or to reveal aspects of our collective public and private personae.
Slide 2 Land of Cokaygne at Ad site near Cardiff Castle
The image used by Melanie herself was ‘found’. It details a freak of nature documented in the teratological collection of the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. An apple perfectly formed yet miraculously growing from the trunk of a tree.
In Celtic legend Avalon or apple-land is the precursor to the Christian association of apples with Eden, and therefore paradise. In the late middle ages the English conjectured that an earthly paradise was located in the west, a land which they called Cokaygne, evidence of which could be found in cargo washed up on the coast of Wales. Wales is of course west of England and Cokaygne rapidly became a derogatory term for working class sloth. Embedded in class stereotypes it was used to describe those who wanted reward without labour, paradise without earning it. This perfectly formed genetic mutation echoes the social perversions and unconscious desires the mythology made manifest and point up its residual presence in contemporary life. It was placed near Cardiff Castle, the large and fantastical permanent manifestation of the wealth of coal and shipping magnate the Marquis of Bute, made on the backs of the apparently resentful working class sloth of the Welsh capital.
The ad sites were already perfectly established for showing artwork. The placement of images at these sites called a halt to the bombardment of advertising imagery and made visible images of an entirely different order and meaning. Like the ads they replaced for a month, they are a temporary intervention, which makes no indelible claim on communal ‘public’ space.
In addition to the sites the images were reproduced as multiples in postcard form and made freely available in their thousands throughout the city at cafes, bars, shops, clubs, libraries and post offices. The recognition of the images, their humour, thoughtfulness intimacy and sheer mind boggling meaning was absorbed and the entire city media proclaimed the project a success. In the midst of visitors to the European council conference in Cardiff at the time we demonstrated the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of our city. Our insight and vision in using artists in the city was tangibly rewarded.
However an extension of the project involved Melanie in work with children at a nearby school, on the fringes of the freshly regenerated Bay area. As well as making artworks in banner form, the artist found herself amid hungry, socially disenfranchised children often waiting for absent parents and fending off bullies.
The area around the school has few public services, no public telephones in order, inadequate post war housing, no safe parks, streets or other communal area. There were no Ad sites, as no bus shelter survived for very long before being destroyed. Less than three miles from ‘Europe’s most exciting waterfront’, the area resembles a slowly recovering war zone.
Vinyl banners designed by the children carried their thoughts, aspirations and fears,
One read I can’t go to sleep at night without praying to God that nothing bad will happen", another "I would like to tell the world I will be an astronaut"
There are no images of the banners for they were in place just twelve hours before they were systematically slashed and cut down. Art is not what was needed here it seems and our claims for enfranchisement and empowerment are instantly rejected. Caught up in the constraints of time and a civic agenda for visible park activity, our misguided mission of enlightenment is revealed and we are for a time, stunned.
Jochen Gerz
Slide 3 - Language Plaque at the Harburg Monument Against Fascism 1986 - 1993, Hamburg.
" The single most important factor in my life remains the war I didn’t fight"
Jochen Gerz, Paris, 1989
Gerz was born in Berlin in 1940. At four years old the smallest in his family, he escaped from his bombed home through a cellar window and watched while the fir trees burned like candles to the ground. Rendered deaf through the shock of the explosion he recovered his hearing within a short time. His speech however, also lost as a result of this "unreal silent situation", did not return for a year. At five years old he proclaimed that he had lost his childhood and emerged with a consciousness of which he was not previously aware. He emerged carrying the guilt of the crimes of his nation, he did nothing in this war he says, but survive.
" We invite the people of Harburg and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the long run it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice."
Jochen Gerz & Esther Shalev Gerz Harburg Monument against Fascism text.
Slide 4 The Column at full height
Jochen and Esther Shalev Gerz were commissioned to realise a monument against fascism. They entered into extensive dialogue with the citizens of Harburg the details of which are far too complex for this paper. The resultant column was sealed in a lead skin upon which all who came upon it were invited to write whatever their thoughts, feelings and beliefs desired.
Slide 5 Man signing
Using the steel pens wired to the piece, many inscribed their thoughts. Others used bullets, sharp tools and hammers to damage the piece. Some simply ignored it. Not all the text was anti-fascist. When each section within reach was covered, the column was lowered into a kind of sarcophagus at its base.
Slide 6 After Sixth lowering 1991
Eventually it was fully lowered and sealed above with a secure plate, only visual access could now be gained, through a small glass slit in a steel door (a replacement for the damaged glass door, which had been shot at).
Slide 7 After the Final lowering
The monument disappears, all its meanings, its own ageing process and its significance for generations to come, locked in a tomb in the centre of the city.
Remaining above ground is the plaque, reminding us that "In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice."
Slide 8 The Bremen Questionnaire 1990 -1995, detail
Here Gerz collaborates with students, to the aim of a sculpture, which existed only for those who imagined it.
Again Gerz questions groups of people, this time 50,000 people.
269 responded and decided to go on with the project. The work is derived from the answers of the citizens of Bremen, from all social layers, to questions about art. A wide range of issues emerged. Xenophobia, violence, fear of political violence, manipulation and environmental destruction were recurring themes.
These people were considered and operated as co-authors of the work yet they were the ‘public’. Many more ‘publics’ existed via the network of support used to publicise the questionnaire - Bremen Art Academy and University, the city’s cultural institutions, the daily newspaper, on TV, Radio Bremen and throughout the prison service. In addition Gerz and the co-authors held numerous well attended public seminars. The site for the piece was already established on the Smidt Bridge over the Weser River, as a result of the public seminars.
The extent of the discourse of art in the public realm was far ranging yet one clear signal recurred - that Bremen’s traditional object centred approach to public art was redundant -to quote Gerz’ s text it was "feared rather than wished."
Slide 9 The Bremen Questionnaire
In 1994 the foundation and the State Senate of Bremen approved the concept that a sculpture in the public realm does not necessarily have to be or represent an object.
The piece was inaugurated in 1995.
Slide 10 The Monument Against Racism, Saabrücken Castle 1990-93 Gerz, again collaborating with local students created on the square of the castle a monument against racism.
The artist approached 66 Jewish communities of former east and West Germany requesting lists of their cemeteries in use up to the time of the National Socialist dictatorship. As a result the most complete list to date of Jewish cemeteries in Germany was established.
Illegally, without authorisation and in the middle of the night, the students removed cobblestones from the centre pathway of the square, leading to the castle, replacing them with temporary stones. Onto each of the stones removed was carved on the underside, the name of a Jewish cemetery. The stones were then replaced in the square in their original positions.
In 1991 in the castle, once the headquarters of the local Gestapo, the council of the region voted for the legalisation and inauguration of the Invisible Monument.
The lists increased until 1992 due to further information from the Jewish communities and reached 2146. This informed the title 2146 Stones - Monument Against Racism.
The chiselled stones were returned to the central pathway in two stages and since then have remained invisible to the viewer.
Slide 11 Signage
The Minister President, Oscar Lafontaine and other significant Jewish representatives inaugurated the piece in 1993. Signage for the piece was installed and unveiled during the ceremony. A publication including all the cemeteries was produced.
With every work Gerz calls into question the very nature of art and the tools and methods used within it. Every work questions the need for remembrance and seems to bolster the need for forgetting and laying to rest. In every work he reminds us that it is not the monument which provides salvation, but ourselves.
Stefan Gec
Slide 12 Natural History, Pilgrim Street Fire Station, Newcastle Upon Tyne
26 April 1995
On the 9th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident Natural History was premiered. Huge portraits, photographic reproductions on vinyl 4.5 X 3mtre each were erected on a scaffolding structure on the roof of Pilgrim St. Fire Station, Newcastle upon Tyne. The piece was 18metres long.
The portraits were of the first six fire fighters to die in the attempt to contain the disaster at Reactor Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The men were allotted three minutes each to physically clear radioactive debris from the roof of the power station. Their protective clothing, issued by the authorities was inadequate for the task.
The size and composition of the images relate to those used in Soviet countries. They relate directly to Soviet iconography. These icons usually hail heroes and leaders, however the six fire fighters were only briefly celebrated in the Soviet press at the time.
The images drew attention and diverse comment, some thought they were the pictures of those on duty today, others a birthday prank. In any event a visual and intellectual link was made between the dead men and the men on duty today - those still facing the danger. The piece was next shown in Derry in Northern Ireland and this East West move traces the path of the fallout which drifted from Chernobyl in the spring of 1986.
Slide 13 Once Removed
Stefan’s initial visits to Chernobyl were met with suspicion and hostility until it became clear that his aim was personal as well as professional, and the Natural History Project was explained. The relationship between the artist and the firemen at Chernobyl, abandoned guardians of the sleeping yet still potent threat, suddenly shifted.
A button was cut from a tunic and presented to Stefan in a gesture of solidarity and mutual understanding. This act formed the genesis of Once Removed.
The loss of the original button in the process of casting into another material – one representing material value - presented the artist with a considerable conflict.
Slide 14 Submarines
Around 1989/90 the collapse of the Soviet Union was in full swing and Stefan began the first of a series of works in the public realm, related to historical this historical event and to his personal exploration of his Ukrainian father’s displacement and exile. The project is on going.
Stefan discovered that eight Russian Whiskey Class Submarines were to be scrapped at Blyth shipyard in the North of England, Britains largest decommissioning yard. The submarines were part of the Soviet Naval Fleet and had played a major part in the early days of the Cold War.
Steel from each submarine was cut and made into eight large bells, installed on a wooden pontoon surrounding one leg of the High Level Bridge spanning the River Tyne.
Slide 15 Trace Elements, Bells
Purpose built wooden spurs were constructed to blend with the original structure and from these the eight bells were hung.
At low tide the bells were left hanging and at high tide the river submerged them. While underwater the flow of the tide activated the bell clappers and the vibrations of their ringing were carried out to sea, travelling back to the shipping lanes the submarines once patrolled.
In 1994 the bells were transported to other locations in Glasgow, Helsinki and Derry, all coastal ports near national borders. These installations allowed the industrial and political histories of both the cities and the material to merge. In particular it highlighted the movement of the submarines in the waters of the Atlantic, North and Baltic seas during the Cold war, by reflecting their unseen journeys. At these sites the bells were not allowed to become submerged and were housed in bell towers on dry land, forces to stay visible.
Slide 16 Drawing for Buoy
Continuing the process of transformation and movement the metal from the submarines was again melted down and incorporated within the fabric of a fully operation navigational Buoy.
The Buoy marks safe shipping lanes, locates dangerous marine objects and entrances to safe havens. The movement of Buoy, loaded with its cold war history will take it through waters it once patrolled as a Soviet submarine, this time its function is a positive one, guiding vessels in the lanes of the Atlantic Ocean, North, Baltic and Barents Seas.
Slide 17 & 18 Mc Allisters
The scale of the projects involved a great many publics. The workers fabricating Buoy at McAllisters, members of the International Association of Lighthouse authorities, Trinity House London, Oxford Laboratory, Ormeau Baths Gallery Belfast, Trimble Navigation Spain, Ray Scrivens software, Locus+, Northern Lighthouse board and the UK Met Office – the list is endless.
All these publics were involved, informed and enfranchised with their cultural capital long before Buoy hit the public art world headlines.
Slide 19 Buoy and shipmates
Slide 20 Buoy at Sea
Aside from the positive and transformative aspects of Buoy are the personal notes from a boy to his father. A father from a different culture and nationality, displaced, alienated and keeping many stories hidden from his family.
Buoy was originally designed to come to rest at Murmansk, close to the town of Stefan’s father’s home and to the area where the submarines were originally built.
The project has gathered so much pace that there is now a website and new software is being developed so that Buoy will be able to communicate atmospheric conditions.
This commemorative work is both an intensely private tribute to a fathers wartime experience and a son’s search for ancestral connections. It is also a very public, universally shared exploration of the circumstances and activities of the Cold war, the connections between the two and the process of placing the project in the public realm.
These projects engage numerous publics and operate on many levels well beyond the agenda of regeneration and social facilitation.
Stefan Gec is currently working with Cardiff Bay Arts Trust at Cardiff’s most historic shipping dock, the Oval Basin. The site is loaded with historical resonance, at first created to fulfil the need to export enough coal to fuel the world and eventually being partly filled with waste from one of South Wales most horrific mining catastrophe’s.
Conclusion
These artists and others are dealing with the human, social, iconographic and historic aspects of regeneration – not simply the physical structure which is largely objectified.
They are challenging the perpetual underestimation of audiences of all kinds, sometimes falling fowl of am all too aware "public", but nevertheless avoiding the dilute agenda of "access".
We need artists like Jackson, Gerz and Gec not only to challenge and inspire us with the courage of their exploration into cultural ideology, alienation and enfranchisement, but also to hold up a mirror to our own blinkered vision.
The current stasis in discourse is for me echoed in Melanie Jackson Project Soil & Seawater: 0798 New York. The text demonstrates the narrow field of vision in current discourse, hurtling towards the immovable object that is the regeneration agenda. The text is as follows and is derived from a recorded exchange, via navigational radio, between a US Navy vessel and a Coastguard:
A: "Please divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision."
B: "Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees north to avoid collision"
A: "Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid collision.
B: "This is the captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again divert your course."
A: "No. I say again divert your course."
B: "This is the USS Lincoln, the largest ship in the US Atlantic Fleet.
We are accompanied by 3 destroyers, 3 cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand you change your course 15 degrees to the North or counter measures will be taken to ensure the safety of this ship."
A: "This is a lighthouse. Your Call.
Nr, 2 February 2000
David Haley BA Hons MA
"O Brave New World": A Change in the Weather.
Ecological Artist. Research Fellow in Water & Well-Being and Arts for Health, Faculty of Art and Design Arts for Health, the Manchester Metropolitan University
1. ABSTRACT / INTRODUCTION
1.1 SUMMARY
The concept of "Waterfronts" becomes a powerful poetic metaphor. A point of departure and arrival in understanding arts practises. The ebb and flow between definitions of Nature and Culture. The littoral from which evolutionary transition is made. Referencing The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1564 -1616) some paintings by Turner and the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519), this presentation considers how Public Art in the context of urban and social development may start to engage the issue of Climate Change. It will also explore our relationship with water from different perspectives, as a learning process.
1.2 APPROACH / PHILOSOPHY - IN PRACTICE
Acting as a creative catalyst I devise collaborative strategies to engage the economic, social and environmental values of the day - to further the understanding of 'Creative Ecology' as an interdisciplinary art form. My development of active research at the Manchester Metropolitan University with Arts for Health and Water & Well-Being play an important part in this.
1.3 UNCERTAINTY & RISK / FEAR & UNDERSTANDING
With the best intentions, anthropocentric intervention can sometimes destroy the very things it values - including itself - and it develops the language to do it. Predicting the effects of art can be as risky as forecasting the weather. "Waterfronts of art" will prompt stories of creation, but 'A Change In The Weather' may evoke evolution? "O Brave New World".
SFX Thunderstorm introduction to - "Riders on the Storm" ...
SLIDES Leonardo - Deluge Turner - Storm
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!" [Miranda, Act V, sc. I - The Tempest] Please indulge me in this presentation. Shift your focus and suspend your disbelief.
2. WATERFRONTS
I would first like to explore and contribute some of the active metaphors evoked by the notion of "Waterfronts". This will introduce the broad issues I wish to address and some of the poetic possibilities. With the help of William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci and few other ecological artists, I hope to add to the diversity of the conference theme.
2.1 TIDE MARKS & TEMPESTS
So what of Waterfronts? The edge dividing land from sea, or bank from river? Or perhaps the shoreline, marking the pattern of tides. Between one time and another. Between one place and another.
Perhaps, Waterfronts looks to the Littoral. The edge between atmospheres. The place between states of being, where the ebb and flow of evolution finds a rhythm. And we may consider 'fronts' and membranes, fractals and Mandelbrot facets when identifying riparian or coastal forms. The boundaries and integrity of a place. The surface tension containing every drop.
Waterfronts like The Tempest can be a metaphor for transition. A Tempest, a shocking shift from one state of being to another - from hot to cold (Ref: Beuys) from high to low pressure. A confrontation or an electrifying exchange. A cacophonous release of energy. The sort of dynamic event that prompts a revolution or an evolution. It could even provoke a paradigm shift in thinking - in seeing?
2.2 NATURE & CULTURE - SCIENCE & ART
As an Englishman, delivering this presentation in Barcelona, I am very aware of our histories of maritime discovery, of Empire, trade, industry and the exploitation of natural and human resources. I am aware of the 'Public Art' that celebrates these historical 'Waterfronts' and some that proclaim hope for the future.
Based in Manchester, once the heart of the Industrial Revolution, with its docks and constructed sea route, I am also aware of another water phenomenon - the weather; and rain in particular.
This brings me to The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Published and performed in 1623, some 130 years after Columbus voyaged from this city's 'waterfront' to the New World.
Shakespeare's play is based on the "Bermuda Pamphlets", a true account of a trade mission to the English plantations in Virginia.
The play starts with an enormous storm that splits the King of Naples' ship from the fleet. Blown off course, the ship is fortuitously grounded within reach of land. The survivors are delivered onto a paradise island where they engage a 'New World'. There, amidst a power struggle for the Dukedom of Milan and a political marriage of convenience, Shakespeare's characters enact a debate that continues to this day. Led by Prospero the rightful Duke of Milan and his spiritual adversary, Caliban the perennial question of 'Nature versus Nurture', which is supreme and which should we favour in our actions? Mind or matter? Culture or biodiversity? Art or life? Science or Art? This schism has been paradoxically central to cultural development since Leonardo's Renaissance. And the polarised way of thinking continues to prevail in the Western perception and understanding of our world and indeed the universe.
3. RENAISSANCE & REGENERATION
Shakespeare's Tempest addresses the New World in the context of the Old. Like the work of Leonardo, it looks at a New World emerging from the Old - a new perspective. The potential of the future to be born out of the past, not frozen in a heritage time-warp, or as Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison (The Harrisons) put it: " Every place bespeaks the story of its own becoming". Today, Regeneration and Urban Renewal tell their own stories.
Regeneration like the Renaissance is driven by economic values with belief systems often based on misconceptions of the past. And just as Prospero's Art is used to re-address injustices, so too are artists today often expected to perform magic to patch up political, social and environmental problems. Rarely is this the 'Social Sculpture' proposed by Beuys. I am pleased to say, however, that there are signs in the UK of attempts to address such issues, even at a meaningful scale of government and planning. It is easy to be cynical, but New Labour's New World is actively moving towards something called Social Inclusion and this is being approached holistically. The effect, with regard to funding policy, may be a significant shift away from architectural forms of Public Art to social processes and outcomes.
Over the four two years, through my practice, work with The Harrisons and various research and planning institutions, I have seen proposed visions move to research projects, to policy, and even to strategic planning. It never happens exactly how you want it, but that's part of the process of understanding, adoption and implementation.
Two brief examples of this are: a) The first, initiated by ‘artranspennine98’, sees the moves towards acceptance by the Regional Development Agencies in the North of England to promote housing development in the form of the Harrisons' "Eco-Urban Edge", a principle already adopted as policy in Holland, which favours development along the edges of existing towns and cities. This maintains the separate physical cultural integrity of urban development, while conserving the continuity of biodiversity. b) the other example is from my research at the Institute for Terrestrial Ecology (ITE). They have used the Countryside Information System (CIS) as a database and design tool to present planning proposals and predictions on land use for government and industrial use, since 1988. CIS uses data sets gathered from field studies and satellite imaging, and this information is used in conjunction with specified 'Landscape Categories'.
In their review and update of the System last year, they became perplexed by my problems with their definitions of 'Urban' and 'Rural'. It was obvious to me that there was no cattle farming in central Manchester, but that there are vast, unrecognised, tracts of 'Brownfield' wildernesses that form an integral relationship between the urban and rural land. So, ITE recognised 'Urban' as a Landscape Category.
As a result of this recognition, they had to acknowledge something called 'Human' as a criterion to define Urban. This in turn forced them to include this new criterion in the definition of Rural Landscape Categories. So, it is now officially recognised that humans are integral to the landscape and not separate from it. Finally, on this point, the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology are now considering ways of linking up with the Institute of Hydrological Ecology ... someone asked if water and land patterns should not be inter-related?
4. AN ECOLOGICAL ART,
LEARNING & UNDERSTANDING
4.1 ART IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST
As an artist, what is the most important thing I need to do now to bring the whole to life?
The Tempest considers the skills and abilities needed to survive the 'New World' and challenges our dominant perspectives. Many commentators have noted the possible auto biographical characterisation of Shakespeare's Prospero's and that he used the role to promote his own 'Art'.
The word art in Greek meant skill, or the practice of skills and was personified by Daedalus the inventor. We still talk of the art of doing something well - cooking, gardening, football. The how of doing things, tekhne, has become technology, but now the idea has less to do with the exercise of practical skill and more to do with power. So, we loose the Art, practised by Prospero and Deadelus - an intimate and integrated relationship of art, technology and magic - in favour of cultural abstraction..
Although ‘cultured’, Prospero's Art remains practical, inventive and virtuous. His Art is employed to achieve supremacy over the natural world by holy magic and supernatural virtue- the absolute perfection of "Natural Philosophy" (Science). It incorporated astrology, alchemy, and ceremonial magic and its purpose was to redeem the world of civility and learning. Its antithesis of black magic was the practice of his vile opponent from the New World, Caliban - the 'salvage' man of Nature.
But that notion of art being virtuous actually predates the Greek word, areta, with rta from an Indo-Aryan noun/adjective of the Rg Veda, and it is the root of many words of virtuous quality.
Rta meant the dynamic process, by which the whole cosmos continues to be created - virtuously.
Here I make the link to what may be called 'ecological art'. Ecology "... the study of organisms in relation to one another and to their surroundings...", derived from another Greek word, oikos, house, or dwelling.
To help me define ecological art and my own practice, I wrote the following:
4.2 STATEMENT OF PRACTICE ...
ECOPOIESIS©: Creative Ecology.
To draw on arts processes, to question concepts, values, perceptions and practices currently held by our society.
In cultural diversity and biodiversity, the aim is to further understand our relationships to one another and to our environment.
Through artworks and collaborative projects of many media, we need to envision and invent systems, networks and capabilities that value future generations. Developmental experience and management skills from community, industrial and commercial contexts may contribute to creative ecological research / practice.
The practice generates dialogue to provoke critical debate, and this may evoke an equitable community of enquiry, learning and care.
ECOPRAXIS©: Practising the art of Ecology.
4.3 DEEP ECOLOGY MOVEMENT
Embedded in that statement is the idea of creativity in its broadest sense being fundamental to both art and nature. This notion is made more potent by the concept of Deep Ecology.
Ecocentric, not anthropocentric. A philosophy that enables its supporters to ask deeper questions.
Arne Naes, the Norwegian philosopher, contrasts the difference between the Shallow and the Deep Ecological movements and we can see many of its elements entering our consciousness:
"1. The Shallow Ecology movement:
Fights against pollution and resource depletion. Its central objective is the health and affluence of people in developed countries.
2. The Deep Ecology movement:
(i) Rejects the human-in-the-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image. ...
(ii) Promotes Biospherical egalitarianism - in principle ...realistic praxis..
(iii) Advocates principles of diversity and symbiosis. Diversity enhances the potentialities of survival, ...
(iv) Anti-class posture. Diversity of human ways of life. ...
(v) Fight against pollution and resource depletion. In this fight ecologists have found powerful supporters, but sometimes to the detriment of their total stand....
(vi) Complexity, not complication. ...
(vii) Local autonomy and decentralization."
4.4 WATER & WELL-BEING
So, an art of the highest utility? Perhaps, this is a learning-focused type of creative education that Fritjof Capra has developed from Steiner to 'ECO-LITERACY, or Susan Lacy's 'Service Art'. Or Sculpture Chicago's "Culture in Action".
Anyway, I am pleased to say that the Manchester Metropolitan University embarked on a programme of Social & Environmental Research Practice, thanks to Professor Margaret Harrison. The Faculty of Art and Design recognised that a number of individuals were researching and pursuing their arts through similar themes and saw the potential for issue- based development. From this "Water & Well-Being" was set up by a fine artist (Mel Chantrey), a landscape designer (John Dyke), the Director of Arts for Health (Peter Senior) and myself.
Within a year, we have each developed and diversified our individual practices, while contributing to the central theme of studying the creative use of water in public domain.
W&WB has initiated and been invited to join many pure and applied research projects. These include:
Designs for fountains and water sculptures,
Neuro-physiological experiments into the effects of water on people,
The psychological role of water in environmental contexts
The creative use of water in Psychiatric Care,
A History of Landscape Design in Psychiatric Institutions,
A Celebration of Water Features in Manchester.
My work includes new developments in ARTS for HEALTH - with a particular regard to Social Inclusion and the development of a Creative Health Strategy. And with regard to water, I am developing three Research/Practice projects concerned with Microbiology and Climate Change:
Dialogue with Streamers: Drawing with Algal Biofilm Flow Forms ©
With the introduction of Health & Safety legislation to minimise the risk of water-born diseases (such as Legionella), artists and designers of water-based public artworks currently rely on approved (BS / ISO) mechanical filtration systems and regimes of chemical purification to inhibit the growth of algal and bacteria biofilms. This strategy is normally considered separately from the aesthetic purpose of the artwork. With regard to Leonardo da Vinci's designs for sewage systems and current mathematical modelling and flow analysis simulation, this study considers the integrated management and control of biofilm within the design process, thus developing a sustainable aesthetic and practise for practical application.
Ethic Cleansing: Including the Excluded ©
In the 1970’s advances in the technology of scientific instruments prompted a rapid increase in the discovery and registration of new bacteria. By the end of the decade, as a matter of expediency, the names of 250,000 'species' were purged from the taxonomic classification of bacteria. A constant 25,000 remain recognised. In the name of cleanliness, our culture continues to pollute water systems with biocides to rid itself of the 'other', the unclean, while society is fed on fear and antibiotics.
Through the publication of a rediscovered bacterium, a name will be identified and restored. An installation of scrolls will reveal the bacterium in its taxonomic and ecosystemic contexts. A counter memorial set of scrolls will name the 'disappeared' taxonomy of bacteria. The Latin, taxonomies will be set to a chant and performed from the scrolls.
This bacterial rite of passage maps a metaphor to resonate with cultural actions at the macrobiotic scale.
A Drop in the Ocean: A Trace of Life © This ‘live’ artwork will trace the journey of a water- born bacterium from Manchester’s River Medlock to Liverpool, in time for the Society of Ecological Restoration’s Symposium, and then through the Irish Sea to the North Atlantic Drift where it evaporates into the atmosphere and is blown South down the USA to fall as rain and flow into the Chattahoochee River, passing Atlanta in time for an exhibition at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery in October 2000, then down to the Gulf of Mexico where it follows back across the Atlantic Ocean in the Gulf Stream, evaporating again and precipitates on the Pennines to flow back to Manchester, via the River Medlock.
Conceptually, it is possible to detect our bacterium, and many others, at each water sampling on the journey. Is the Ocean that separates our two cultures not the thing that connects the UK with the USA? Is the dynamic weather system more important than terrestrial closeness? Can a bacterium survive the different states of water (liquid, solid, vapour)? Dose the presence of bacteria with the ability to swap genes and evolve according to need suggest that climate, itself, is a biological phenomenon?
4.5 INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH INITIATIVES
One of the most important achievements for Water & Well-Being, has been the methodology/practice that has evolved. As many of you are aware, the debate about what may or may not constitute research in art continues to be a thorny issue. I am not going to pursue that here, except to acknowledge that each side could learn a lot from the other.
The name, Water & Well-Being, has become synonymous with our understanding of what arts research / research in art might be. From an inter-disciplinary viewpoint, our small unit involves all the Departments in the Faculty of Art and Design It also works across the different Faculties within the University, so we are able to work with quantitative methods from the Natural Sciences (water) and qualitative methods from Social Sciences (well-being). The ampersand (&) is what we contribute as creative catalysts - bringing the other disciplines together. This is largely achieved by not concentrating on departmental discipline, but by focusing on the issue at had, be it practical or philosophical. Each is embedded with its own aesthetic.
This diagram starts to map a possible set of relationships, based on Fritjof Capra's synthesis of elements existing in all living forms.
Structure - Pattern - Process
water well-being natural science social sciences thesis /antithesis quantitative qualitative structure pattern
&
arts synthesis
creative process
5. INVENTING THE FUTURE
5.1 A CONFLUENCE OF IDEAS
Finally, I would like to consider an art of creative ecology and its contribution to Waterfronts of art in the context of climate change. Each of the following elements must be considered embedded within the others and of no greater importance.
5.1.1. The processes of urban development and regeneration must be understood in terms of its social AND ecological implications for the transformation of the city to be sustainable. < COGNITIVE PROCESS >
5.1.2. The public artist's role in this context is to act "on the urgency of the moment" [Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison]. A prime activity is the development of creative relationships between diverse disciplines to generate the capabilities necessary to invent solutions for dwelling. < PATTERN POIESIS>
5.1.3. The support from higher education is crucial for the development of artists to contribute to the generation of a 'community of enquiry'. Artists need to learn how to be creative practitioners and how to care. Institutions need to be dynamic ‘learning organisations'. 5.2 CLIMATE CONSIDERED Tell the Story. It's a creation myth for survival. First consider climate as a biological phenomenon. Then ask 'what is our part in this?' The unpredictability of weather suggests that it is Not a question of cause and effect, But perhaps, A Dynamic symbiotic, structure, pattern and process. Now consider the part played by water. Anaerobic organisms evolved from the first domain Hosting cells to respire to create a new atmosphere. Forming themselves to become the second domain. Is our survival to be a reaction to climate change, Or a response to climate evolution? What part will water play then? 5.2 NOT KNOWING THE ODDS As an allegory for enquiring of the Old World through our attitude to the New World, The Tempest also examines our fear of the unknown. Not just fear of embarking from the safe harbour of knowledge across the sea of uncertainty, but of the unpredictable changes that transform our familiar world into the unknown. Columbus's New World put the known world into a new context. It questioned old belief systems and in so doing, it generated great fear of uncertainty. No wonder that Descartes, the great mathematician, cartographer and philosopher found refuge in the clockwork mechanism. This is illustrated by the Renaissance fashion for Apocalyptic visions and Leonardo's late drawings of the Deluge also show this preoccupation. Water becomes a frightening phenomenon in violent climatic conditions. His aesthetic, however, was to envision this as the stuff of life. He continued to invent and create with pathological optimism, knowing his ultimate fate in the face of Natural forces. And with regard to our response to Climate Change, or Climate Evolution, I suggest we follow his example. He wrote on the subject of morals: "Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning to the first state of chaos is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new springtime, each new summer, each new month and new year - deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming - does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world." [Leonardo da Vinci - (1162)] David Haley, August 1999 NOTES & REFERENCES DATES: Christopher Columbus (1451-1506 - First voyage to New World 1492) Leonardo da Vinci (1452- 1519) William Shakespeare (1564- 1616: The Tempest 1623) Rene Descartes (1596-1650) REFERENCES ALEXANDER, C., ISHIKAWA, S,. SILVERMAN, M., with JACOBSON, M., FIRSDAHL-KING, I., ANGEL, S. (1977) - A Pattern Language. Oxford University Press, New York BERGEY'S Systematic Classification of Bacteria (1985) BEUYS, J. (1990) - Interview with Willoughby Sharp, Energy Plan For the Western Man Four Walls Eight Windows, New York CALLOW, ME Heath, CR Hartley, A Leadbetter, SC & House, WA (1995) The calcification of algal biofilms in hard waters. In The Life and Death of Biofilm, Eds., J. Wimpenny, P. Handley, P Gilbert & H. Lappin-Scott. Bioline, Cardiff. pp 113-117. CAPRA, FRITJOF (1996) - The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. HarperCollins, London. CAPRA, FRITJOF (1999) - unpublished lecture - Schumacher Lecture for John Mores University, Liverpool. COLEMAN, ROGER (1988) - The Art of Work: An Epitaph to Skill Pluto Press, London DOBSON, M & FRID, C (1998) Ecology of Aquatic Systems. Longman, london Ed. DRENGSON, A & INOUE, Y (1995) - The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Essay by NAESS, ARNE - The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary, North Atlantic Books, Berkely California Health & Safety Executive (1991), The Control of legionellosis including legionnaire’s disease. HMSO Health & Safety Executive (1991), The prevention or control of leionosis (including legionnaire’s disease). London HMSO Ed. HOLT, ELIZABETH G (1957). A Documentary History of Art. Volume 1 The Middle Ages & The Renaissance Quote: Leonardo da Vinci - Doubleday Anchor Books, New York. KAPROW, A (1995) - Ed. Steinman, "Directional Signs: Compendium of Artists" - Ed. LACY, S Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art Bay Press Inc. Seattle, Washington LACY, SUZZANE (1998) -unpublished lecture - Littoral in Ireland, organised by Projects Environment McCOY, W & Wireman, JW (1988), Efficacy of Bromochlorodimethylhydantoin Against Legionella pneumophila in Industrial Cooling Water. Paper presented by Great Lakes Chemical Corporation & Biological Research Solutions, Inc. to the Soc. for Industrial Microbiology, Chicago IL. MALINSKY, 1995, Fragile Ecologies - a conversation with Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. MARGULIS, LYNN (1998) - The Symbiotic Planet: A New look at Evolution. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London MATURANA, H & VARELA, F (1998) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala, Boston & London PAOLOZZI, EDUARDO (1985) Lost Magic Kingdoms PIRSIG, ROBERT- (1993) Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals - Black Swan, London Ed. SACKS, SHELLEY (1997) - Social Sculpture Colloquium. Essay BASTEN, ROSALIE Le Sphinx Dialogues - Quotes BOHM, DAVID. The Social Sculpture Forum, The free International University, Goethe Institute, Glasgow SCHWENK, T (1996) Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Forms in Water and Air. Rudolf Steiner Press, London SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM The Tempest VERRAN, J. Beadle, IR Hissett, T & Jones, CL (1998)A simple in vitro system for the study of biofilm. OPA. Biofouling, Vol 13(2) Nr, 2 February 2000 Gordon Brent Ingram Contests over social memory in waterfront Vancouver: Historical editing & obfuscation through public art nr 2, Jan. 2000 Abstract Every public art site has a relationship to the history of surrounding areas whether in obscuring social memory or in highlighting certain relationships and events over others. Over the last decade, much of central Vancouver's waterfront, particularly around False Creek (a marine inlet), has been redeveloped with international capital - much of which has been linked to Hong Kong. Several large redevelopment areas have involved close cooperation in urban design processes between `the city' and `the developer'. In these megaprojects, public art has emerged as a more substantial and stable urban amenity while becoming less overtly ideological and associated with democratic public space. In this part of North America, such relatively public art projects have become almost iconographic for economic and social changes associated with globalization. Contentious historical information has tended to be censored - particularly around a range of non-European communities and events over the last century involving social conflict. In the same period, outdoor art has been increasingly used as a part of strategies to reclaim public space and attempts to democratize it. These two kinds and functions of public art have tended to be used for divergent experiences of the relationships of history to the present, of public space and the existence of and responses to social conflict, and of `sense of place'. Six public art sites, with four built, along the north shore of False Creek, in central Vancouver, are analyzed in terms of their cultural, urban and spatial politics and, in particular, in terms of contemporary tensions around the extent of aboriginal presence before and after the arrival of Europeans, the multiracial and multicultural origins and character of the city, contamination with toxic chemicals, violence against women, and the AIDS pandemic. A method for better analyzing the cultural politics of public art sites (and the design processes that were central to their creation) is outlined along with a framework for considering sites with a broader mosaic with a sort of (cultural) landscape ecology. Certain newer cities such as Vancouver put as much if not more of their resources in public art into obliterating and obscuring reminders of social memory than in more carefully highlighting diverse experiences. In comparison to other cities of its size (2 million), Vancouver has a relatively low number of public art sites though the costs for many of the newer works, especially those associated with redevelopment involving `off-shore' capital, are relatively high. In this paper, I discuss some of the mechanisms at work around the functions of public art in city-owned spaces in central Vancouver. I also reflect on being a member, appointed by City Council in early 1999, of the City of Vancouver Public Art Committee. Problem statement: Analyzing the specific functions of public art works in urban space Like many at this conference, I believe that in the present period, public art has a direct impact on the texture of public spaces and their use1. I have travelled to Barcelona from Vancouver to explore the follow ideas through six sites, four of which have complete public art projects with two other works perhaps a year or two away from construction. 1. social memory is contentious - Social memory in the city is always contentious and interpretations, editing, and censoring of information on particular social groups, experiences, and events take place on an ongoing basis2. 2. public art is increasingly being commodified - In periods such as ours with intensifying globalization, public space is increasingly linked to commodified amenities and is marketed. Public art in a neighbourhood is an increasingly attractive marketing accessory especially for housing of and services for groups associated with information-based economic sectors. 3. social memory is problematic for large-scaled redevelopment - In information and service-oriented `neighbourhood' economies, being rapidly transformed by global capital, the functions of social memory are particularly contentious. Memory is usually found to have a relationship to questions of the legitimacy and social costs of the redevelopment (as well as the intrusion of global capital) and because of the pressures to maximize investment returns. 4. site planning as cultural editing - Public art directly affects the `sense of place' of public spaces and, therefore, has a direct relationship to modes of access to information on local histories. The establishment of a few piece of public art invariably re-edits and re-interprets the history of a particular neighbourhood3 privileging some details and ignoring or actively obscuring others. 5. public art invariably is historicized - Any work of public art has a relationship to, whether overt or covert, to the history of a particular site and neighbourhood. A work of public art will typically have either an allied or adversarial relationship with an interpretation of local history. 6. where there is relatively less public art additions in some cities additional works engender more conflict - In relatively recent cities, established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the relationship to previous cultures is particularly contentious. Symbols and coding, no matter how innocuous, tend to be sources of civic controversy. 7. the role of public art becomes more important where natural landscapes are destroyed - Where natural icons have become obliterated or obscured through redevelopment and densification, the role of public art in both sense of urban place and the marketing of real estate becomes more important. 8. resistance to certain public memory manifests in attempts to censor public art - In such newer cities as Vancouver, conflict is often centred on resistance to allowing and `making space' for a particular memory, historical interpretation, or cultural assertion of a particular social group. Social Memory in The Terminal City Since its inception in 1886, as the western depot of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Vancouver has also been known `The Terminal City'4. Initially, a highly multiracial and multicultural town, with three major languages spoken, English, Chinook, and Cantonese (as well as the Salish dialects of the indigenous towns), Vancouver came, in the early twentieth century, to try to reinvent itself as a more anglocentric and avowedly neocolonial enclave than it was initially. In reinventing itself, acknowledgement of social memory that contrasted with the revised civic identity was a serious taboo. Even today, one of the few artists who has made any headway in situating, let alone confronting, (neo)colonial legacies is Stan Douglas. Raised and still based in Vancouver, today Douglas is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists on earth. His 1999 mid-career retrospective, curated by Daina Augaitis, began at the Vancouver Art Gallery and is now travelling5 with a substantial catalogue6. In addition, a superb book on Douglas was recently published as part of Phaidon's series on contemporary artists7. This solo show by Douglas at the VAG was a milestone. Two of the four pieces say much about the conflicted nature of culture in post-lotus-land West Coast. The 6,50 minute 1997 video, Nu.tka., takes us back to the end of the eighteenth century and the confrontation between Spanish and British `explorers' and the Mowachaht Confederacy on the northwestern coast of Vancouver Island. Two paranoid sea captains from the opposing empires babble while shifting views of the landscape go from blurred to focused. In the accompanying stills, Douglas uncovers clues to unresolved historical tensions in the cultural landscape. But the images of contemporary forest clearcuts are disappointingly understated. Though Douglas has said that Nu.tka. is about `unrepresentability'8, this piece also functions to pick apart contemporary takes on the land and nature. In most discussions, there is a disappearance of aboriginals as First Nations. In a year when some of the first treaties in over a century are finally been negotiated on the West Coast, Nu.tka. is one of the few works by a non-aboriginal in recognition of the changing political landscape. Nu.tka. may well be the most `paradigmatic' takes on the West Coast landscape since some of Emily Carr's later oil paintings. But the Nootka affair, and the high level of local resistance to imperial intrusion, is an exoticized moment in Canadian history. But as a case of imperial jitters, the confrontation at Nootka was the exception. Curiously, the other location of Anglo-Spanish confrontation, around what would become the British Columbia coast, was Point Grey, the exclusive neighbourhood of Vancouver where Douglas spent his formative years. Perhaps more indicative of the contentious nature of memory and maps in contemporary Vancouver culture is a more problematic work. Douglas' 1998 video9 and graphic presentation, Win, Place or Show, is not nearly as successful as Nu.tka., particularly in its pretensions of describing relationships between political economy, culture, and location in Vancouver. In fact, it seems like Douglas wades into a wide range of urban issues then almost purposefully obscures the social coordinates. The description of the piece by Douglas devalues social memory in favour of a discussion of television. Set in the nineteen sixties in a residential tower, that was never built, on the east side of central Vancouver, two dock workers argue in a nearly endless video loop. What undermines the credibility of Win, Place or Show is the inclusion of considerable historical data on urban renewal in Vancouver without a specific discussion of race. In this work, Douglas features prominently proposed plans from an infamous University of British Columbia study from 195010. Those plans clearly showed western Canada's first black neighbourhood, `Hogan's Alley'11, obliterated by a series of redevelopment towers. This so called urban renewal was successfully master-minded nearly two decades later by figures such as Trudeau cabinet-advisor Peter Oberlander and ranks as one of the worst assaults on an African Canadian community after Halifax. But with all of the historical pretensions surrounding Win, Place or Show, and with all of the symbolism of an endless loop of two white men fighting, the location of the actual mythic tower was moved to a historically more white block several streets to the north. The resulting `map' that Douglas constructs, something about sixties television and something about urban renewal in Vancouver without mentioning race, lacks credibility. But it's only television, right? But that was not what the work inferred. Is this work too imprecise to be anything but art? If so, Douglas is calling into question some of the intellectual cache attached to his career. The essays on accompanying catalogue do little to clarify these questions. False Creek as Vancouver's first public art narrative Over the last two years, four major new works of public art have been installed along the north side of False Creek in central Vancouver. Two more have been proposed and a number of smaller works have been installed or have been planned. This inlet, that formerly had extensive tidal flats, has been central to centuries of local aboriginal history as well as to the building of early Vancouver. The Musqueam and Squamish cultures experienced the mountains and sea, in what is today greater Vancouver, as a giant bowl. False Creek was particularly important in local cosmologies as the lowest point in that curve, as Skwaychays, `hole in bottom'12. The shore became the western terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway and it was here that early neighbourhoods formed such as Kitsilano, Granville Island, Chinatown, and Strathcona with the west's first African-Canadian enclave Hogan's Alley (bulldozed for an expressway in the late nineteen sixties). As industries were built, False Creek became a cesspool that was only cleaned up in the nineteen seventies. Hole-in-Bottom was also the location of Expo 86 and the new neighbourhood of towers that have been built in subsequent years. After government ownership of the former railway lands, for Expo 86, the entire area, a city in itself, was sold to the same Hong Kong-based development company. Dogged by controversy, the redevelopment was forced to cede some outdoor areas for control by a number of City of Vancouver agencies as well as the semi-autonomous Vancouver Parks and Recreation Board. With so much (multicultural) history and continued pressures for redevelopment and densification, public art and landscape designs along the north side of False Creek are some of the higher profile (and most prone to controversy) west of Toronto. What happens in False Creek says much for the change role of public art in Canada. Given the costs and controversies that come with this territory, the actual design and construction of these public spaces, with such an emphasis on contemporary art, are achievements in themselves. The three works were funded by developers, Concord Pacific owned by Hong Kong-based Li Kai-shing, through an innovative public arts programme directed by the City of Vancouver. And the Concord Pacific redevelopment project played a key role as a symbolic neoconservative project for a city13 with an extensive history of social struggle around inequities and the construction of more responsive social institutions. A contrasting work of public art, more representative of grassroots approaches to public space, is `Marker for change', the national memorial to the fourteen women murdered in Montréal in December 1989 and was created through many small donations and much volunteer time. These four works represent some of the interests, aesthetics, and conflicts at work in public landscapes with art involving (often tenacious) social memory on the West Coast. These works form an arc, a progression, from intuitive to precise historical experiences and the role of public art from relatively affluent to poor neighbourhoods. Two additional works have yet to be constructed. Near the Marker for Change is the site for the proposed Chinatown place marker which supposedly was to have memorials to Chinese railway workers and veterans. After over a year of meetings with Chinatown business and citizen groups, the future of this unbuilt project is in doubt. At the far western end of this arc is Sunset Beach where the proposed AIDS Memorial has yet to break ground. 1. Marker for Change We can begin at what was two points separated by a narrow channel, Khiwah'esks, `separated points'. In Thorton Park, in front of what has been Vancouver's train station for much of this century, is the austere monument to the women who died in the massacres and to other female victims of male violence. Toronto-based Beth Alber designed, and built with a large group of volunteers, Marker For Change. Between the train and bus station and a busy street is a circle of thirteen casket-like benches of pink granite with vulvic indentations. There are donor tiles as well. The park is old with large, sheltering trees. In contrast to the corporate and market- oriented jury that selected the public art to the affluent area to the west of this site, (cultural) politics was more overt in the articulation and selection of Alber's design. A jury of seven women of various backgrounds in the arts and activism, Rosemary Brown, Nicole Brossard, Wilma Needham, Haruko Okama, Doreen Jensen, Maura Gatensby, and Irene Whittome, selected Alber's austere design from 98 entries. In this, the most impoverished neighbourhood in Canada, with some of the highest levels of violent crime, this park is a battleground between the forces of gentrification and drug-dealing. Some neighbourhood resistance to the Marker for Change project was preoccupied with the fact that the thirteen women named were university students with supposedly high levels of social privilege. With chronic crime in the area, Marker for Change is difficult for many people, particularly women, to visit it individuals and is mainly a site for group observance. In recent months, the Vancouver's Parks Board so reacted to the controversy around the piece, particularly the male backlash to some of the monument's wording, that it announced that it would not allow further public art that might "antagonize"14 other groups. Why all this reaction about (gendered) social memory in public space? The recent video, Marker for Change: The Story of the Women's Monument15 begins to explain why. Documenting the small group of organizers over seven years, the video shows how they successfully eschewed the conventional sources of funding. A high point in the discussion is organizer Chris McDowell's statement that the marker was "a gamble on the powers of art." Taking seven years, eschewing the conventional sources of funding, and involving over 6,000 donors giving amounts between US$15 and $35, Marker for Change was, in the words of organizer Chris McDowell, "a gamble in the powers of art." Marker for Change was nearly not constructed because of a local campaign of male paranoia and disinformation. As Rosalyn Deutsche argued so aptly in her 1996 Evictions, women and feminist art in particular continue to be evicted from public space16. After the homophobic backlash around the yet-to-be-built AIDS Memorial, the City of Vancouver Parks Board put in place guidelines that will effectively censor any public reminders of groups which could "antagonize"17 (more privileged social groups). 2. Chinatown place marker With a deep-seated history of anti-Chinese racism18, there are few historical references to Chinese history in The Terminal City. This lack of historical acknowledgement of the contributions of Chinese Canadians is probably the most glaring omission of a kind of de facto censorship in the city's public space. After a year of discussions with Chinatown business and community groups, two monuments proposed for Keefer and Columbia, where Chinatown touches False Creek, were postponed by a city in July. This in turn sparked attacks on the city government with implications for the November 1999 elections of the mayor and councillors. 3. Street Light Moving west to False Creek and then along the shore, we come to one of the more imposing pieces of new public art on the West Coast. Street Light, by Toronto-based Bernie Miller and Alan Tregebov, is a more problematic discussion of local history in contrast to Welcome to the Land of Light. On a two storey constructivist-like scaffolding loom historical photographs, of the surrounding site, transferred on to metal sheets. Some of the sheets are at angles as to produce shadows of the images at certain times of the year. The superb photographs speak of the shift from subsistence aboriginal communities to the early wharf and mill camps that grew into a town called Vancouver. The archive numbers of the photographs are engraved, overly monumentally, in concrete pillars at the base of the scaffolding. Disturbingly, the resolution of the holes in the sheets is so poor as to make most of the images unreadable — particularly for reading faces and discerning many details such as the fact that many of these early Vancouverites had non-European heritages. The excessive reduction of the images in this strategic public space effectively contributes to loss of historical memory. In addition to this dubious abstracting of history, the entire piece blocks key views of the sea for some neighbourhood residents and for pedestrians and bicyclists travelling down the main thoroughfare, Davie Street. Miller and Tregebov have proposed the same kind of work for a number of cities and variety of sites but clearly there is a poorness of fit at this point along False Creek. The cramped and obstructive position of the work on this location violates basic canons of site planning. Not surprisingly, owners of adjacent condominiums angered at the loss of harbour views have gone to court to get Street Light dismantled, contributing further to local history. This work, and the two described directly after it, were `private' pieces of public art selected in international competitions as part of the Roundhouse Community art programme involving the developer and the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. The same jury selected each work over more than a two year process and consisted of Barry Downs, Concord Pacific representative and project architect; Peter Web, architect and project manager for the developer; Barbara Swift, landscape architect and former Seattle Arts Commission Public Art representative; Anne Ramsden, artist and resident of the historic Strathcona neighbourhood nearby, and Bruce Grenville, then chief curator at Edmonton Art Gallery and now Senior Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. 4. Welcome to the Land of Light Walking west from Street Light, along the shore, is Henry Tsang's lower budget but more thought-provoking, Welcome to the Land of Light. The Concord developments have high-speed fibre optic connections and Tsang playfully advertises this fact in English and Chinook. A kitsch passage, unabashedly verging on advertizing, follows the railings along the shore in both English and Chinook. A cable below the text emits a light of shifting colours. There is a small sign indicating that Chinook was the trading language, the "lingua franca," from Alaska to California in the nineteenth century and was a mixture of native languages from Oregon and Vancouver Island along with English and French. Chinook was early West Coast fusion culture. When the trans-Canada railway was completed, less than half of the population of Vancouver was of European heritages. Speakers of Chinook, English and Cantonese were in roughly equal numbers19. 5. Brush with Illumination Again walking west along the shore we can view in the harbour the only work in Canada by celebrated Seattle-based environmental artist, Buster Simpson20. His off-shore sculpture, Brush With Illumination, bobs well over a storey above the inlet while giving clues about the wind and tides. A large polished metal rod is buoyed by steel balls. Solar panels power its night lights. The position of the shaft shifts with the tides. The artist statement notes, "...Brush with Illumination is the evolutionary successor of an ancient communication tool: the calligraphy brush. The pieces is fitted with an array of sensors that glean environmental data from the air and water...and transmit it both visually, through the laser lighted pulsations of the cursor at the tip of the brush, and electronically to a land based computer. Mathematical functions translate these elemental events into a series of characters that are continually displayed...at www.brushdelux.com."21 Sleek and shiny, the analogies to male anatomy are difficult to dispute. Not simply a "boytoy," Brush With Illumination functions as a not-so-subtle property marker as the developer's holdings that extend into lucrative water rights. 6. Vancouver AIDS memorial If there were any doubts about whether there was still homophobic resistance to sexual minorities taking up more public space in Vancouver, the raucous debate in 1996 about the proposed location of the AIDS Memorial confirmed the worst. Organizing for the memorial began in 199522. A jury that included gay architect Arthur Erickson23 selected a sixty foot long undulating metal fence24 for a stand of trees Stanley Park near a historic but less current cruising area25. The names of people who had died of AIDS were to be perforated through the metal26. The light from the sea would filter through trees and softly work through the holes in the metal. Soon after the elected Parks Board approved the project with reservations27, the location of the memorial became a major civic issue. The Friends of Stanley Park opposed the location of the memorial with a spokesperson arguing unconvincingly that, "its not a question of homophobia...its a question of keeping the park in as natural a state as possible."28 The problem was Stanley Park had been heavily modified since its establishment29. As many as 2,000 people had occupied Khwaykhway on the north side alone of what is today the park, as late as 186230. Much of the park had been selectively logged from 1866 to 187131 and since has been heavily fragmented by roads. In terms of magnitude of ecological change, a thin sheet of metal would have had a negligible impact. But some homophobes might have found some of the new visitors to the memorial to be `unnatural'. After such abuse of the ecosystems of Stanley Park, it is bizarre the "line in the sand" around better protection was drawn around a proposed sheet of metal with the names of people who had died of AIDS32. Ironically, there was a reconstruction of the nature versus the people conflict of a century ago33. The people to be evicted, this time, were not First Nations nor the poor but rather sexual minorities. At this second fin-de-siécle of the park as a social institution — almost as a form of mediation, it was the factually misguided environmentalists, who conjured the spectre of queer hoards. With all of the denials of the Parks Commissioners, most notably by gay politician Duncan Wilson homophobia34 was largely behind this latent interest in the carrying capacity of Stanley Park. But there was little specific discussion of ecological impacts. Supporters of the monument and the first proposed location were soon wondering why a small, thin memorial was being targeted in a park with serious environmental degradation35. In addition, there was an effective equation of AIDS with homosexuality in the park with little sensitivity for the trajectory of the pandemic36 towards IV drug users, heterosexual women, and First Nations. The problem was that the preferred site, in Ceperley Park, was originally proposed by the designers was not adequately reviewed by the AIDS Memorial Project (VAMP) and posed some serious difficulties. None of the individuals on the winning team had much serious experience with site planning especially in working in natural areas. The jury was not better prepared for blending a concept and a design with an already existing place — especially in an area well- established for conflicts involving gay men, police, and bashers. Aside from a handful of exceptions, most notably the UBC Anthropology Museum, high modernist Erickson was better known for obliterating the naturalness and sense of place of sites rather than working with them. The original site proposed was adjacent to a parking lot and a major road that often sees successions of large tourist tour buses. This is not an intimate space for grieving. The closest public transportation is currently four blocks away. While the sixty foot screen could have been undulated around trees, it was unclear whether the non-native trees would have to had to have been cut. The long memorial would have disrupted circulation, created an effective barrier in an area which is also highly vulnerable to bashing. But with all of these problems and even with the prospects of having to cut down a few young and non-native trees, the memorial would not have had any significant negative impact on natural habitat. The one major ecological change from the memorial would have been to bring in more people to the park - many of whom are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered and whom are increasingly interested in asserting their presence in a park that is iconographic of the shift from underground to activist queer spaces. After a telephone poll37 organized by a conservative television station — a week before the November 1996 municipal election38, the Parks Park, voted to withdraw support for the location of the memorial39. In backing down from support for Stanley Park location for the memorial, the chairman of the Board noted that "Stanley Park is a place with almost spiritual resonance to Vancouver,"40and then effectively evicted the memorial from the park. The Board caved in to a notion that a memorial to people who had died in STD-related pandemic, or perhaps the survivors, were less spiritual. Even the two members of the Parks Board from the leftish COPE bowed to pressures to change the location in favour of public hearings41. In the subsequent week, neither of these individuals were not reelected. Within many networks of West End gay males there emerged considerable antipathy towards Park Board members, especially the gay and lesbian members, who backed down42. After the controversy died down, the Parks Board worked hard to appear to have not caved in to homophobia. In large part because of the criticism that the Parks Board might have been swayed by homophobia, it commissioned guidelines for proposing any new public art in Stanley Park43. By mid-1997, VAMP was again proposing the Ceperley Park site, with its mottled light filtered through lovely and non-native woodland — a site whose ecological integrity was compromised long before the proposal of an additional of thin sheet of metal. And consistent with the new guidelines, three other, far less visually powerful sites were then considered44. Finally, in June of 1998, Sunset Beach, a bare space a half a kilometre east along False Creek from the Stanley Park site was approved - over the objections of hundreds of homophobic residents45. But within months of the site being allocated for the memorial it has also been made a leashless dog run area with the small and exposed site affording virtually no privacy for grieving. Analysis: Over-edited collective memories as underdevelopment Vancouver has never had a comprehensive public art plan the way have some cities in western North America46. In such a review gaps in the civic narrative could be identified and confronted more directly. If we go back along False Creek the public art there, and not there, indicates social priorities, hostilities, and the effectiveness of certian social alliances over others. The women's Marker for Change is still perceived by many in the neighbourhood as being preoccupied with university students when poor women, die from violence (directed at women), every week. While there were some late design interventions to bring in community organizations, the casket-like seats remain a statement in relationship to the 1989 tragedy. The Chinatown place marker, with two long-overdue monuments, is not even designed and could be fully cancelled. And this was not a particularly inspiring site within Chinatown to begin with. In deed, another decade could go by where people are still trying to decide what to highlight and where to illuminate the history of this Chinatown. The Street Light reproductions of early photographs of the area, are so abstracted as to obscure the multiracial / cultural origins of the city. The scaffolding blocks a key view in the city and supposedly detracts from some apartment views at a time with real estate values in the city remain low in the aftermath of the so-called `Asian flu'. Tsang's piece with Chinook effectively advertizes the installation of a fibre cable attractive to people. The Buster Simpson piece is the major environmental piece of an important urban body of water but there is little information on how these ecosystems have been polluted and mismanaged. In this sense, Brush with Illumination effectively obscures the issue of toxic waste in False Creek. And the AIDS Memorial, if it is built, with be crammed into a narrow site offering little space for grieving. While these four pieces and the siting and design processes for the unbuilt two works involve memory, today there is as much forgetting, editing, and censoring in Vancouver's public art as there are new information and experiences being brought to light. Conclusions: Strategies for more openly discussing the role of public art in community memory As a relatively `leftish' appointee to the City of Vancouver's Public Art Committee, coming in 1999, I have been particularly concerned with social infrastructure questions far more than the centrist block that governs the city. I have looked at public art and spaces of memory in terms of infrastructure and facilities and am now participating in a subcommittee to consider options for on outdoor art space - a series of spaces and neighbourhood amenities engendering more communitarianism than discrete `sculpure parks'. This art park could function to allow even more public memory to be articulated. While I will be continuing to explore the points that I made at the beginning of this discussion, there is no effective monopoly on Vancouver's public memory nor open spaces. Interpretation of Vancouver's rich historical memories will remain contentious with differences around the extent and kind of public space remaining volatile. It remains difficult to bring up these issues of history, memory, and space. And until there are new spaces and art works, programmed and designed for such communitarian reflection (and disorientation), the partial memories, some very weak, will continue to dominate a city struggling with its identity and mixed, and very unresolved, legacies. Notes 1. Miles, Malcolm. 1997. Art, space and the city: Public art and urban futures. London: Routledge. 2. M. Christine Boyer. 1996. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainment. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 3. Dolores Hayden. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban landscapes as public history, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. 4. Patricia E. Roy. 1976. The preservation of peace in Vancouver: The aftermath of the anti- Chinese riots of 1887. BC Studies 31: 44 - 59. See p. 44. 5. Stan Douglas. Vancouver Art Gallery: 27 February to 24 May, 1999; Edmonton Art Gallery: 25 June - 24 August, 1999; The Power Plant, Toronto, 24 September - 21 November, 1999; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angels, 10 December, 2000 - 1 April, 2001. 6. Daina Augaitis (Exhibition Curator). 1999. Stan Douglas (catalogue). Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery. 7. Scott Watson, Diana Thater and Carol Clove (editors / contributors). Stan Douglas. London: Phaidon, 1998. 8. Stan Douglas interview with Diana Thater. Stan Douglas. Scott Watson, Diana Thater and Carol Clove (editors). London: Phaidon, 1998. pp. 8 - 29. 9. Win, Place or Show. Produced and directed by Stan Douglas. video 204,023 variations an average of 6 minutes each, 1998. 10. Leonard C. Marsh. Rebuilding a Neighbourhood. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1950. nr 2, Jan. 2000 11. Hogan's Alley, Produced and directed by Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden, video, 32:30 minutes, distributed by Video In, Vancouver, 1994. 12. alone (Bruce Macdonald. 1992. Vancouver: A Visual History. Vancouver: Talonbooks. 13. Katharyne Mitchell. 1996. Visions of Vancouver: Ideology, democracy, and the future of urban development. Urban Geography 17(6): 478 - 501. 14. Todd, Douglas. 1998. Monuments policy toughened. Vancouver Sun (December 11, 1998): A3. 15. Moira Simpson - Director, 58 minutes, Moving Images Distribution, Vancouver, 1998, 1-800- 684-3014, [email protected] 16. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: art and spatial politics. Chicago: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts / Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. pp. 203 - 244. 17. Douglas Todd. 1998. Monuments policy toughened. Vancouver Sun December 11, 1998: A3. 18. Kay S. Anderson. 1991. Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial discourse in Canada 1875 - 1980. Montréal: McGill-Queen's Universities Press. 19. Charles Lillard with Terry Glavin. A Voice Great Within Us. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1998. [email protected] 20. Documentation of Simpson's work includes the following: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Hirshhorn WORKS 89: Daniel Buren, Buster Simpson, Houston Conwill, Matt Mullican / Sidney Lawrence, Ned Rifkin, Phyllis Rosenzweig. [Washington, D.C.] : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1990 & Barbara C. Matilsky. 1992. Buster Simpson urban environmental action. In fragile ecologies: Contemporary artists' interpretations and solutions. (B. C. Matilsky ed.). New York: Rizzoli. pp. 92 - 98. 21. 1999. Private development projects. Panorama Public Art Newsletter (City of Vancouver) 9: 5. 22. Kevin Griffin. 1995. AIDS memorial in planning stage. Sun (August 3, 1995): B3 & Paula Gustafson. 1995. AIDS memorial planning under way. Sun (September 7, 1995) 54: 11. 23. Sylvain Bombardier. 1996. Fragment of queer archisexualities. pp. 50, 54 - 56. 24. The design team for the AIDS Memorial design (and location) was composed of Bruce Wilson, Susanna Barrett and Mark Tessler. 25. One of the only discussions that even mentioned the issues of AIDS memorials and cruising, and this was only obliquely, was Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco. 1997. Forgetting AIDS: Memorial bric-a-brac. MIX: The Magazine of Artist-run Culture (Toronto)(Spring 1977): 33 - 35. Page 35 has some of the only site analysis of the proposed memorial suggesting a minimal ecological impact thought a significant visual / circulation impact. 26. Artseen. 1996. Vancouver AIDS Memorial Project. Artichoke (Vancouver) (Summer 1996): 8 - 9. 27. Petti Fong. 1996. Stanley Park AIDS memorial to bear 2,000 names. Sun (November 6, 1996): B3. 28. Anne Sullivan. 1996. Friends oppose monument in park. Vancouver Courier (October 30, 1996): 12. 29. Since its establishment, the Stanley Park has seen road and trail building, a suspension bridge and expressway, considerable trimming and thinning of native vegetation, establishment of a largely non-native species botanical garden, green houses, a zoo, an aquarium, various dining and concession facilities, swimming pools. William Carey McKee. 1976. The History of the Vancouver Park System 1886 - 1929. MA Thesis in History, University of Victoria. on file, University of Victoria MacPherson Library, SB485 V33M2. See pp. 36 - 38. 30. Bruce Macdonald. 1992. Vancouver: A Visual History. Vancouver: Talonbooks. See p. 16. 31. ibid., pp. 14 - 15. nr 2, Jan. 2000 32. Clint Burnham. 1997. Fuck nature. Boo (Vancouver) 10: 4 - 7. Se p. 6. 33. Robert A. J. McDonald. 1984. `Holy retreat' or `practical breathing spot'?: Class perceptions of Vancouver's Stanley Park, 1910 - 1913. Canadian Historical Review LXV (2): 128 - 153. 34. Ted Townsend. 1996. AIDS memorial belongs in park. West Ender (November 14, 1996): 10. Also see Gareth Kirkby's 1998 review of continuing homophobia in the siting of the memorial in his editorial, "Why I support Sunset Beach West." Xtra West 119: 7. 35. One of the Stanley Park groups involved stated that `Lifeforce hopes that we may all realize that we can remember one has left us by walking through Stanley Park Forest habitat'. (Janet Smith. 1996. Supporters debate AIDS memorial sites. West Ender (November 14, 1996): 2). 36. "Lifeforce," one of the major groups against the location of the memorial in Stanley Park, seems to have had a vague "deep ecology" philosophy — one that at times had incorporated elements of homophobia and AIDSphobia (Michael E. Zimmerman. 1994. Contesting Earths Future: Radical ecology and modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 168). 37. Miro Cernetig. 1996. An AIDS memorial in Stanley Park. Globe and Mail (November 15, 1996): A25. 38. Cam Cathcart. 1996. Late controversy for park board. West End Times (November 15, 1996): 6. 39. Karen Gram. 1996. Parks board sets aside approval for AIDS project. Sun (November 9, 1996): A1 & Sherryl Yeager. 1996. Stanley Park AIDS wall: Row still simmering. Province (November 10, 1996): 8. 40. ibid. 41. Petti Fong. 1996. Memorial's location up to public. Sun (November 12, 1996): B3. 42. Bill Richardson. 1996. Park Board's reveral rankles. Georgia Straight (November 14 - 21, 1996): 20. 43. Janet Smith. AIDS memorial plan waits for report. West Ender (January 23, 1997): 3; Janet Smith. 1997. Monumental debate. West Ender (March 13, 1997): 1, 4 & Cam Cathcart. 1997. Park board gives ok to guidelines. West End Times (March 14, 1997): 2. 44. Gareth Kirkby. 1997. Still top of the list. Xtra West (July 10, 1997) 102: 9 . 45. Janet Smith. 1998. Angry seniors stalk out of AIDS memorial meeting. Westender (June 18, 1998): 8 & Tom Yeung. Top 10 reasons for an AIDS Memorial at Sunset Beach as heard at the Jun[e] 15 public meeting. Xtra West 127 (June 25, 1998): 11. 46. Place debate. 1996. Revisiting the Phoenix Public Art Plan. Place (New York) 10(3): 52 - 63. Nr, 2 February 2000 Jesús Pedro Lorente Universidad de Zaragoza Art neighbourhoods, ports of vitality Port cities have a special cosmopolitan charm which makes them particularly attractive to artists and, of course, no less interesting for researchers devoted to urban studies, most prominently those studying urban decline and redevelopment, because many traditional port cities are suffering from heavy unemployment and redundant maritime facilities since the generalisation, in the 1970s, of the modern roll-on/roll-off loading and unloading of containers, which required brand new ports in deeper waters. Further proof of the burgeoning interest in these matters is the number of papers devoted to port cities featuring in this symposium of ours, entitled "Waterfronts of Art"; nevertheless, I feel the need to justify the particular approach of this paper, because hitherto the work of the Public Art Observatory has been primarily concerned with the impact of "public art" on urban regeneration processes, whilst I would like to open up such target to broadly consider the public urban scene where creators and consumers of art interrelate. We all agree that it is not just with an artistic make-up of open-air sculptures and installations parachuted by politicians that city ghettos are going to be cured, only the presence of "artists in residence" working in a grass-roots art project in contact with the locals can assure some success. But then, it is time to consider as well the existence of artists' studios, or the mere presence of artists in the cafés, in the shops, just in the streets of an urban area, as a stimulus for its revitalisation. What happened in Montmartre and Montparnasse in the Paris of the Belle Époque, can happen again in a derelict port area, as it occurred in the SoHo district of New York in the 1970s or the Temple Bar area of Dublin has showed in the 1980s. Yet, the special contribution of the arts-scene to urban boosting is usually analysed in the ever growing bibliography available as the culmination of a long coveted recuperation of some highlights of our architectural heritage. At the most, certain publications have paid tribute to the role of new cultural venues as `flagships' of some processes of image-betterment and urban regeneration. My aim here is to point out that the birth of art districts is not merely the consequence of a renewal process but also a decisive catalyst for the further re-use of other nearby derelict buildings for art purposes and, in general, for the boosting of standards of living. Thus this is not yet another study of the trickle-down economic benefits created by cultural policies in distressed areas; but a plea for art investments to be wisely devised, aiming also at producing some knock-on impact in cultural targets. In order to emphasise this perspective the title chosen for this essay avoids the term "urban renewal" usually linked to physical change, preferring instead `urban regeneration' -i.e. the revitalising not just of dilapidated buildings but also a deteriorated quality of life. Previous work on this topic had shown very interesting examples in districts of New York, Baltimore, Paris, Dublin, Barcelona, Berlin or London. But obviously in such rich and burgeoning cities urban revitalisation has been boosted by an array of vested interests, among which the arts sector was just one component -and not necessarily the most consequential. No matter the size and history of the arts presence in particular districts, it seems obvious that any derelict area in the heart of a prosperous city is bound to be revitalised by urban developers anyway. However, the prospects of redevelopment are less likely when dereliction lays in the middle of a declining city facing economic recession, unemployment, depopulation, social/ethnic unrest, and physical decay. If we can show that even in such adverse circumstances, arts-led regeneration can prosper, then we would have demonstrated its deeds beyond doubt. Liverpool and Marseilles are such cases: in the last decades everything seems to have gone wrong there, except the arts, which constitute the most world-known winning asset of both cities' limited resources. Indeed, it is their cultural glamour what makes Liverpool and Marseilles especially interesting amongst many other cases of recent urban decay. As if to compensate for their worse fate in economic statistics and the troubled waters of their political context, both cities rank very high in the arts. As it is well known, the two cities have become famous in modern times for the performing arts and popular music, which has no doubt played a part in encouraging people to take a pride in their local life, and both passionately support the high profile of their football teams. Less celebrated is perhaps another common cultural characteristic that I have chosen to discuss here: Liverpool has the most notable network of museums in England after London, whilst Marseilles is in France second only to Paris. Moreover, the density of studios in Marseilles also makes of it the second artist's capital of France while Liverpool has more artists per head of its multicultural population than anywhere else in the country. This paper draws on research about the role of the arts sector in urban regeneration which I started as postdoctoral research-fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester (UK), then continued at the Department of Art History, University of Saragossa (Spain). I first focused on comparing recent developments in Liverpool with similar ones in Marseilles; this gathered momentum on the occasion of the one-day symposium `The Role of Museums and the Arts in the Urban Renewal of Liverpool' (Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 21st October 1995) which was the origin of a book I edited (Lorente, 1996). Then, wanting to expand the picture, I looked for other point of comparison: Bilbao, Glasgow and Genoa might equally qualify as appropriate further study cases, but I went for a general review of the situation in several Spanish cities (Lorente, 1997). This paper condenses some of the findings discussed in such earlier works, bringing out new examples and more matured ideas which I have lately acquired attending some international conferences on the topic. I am immensely grateful to the colleagues that have thus stimulated and enriched my work, particularly the other members of the Public Art Observatory. But a special acknowledgement of gratitude must be made, above all, to the artists and gallerists who, notwithstanding their heavy work-schedule, found some time to answer my questions and providing me with information on their organisations. This paper is in a way my homage for their essential contribution to cultural politics of urban regeneration. Arts in derelict quarters. Historical precedents and recent trends. The installation of artists in forlorn urban spaces is by no means a new phenomenon peculiar of our time. Ancien Regime Courts used to accommodate scholars and artists in poor garrets and attic rooms of aristocratic palaces, or in disused buildings. For example, when Versailles became the official dwelling of the French Court, two Parisian palaces deserted by the royal family were gradually handed over to artists and craftspeople: a number of studio apartments for pensionnaires du Roi were allowed between 1608 and 1806 in the Louvre, some of them near the stables, others on the top floor above the Grande Galerie, while part of the abandoned Luxembourg Palace was offered to the painter Charles Parrocel in 1745. This practice became an established policy after the French Revolution. The church of Cluny, the chapel of the Sorbonne, the convents of the Petits-Augustins, Carmes and Capucins, the Louvre and many empty palaces abandoned in their flight into exile by the enemies of the new Republic, were partly given to artists -one hundred years later the Bolshevik Revolution did the same in Russia. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century it was an established vogue for artists in great art capitals to take lodgings collectively in derelict religious or aristocratic buildings -the Nazarens at the ex-convent of Sant'Isidoro in Rome, Whistler with John Singer Sargent and others at the dilapidated Palazzo Rezzonico of Venice. As much as this cultural practice was grounded on what Aloïs Riegl called the monument value of some architectural heritage, this was perhaps a corollary of the fact that such buildings were in many cases the only sites available at affordable price in the city centres. Similarly, the re-use of abandoned buildings for museums has been one of the key cultural policies ever since the French Revolution, when many deserted aristocratic palaces and deconsecrated churches and monasteries were turned into art galleries. Of course, that was mainly a political move, by which spaces hitherto closed to the general public were opened to the citizens (Poulot, 1986). Nevertheless, it is clear that such policy contributed to the conservation of historic buildings threatened by ruin and disrepair. Such was the case of Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Monuments Français at the Petits-Augustins, and also of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers at the abbey of St. Martin-des-Champs, the art galleries of the Louvre, Versailles and the Luxembourg Palaces, or the Musée Cluny in Paris. This was soon emulated in the provinces in the locating of other well-known art museums. For example in Strasbourg the palace of the prince-bishops, in Dijon the palace of the earls of Bourgogne, in Lille the Recollets convent, in Toulouse the Augustins, in Reims the abbey of St. Denis, in Arras that of St. Waast, in Lyon the abbey St. Pierre, in Aix the Hospitaliers priory (Monnier, 1995: p. 104). In nineteenth-century France alone the list seems inexhaustible! But soon the neighbouring countries followed suit, installing some of their most prestigious art museums in former palaces -like the Fine Arts Museum of Brussels at the Ancienne Cour or the National Museum of Sculpture at the Barghello in Florence- or in ex-religious buildings -e.g. the Museo Nacional de la Trinidad in Madrid and the Germanisches Museum of Nüremberg. Nevertheless, interesting as the above examples might be as historic precedents, it seems clear that the present vogue of bringing the arts into forlorn buildings is a new trend that started with the post-industrial economic restructuring which took place after World War II. Entire inner-city industrial quarters born on the wake of early capitalism, then became obsolete and redundant; but their brick and cast iron buildings infested with rats, lacking of baths, terribly cold in winter, revealed themselves to be immensely attractive to modern artists because the rent was cheap. Converted factories, workhouses, slaughterhouses, hangars, silos and warehouses allowed a modern return to the role of the artist as host of meetings, parties, debates and artistic `happenings' -social historians could compare such places to the usually huge and equally convivial artists' studios of the 19th century. These vast spaces made possible the creation of large-scale art-works, so typical of the artists of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism, the pioneers in the re-occupation, legal or not, of such buildings during the 1950s and early 60s! New York, then emerging as world artistic Mecca, produced the most influential examples, like A street in SoHo, New York City. Andy Warhol's Factory or the co-operatives of artists living in SoHo lofts promoted by George Maciunas and the Fluxus movement (Zukin, 1982; Simpson, 1981; Broner, 1986, Crane, 1987). Thus, thanks to the initiative and vision of some social outcasts, jewels of a then devalued heritage of `industrial archaeology' escaped destruction. The agitated new life of these places embodied the alternative culture of the late 1960s and early 70s. In Europe, like in the U.S.A., former commercial/industrial capitals also hosted famous examples of this urban fashion for art venues in alternative places: London (Albany Empire, Arts Lab, Middle Earth, Oval House, Round House), Amsterdam (Melkweg, Paradiso, Kosmos), Hamburg (Die Fabrik), Copenhagen (Huset) and Brussels (Ferme V). When a 19th-century hospital of Berlin was transformed in 1973-76 into Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a cultural centre and studios for artists, the re-use of warehouses and similar industrial edifices for artists' studios had become a common policy everywhere; especially in London, allegedly the city with the largest population of artists in Europe, where during the last twenty years hundreds of buildings have been converted by developers, artists' co-operatives, and artists' associations like SPACE Art Services, created in 1968, or ACME Studio, established in 1972, which provide cheap apartments and studio spaces (Williams, 1993; Jones, 1995). It has been primarily thanks to such well-established initiatives that `industrial archaeology' sites with their huge brick-made vaults have become so much in vogue as a setting for artists1 Most interestingly, modern artists and art critics love these new kind of spaces, considering them as challenges to contemporary creation. Actually, since 1983 there exists a European network called Trans Europe Halles, linking independent art centres installed in warehouses, market-halls, factories, etc2 . Membership now stands at around twenty members: Bloom (in Mezzago, near Milan), City Arts Centre (Dublin), Confort Moderne (Poitiers), Halles de Schaerbeek (Brussels), Huset (Aarhus), Kaapelitehdas (Helsinki), Kultur Fabrik (Luxembourg), Kultur Fabrik (Koblenz), Kulturhuset (Bergen), L'Usine (Geneve), Mejeriet (Lund), Melkweg (Amsterdam), Moritzbastei (Leipzig), Retina (Ljubljana), Rote Fabrik (Zürich), The Junction (Cambridge), Ufa-Fabrik (Berlin), Vooruit (Gent), Waterfront (Norwich), W.U.K. (Vienna). A number of associated-members complement this register: Hôpital Ephemere (Paris), La Friche Belle de Mai (Marseilles), Ileana Tounta Art Center (Athens), Kaapelitehdas (Helsinki), Kulturhuset USF (Bergen), Mylos (Tessalonica), Multihus Tobaksfabrikken (Esbjerg), Noorderligt (Tilburg), Petöfi Csarnok (Budapest), Retina-Metelkova (Ljubljana), Tranway (Glasgow). Now we are living the emergence of another European network, younger and with no name, rules or definition, linking artists' run organisations; and although the location in reused premises is not a prerequisite to be a member, many of the groups and spaces belonging to it are situated in urban regeneration quarters -for example BBB in Toulouse, B16 in Birmingham, Catalyst Arts in Belfast, Cubitt in London, Peripherie in Tübingen, Purgatori in Valencia, Raum für Kunst in Graz, or indeed Konstakuten in Stockholm, which acted as host of all of them at the First European Seminar of Artists' Run Spaces in May 1999. Of course, apart from the art spaces belonging to such international networks, many others active on their on feet are also to be considered. But it would be a daunting Tacheles Cultural Centre in East Berlin: ruins of a bombarded shopping mall now used by artists. and impossible task to discuss here the vast number of initiatives whereby grass-roots communities of artists are animating derelict buildings. One can only try to add a few names of well-known initiatives similarly installed in former warehouses or industrial buildings. At the end of the 1980s, a contemporary art centre, `Tinglado 2', opened in a rebuilt warehouse on Tarragona's port waterfront. The Centre d'Art `Usine Fromage' in Darnétal, near Rouen, is installed in a former cheese factory. Since 1994, a co-operative of artists in Liège have occupied the `Space 251 Nord', the 19th-century building of a coal mining company. In the North of England, the model village of Saltaire built by the industrialist Titus Salt in 1853 to become the main site of the textile belt of Bradford, has been brought back to life by the painter Jonathan Silver, who has developed in a huge mill complex he bought in 1987 a combination of shopping, performing arts and art exhibition activities -including a permanent gallery featuring works by Bradford-born pop artist David Hockney. In what used to be East Berlin two former breweries of the Prenzlauerberg district, are now very popular drinking, shopping and art places for the urban flaneurs and night socialites. This is by no means a comprehensive and closed list, because there are increasingly more and more redevelopments like these. Every year, new examples of these kinds of grassroots initiatives are mushrooming all over Europe. The secret of their success3 consists in a mixed formula: restaurants, salad bars, cafes, bistros, alternative shops, young radio broadcasting, art exhibitions, art studios, nightlife, festivals, life music, cinema, theatre, dance... all within one complex of buildings in a former industrial estate. The atmosphere in such places is usually a cosy mingling of fringe artists and thriving alternative multi- cultural social groups -hippies, punks, gays, Blacks, Arabs, Sub-Americans. New wine in old barrels: museums of contemporary art in age-old buildings. Parallel to the reuse of forlorn building by artists, another change in the cultural scene brought back the newest museums to the city fabric and into previously existing buildings. Some have returned to the old policy of re-using grand historic houses: old palaces (like the museums devoted to Picasso both at the hôtel Salé in the Marais of Paris and the palacio Berenguer in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona), convents (a branch of Valencia's IVAM -Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno- inaugurated in 1989, is situated in the ex-cloister of the Carmen), aristocratic castles (since 1984 the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Castello di Rivoli; or the Contemporary Art Centre of the Château d'Oiron since 1987), charity hospitals (in Edinburgh the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has, since 1984 been housed on the site of a former school originally built as a hospital in 1820; in Madrid, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Moderno `Reina Sofia' opened in 1986 in an ex-hospital; whilst in Barcelona and Marseilles two hospices for the poor called Casa de la Caritat and Vielle Charité have been transformed in museums/exhibition centres in the late 1980s; and in Dublin the Irish Museum of Modern Art opened in 1991 at the old Royal Hospital Kilmainham). A step forward in this way has been the musealisation of some of the most typical city landmarks of a more recent architectural heritage called `industrial archaeology'. It seems an irony of History that our post-modern/ post-industrial age treats the inherited architectural emblems of the industrial era in the same way as the revolutionaires used the empty palaces and convents, symbolic legacy of the Ancien Régime! A dramatic milestone in this new tendency was the refurbishment of Orsay train station in 1986 for the display of nineteenth- century art (as a matter of fact, the Musée d'Orsay can be considered in many ways as a banner of post-modern policies: cf. Lorente, 1994). In Paris this museological vogue arrived too late to save Baltard's food-market halls... But one could speculate that, had the urban renewal of Les Halles and the `plateau Beaubourg' taken place some years later, the Centre d'Art et Culture George Pompidou might have been housed there instead. In fact, in the general come- back of art galleries to Richmond House in Hackney, London: a former garage now headquarters of MOMART and reused by the association SPACE for artists' studios old city districts, cast-iron market-halls have served suitably in other French cities4 . Since 1985 Rennes' Halle d'Art Contempo-rain brought new life to the former Criée aux Pois-sons, whilst the Centre d'Art Con-temporain `La Halle' of Pont-en-Royans opened in 1986 in a covered market-hall and the Centre National d'Art Con-temporain `Le Magasin' in Gre-noble exhibits art since 1986 in a former covered market, built in 1900 by the workshops of Gustave Eiffel. Other 19th-century structures have been similarly used. Most remarkably, defunct train stations: in Berlin the new Museum of Contemporary art has opened in 1996 at Hamburger-Bahnhof. But practically any other civic landmark of our grandparents' time can now become a museum, be it a water-tower -like the old and picturesque water-tower in the Scottish town of Perthan now home to the Fergusson Gallery-, or municipal bath-houses -e.g. the Espace Départemental d'Art Contemporain of Chauvigny-, or ex-slaughter-houses -in 1984 the Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris became a mixed-use space for exhibitions, fairs, music venues, etc... and soon a similar place in Toulouse will open as its Musée d'Art Moderne. Not surprisingly, some of the most successful interventions in bringing back to modern life these `industrial archaeology' monuments have been museums/centres of modern and contemporary art. Most celebrated, internationally, have been for example some of the newest U.S. museums of contemporary art like the Temporary/Contemporary (TC) of Los Angeles, a branch of the `L.A. MOCA' opened in 1983 in an old warehouse and police garage, or the new branch of the Guggenheim Museum New York, opened in 1992 in downtown Manhattan, re-using a characteristic 19th-century SoHo warehouse built out of cast-iron and brick. But, for once, Europe has also been in the lead on this matter. In France, a pioneering example of this has been the Centre d'Arts Plastiques Contemporain (CAPC) de Bordeaux, which was opened at the entrepôts Lainé as early as 1979. Liverpool followed in 1984 with another astonishing example, the restoration of a huge nineteenth-century dock-warehouse, the Albert Dock, as a mixed-use complex featuring the `Tate Gallery of the North'. We shall soon discuss this example in particular, but in general the resurrection of derelict warehouses could be quoted as one of the focal contributions of the latest generation of museums/centres for contemporary art. In the old port of Bristol, the Arnolfini Arts Centre was established in 1976 within a former tea warehouse dating from 1830. In Newport, the main town of the Isle of Wight, the Quay Arts Centre opened in 1982 in a former warehouse on the docks. In Edinburgh, the City Art Centre opened in 1980 in a 19th-century warehouse. Ostend's Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst was established in 1986 in a former warehouse-workshop built in the 1940s. Antwerp's contemporary art museum Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen- was inaugurated in 1987 in a renovated grain silo. In Rotterdam, the veteran `Witte de With' is a contemporary art complex installed in a converted warehouse/workshop. Also in Antwerp the Photography Museum -Museum voor Fotografie- has been situated in a former warehouse dating from 1911. In Poitiers the Centre for Contemporary Art and Music has kept the building of a household appliance warehouse and also its name: `Le confort moderne'. A former wine cellar is now the new L.A.C. (Lieu d'Art Contemporain) of Sigean. Not second to the warehouses come the old factories, foremost symbol of the past industrial era. These austere buildings of brick, metal and glass have become most cherished settings for the leisure of visitors in our post-Fordist age. It is already a long time since Oxford's Museum of Modern Art was located in a 19th-century brewery building. Similarly, in Thiers the Centre d'Art Contemporain `Le Creux de l'Enfer' was set up in the former cutlery factory. Since 1991, the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, has been located in a vast umbrella factory. A former workshops' building in Zaragoza, Spain, has been since 1994 the Museo Pablo Serrano and in 1998 the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art was established at the former porcelain factory of Seville's Cartuja. In Schaffhausen, Switzerland, the contemporary art collector Urs Rausmuller remodelled in 1982-83 a former textile factory from the beginning of the century, in order to create a new museum, the Hallen für Neue Kunst. Established between 1976 and 1980 in a renovated area of Basel, the Contemporary Art Museum -Museum für Gegenwartskunst- occupies two old industrial buildings. Created in 1991 the F.A.E. Musée d'Art Contemporain de Pully, Lausanne, enjoys about 1500 square meters of exhibit space in the former Teintureries Lyonnaises -Lyon dye works. In Tilburg, South of the Netherlands, an abandoned factory has recently been reopen by the Foundation de Pont for Contemporary Art. In 1995 the city of Maastricht has reopened the Wiebengahal, an old factory now listed as the first Dutch construction in reinforced concrete, which now houses the Bonnefantenmuseum. In Malmö, the largest city in southern Sweden, the local businessman Fredrik Roos opened in 1988 a museum of contemporary art called Rooseum, installed in a former electric power- station. Similarly, in London the new extension of the Tate Gallery will open soon after the year 2000 in a former electric power-station. Thus, public funded museums/centres of modern art are now often conceived as a symbolic reappropriation by the citizens in general of work-sites of the industrial age which used to be closed to outsiders and were emblematic of the absolute dominion exerted on the premises by the private businessmen who owned them. More synergisms art scene/urban boosting. Spitalfield Market, London (entrance to the artists' studios of Spitalfield's Art Project) If complexes of artists' studios and museums have become everywhere, during the 1980s and 90s, a favourite tool for the preservation of our urban heritage, they have not been the sole factor in the vitalisation of deserted heartlands. Post-Modernism has brought along a complete desacralisation of the ideal of heritage; it now includes aesthetically unpretentious buildings of social housing, and the humble houses of historic city centres, whose destruction is nowadays opposed by conservation movements (Ballé, 1984; Green, 1987; Minissi, 1988; Neyret, 1992: p. 9; Jiménez-Blanco, 1993). These had not been thought of as `historical' city landmarks, yet it is undeniable that their history is interwoven with the social history of the place and, in many cases, they are rather attractive spaces. Therefore, it is not surprising that commercial galleries specialising in avantgarde works are migrating from `banal' bourgeois environments to `historic' quarters too. The most striking case is the world's art capital, New York: the old warehouses of SoHo have been bursting with galleries of modern art since Leo Castelli moved there in 1971, however antiques dealers have remained in the rich midtown district further North. In Paris this cleavage is less clear, but it is still more or less true that the classic distribution of the art market in the central rive droite/rive gauche areas is not so popular now for `marchands' of modern art, who tend to concentrate in two urban renewal districts, the Marais and the Bastille. In London too, a young alternative to the traditional dealers in antiques and old masters of Bond Street at the luxurious West-End is emerging with the modern art galleries installed in the old warehouses of Charlotte Road, the Surrey Docks and the Covent Garden area. It seems that even private art collectors have been lured by the appeal of such buildings. Many an art-patron likes gathering modern art-works on store/display in an old structure, as proof the case of the famous Saatchi Collection in London, installed in an ex-factory of paintings. Last but not least in this discussion weights the contribution of real estate companies and urban developers. There are some sociological considerations to be made at this point. Long past are the times when living and working in converted buildings in ex-industrial districts was left to the social outcasts. There is no place here to undertake a general review of this fascinating social phenomenon. But the fact is that, ironically enough, whole urban districts of warehouses, factories and `industrial archaeology' heritage are today very sought after by the fashionable and wealthy. Now `loft-living' is socially in vogue and enjoys great popularity with young people and business people. Thus, catering for this new social market, both private and public developers are more and more seeking for market-halls, ex-churches, factories, mills and warehouses to convert them into small studio-apartments for singles, shopping malls and festival markets. Essentially the new use tends to be an extravagant offer of business centres, shops, hotels, office suites and loft-apartments for yuppies, although other usual services also include recreational sites, sport facilities, leisure amenities, community workshops, research/higher education centres, workspace for small firms (Hall, 1988: p. 264; Colquhoun, 1995: p. 21-23). Cultural Centre of Belem (Lisbone) by Gregotti nr 2, But it is becoming ever clearer that the presence of art venues can attract occupants and activities which also require large areas of cheap, flexible space (Keens et al., 1989). This formula of cultural amenities in mixed-use developments has been widely experienced and studied in America (Porter, 1980; Snedcof, 1985). Perhaps the best known and most studied cases are major redevelopments of run-down port areas: Baltimore's waterfront, Chicago's North Pier, Boston's Quincy Market, Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. In Europe, other port-cities have experienced similar initiatives: Thessalonica's port, Genoa's water-front, Barcelona's Port Vell, Lisbon's Belém district, Antwerp Docklands, Amsterdam's Neumarkt, Hamburg old port, Temple Bar in Dublin, Cardiff Bay, the Docklands and the Covent Garden area in London all feature new museums and illustrious art amenities or will do so in a near future. But as we shall now see, perhaps the most outstanding examples have come out in the two cities brought here as case-studies. A tale of two cities: Liverpool and Marseilles. Cable Factory, Helsinky: now an art complex with studios, exhibitions and performance spaces. The urban fabric of Liverpool and Marseilles is different from that of most European metropolises. A geographer consulting modern maps will find they are the capitals of two densely urbanised regions called Merseyside and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, but these correspond to the new administrative boundaries put into effect in Britain and France since the 1970s; in fact, neither Liverpool nor Marseilles had historically a subordinated hinterland, for the one was part of Lancashire and the other used to depend on Aix. Similarly, a traveller approaching them by land or by sea, will be misled by the typical silhouettes towering over their respective cityscapes, the Anglican and the Catholic cathedrals in one case, the Major cathedral and the Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde in the other: actually, these are quite recent monuments. Liverpool received a charter as early as 1207 and Marseilles, established in 600 B.C., can boast to be the oldest city in France, but neither of the two was an historic cathedral- city. Only in the 17th and 18th centuries did they both became booming and massive cities. Subsequently, at the peak of British and French colonialism, they became the main ports for those embarking to the colonies, for the importation of raw materials from these colonies, and for the exportation of manufactured goods to them. Liverpool was designated, during the 19th and early 20th century, with the sobriquet `Gateway to Empire' and Marseilles was then nicknamed `Porte de l'Orient'. Accordingly, their most characteristic urban landmarks are on the one hand the stone façades lavishly built on the main waterfront to accommodate the central headquarters of the navigation or insurance companies, and on the other hand the functional brick-architecture of the docks and numerous warehouses which mushroomed in the vicinity of the port to keep stocks of cotton, timber, tobacco, sugar, food (Smith, 1953; Bailey & Millington, 1957; Sammarco & Morel, 1985 & 1988; Roncayolo, 1990; Aughton, 1993; Hughes, 1993). These facilities became obsolete in the aftermath of World War II. The docks and railway goods terminals and warehouses were shut down by modern ways for the transportation of goods, particularly containerisation. The once long and labour intensive loading and offloading of cargoes was replaced by a direct transit of containers between lorries and ships. Deeper waters, larger hangars and parking-sites were required instead of the old linear docks to locate bulk terminals, container ports and roll-on/roll-off methods of loading and unloading ships. Hence, in the 1960s and early 70s, the MDHC (Mersey Docks and Harbour Company) and the DATAR (Délegation à l'Aménagement du Territoire et à l'Action Régionale) created concrete- made ports, gaining new space to the sea, in Seaforth and Fox-sur-Mer respectively (Hyde, 1971; Al Naib, 1991; Bonillo, 1991; Borruey, 1992; Borruey & Fabbre, 1992; Brunier, 1993; Hughes, 1993; De Roo, 1994). Moreover, not only was the bulk of port-related activities transferred out of Liverpool's and Marseilles' city centres, but also the ownership of their merchant, industrial and food-processing business was taken over by international corporations based elsewhere. This became of great consequence for the present physical decay of both cities, which starkly contrasts with their past situation speculation in the building industry and in real estate was a secure investment for the local elites in case of ruinous disasters at sea. Finally, the new political and economic realities in Europe had done the rest. With the decolonisation process and the launching of the European Community, both cities, have found themselves far from the new routes of wealth. Since Rotterdam acts as the central port of Europe, its more peripheral competitors have been condemned to languish in the backwaters and the urban effects of this are especially manifest in Liverpool and Marseilles, although this is also true in Catania, Genoa, Vigo, Bilbao, Bristol, Glasgow, Antwerp and Hamburg. Economic decline, unemployment, crime, depopulation, urban dereliction, political radicalism and social violence have been endemic in Liverpool and Marseilles since the world economic crisis of 1974 -with particular virulence perhaps in the early 1980s (Cousins et al., 1980; O'Connor, 1986 & 1990; Donzel, 1992; Becquart, 1994). However, the shifting geography of macroeconomics does not explain all the recent misfortunes of Liverpool and Marseilles. Neighbouring towns like Blackpool, Southport and Chester on the one hand, or Nice, Cannes and Arles on the other, enjoy a better fate related to their popularity as tourism resorts and, increasingly, as retailing centres -the middle classes living in wealthy suburbs of the Wirral drive for their shopping to Chester instead of the centre of Liverpool, and the well-to-do inhabitants of the terraced chalets near Marseilles' Prado-beach favour Aix or Cassis. But the counterpoint is still more striking when contrasting Liverpool and Marseilles to their great rivals, Manchester and Lyons5 ; these traditional hubs of textile manufacturing have successfully overcome their post-industrial crisis to become fashionable for their tertiary sector. Thus, Liverpool and Marseilles are mainly suffering from a bad image, which is to a great extent a problem of poor self-image. Yet, no matter how strong the criticisms, it is nevertheless curious the level of attraction and personal attachment the two cities provoke amongst both locals and foreigners. They certainly have a special charm; people might find them environmentally degraded, dirty, strident, dangerous, but never unattractive. There is a cultural dimension to this. Liverpool and Marseilles are vastly proletarian, cosmopolitan and multicultural cities. Their people are renowned in their respective countries for their vivacity, humour, strong clans linkages... and because they speak a very peculiar English and French. All this is just commonplace, but is part of their glamour and cultural image (Cornelius, 1982; Baillon, 1989). Friche de la Belle de Mai, Marseilles: a former tobacco factory now housing an art complex with studios, alternaive theatres, and a radio station. Recently, both cities developed a cluster of museums in urban regeneration areas. A gallery of arts and crafts -Maison de l'Artisanat et des Métiers d'Art- was created in 1983 and located in Marseilles' newly restored 17th century naval dockyard of galleys. Also in Marseilles, a new Gallery of Contemporary Art opened in 1993 in a modern building aping an industrial architecture while in Liverpool the former Midland Railways Goods Depot has been restored to house the Conservation Centre of the National Museums and Galleries of Merseyside. But I want to concentrate now on the two most important examples, both of them of great symbolic value: the Albert Dock in Liverpool and the Hospice de la Vieille Charité in Marseilles. The state of dereliction of these monuments, two of the most neglected landmarks of their heritage, was a most depressing sight at the very heart of Liverpool and Marseilles. Their restoration and opening to the public for mixed-use amenities, including several museums, has turned them into a proud shop window for the cities' image and has been consequential in the urban renewal of the surrounding area. Liverpool's Albert Dock was designed by Jesse Hartley as the first enclosed dock warehouse in the world made entirely out of incombustible materials: cast, iron, brick and granite. It opened in 1846 and closed in 1972 -but it was defunct long before that time (Ritchie-Noakes, 1984: p. 49- 56; Cockcroft, 1994; Newell, s.d.). With its five blocks, each of five storeys, it is Britain's largest Grade I listed building. Its restoration, which cost circa £30m, was conducted by the MDC (Merseyside Development Corporation), one of the Urban Development Corporations created by the Government of Margaret Thatcher in 1980 in fierce opposition to some Labour-led local councils (Parkinson & Evans, 1988 & 1992). The riots of 1981 prompted the MDC to seek quickly a highly visible physical regeneration in part of the 865 depopulated acres under their command in Liverpool, Sefton, and the Wirral. Therefore, after largely unsuccessful attempts to redevelop the South Docks for industrial and commercial purposes, they turned towards a tourism and leisure-led strategy. The models for this strategy were the famous urban renewal developments based on leisure events like festivals, aquariums and museums, in the former decaying waterfront areas of the great American port cities: Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco in the 1970s, and more recently, New York's old port warehouses -South Street and Seaport Museum- and Chicago -with the opening of the Maritime Museum and a Children's Museum. So, in 1984 an area of 50 ha of derelict oil installations, naphtha tanks and a domestic rubbish tip was developed to a greenhouse and theme gardens at a cost of £30m to hold an `International Garden Festival' which attracted 2 million visitors but the site has remained underused since them. However, the best `flagship' of MDC's achievements in developing the tourism industry in the city is the Albert Dock, which attracts between 2 and 3.5 million visitors annually. Tourists are the most usual customers of the Beatles Story and the other public entertainments there, but it is worth pointing out that the Albert Dock's main leisure amenities are two major museums that are extremely popular amongst Liverpudlians too: the Maritime Museum and the Tate Gallery. The Merseyside Maritime Museum was inaugurated in 1984 at Block D of Albert Dock and other adjacent buildings. The Tate Gallery, opened in May 1988 based on designs of the celebrated Liverpool-trained architect James Stirling. Too many expectations for economic boosting and tourism attraction were raised on the arrival of a new branch of the Tate to Albert Dock. Only now this junior sibling of the national gallery of modern art is starting to be judged for questions really related to contemporary art encouragement and curatorship (the same happened with the economic goals envisioned for MASS MoCa in North Adams, Massachusetts, cf. Zukin, 1995: 79-108). This led to disappointments and, most dangerously, to a feeling of estrangement between some Liverpudlians and the lavishly converted wharf, which was seen locally as a sort of horse of Troy, sheltering officials sent by the right-wing government in London for the conquest of left-wing Liverpool. It has taken much effort to normalise relations between this national museum and the local citizens. With time, this centre of excellence, whose exhibitions are mostly free of charge -as against the use in London-, has contributed a great deal to bridge the initial gulf of the MDC with the local community -unlike the London Development Corporation, whose investment in London's Isle of Dogs just created private offices. In particular, the Tate has upgraded artistic life in Liverpool miti many small independent art galleries and studios have flourished since 1988 in the derelict warehouses of the Duke Street area: the part of the city between the Anglican Cathedral and the Albert Dock now known as `the Creative Quarter'. Air view of Le Panier district, Marseilles, showing the Vielle Charité complex in prominence. Marseilles' poor-house, La Vieille Charité, was built in 1671-1745 based on plans by the local architect, sculptor and painter Pierre Puget at the heart of the city's most popular district, Le Panier. It lost its original function in 1883 subsequently becoming military barracks, tenants houses, improvised shelter for the homeless and then finally remaining empty and derelict. The building basically consists of a three-store patio with porticoes and, in the middle of it, an oblong chapel crowned by an astonishing dome. The works of restoration carried out from 1970 to 1986, at a cost of 99m francs were paid for by the city council, helped by the governments of the nation, the region and the province (Paire, 1991). Now the site houses several university institutions, four galleries for temporary exhibitions, a videotheque, the Maison de la Poesie, the Museum of Mediterranean Archaeology, and the Museum of African, Oceanian and American- Indian Arts (the latter seems a particularly happy choice, considering the number of non- European citizens nearby). The `trickledown' effect on the physical renewal of the quarter has been immediate. First to follow suit were the public powers: the regional government restored another Baroque building just in front, an ex-convent, in which was installed the Fond Régional d'Art Contemporain, whilst the municipality refurbished old derelict houses nearby to open there the Maison de la Poesie and studios for artists. Now, many rundown houses in the area have been refurbished and reopened by private business catering for culture congating out-migration of local artists to the capital. Consequently, Liverpool is now becoming a new Mecca for artists from other places, including London or foreign countries: the local organisations offering studio-spaces for artists (the Bluecoats, Bridewell, Arena, Off Stage, Quiggins, the Arts Palace) have waiting lists. Also, it is no coincidence that sumers. It is true that, since they cannot afford costly architectural repairs, their contribution to urban renewal has just consisted in redecorating the premises6 . Yet the mere presence of art-dealers and artists is in itself a great enhancement of the urban milieu. The Panier quarter was becoming a ghetto for social and ethnic minorities who had come to seek homes left empty by the departure of many of the traditional inhabitants in the quartier, like port-workers and sea-folk. Now this process is slowing down because of the arrival of art- professionals, and the presence on the streets of a number of university students and tourists going to the Vieille Charité to attend classes or to see the latest exhibition. Agents of the succesful "Creative Quarter" of Liverpool. The typical paradigm of arts' led urban regeneration exposed hitherto gives half of the story. Specially in Liverpool, art-production spaces such as artist studios and community centres were not the only prime movers for the revitalisation of derelict areas of the city centre. Consumption- oriented art businesses have also been actively involved from the very beginning. In the immediate years after the opening of the Tate Gallery in Albert Dock, a number of empty Victorian warehouses of the Bold Street/Duke Street area were snapped up by commercial art galleries run by alternative art dealers or by art professionals turned `mediators'. There was already an historic presence of art material suppliers in the area plus the shops and galleries of the Bluecoat Chambers, but the forerunner to the post-modern arrival of art-dealing hubbub in the area was the Hanover Galleries, founded by the painter Susan Prescott in 1983 in a charm ing Victorian building on 11-13 Hanover Street originally a cap and hat factory. Then, in 1984, an enterprising artist from Northern Ireland who studied at the Liverpool College of Art and was living in Toxteth, Janine Pinion, opened Acorn Gallery & Cafe in her own studio/kitchen, on the top floor of a former warehouse off Bold Street: this soon became the favourite meeting place in the Liverpool arts-scene for a vegetarian meal and a coffee. The next step of the burgeoning Liverpool art scene on the wake of the birth of the Tate of the North, came in 1989 when sculptor Arthur Dooley and garage owner Alan Johnson, established their own gallery, The Liverpool Academy of Arts -no connection with the historic institution of that name founded by William Roscoe. The gallery, which, since 1990, has doubled as a theatre is located in a Seel Street warehouse provided by Exhaust Supplies: the house was already home to the Liver Sketching Club, a cafe, a shop, a studio of two sculptors and the workshop of a clothes designer... Such a neighbourhood offered a natural habitat to the new gallery, whose exhibitions feature mainly artists starting their professional careers. The new Merkmal Gallery, on the other hand, specialises in well-known national and continental modern artists and was opened in 1992 by Martin Ainscough and Wera von Reden-Hobhouse in a former shop and a semi-derelict city council property, at 5-9-11 Falkner Street -since 1995 it has become the Ainscough Gallery and also runs a trendy pavement cafe. Further, in 1994 the architect Ken Martin refurbished at his own expense the two top floors of a large warehouse building at 32-36 Hanover Street to install his studio and a gallery for private views of modern architecture and visual art displays, The View Gallery, which is somehow shrinking but still a very active part of the vibrant artistic life now animating the district. This is not to say that every commercial venture has been a success story in the reconquest and recovery of derelict buildings in the area; that would be quite strange in this kind of business which is marked by many short-lived ventures. Less fortunate have been other recent commercial ventures, but the strength of the local arts-scene remains a great asset for the regeneration of the quarter as can be tested every-year in October on the occasion of the Visionfest Festival. This started as a series of open studio events and alternative exhibitions arranged by the local community of artists, but since 1992 it has become a unique national event, partly funded by the North West Arts Board and the City of Liverpool, collaborating with galleries, universities, communities artists' co-ops and individuals. As any other biennial or annual arts-festival, it works primarily as a public showcase for the latest art; but with the peculiarity that, on the other hand, Visionfest wants to work also as a hothouse for innovative art-making in new places: pubs, street billboards, warehouses, alternative galleries, ferries, schools, etc Quiggins building in Liverpool, an alternative shopping centre with artists' studios on the top level. From the very beginning, this booming of places for art production and consumption in a part of town containing many dilapidated landmarks of the Victorian splendour of Liverpool, has inevitably conjured up reminiscences of other famous art districts like SoHo in New York, that quarter of derelict Victorian warehouses in Manhattan turned a hot-spot for arts in the 1970s, which is now a luxurious area for tourists and celebrities. Such comparison is only brandished with anger and menace by Liverpool artists, who fear a similar process of gentrification will eventually substitute trendy yuppies for poor artists, but amongst other Liverpudlians outside the arts-scene the analogy only came as a wishful inspiration for promoting urban renewal. Policy makers and urban developers hoped for a massive arrival of creative people, acknowledging the tremendous appeal for young socialites entailed by a lively arts-scene. Liverpool City Council, the regional art administration and private developers started a publicity campaign claiming a new image for Liverpool, formerly a `city of merchants', as a `city of artists'. Thus in 1989-90 Charterhouse Estates, a private London company with a vision for Liverpool, bought from the city corporation most of the properties of the area: more than three hundred buildings. It was hoped that, like in the Marais quarter of Paris, SoHo in New York, or Temple Bar in Dublin, a market-led renewal of these run-down buildings would succeed in attracting a young population of squandering urbanites to this district, which was thus optimistically renamed `The Creative Quarter'. The idea was good, however selling the city properties to London-based urban developers instead of choosing local firms soon proved problematic, because as is well-known, the massive wreck of London Docklands truncated the London developers' investments in Liverpool. That was the case of Charterhouse Estates and the CZWG developing company, run by Roger Zogolovitch. The renewal of the `Creative Quarter' came to a stand-still. But now other developers of the Northern region are increasingly active in Liverpool's `Creative Quarter'. Most remarkable is Urban Splash, a Manchester architects' partnership -based in a converted Victorian factory behind Piccadilly Station- run by two associates, Jonathan Falkingham and Tom Bloxham. They specialise in upgrading run-down inner areas by developing apartments, offices, pubs, clubs and young-life retailing. In Liverpool they have turned a number of Georgian warehouses in Slater Street and Wood Street into offices, tapas bars, youth shops (designer clothes, computer games, music, tattoos, etc). Often, as in The Liverpool Palace, they provide studio spaces for creative people (architects, designers, artists) or, as in Baaba Bar, they arrange temporary art exhibitions on the premises. Their strategy is to nurture a lively artist' presence as a means to enhance their establishments with an atmosphere of youth and alternative culture. In 1995 culminated the urban renewal operation of `Concert Square' with the opening of a Victorian building, originally built for a chemical company, as loft studio apartments and bistros. Nevertheless, the most outstanding initiative in this respect remains the opening of a nearby Victorian building as the first great department store for clubwear, alternative shopping and second-hand bric-a-brac, called `Quiggins' (a very successful business; so much so that Mr. Bloxham, its entrepreneur, has repeated the operation in a similar building in Manchester). Quiggins' of Liverpool is expanding, and the latest development in the premises has been the opening of the top floor by a group of artists, Merseyside Arts Base, who run an exhibitions gallery and five artists' studios. Thus even the private market of urban developers and business people sees great benefits in nurturing artists and arts venues in terms of bettering the image of an urban area and attracting people to it. Hosting art exhibitions, inviting musicians and using designers is now becoming the new tune generally cheered by equally artist-friendly developers, like Urban Strategies, or other mixed- use centres for fashion shopping, like Trading Places or the Cream Shops. Furthermore, the burgeoning array of new nigh-life venues in the area, like Largo Bistro, Eve Bistro, The Jazz Club, The Gallery, Beluga Bar, and countless dance and music clubs (rock, jazz, house, dance, etc.) is making the `Creative Quarter' Liverpool's `Clubland' ... once again popular music is doing the miracle of rejuvenating and regenerating the city centre of Liverpool! Arty neighbourhoods at Le Panier and other districts of Marseilles. Less developed is, for the time being, the nightlife economy of the old quarter of Le Panier in Marseilles, probably because this is still considered a dangerous area by night but also because the noise and agitation would be a disturbance to the inhabitants of the houses in this district (this is an important contrast to the area around Duke Street in Liverpool, which is a non- dwelling district of warehouses). Artists started to move into Le Panier during the 1980s, because the neighbourhood was outmigrating and the rents were extremely cheap: some painters like Guy Ibañez, François Mezzapelle or Gérard Fabre, from the Association Lorette, have been in the area for twenty years. But arts presence in the area started to grow and become noticeable only after the opening of the Vieille Charité cultural complex. Consequently, in the 1990s the art scene in Marseille has been torn in two halves: South of the Cannebiere Boulevard, in the well-to-do district, have remained professional art dealers, like the Galerie Roger Pailhas or the Galerie Athanor and the historic hub of well-established galleries (Veer, 1994), whilst the less favoured North districts and the Panier in particular have experienced a booming of fringe art flourishing in alternative places. Alas, the botanical terminology describes too well this phenomenon because of the ephemeral life of many such initiatives which did not last long. But as soon as one closes down many others are emerging, most of them run by artists doubling as amateur dealers, and the thriving art trade in the Panier is now actively supported and well-publicised. However in Marseilles, hometown of Pagnol and other national glories of the French theatrical tradition, the leadership in arts-led revitalisation of derelict buildings has historically been galvanised by avant-garde theatre companies -a bit like pop music gigs in the case of Liverpool. The epitome of this kind of intervention has been the establishment of Théâtre National de la Criée Aux Poissons in the old port's fish-market, constructed in 1909. This cast-iron structure had become redundant in 1976 and a new national theatre was inaugurated there on the 22nd May, 1981, under the lead of the famous actor and director, Marcel Maréchal. Just a few blocks down the portfront, at number 16 quai de Rive-Neuve, in a courtyard of warehouses, Anne- Marie and Frédéric Ortiz created the `Passage des Arts' with the establishment there, since 1983, of two theatres Théâtre Off and Badaboum. The site soon became a true Passage of Arts, fully deserving that name, because the association Arts Parallèles runs an art gallery there and the painter Jean Triolet has also moved in, installing his own studio and a reprographic business. A similar venture has also come to life in the area of the port de la Joliette, where, since 1985, the Compagnie Théâtre Provisoire has used a former silo and mill as the Théâtre de la Minoterie: two theatre-rooms of capacities of two hundred and one hundred respectively, a bar, and a specialised library which also doubles as an art exhibitions gallery. During the last two decades, countless other buildings, including religious edifices have been converted into theatres in Marseilles. A milestone in this story was reached in 1990, when Alain Fourneau, from the Théâtre des Bernardines, and Philippe Foulquié from Massalia Théâtre de Marionnettes, with the backing of Christian Poitevin, then Head of Cultural Affairs of Marseilles City Council, founded Système Friche Théâtre, a structure of interdisciplinary vocation, the first location of which was a grain silo in the suburban boulevard Magallon. But the following year, with help from the Municipality, the Direction Régionale d'Art Contemporain (DRAC) and the Ministère de la Culture, the team moved into the so-called Friche Bel-de-Mai. This immense site of 40 000 m2, a former tobacco factory in the Belle-de-Mai quarter, a central working-class city district, allowed a capacity of one-hundred seats making the Massalia the biggest permanent marionettes theatre in France, but apart from this attraction other venues came to the Friche de la Belle-de-Mai in 1993: e.g. the Association des Musiques Innovatrices, led by Ferdinand Richard, and ten studios for visual artists administered by the Association Astérides. Then, in 1994, some music studios -Euphonia-, as well as workshops for photography and video creation -Aye Aye Production-, a gig hall for up to 700 people, a nouvelle cuisine restaurant, a bistro, and various mass-communication ventures catering for the young and alternative multicultural audiences of the great metropolitan area of Marseilles: radio Grenouille, and the newspapers/magazines Taktik, Tk2 and Régie Bleue. Small art galleries and dealers open near the Vielle Charité The Friche Belle-de-Mai is perhaps a very special case of public funds pouring generously into a grass-roots artist-led initiative, but regardless of the amount invested there, it has to be seen within the context of political practices in France, where cultural policies are not reluctant to tax- payer money being spent supporting artists and encouraging art production7 . The political upheavals in France have brought some changes in arts spending, but not a significant change in cultural policies - in Marseilles the main promoter of the reuse of redundant buildings by artists remains the City Council. Firstly because a number of artists, chosen by established application procedures, can benefit from a free lease of about twenty-three months of a modern studio in one of the converted buildings administered by the Ateliers d'Artistes de la Ville de Marseille, a new municipal service created in 1990. Its headquarters are based in a former textile factory in the Lorette district (there is a space for exhibitions on the ground floor, usually featuring works by the tenants above). The other main site they own is a former furniture workshop in the central Panier quarter, where two other buildings are now in refurbishment and will soon become artists' houses as well. Secondly, the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Marseilles City Council has, in the last decade, run an ambitious programme of art commissions, some of which have consisted of artistic interventions on derelict sites. Third, the Office de la Culture, a semi-independent organ financed by the City Council, seeks the co-ordination of public patronage of the arts in Marseille, giving special attention to art developments in derelict or less- favoured city areas. Thus, in contrast to the usual situation in Liverpool, it is rare to find in Marseilles inner-city slums artists' associations which have not sometimes benefited from public money usually matching funds from the Ville de Marseille Council, the Conséil Général of the province, the Region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, and the Ministry of Culture. This is generally the case of almost any organisation aiming at converting buildings into artists' studios: the list is inexhaustible. For example five visual artists, headed by Sylvie Reyno, who installed themselves in the former Pâtes-Bonhomme factory of La Calade. Or the exhibition/studio space created by Mary Pupet and Louis-Daniel Jouve, in a former silo not far from the port hangars -in the distressed 15th city district. Or again the ex-priory of Le Canet, a nearby modest working- class area, transformed into artists' studios and an art-exhibitions centre in 1995 by the association Hors-Là. Or also the old Public Baths of the rue de la Palud, refurbished for public art in 1992 by the group Avanti Rapido -later on by the association New Baz'Art. The same as other former Public Baths, the Grands Bains Douches de la Plaine, which have been converted into studios by François Bazzoli and the other members of the association Art-Cade in 1993. But perhaps the most remarkable case is the association Lézard-Plastic-Production: they had started in 1989 at the former slaughter houses of the chemin de la Madrague, and in September 1995 opened new headquarters in the city centre, converting a forlorn furniture warehouse near the port into an exhibition and performance space: the Centre international d' Arts Visuels Cargo. Thus, tax-payer money is not the only source of support for provision of artists' studios in Marseilles and to the private initiative of business-minded artists, we can add the contribution of corporate patronage, which often comes forth with synergetic partnerships with artists. Some companies see the presence of artists on their premises as an enhancement and revaluation of their property. This is the case of the Port Autonome de Marseille, the company in charge of Marseilles' port infrastructures, which often holds art exhibitions along the main pier and every Summer it hosts some of the events of the Fête des Suds festival in one of its hangars (besides, sculptor Harmut Bosbach has been graciously granted the use of a redundant hangar as his studio). Another local example is the Societé SARI-SEERI, administrator of the Docks de la Joliette, where every year a new block of these typically Victorian warehouses has been restored and converted into offices. Before the new spaces are offered for sale however, the company temporarily offers some parts for artists' studios and/or art exhibitions -this works well as publicity bait, because on the occasions of ´private view' and `exhibition inauguration' parties the development company rallies a social gathering of wealthy socialites who might be potential clients of the art-works... and the property's future development as offices! Truly enough, these business-led initiatives are no arts charity: clever property developers are now very aware of the glamorous appeal of artists studios and thriving alternative life as an attraction for customers. I have already pointed out this while discussing the contribution to the regeneration of Liverpool leaded by private initiative business lie Urban Splash, the entrepreneurs for The Arts-Palace and Concert Square -and promoters of the conversion of number of Victorian warehouses in Manchester city centre into alternative shopping complexes, loft living apartments, spaces for independent theatre groups and other young cultural venues and art galleries. Thus, ironically, artists and the arts have become a kind of bait both in Liverpool and Marseilles: an attractive packaging for mega-projects aiming at the renewal of entire derelict districts for sale/hire as mixed-use estates in the housing market. Actually, in the publicity campaigns of urban renewal operations launched either by city planning authorities or by real estate agencies, one often finds catch phrases boasting about the involvement of the arts sector in the area to be developed. This is a modern phenomenon which now fascinates some urban historians (Ghilardi Santacatterina, 1995: p.14; cf. also Landry & Bianchini, 1995: p. 26 and 47). General conclusions. A new approach to the `knock-on' effect. Adding to other examples examined by specialists in policies of arts' led urban boosting (cf. Bianchini, 1993; Landry & Greene, 1995; Langsted, 1990; Remesar, 1997), what the two study- cases analysed above demonstrate, is that the level of success of urban regeneration policies cannot be adequately measured in solely physical terms8 . So much so that it is very debatable whether a boom of new building-developments always constitutes a success: from my point of view this is not the case when real estate pressure scratches out the `spirit of the place', transforming historic ports into a jungle of office-buildings, commercial stores and hotels, like in the London Docklands, New York's Battery Park City, the harbourfront of Toronto, or the port of Tokyo. Urban developers should be encouraged to introduce more and more public spaces in their projects. Many European cities like Antwerp, Brest or Genoa have learned from the celebrated examples of the ports of Boston and Baltimore that in the case of port cities some of the more appropriate urban renewal developments are maritime museums, aquariums and leisure waterfronts (Baudoin & Collin, 1992). They help urban sightseers get some personal approach to a seaside experience and they create jobs for which unemployed local workers qualify very well: they are enthusiastic interpreters of maritime displays, they have first hand knowledge of many aquatic species, and they are the most proficient in the manoeuvring and maintenance of boats. Thus historic preservation of port waterfronts can go beyond merely keeping some old buildings, rescuing the neighbourhood too; saving not only the buildings, but also their utility and the morale of the people. Frank Ghery´s building in Bilbao Now Liverpool and Marseilles have shown that art galleries are also a very successful investment, for they can become catalysts of further urban regeneration when an `arts district' emerges closeby (Lorente, 1995). Obviously this is not a medicine suitable for every city with problems of urban decay, because not every place has the artistic background and the cultural glamour of Liverpool and Marseilles. But there are plenty of declining ports in Europe whose pedigree as artistic metropolises qualifies them for a similar cure expecting the same results. It is surely no coincidence if some of the most successful examples of the `Cultural Capital of Europe' festival, like Glasgow (1990), Antwerp (1993) and Lisbon (1994) have produced arts-led rehabilitation of decayed waterfronts. The same happened in the old ports of Barcelona and Genoa, two historic art-capitals again, whose renewal started following the occasion of the Olympic games and the Columbus celebrations in 1992 and it is now well-advanced, with brand new aquariums and new museums about to open. To this list we could add the old artistic sea- side colony of St. Ives in Cornwall, which is hosting a new section of the Tate Gallery since 1993, the Greek city of Thessalonica, cultural hub of Macedonia, whose port-quays feature since 1994 a Museum of Byzantine Arts, and the docks of Bilbao, capital of the Basque arts avantgarde, where a branch of the Guggenheim Museum has open in 1997. I have surely forgotten some relevant examples, but these are more than enough to illustrate my argument. Museums in general and art galleries in particular are not a panacea able to heal ailing ports everywhere; but in the presence of professionals of the arts world they can work as catalysts of urban regeneration of port-cities in decline . In this respect cultural politics in Liverpool and Marseilles are succeeding where more celebrated cases like London and Dublin have failed. This is mainly due to the hurried urban renewal of the docklands areas in these and other capitals which is led -and ultimately undermined- by real estate interests dictated by speculation in the local housing-market. Contrariwise, the scarceness of land speculators investing in the `industrial heritage' buildings of Liverpool and Marseilles, due to the hard economic crisis affecting both cities, has given an exceptional chance to their re-use for the arts. The first conclusion I would draw from the above is that, in order to accelerate such knock-on reaction, urban developers should be encouraged in some cases to assure the presence of art professionals. It is good to create multipurpose public spaces, mixed-use centres with shops, offices and different kinds of leisure provision, including museums and galleries. It is even better to provide lodgings or, if urban planning regulations do not allow it, working spaces for artists. This gives the area some life after business hours, and attracts a nocturnal dolce vita. The whole Albert Dock complex is terribly dark and hollow after 6:00 p.m., when the shops and museums are closed; even the restaurants and pubs are shut by then. Would this be so if, as initially intended, the MDC had provided artists' studios on the top floor? Not very dissimilar is the case of Marseilles' Vieille Charité, where, according to the original plans, some artists should regularly have studios, but this has not really occurred. Yet there is still some hope that these studios might one day be delivered, because both places have kept the spaces previewed for these projects unused. Their managers have not completely ruled them out, but they need perhaps a little more social encouragement to regain interest in art provision: I hope this paper will be a useful contribution to it. Another conclusion to be drawn from Marseilles and Liverpool is the existence of a second pattern of arts-led urban renewal processes, diametrically opposed to the general scheme taken for granted regarding the development of art-districts in the inner-cities. Examples like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the Paris of the Belle Époque, the SoHo district in New York between 1971 and 1981 or the Temple Bar area of Dublin in the 1980s, have lead to the assumption that art districts come into existence in deprived neighbourhoods following this typical format. Firstly some non-established artists discover the existence of cheap atelier- spaces to rent in derelict unused buildings (the Bateau-Lavoir in Paris, the Victorian storehouses of downtown Manhattan, etc). Then art-dealers follow suit installing their galleries in the area while other private entrepreneurs come with alternative/youth amenities like fashion shops, trendy bars, restaurants, dancings, etc. Eventually, there is the arrival there of museums, national theatres and public arts centres marks of the `officialisation' of such arts districts. The fatal culmination of this is the installation of apartments for yuppies, while artists have to move out little by little, because the rents have become too high in that district. The typical story of this general cliché can therefore be described as a gentrification process: redundant buildings with stagnating rents in a deprived city area get resuscitated thanks to the presence of artists, this attracts developers who transform the district into an `arts quarter', which brings in a lot of people, institutions, and money but, eventually, will inevitably expel the artists, because they cannot afford the growing rents. I am not intending to refute that scheme or even to contradict its final output -namely that the arts are victims of their own success and act as instruments of a gentrification process. But I believe that another scheme is also possible, where museums arrive first as a consequence of a political decision to bring derelict landmarks of city heritage into new life, then in a knock-on domino-effect other derelict buildings in the district become cultural centres or art galleries, and finally also artists move their studios in creating a lively atmosphere in what used to be a no-go area. Such has been the process, as we have seen, in the cases of Liverpool and Marseilles. One could thus conclude that arts-led urban regeneration is not always a spontaneous process originated by `bohemians' and finally benefiting speculators dealing in the housing-market. In some cases the process can start following the political decision to open a museum in a derelict area. This is of great interest in the realm of contemporary politics towards sustainable cities. Nevertheless, the spirit of independence and revolt inherent in the personality of artists makes them, in general, undomesticated citizens, more often eager to confront urban developers than to collaborate with them. Proof of this is the fact that artists and artists' organisations often have headed urban revolts. In America, the most notorious case took place two decades ago when passionate campaigns for the preservation of New York's SoHo occurred through public demonstrations, political lobbying and anarchist hostility to the law. There are also some well- known European cases. In Berlin, during the riots of 1981, artists and young students featured prominently in the world media as the squatters who radically opposed their eviction from the district of Kreuzberg (Colquhoun, 1995: p. 128). Great criticism as well, by both artists and scholars, has met the renewal of the Temple Bar quarter in Dublin, which has lost its artistic soul and is now a trendy commercial district where most of the new housing is apartments for singles. Many other famous examples could be quoted, not all finishing with happy endings. Such was the case in London, where recently, artists led the local communities in protests unsuccessfully opposing the transformation of the Docklands into a jungle of offices towers (Bird, 1993). On these matters, the natural place where art activism belongs is with grassroots movements and communities, not with developers (Kelly, 1984; Felshin, 1995). On the other hand, it is quite comprehensible if artists are often diffident and critical towards property developers and urban planners. Nobody would like to be used and abused as an attraction for other tenants, whose presence might eventually outnumber and undermine the initial high concentration of creative people. Thus, regardless of the order followed in the process, there is a risk that the end might be the same for artists in Liverpool and Marseilles as in New York's SoHo, Paris' Latin Quarter, Montmartre, Montparnasse and Marais, London's Chelsea, Covent Garden, St. Katharine's Dock and Butlers Wharf, or Dublin's Temple Bar. Everytime I visit Liverpool and Marseilles, I get mixed feelings of joy and concern when I see the bistros, ragtrade and nightlife increasing around Duke Street/Seel Street and in the narrow hilly lanes of the Panier quarter. I do not want to sound like a raging Jesus chasing the merchants from the temple, but it would be a pity if these districts lose their soul. The solution to the problem might come from a new spirit of collaboration between the arts communities and the public powers, so that instead of just helping creative people to convert buildings (if at all), grants are also directed at helping artists' co-ops to get affordable mortgages so that they can buy the buildings they have refurbished as studios and galleries. Finally, it also would be very helpful if all the players involved adopted a more realistic and compromising approach regarding the funding of arts and urban regeneration. In an ideal world, the arts budget of a local, regional or national government should be used for nurturing the arts, whilst the budgets for city planning and urban renewal should be invested in housing and urban betterment schemes. Yet in times of hardship and cuts in arts expenditure, I see no harm in blurring these artificial limits, fostering synergetic collaborations between artists and urban planners. It is sometimes discouraging to do research on the arts scene and be permanently confronted with the bitter accusations of artists, always complaining that too much money is expended in consultants, curators, mediators..., even if the fact is that the grant sponsoring the research in question is not squandering funds from the arts budget. But if artists need to give up their plaintive stance, city planners should also show a more co-operative attitude towards creative people. It is sad to see that the most ambitious projects for inner-city urban renewal now being implemented in Liverpool -'Liverpool City Challenge'- and Marseilles 'Euromediterranée'- both financed with very generous European, national and local funding, and both steered by interdisciplinary teams of smartly clothed specialists, have had no position to offer for downdressed artists to have their say. These agencies are doing an admirable job in restoring the old hearts of the two cities to their former splendour, providing decent housing to some of the most deprived citizens who were cramped in derelict unhealthy houses. But it seems ludicrous that none of the two agencies has plans to co-operate and give support to the lively arts scene, which has always been the historic harbinger of the urban regeneration of Liverpool and Marseilles. REFERENCES : AL NAID, S.K., 1991. European Docklands. Past, Present and Future. An Illustrated Guide to Glorious History, Splendid Heritage and Dramatic Regeneration in European Ports. London, Thames & Hudson. ARTS COUNCIL of Great Britain, 1989. An Urban Renaissance. Sixteen Case Studies Showing the Role of the Arts in Urban Regeneration. London. AUGHTON, Peter, 1993. Liverpool. A People´s History. Preston, Carnegie Publishing. AYARD, C., 1988. `Quartier Nord Malpassé, commande publique', La Galerie de la Mer, nº 1. BAILEY, F.A. & MILLINGTON, R., 1957. The History of Liverpool. Liverpool, City Corporation. BALLÉ, Catherine, 1984. Nouvelles institutions culturelles et réutilisation des monuments historiques. Paris, CNRS-CSO. BAILLON, Jean-Claude (dir.), 1989. Marseille. Histoires de famille. Paris, Éditions Autrement, `Série Monde' H. S. nº 36. BARRÉ, François, 1993. `Les ateliers d'artistes', Arts Info, n. 64 (mars): 2-3 and ff. BAUDOUIN, Thierry & COLLIN, Michèle, 1992. `'Patrimoine et capital portuaire', in Le patrimoine portuaire. Le Havre, Association Internationale Villes et Ports (actes de `Le port et la Ville. Rencontres du Havre', 16-17 novembre 1992): p. 65-70. BECQUART, Dominique (dir.), 1994. Marseille: 25 ans de planification urbaine. La Tour d'Aigues, Éditions de l'Aube. BIANCHINI, Franco, 1991. `Urban renaissance? The arts and the urban regeneration process' in MacGREGOR, Susan & PIMLOTT, Ben (eds.), Tackling the Inner cites. The 1980s Reviewed, Prospects for the 1990s. Oxford, Clarendon Press: p. 215-250. BIANCHINI, Franco, 1993. Urban Cultural Policy in Britain and Europe: Towards Cultural Planning. Griffith University. BIANCHINI, Franco et al., 1988. The Role of the Arts in the Revitalisation of Towns and Cities. Manchester, Centre for Local Economic Strategies. BIANCHINI, Franco & PARKINSON, Michael, (eds.) 1993. Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration. The West European Experience. Manchester & Ney York, Manchester University Press. BIRD, Jon, 1993. `Dystopia on the Thames', in BIRD, J. et al.: Mapping the Futures. Local cultures, global change. London & New York: p. 120-135. BONILLO, Jean-Lucien (dir.), 1991. Marseille ville & port. Marseille, Parenthèses. BORRUEY, René, 1992. `Réinventer une ville-port?', in BONILLO, Jean-Lucien & DONZEL, André & FABRE, Mario (dir.). Métropoles portuaires en Europe: Barcelone-Gênes, Hambourg- Liverpool-Marseille-Rotterdam. Paris, Parenthèses (`Les Cahies de la Recherche Architecturale' nº 30-31): p. 127-147. BORRUEY, René & CHALINE, Claude, 1992. `Marseille, les nouvelles échelles de la ville portuaire', Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine n º 55-56 `Grandes villes et ports de mer': p. 53-62. BRESSAN, Serge & DUPONT, Pascal, 1994. `La «movida» de Marseille', C'est l'époque, 17-2, p. 16-20. BRONER, Kaisa, 1986. New York face à son Patrimoine. Préservation du patrimoine architectural urbain à New York: Analyse de la méthodologie. Etude de cas sur le secteur historique de SoHo.Bruxelles, Pierre Mardaga éditeur. BRUNIER, Jacques, 1993. Les ports maritimes et fluviaux, leur place dans l'économie française et leur rôle dans l'aménagement du territoire. Paris, Conseil Économique et Social (texte du rapport présenté dans le cadre des séances des 27 et 28 avril 1993). CHALINE, Claude, 1992. `Le réaménagement des espaces portuaires', Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine n º 55-56 `Grandes villes et ports de mer': p. 79-88. CHALINE, Claude & LE BOSSÉ, Mathias, 1994. `La reconquête des `waterfronts' au Royaume- Uni' in CHALINE, Claude, Ces ports qui créèrent des villes. Paris, L'Harmattan: p.71-80. CHARLIER, Jacques, 1992. `Redéveloppement urbain ou portuaire des vieux bassins? Les exemples contrastés de Londres et d'Anvers', in Le patrimoine portuaire. Le Havre, Association Internationale Villes et Ports (actes de `Le port et la Ville. Rencontres du Havre', 16-17 novembre 1992): p. 45-52. COCKCROFT, William R., 1994. The Albert Dock and Liverpool's Historic Waterfront. Rainworth, Print Origination Formby and Books Unlimited. COLIN, Jean Pierre, `1994. La Cité de la création: et l'art change la ville' in COLIN, Jean-Pierre & SELORON, Françoise, Le mandarin étranglé. Le rôle de l'art dans les transformations sociales, Paris, Publisud. COLQUHOUN, Ian, 1995. Urban Regeneration. An International Perspective. London, B.T. Batsford Ltd. COUCH, 1990. Urban Renewal. Theory and Practice. London, MacMillan. COUSINS, Liz et al., 1980. Merseyside in Crisis. Birkenhead, Merseyside Socialist Research Group. COX, Lizzie et al., 1995. The Custard Factory Manifesto, issue n. 1. Birmingham. CRANE, Diana, 1987. The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. The New York Art World, 1940- 1985. Chicago and London, Chicago Univ. Press. DAVIS, M., 1985. `Urban renaissance and the spirit of Postmodernism', New Left Review, n. 151, May-June, p. 107-108. DE ROO, Priscilla, 1994. `Marseille: de l'aire portuaire à l'aire métropolitaine' in COLLIN, Michèle (dir.), Ville et Port. XVIIIe-XXe siècles. Paris, L'Harmattan: p. 107-126. DONZEL, André, 1992. `Marseille, la métropole éclatée', in BONILLO, Jean-Lucien & DONZEL, André & FABRE, Mario (dir.). Métropoles portuaires en Europe: Barcelone-Gênes, Hambourg-Liverpool-Marseille-Rotterdam. Paris, Parenthèses (`Les Cahies de la Recherche Architecturale' nº 30-31): p. 113-126. DUFAY, Jean Pierre, 1993. `Vers une défense de l'architecture portuaire', in CANTAL DUPART, Michel & CHALINE, Claude (dir.). Le port cadre de ville. Paris, L'Harmattan (actes du séminaire du même titre organisé par l'Association Internationale Villes et Ports): p. 109-117. DUNN, Peter & LEESON, Loraine, 1993. `The art of change in the Docklands', in BIRD, Jon et al.: Mapping the Futures. Local cultures, global change. London & New York: p. 136-149. EVANS, Richard, 1992. `La reconversion des docklands et le nouveau statut du littoral', in BONILLO, Jean-Lucien & DONZEL, André & FABRE, Mario (dir.). Métropoles portuaires en Europe: Barcelone-Gênes, Hambourg-Liverpool-Marseille-Rotterdam. Paris, Parenthèses (`Les Cahies de la Recherche Architecturale' nº 30-31): p. 99-112. FELSHIN, Nina (ed.), 1995. But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism. Seattle, Bay Press. FOUR, Pierre-Alain, 1995. `Marseille, de l'isolement à l'ouverture', Le Journal des Arts, n. 19, novembre, p. 7-9. GASQUY-RESCH, Yannick (dir.), 1991. Marseille-Montréal. Centres culturels cosmopolites. Paris, L'Harmattan. GHILARDI SANTACATTERINA, Lia, 1995. Artists and the Creative City. Gloucester, Comedia. HALL, Peter, 1988. Cities of Tomorrow. An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, Blackwell. HUGHES, Quentin, 1993. Seaport. Architecture and Townscape in Liverpool. Liverpool, The Bluecoat Press & Merseyside Civic Society. HURSTEL, Jean et al, 1993. Friches industrielles, lieux culturels . Actes du colloque 18-19 mai 1993). Strasbourg, 1994 HYDE, Francis E., 1971. Liverpool and the Mersey. An Economic History of a Port 1700-1970. Newton Abbot, David & Charles Publishers Ltd. JIMÉNEZ-BLANCO, Maria Dolores, 1993. `Los museos de arte contemporáneo' in Calvo Serraller, Francisco (ed.): Los espectáculos del arte. Instituciones y funciones del arte contemporáneo. Barcelona, Tusquets, p. 135-160. JONES, Susan, 1995. Survey of Group Studio Provision. Stage 1. London, National Artists Association. JUDD, Dennis & PARKINSON, Michael, (eds.) 1990. Leadership and Urban Regeneration. Cities in North America and Europe. Newbury Park, London, New Delhi, Sage Publications. KAHN, Frédéric, 1994. 'On défriche', Marseille. La revue culturelle de la ville, no. 171, p. 102- 105. KARTES, Cheryl, 1993. Creating Space: A Guide to Real Estate Development for Artists. New York, ACA Books & Allworth Press. KEENS, William et al., 1989. Arts and the Changing City: An Agenda for Urban Regeneration. London, British-American Association. LANDRY, Charles & BIANCHINI, Franco, 1995. The Creative City. London, Demos. LANDRY, Charles & GREENE, 1995. Revitalising Cities and Towns Through Cultural Development. Bourners Green, Comedia. LANGSTED, Joorn (ed.), 1990. Strategies. Studies in Modern Cultural Policy. Aarhus, Aarhus University Press. LANSMARK, Theodore C., 1981. Artists' Spaces: A Study of the Development of Artists' Living and Working Space in Boston. Boston, Artists Foundation. LAWLESS, Catherine, 1990. Ateliers et artistes. Nîmes, Editions Jacqueline Chambon. LAWSON, Guy, 1988. `Mills of the North rejoice!', Arts Review, vol 40, n. 2, June, p. 440. LÉON, Myriam, 1993. `Une étonnante loge d'artistes: la «Friche de la belle de mai» est un lieu marseillais sans équivalent parisien', Le Jour, 4 juin. LIPSKE, Mike, 1988. Artists' Housing: Creating Live/Work Space that Lasts. New York, Publishing Center for Cultural Resources. LORENTE, J. Pedro, 1994. `A «post-Modern» museological vogue: the Musée d'Orsay and other galleries featuring 19th century art', Museological Review, vol 1, n. 1: p. 14-30. LORENTE, J. Pedro, 1995. `The city's beating art', Museums Journal, vol 95 n. 10: p. 29-30. LORENTE, J. Pedro (ed), 1996. The Role of Museums and the Arts in the Urban Regeneration of Liverpool. Leicester, Centre for Urban History. LORENTE, J. Pedro (ed), 1997. Espacios para el arte contemporáneo generadores de revitalización urbana. Zaragoza, Departamento de Historia del Arte de la Universidad de Zaragoza. LORENTE, J. Pedro, 1998. «Les musées catalyseurs de quartiers d'art. Deux villes portuaires en déclin: Liverpool et Marseille», in POULOT, Dominique, Patrimoine et modernité. Paris, Montréal: L'Harmattan, p. 240-250. LORENTE, J. Pedro, 1999. `Artists, gallery owners and museums as agents for urban revitalisation´, Circular, newsletter of the Council of Europe's CIRCLE for Research and Documentation on Cultural Policies, n. 19, July p. 10-13. MARKS, David, 1993. `La conservation et la réutilisation de bâtiments portuaires: Albert Dock et Tobacco Dock', in CANTAL DUPART, Michel & CHALINE, Claude (dir.). Le port cadre de ville. Paris, L'Harmattan (actes du séminaire du même titre organisé par l'Association Internationale Villes et Ports): p. 61-69. MILLET, Catherine, 1994. L'art contemporain en France. Paris, Flammarion. MINISTÈRE DE LA CULTURE, 1993. L'accueil d'artistes en résidence temporaire en France. Paris, Delegation aux Arts Plastiques. MINISSI, Franco, 1988. Conservazione, vitalizzazione, musealizzazione. Rome. MOREL, Bernard, 1994. `Arc méditerranéen et stratégie marseillaise' in COLLIN, Michèle (dir.), Ville et Port. XVIIIe-XXe siècles. Paris, L'Harmattan: p. 195-208. MYERSCOUGH, John, 1988. The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain. London, Policy Studies Institute. NEYRET, Régis (dir.), 1992. Le patrimoine atout du développement. Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon. NEWELL, Elizabeth, s.d. Albert Dock Liverpool. Liverpool, author's edition? O'CONNOR, Freddy, 1986. Liverpool. It All Came Tumbling Down. Liverpool, Brunswick Printing & Publishing Co. Ltd. O'CONNOR, Freddy, 1990. Liverpool. Our City - Our Heritage. Liverpool, author's edition. OFFICE DE LA CULTURE DE MARSEILLE, 1994. Art contemporain: 53 projets réalisés en partenariat avec la Ville de Marseille. Dossier photocopied. OPHER, Philip & SAMUELS, Ivor, 1982. New Use for Old Stones. The Practice of Using Old Environments for New Cultural Activities. Strasbourg, Council of Europe. PAIRE, Alain, 1991. La Vieille Charité de Marseille. Aix-en-Provence, Édisud. PARKINSON, Michael, 1992. `Liverpool, de la crise à la régénération urbaine', in BONILLO, Jean-Lucien & DONZEL, André & FABRE, Mario (dir.). Métropoles portuaires en Europe: Barcelone-Gênes, Hambourg-Liverpool-Marseille-Rotterdam. Paris, Parenthèses (`Les Cahies de la Recherche Architecturale' nº 30-31): p. 89-98. PARKINSON, Michael & EVANS, Richard, 1988. Urban Regeneration and Development Corporations: Liverpool Style. Liverpool, European Institute for Urban Affairs, `working paper nº 2. PARKINSON, Michael & EVANS, Richard, 1992. `Liverpool, la restructuration urbaine d'un port en déclin', Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine n º 55-56 `Grandes villes et ports de mer': p. 45-52. PATTE, Emmanuelle, 1992. `Réménagement des anciens docks: leçons britanniques', in Le patrimoine portuaire. Le Havre, Association Internationale Villes et Ports (actes de `Le port et la Ville. Rencontres du Havre', 16-17 novembre 1992): p. 9-32. PELLES, Geraldine, 1963. Art, Artists and Society. Origins of a Modern Dilemma. Painting in England and France 1750-1850. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall Inc. PORTER, Robert (ed.), 1980. The Arts and City Planning. New York, American Council for the Arts. Jan. 2000 RAMBAUD, Isabelle, 1995. `De la vigne aux usines, les mutations de la Belle-de-Mai', Marseille. La revue culturelle de la ville, no. 175, p. 49-52. REMESAR, Antoni (ed.), 1997. Urban Regeneration. A Challenge for Public Art. Barcelona, Univ. de Barcelona. RITCHIE-NOAKES, Nancy, 1984. Liverpool's Historic Waterfront. The World's First Mercantile Dock System. London, H.M.S.O. RONCAYOLO, Marcel, 1990. L'imaginaire de Marseille. Port, ville, pôle. Marseille, Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie, `Historie du commerce et de l'industrie de Marseille XIX-XX siècles', t. V. SANMARCO, Philippe & MOREL, Bernard, 1988. Marseille l'état du futur. Aix-en-Provence, Edisud. SELIGMAN, Patricia, 1986. `Artists' Warehouses', Arts Review, vol. 38, n. 8, April, p. 214-215. SIEGEL, J.E., 1986. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930. New York. SIMPSON, Charles R., 1981. SoHo: The Artist in the City. Chicago & London, The Univ. of Chicago Press. SMITH, Wilfred, 1953. `The urban structure of Liverpool' in SMITH, Wilfred (ed.), A Scientific Survey of Merseyside. Liverpool, British Association & Liverpool University Press.: p. 188-199. SNEDCOF, Harold R., 1985. Cultural Facilities in Mixed-Use Developments. Washington, The Urban Land Institute. VAN HAMME, Marie, 1992. `Marseille t'as de belles friches, tu sais!', Calades, n. février, p. 15- 7. VEER, Shirley, 1994. Des lieux d'exposition à Marseille, 1960-1969. Marseille, Laboratoire d'Art et d'Histoire. VV.AA., 1989. Gérer les crises urbaines. Le cas de quelques métropoles de la Méditerranée Occidentale. Marseille, C.E.R.F.I.S.E. (actes du colloque organisé à Marseille le 21-23 octobre 1987). WILLIAMS, Jennifer et al 1993. The Artists in the Changing City. London, British American Arts Association. WILLETT, John, 1967. Art in a City. London, Methuen & Co. (cf. specially Appendix B: `Comparative data for five cities: Genoa, Marseilles, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Boston, and Liverpool', p. 268-270). ZUKIN, Sharon, 1982. Loft Living. Culture and Capital in Urban Change.Baltimore & London, The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. ZUKIN, Sharon, 1995. The Culture of Cities. Oxford, Blackwell. NOTES 1 Or, in the absence of real factories, new houses imitating the buildings of old factories might be erected from scratch! E.g. the edifice built in Marseilles in the 1980s by Dr. Rau, a German art-collector -which houses since 1994 the MAC-Galeries Contemporaines des Musées de Marseille. 2 This cross-European network supported by the European Union and backed by the Council of Europe was born in March 1983, during a weekend festival of seminars, exhibitions, films, and performances celebrating the recuperation of several derelict buildings by independent cultural centres. This festival, entitled `Les aventuriers de l'arche retrouvée' was organised by the Halles de Schaerbeek (Brussels), inviting similar centres from seven European cities. That was the start of more than thirty similar meetings elsewhere in the following ten years, in which time new associates joined from all around Europe. However, as any association, Trans Europe Halles has also experienced, with time, some withdrawals. There is, as a result, also a list of ex- members: Ny Scen (Göteborg), Huset (Copenhagen), Albany Empire (London), Transformadors (Barcelona). 3 But in their success also lays a great danger. If artists and art communities become successful redevelopers, they can be tempted to resign from their initial vocation and pursue a new career as urban developers. In Britain this has been a notorious phenomenon during the urban boom of the 1980s, when so many business-minded artists left the tools of their craft, realising that their ability to discover and revitalise derelict buildings could earn them more money, more quickly (Seligman, 1986; Lawson, 1988). At another level, this is still the case of some very successful London organisations, such as `SPACE Art Services', `ACME', the `Limehouse Foundation' or other similar ventures for studio provision in converted buildings (Williams, 1993; Jones, 1995): they are doing a fine job both in regenerating abandoned buildings and in ensuring some regular income to the artists employed in their management. But it can sometimes be embarrassing when visiting these artists organisations if one asks the managers about their latest art creations, because in many cases their burocratic job has completely taken over and they are not any more practising artists. An old solution for this problem is to establish a rota: in Paris in the 1830s a group of five painters -Trimolet, Steinheil, Meissonier, Daubigny, and Dechaumes- tried such a deal, forming a sort of co-operative, agreeing that each in turn would work at his art for a year at the expense of the others (Pelles, 1963: p. 30 and 166, footnote 21). However, in my opinion the best solution would be that urban developers came forward producing affordable artists' studios instead of systematically `office- ificating' ex-industrial buildings. A paradigmatic case, combining galleries, studios, apartments, cafes and dancing spaces, is Birmingham's Custard Factory Quarter, opened in 1994 by a London-based businessman on the former premises of Birds, once a world leader Victorian firm in custard production (Cox et al., 1995). 4 I only know two cases out of France, the Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. 5 I find particularly interesting this double comparison of Liverpool/Manchester with Marseille/Lyon; but of course the most natural points of comparison in previous studies have been other port-cities in general. Cf. for example the counterpoint Marseille-Montreal (Gasquy- Resch, 1991), the proceedings of two colloquia hold in Marseille (VV.AA., 1989), Merseyside (Judd & Parkinson, 1990), and Le Havre (Marks, 1993 & Dufay, 1993 from the book edited by Cantal Dupart & Chaline), the special issue of the Annales de la Recherche Urbanie on «Grandes Villes et Ports de Mer» (septembre 1992), etc. 6 Presenting this as a success of urban regeneration might seem debatable, but in previous experiences the municipality of Marseilles has encountered social hostility to other kind of cultural policies for urban regeneration. When they commissioned `L'aventure', a public art work from Richard Baquié, the famous conceptual artist, to be placed in Quartier Nord Malpassé, a disadvantaged suburb, they found a resentful response from the local communities who tagged and vandalised that expensive art commission, whose money they thought could have been better spent in more useful ways (C. Ayard, 1988). When the city opened a national theatre for contemporary plays in the depressed Northern district of Merlan, it found few customers in the neighbourhood, while people from richer areas were afraid to use their cars to go there or would have difficulties in finding a taxi-driver prepared to do so by night -and not for nothing are theatre-performances called `soirées'. 7The Direction des Arts Plastiques of the Culture Ministry regularly bestows a considerable part of its budget on promoting new artists' studios, co-financing repair woks undertaken by artists in their studios (up to 50% of the total expenditure) and subsidising urban developers who built artists' studios (between 80,000 and 100,000 FF. for every studio). As Catherine Millet has pointed out, the contemporary arts-scene in France has evolved from slumming anti- establishment art communities to associations of tenants working in subsidised sites (Millet, 1994: p. 280). Happily enough, this growing concern to reintegrate artists back into the heart of our cities seems to be pervading beyond political or social divides (for specialised literature on studio provision cf. Lansmark, 1981; Lipske, 1988; Keens, 1989; Lawless, 1990; Kartes, 1993; Williams, 1993; Colin, 1994). 8 A similar conclusion arises, from another perspective, in other studies on urban renewal through the arts (Cf. especially Bianchini et al 1988; Bianchini, 1991; as well as Bianchini & Parkinson, 1993). Nr, 2 February 2000 Beatriz Lucea Universidad de Zaragoza Artist´s neighborhoods in Barcelona For many years artistic neighbourhoods have been a study object in the Western World. Because of their powerful capacity of social and urban regeneration, they have become an attractive topic for art historians and sociologists. However, this subject is not very often approached in Spain, in spite of the fact that cities like Barcelona and Madrid could offer particularly interesting study cases. Referring to those in the city of Barcelona, we can track the clear existence of three artists' neighbourhoods. Two of them born out from the influence of the creation of museums of contemporary art in the heart of the city's historic centre; the other one in the once most industrial neighbourhood of the city, made up by the factories which brought progress at the beginning of the century. In the first place, about those ones sheltered by contemporary art museums, whose paradigmatic model can be found at the Pompidou Museum in Paris, we can mention the neighbourhood of the Raval and the neighbourhood of the Casco Antiguo, both belonging to the district of Ciutat Vella. In the most Western part of the "Ciutat Vella" we find the neighbourhood of the Raval, which was born little by little as the Roman Barce lona (Barcino), expanded through the countryside area, crossed by important Roman roads. The third Roman wall encompassed this neighbourhood almost entirely, since two fifths of it belonged within it. As the primitive wall didn't disappear, the city was divided in two parts, the Old City, and the new City, known as the Raval. During the Middle Ages the area of the Raval was known as "the neighbourhood of the convents" featuring in that moment more than twenty. This way, the medieval plot of this urban nucleus was traced, and lasted until the eighteen century, when the neighbourhood experienced a radical urban and social change while undergoing a recycling towards the textile sector. From this moment, the Raval became a labour and industrial neighbourhood. At the end of the nineteen century, the neighbourhood suffered a slow and progressive decline when the plan Cerdá disregarded the area almost completely in favour of the new Barcelona. Performance in the Angels`Square Until the present time, that process of continuous and marginal degradation has supposed a raw and very hard reality _a reality that, however, for about four years has been changing in unstoppable way. Only about five years ago going through this sector would have been sheer bravery, due to the vice, delinquency, prostitution, illegal business... it was an absolutely marginal area and unaware to the cosmopolitan Barcelona. In 1995 the beautiful building of Richard Meier, "the pearl of the Raval", was opened as container of the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona (MACBa). This brought not only a museographical project, but also a future project for the neighbourhood. It is evident that the installation of this type of museums immediately attracts contemporary art galleries, which settle round these buildings sheltered by such institutional offer. In the Raval neighbourhood, and more concretely in the streets that flow into the Angels' square, warehouses dedicated to avant-garde galleries are found in an almost continuous way (Galeria de los Angeles, Forun Ferlandina, Alter Ego, Espai Vidre, Ferrán Cano...). Today we can see a curious mixture of these galleries and traditional shops owned by immigrants of countless ethnic minorities, seated in the area for years. Studio «Cocoon» near Picasso's Museum And this is when artists' studios take the chief role. From this moment young artists start settling in down, hoping that this whole nascent cultural vitality, which is growing around the MACBa, will somehow redound directly in their work. In the Raval we can find more than fifty studios of young, and not so young artists, who moved there just about a year ago approximately, many of whom admit to have chosen the area for the presence of the MACBa. However, it is possible that not even themselves are fully aware of how much they mean to this whole regenerative process. By moving to these housings, to which they give their own original touch, they have become usual clients of traditional and basic business like food stores. This process has turned the growing population of artists into authentic mediators between the world of the contemporary art galleries, sometimes frivolous and commercial, and the multiracial population who cohabit in the Raval neighbourhood. Furthermore, the presence of these artists in the Raval has brought numerous business related to their world, such as hairdressers of avant- garde style, clothing stores, records' shops, furnishers of fine arts material, bookstores... To this daily activity we should also add, the countless acts which promote the artists work and give life to the neighbourhood, such as night concerts in galleries, and exhibitions in bars, cafes or bookstores, "open workshops day", performances on the street, etc. Ferlandina Street, in the Raval The social and urban regeneration is evident, it is only necessary to go for a walk around the area to see these changes. That's the reason why associations like FAD (Association for the Promotion of Decorative Arts), the editorial Grupo 68, the University of Journalism Ramón Llull, the noted Escola Massana, the art centre of Santa Mónica, or architects and designers' studios have transferred their head offices to the heart of the Raval. Artist´s Studio in the Raval Another example of artistic neighbourhood generated by placing a contemporary art museum in a certain place is, without a doubt, the one which surrounds the Picasso Museum in Montcada Street. This area of Ciutat Vella, in the middle of the old urban centre, next to the Gothic neighbourhood, is one of the most transited by tourists, the lovers of the avant-garde art and by young people in the late hours. In the surroundings of the Picasso Museum, we find the most alternative galleries in Barcelona (Metronom, Sala Montcada, Espai Blanc, Art BCN, Pretexto...). These galleries settled in these surroundings following the same process as we see in the Raval as well as the countless artists' studios, more than thirty, where we can find some as curious as that of the Japanese Cocon who work with Zen art. The lively day and night life together with the peculiar and fascinating young-artists world have attracted numerous architects and interior designers like HTT Architects, Julia Schulz-Dornburg, graphic designers like Enric Franch or Quim Larrea, and artisan designers workshops like Atlanta Manufacturas or Ricardo Domingo. An inverse process is the one that's taking place in the neighbourhood of the Poble Nou, located in the south-east of the city, between the Barceloneta and the mouth of the Besós river. Its historical origin goes back to the eighteen century, when, as a result of the First Industrial Revolution, the first factories were moved away from the inhabited city (the present Ciutat Vella), in an attempt to avoid its insalubrity and to ensure wider spaces. However, it was at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the new neighbourhood acquired its industrial character, which will mark its urban appearance and its definitive architecture. Artist´s Studio near Picasso´s Museum Nevertheless, today, the image of the industrial modernity, which was defined for more than a century by the profile of the chimneys of its factories, is vanishing as if the buildings were becoming a "ghost neighbourhood". Enormous and beautiful brick factories, overwhelming and firm, see how the history they sheltered has been forgotten. Protagonists of the industrial revolutions, which transformed Barcelona in the most advanced city of Spain, they wait for someone to rescue their walls from the abandonment they suffer Artist´s Studio in the Raval But again artists can play a main role in the definitive configuration of a regenerative process. It is certain that the institutional initiatives, as the opening of the Avenida Diagonal which crosses the area, are opening up the neighbourhood to the heart of the city, but without a doubt the presence of artists is also accelerating the process, acting as a catalyst. At the beginning of the nineties and without any kind of official support, numerous artists communities gathered in associations (Net Art Públic Project, Cultural Associació AXA, Hangar, the 12 Visual, 22A, The Submarí...) and established their studios in the old factories, warehouses and lofts. In the same way, the Association of Visual Artists from Catalonia (AAVC) and the Union of Associations of Visual Artists (UAAV) have moved their headquarters to the district, which adds further proof that an avant-garde artists neighbourhood has started to develop. The new ways of cultural expression and the capacity for innovation, together with an unconformist and continually renovated look is pervading this neighbourhood, which only a few years ago seemed deserted. We could venture to announce that the process which aroused in the SoHo of New York in the seventies is going to repeat itself again here in Poble Nou. Hangar Association in Poble Nou This cultural regeneration parallel to the official plans for urban refurbishment, is the stimulus that really gives life and colour to the ongoing boosting of the neighbourhood, which otherwise might end up like a cold surgical intervention in the urban fabric, which could even bypass the people inhabiting the area. Aware that a new artistic neighbourhood is flourishing, some private companies dedicated to graphic design, architecture and other liberal professions have recently settled down in the area, for example the famous Catalan designer's studio Javier Mariscal or the Winchester School of Art which imparts a master in Fine Arts. As I said, I believe we are facing the birth of a new artistic neighbourhood and we won't take long to realise how galleries of very alternative and conceptual tendencies settle around these studios. Subsequently the arrival of the planned museums and institutional venues devoted to contemporary culture, preferably with a multidisciplinary stand, will give more presence to the arts sector and raise the profile of this artists' neighbourhood. In the meantime, the place, animated not only by the variegated activities that the neighbourhood is already boasting (like the "open workshops day", alternative theatre, concerts, recitals of poetry), will be repopulated not only by more artist and galleries, but also by special shops, by cafes and fashion shops, or other businesses dedicated to the image (designer sheets, hairdresser etc...)… at the same time as the wealthy patrimony of Poble Nou, the so called "industrial archaeology" would have been conserved and reused. Finally, as a closing remark it is important to state that, if the role of official institutions will be undoubtedly indispensable to redevelop this area, this should be understood in artistic terms and with art promotion goals. Not only is important to control urban speculation and to improve urban infrastructure, which in some way it is already happening, but even more important should be to help artists in the most practical way, in other words, commissioning works of art from them. Public art produced and created by the artists who inhabit these neighbourhoods not only is economically more profitable, but it is rather a well proved beneficial method for all parts. For artists this is the best way to expose and make their work known. For neighbours it is a chance to learn about how to appreciate the current art, which is normally difficult for most people in general, and through the daily contact with artists, they end up feeling proud of it. For all of us it is also beneficial, because the embellishment of cities, is without doubt, a pleasure for the senses. Nr, 2 February 2000 Maggie McCormick artisist and curator. Urban Art Group Melbourne private-public-private the public domain at the beginning of the 21st century KULTURAL KOMMUTING At the beginning of 1998, I went to Berlin. I went to see and feel the city of Berlin in the late 1990’s. I went to experience an urban space in massive transition. I went to see how art and artists operate/respond to/influence the public domain in a city as complex as Berlin…………. and I went to the meet the German artists who were part of the Melbourne/Berlin public project, ‘Kultural Kommuting’. ‘Kultural Kommuting’ brought together 18 artists in Melbourne and Berlin, to work on a year long project, with public installation outcomes in both cities. The concept of ‘Kultural Kommuting’ grew out of numerous discussions between Claudia Luenig (the co curator) and myself, about the role of art and artists in public life and public space in contemporary cities. Our interest lay specifically in the links that could be made between Berlin and Melbourne because of the parallels we observed in both places. We were interested in exploring the process and outcomes of linking artists who did not know each other, and were geographically distant but close in their approach to their art. The closeness was of course our perception, and we left the artists concerned to discover or not discover, what this was. We were interested in working in ‘the space between’……the public space of the Internet, the fax machine and the telephone ….. as the points of connection. We were also interested in the public outcomes of these personal engagements intervening at the interface between the private and the public in both cities. The transitional point. Claudia Luenig and I were both curators and participating artists, creating an opportunity for both ourselves and others to explore these ideas. The artists worked in pairs. One in Berlin, one in Melbourne. They did not know each other and some did not share a common language. What they did share was that they lived and worked in an urban environment, in two cities in a state of change……two public domains in transition. The artists were asked to send a ‘travel kit’ to their partner as a means of introducing themselves and the public face of the city they lived and worked in. Claudia Luenig collected many objects in the streets of Melbourne, labeled and packed them in plastic bags and sent them to Ralf Schmitt in Berlin. Ralf traveled all over Berlin ‘losing’ these Melbourne objects, leaving them in public locations throughout the city…..to be ‘found’ by an unsuspecting Berlin public. Paul Nuttney sent a camera with images of Melbourne on the film, to his partners. They shot the film again creating a double exposure of the two cities. Yvonne Kendall faxed her diary pages, the inner thoughts of a city dweller, to Henning Eichinger. He faxed them back to her, but written in the third person and illustrated. Over many months, a book evolved. I took photographs of public projects, that I had done in Melbourne, that critiqued the public scene there. This included a12 storey building installation in Melbourne’s central business district and a second installation titled ‘art/ectural’ where architectural images were installed into the architectural framework of the building itself. I cut the photographs of these large scale installations, into small pieces, so they became independent images in their own right. My partner placed these in public sites all over Berlin and re photographed them. Collaborative outcomes from these partnerships were installed at a subway space and public city transport shelters in Melbourne in March 1998, and in public stairwells in Berlin and Melbourne in October of the same year. BERLIN When I was in Berlin, I stayed in the Mitte district, in the former East Berlin. I arrived to find a doorway in a state of reconstruction, after making my way through pipes and digging and rubble, and a skyline filled with a linear network of cranes. The view from my window changed daily, hourly. Each time I walked though the door something had changed. When I left some 2 weeks later, the entrance door was crisply painted and the pavement outside was flat, but when I turned the corner to take my usual route to the U-Bahn, the construction chaos had moved to this street and I needed to find an alternative route. The effect of this transitional public space could be seen in what many artists were doing and thinking. The chaos was unsettling, but also invigorating with a risk taking edge. Many empty building spaces were temporarily transformed into public space for art and dialogue, before work commenced to change them into private apartments. The site in Berlin where Kultural Kommuting was installed, was a stairwell in what was once a bus station. The space had been taken over by artists and transformed into Galerie Treppenhaus. The Berlin public space was filtering through doors and windows into the private, domestic domain as well. One of the artists in Kultural Kommuting painted his former coal shoot pure white, all one square meter of it, and invited the public and the media into his domestic space to view the exhibitions that take place in this space…….and they came, temporarily transforming a private space into a public space. The breaking down of the distinction between the public domain of outdoor space and the private domestic interior is an interesting blurring of edges. The technology of our time brings the public into the intimacy of our private, domestic space. The screen of the computer and the television are the point of transition. Although people are dispersed in private units, they are drawn together as ‘a public’, as public television images are viewed at the same time or emailed messages cross geographical distance. LIFE IS A CONSTRUCTION SITE ‘Life is a Construction Site’. This is the title of a German film I saw recently and struck me as good description of the urban public domain at the end of the 20th century …. not just the urban landscape of Berlin ….. but cities across the world. Melbourne is one of these cities, with its City Square redevelopment, multiple refurbished office buildings into city apartments, Federation Square, Riverside Park, Melbourne aquarium, new museum, redeveloped National Gallery, City Link, Tullamarine Gateway and the new city of Docklands. TRANSITION The contemporary city in transition is the constructed expression of ourselves, our own personal transitional state of being. Berlin and Melbourne are two contemporary cities at the end of the 20th century that reflect this perhaps better, than at any other stage of the history of the city. From the fall of the Wall in 1989 to the move of the parliament to Berlin just a week ago, Berlin has been in a constant state of transition. Having now experienced this city it makes me even more appreciative of Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag. Through this transitory act, a moment of stillness was created in the midst of a state of super public activity. A moment to ‘watch this space’ and consider the past and the future. These moments are rare in such cities. PUBLIC/PRIVATE What is happening in both these cities ? Melbourne and Berlin. In both cities we are witnessing an ongoing, changing sense of ownership, sense of what is ‘public’ and what is not, and an ongoing changing definition of the concept of ‘public’. In Melbourne, at the beginning of the 90’s, I initiated an art space, ‘No Vacancy’, in a row of vacant shop fronts in a prime central city location on Collins Street, the Regent Theatre and the then City Square, and opposite the Melbourne Town Hall and the then apparently thriving business, Georges. Previous to the economic down turn of the time, these had been commercial shops and restaurants…..private businesses. In 1990 the vacant buildings were owned by the City of Melbourne, who were happy to support this artist initiative. Artists occupied this space, responded to the space itself and the urban environment it was part of and the public who passed by. The space was transformed into a public space for four years, by the intention of the artists who occupied that space and gradually by those who viewed the space and its non gallery/non commercial approach. It was a different way of doing art and viewing art. With the up turn in the market, Melbourne has become a developers paradise. The shop fronts are now about to become up market shops, the building above is residential apartments, the Regent Theatre has been refurbished and is an operating theatre and the City Square has disappeared under a hotel development. Back to private space. Private space that needs a public presence, a paying public presence, the public as consumer, to survive. The definition of what is public and what is private is never completely clear, ever changing and always in a state of transition. Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Once an empty space between two ideologies, is now owned by the corporate world who are constructing both a private and public stage for a powerful 21st century play to take place on. The red ‘Info Box’ contains a corporate gift. The transformation of the working dockland area of Melbourne into ‘The Docklands’ is creating a city within a city, and a construction site on a similar scale to Berlin. The development equals the existing city of Melbourne in size and currently has its own local government with its own rules and regulations. In both cities the public realm is becoming increasingly private. The line between the two is increasingly blurred. Public space is being sold off and the whole public sector diminished. At the same time, new public space is being designed and developed. POWER These new, designed urban spaces with their private and publically funded public art projects, throw up questions of What kind of public space is this ?, What kind of public art is this ? and Who decides what appears in this public/private domain ? What controls do such private owners have over where and what appears in this private/public space ? Who will control what we see, do and say in the public domain of the 21st century ? In an age of economic rationalism and privatization …corporate man would seem to be the answer….but is it ? A NEW PUBLIC ZONE. ART AND ARTISTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY CITY. As the traditional public realm disappears and becomes increasingly privatized, artists are creating and controlling a new public space, that links urban locations in cities across the world. This is the space that projects like Kultural Kommuting occupied. Artists are creating a new public zone. They are creating a new art for a new century. Redefining art and artists, and the public function of art and artists in contemporary society Artists in this contemporary public zone view themselves and others as the public …they are seeking a public dialogue. An audience is an inactive viewer. A public is active. Dialogue is not an art lecture. What is being sought is a critique of urban space and urban life. This is not a social role but rather a political role in the sense of the polis …a place of exchange of ideas. To do this effectively is the challenge for the 21st century. This paper was both presented at "watch this space - conference on public art. University of Newcastle. (Australia) and Waterfronts of Art, Barcelona 3 - 5 September 1999 Nr, 2 February 2000 Graham Roberts Regeneration X. The Artistic Factor The eminent architect Richard Rogers, in a recent lecture, gave his predictive view that; "buildings, the city and its citizens will be one inseparable organism… and our present concern for single objects will be replaced by a concern for relationships". Thus with public art in the regenerative context. Our concern for the art object should be replaced by a concern for the relationship of artistry and imagination to the urban design process. I am an artist and an art programme producer. As an artist I work mainly with light, graphics and the digital image. Currently I am making images for large-scale public place projection and investigating sensor driven interactivity in my light sculptures. I collaborate with architects as a matter of course and I enjoy the symbiotic nature of the relationship. As an art programme producer I conceive public art programmes for capital schemes, almost exclusively within the context of urban regeneration programmes. I assemble the cast of players and I design in methods of involving the public. I like this work. I have many years experience in the public art field. In 1986 I founded the public art agency for the UK’s Yorkshire region, and I served as its Executive Director for twelve years, but my professional involvement with public art really began in 1984 when Yorkshire Arts Association, a regional arm of the Arts Council, appointed me as the region’s first Public Art Officer. Prior to that my artistic practice was mainly in the fields of photography and printmaking and quite a bit of what we then called community art. But I got the job, I believe, because of my enthusiasm for the enlivening role of art, and of the artist, in the built environment and the notion, perhaps amusing to some, that in an urban design context artists could be the first authors of form and that architects, engineers and other design professionals could use their skills to help realise the artistic vision. Now I appreciate that this needs a considerable amount of qualification. I know for instance that arguments about professional primacy and hierarchical distinctions of the status of artists, architects and engineers are self-defeating. I know also that the opportunities to be truly artistic in the built environment are few and far between and, in the UK at least, I think I know some of the reasons why. My contention is that the ambience and the social prospects of our towns and cities would benefit greatly from an injection of bold imagination such as that displayed here in this interactive neon project for the Miami Light Rail System in 1984. In this work, by American artist Rockne Krebbs, the neon activates in response to the movement of trains crossing the bridge. This ingredient, imagination, has been removed from our thinking by, on the one hand a profit driven private sector more than willing to compromise good design for short term gain, and on the other hand, by a timid public sector scared senseless by the prospect of frightening development away and paranoid about an imagined public disapproval of contemporary art and innovative design. These factors and groundless fears have produced a design mentality that is risk-averse within a culture of institutionalised dullness. To break free we need to enlist the support of our most imaginative artists as conceptualists at the earliest stages of design. This can be achieved through application of simple low cost techniques. For instance, in the UK the process of local authority development control for most major schemes should include provision for artistic thinking to be applied to design issues. Creative ideas generated within this artistic potential review process could then be put to the developer informally or, if necessary, formally via Section 106 ‘planning gain’ agreements. Who really designs our buildings? Not architects. They are too frequently merely ‘space accountants’ whose aesthetic parameters have been pre-set by the cost driven dictates of their clients or, more likely, by those, such as pension fund managers, who provide development funding and whose agenda is cost-driven. One US fund manager recently wrote, in ‘Fortune’ magazine, "I’m not sure office buildings are even architecture, they are really mathematical calculations, three-dimensional investment". Depressing isn’t it. Particularly when we see the rare outcome of commissions from bold clients such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao with which we are all probably familiar or the wildly exciting proposal by Daniel Libeskind for the Imperial War Museum of the north in Manchester. A proposal so far too wild, too imaginative, for the UK National Lottery. But I digress and I want to show you some of the amazing projects that artists are involved in around the world. I shall begin in England with a completed project in Manchester. On behalf of the Trafford Park Development Corporation I commissioned this landmark work, ‘Skyhook’ by Brian Fell. Made in steel Skyhook is representative of the heavy engineering heritage of Trafford Park, an industrial area that had been in sharp decline since the mid 60’s. ‘Skyhook’ now provides a metaphor for the regeneration of the dockside area and is the centrepiece of an art programme that includes works by SITE and by Adrian Moakes. This year and next I will be managing ‘Chesterfield Suite’, my programme of new art and new music that forms the core of Chesterfield’s regenerative ‘percent for art’ programme. Chesterfield is a small city in the North of England, where the Council prioritises public art and uses its powers under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act to ensure that developers support its public art policy. One of the artists that I have persuaded to work in Chesterfield is David Mach, well known in the UK for his monumental brick train and for this piece, ‘Sumo’, seen here outside Euston Station in London. The community involvement in ‘Chesterfield Suite’ comes mainly from the work of Nicola Atkinson-Griffith who’s art requires the contribution of reminiscence from local people and from composer/musician Stuart Jones who is writing a piece of new music to be performed simultaneously by four brass bands. One of my speculative projects, this time in Leeds, is ‘Signs of the City’. This is an ambitious attempt to re-write the visual iconography of a major city. To create a new visual identity of signs and symbols through the agency of three aesthetic masterplans for the three main highway corridors. These masterplans are to be drawn by artists who blur the distinctions between the professional practices of art, architecture and landscape, such as Daniel Libeskind, Martha Schwartz, Richard Goodwin and Kathryn Gustaffson. The masterplans will include major sculptural events in the landscape and a number of smaller scale commissions for local artists. These are examples of the type and style of work that has inspired my thinking for ’Signs of the City’. In Sydney the leading Australian sculptor Richard Goodwin made this sound reduction wall for a new suburban highway. The imagery looks abstract but in fact it draws directly on the engineer’s schematic for the city’s highway system. In Florida, Martha Schwartz has produced an undulating, mile long sound reduction wall for Miami. Pietr Kowalski’s wonderful sculpture occupies a roundabout on the outskirts of Paris. I devised ‘Signs of the City’ to be a key component of the city’s ‘Gateways and Corridors’ regeneration strategy and the city made nearly £ .5 million available as the matching-money requirement for a bid to the National Lottery for £4 million. However, at the time of writing ‘Signs of the City’ is too ambitious, too daring, for the National Lottery whose assessor drew the absurd conclusion that "artists would be overburdened with the ambitions of the project and that the Lottery’s money might be at too much risk." What, I ask you, is the Lottery for if not to support artistic ambition and to take risks. My thinking was also influenced by the fact that many major aesthetic and procurement decisions in the city [any city] are routinely taken by junior technicians in the city’s highways department. For instance, a £1million can easily be spent on standard items from a street furniture catalogue but nothing can be found for an artist to design a small family of bespoke items that will raise the aesthetic stock of the city. Here are some more good examples of contemporary public art developed within the regenerative context. Marilyn Zwack’s designs for bridge support were created in consultation with the Native American community, whose Phoenix, Arizona homes were close to the new freeway. Similarly, Judith Baca’s delightful LRT station was created with the involvement of local Los Angelino youth. In Melbourne, the Australian city where ‘percent for art’ operates better perhaps than in any other city, the downtown area benefits from works as sophisticated as Akio Makigawa’s ‘Time and Tide’ sculpture and from Simon Perry’s marvellous ‘Public Purse’ which sits outside City Hall, posing a wry question about the use of public funds on public art. Also in Melbourne the ‘percent’ allocation is pooled up and each year the city departments discuss an art project that will serve their own departmental agenda. Here the cleansing department worked with a choreographer to devise the Trash Tango, a cavalcade of garbage trucks that promoted the services of the department and provided, in their opinion, the most positive publicity for the department. They are now ‘full-on’ ‘percent for art’ because the art served the public agenda. We would all accept that successful regeneration addresses matters beyond the merely physical. We need to work with the regeneration X factor – the imagination of artists. This will add value to the process of regeneration and will make our towns and cities more interesting, more exciting, more liveable places. When urban fact makes dismal reading, we need the urban fiction of artists to raise our spirits. To show us what might be. And we need the help and co-operation of many others to make it real. This paper has been adapted from a talk that I gave at The Building Centre in London in 1998. That talk, entitled ‘Urban Fiction’, was a part of the Creative Collaborations series devised by AXIS. Most of the images in this paper are from my own photographs. Colleagues in Australia and the USA have supplied others. Nr, 2 February 2000 Public Art and City Identity.Political and cultural issues in the development of public art in the UK city of Leeds. Doug Sandle Reader in Visual Studies, School of Art, Architecture and Design Leeds Metropolitan University. Public art by its nature concerns not only aesthetics, but situated in public space it is contextualised by social, cultural and political issues. Public sculpture, for example, both defines and is mediated by its spatial location, and as such is part of a social dynamic in which ‘the processes through which a person defines him / herself in a society are not restricted to making distinctions between oneself and significant others, but extends with no less importance to objects and things, and the very spaces and places in which they are found.’ (Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff :1983). This is pertinent not only to space within the localized environment, but also to whole constructed identities such as towns and cities. For example in Leeds, a major UK city located in the north of England, such contextual variables have helped to determine the city’s changing relationship with public art, and in particular with publicly placed sculpture. The city of Leeds is 320 kilometers north from London, and with a population of 725,000 is the third biggest city in the United Kingdom. Covering an area of 562 square kilometers it is also the largest Metropolitan area outside London under a single local government authority. Although it does have areas of social deprivation, Leeds has been successful in resisting economic recession, and with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the United Kingdom it has a ‘dynamic and thriving local economy that has coped with the decline of traditional manufacturing industries by embracing new sectors and turning itself into a national leader in the provision of financial services’ (Smales and Burgess: 1999). Currently, Leeds has aspirations to become a major European city, and as its current official guide maintains, its desire ‘to establish itself as a key European city and visitor destination, has ensured that Leeds sees itself as a serious- minded international player well into the millennium.’ However, for a city with such international aspirations, Leeds has very little in the way of contemporary or modern public art, and until very recently public art did not feature very prominently in its development programs. For a number of years, contemporary or modern public art in Leeds could be exemplified by such as the unexceptional Dortmund Drayman (Fig.1), a gift in 1980 to Leeds from its twinned city Dortmund, and by the fiberglass sculpture, entitled Androgyne by Glenn Hellman (Fig. 2). The latter, resulting from a competition held in 1965 by a property development firm, is badly sited and neglected, situated alongside a broken escalator in a dank scruffy corner of a shopping precinct. Examples of more notable publicly placed modern sculpture are confined to a reclining figure by Henry Moore (Fig.3) outside the Henry Moore Institute and a work by Austin Wright outside a fashionable city centre office. And while there were a few other examples, including the occasional contemporary mural, nonetheless in 1996 Smales and Whitney commented that in Leeds there was ‘a marked absence of meaningful and relevant public art and sculpture ’ and that ‘Leeds had no clearly articulated policy towards the use and development of public art within the city.’ (Smales and Whitney :1966). In contrast, there are 39 Victorian, figurative and commemorative statues in Leeds (Fig.4), which has lead some to regard Leeds as ‘the city of sculpture’ However, many have been neglected or inappropriately re-sited (Fig.5), although as important examples of the sculpture of their time, they reveal a city once determined during past periods of commercial and industrial growth to express its civic pride and confidence by art and architectural expression, epitomised by its Victorian town hall (Fig.6). With regard to more contemporary art it was not surprising then, that at a Leeds Metropolitan University symposium on Leeds and Public Art held in 1996, an audience of artists, designers, planners and architects expressed some dismay at the lack of significant contemporary public art in Leeds and for the apparent absence of any visible strategic support for the public utilisation of art in the design and planning of the city environment. Paradoxically, the caution and reluctance of Leeds as a corporate city to have developed contemporary public art can partly be attributed to art itself, or rather from the political and cultural fall-out implicit in a proposal for a major piece of innovative public sculpture and its subsequent rejection. The events surrounding the Leeds Brick- man, while complex, are illustrative of the political and social context of public space as a contested domain. In 1987 a group known as the Holbeck Triangle Trust, with the support of a local millionaire industrialist and Public Arts, a regional but nationally successful public art agency, developed an idea, originated by a commercial gallery (St. Pauls) and British Rail, for a piece of sculpture to be erected in an area known as the Holbeck Triangle. Situated in the southern industrial part of Leeds just outside the Leeds main railway station, the site is surrounded by railway lines. The proposal that emerged was for a 35 metre statue, entitled Brickman by the artist Antony Gormley (Fig. 7 and Fig.8), not so well known then as he is today with works such as his Angel of The North (Fig.9). The Brickman proposal engendered much controversy and debate, not only in Leeds but also in the national press of the time. After a sometimes bitter struggle with local politicians and media, the project failed in 1988 to achieve planning permission from the Leeds City Council and the project was eventually abandoned. Not only was an opportunity lost for Leeds to have been internationally innovative with a high profile contemporary public art development, but the Brickman might have gained for Leeds the kind of publicity and influence on regeneration that the Angel of The North appears to have achieved for the North East of England a decade later. However, the Brick -man debacle, given the bitter hostility shown to the proposal by key local politicians and the local press, inhibited further public art development within Leeds for a number of years. There are many interrelated reasons why the Brickman project failed. It did not help that while its advocates argued for its local relevancy as a site-specific work, symbolic of the industrial history of Leeds, the sculptor himself specified with insistence that rather than using local material it should be made from brick from a neighboring and rival area of Northern England. The selection process by which the Antony Gormley proposal was adopted was also counterproductive, - for although originally proposals from 15 selected artists were exhibited in the city art gallery in October 1985 for public comment and vote, it was not made clear that this public vote was for guidance only. Accordingly a hostile local press exploited the fact that the selection committee rejected the first two favourites of the public. Although the Brickman proposal received support from many leading figures within the art world and also by some local and national politicians,vii it failed in the end to gain the support of those local politicians who were most influential, including the then Chair of the City’s Planning Committee, and the Leader of the Council. Their opposition was strengthened by political expediency, as the local press, supporters of the opposing political party, the Tories, conducted an aggressive campaign against the project. One prominent local newspaper held a public telephone vote and claimed that with 2,284 votes for and 3,114 against, the public of Leeds as a whole had rejected the Brickman. The poll was later condemned as biased and methodologically unsound by a leading international polling organisation, Mori. The Brickman proposal and the space it was to occupy was construed with meanings and sub texts that go beyond the prosaic practicalities considered by the planing committee and the stated reasons for its rejection.iix For the proponents of the proposal and for those nationally established figures from the world of arts and culture who expressed support for the project, the Brickman was construed as a new iconic symbol for Leeds, a stimulus for regeneration and an expression of creative confidence for the city. In contrast, for those local politicians who opposed the concept, such opposition was seen as a populist expression of local common sense, as they uncritically welcomed the results of the local newspaper poll. For example the Chair of the Planning Committee of the time commented, ‘I very much welcome this poll, which gives an indication of public opinion. Certainly the result will be noted when we discuss the planning application next month.’ Further, the then Leader of the Council commented, ‘I am delighted but not surprised with the formidable common sense of the Leeds public. The result demonstrates that the scheme should not go ahead.’ix Undoubtedly political expediency had a role to play, and there was a concern that the opposition would make political capital from the project, especially as the factually incorrect notion that large sums of public money were to be involved was gaining credence. However, it is significant that in spite of the lack of its objectivity, the local newspaper poll should have been seized upon as ‘evidence of the formidable common sense of the Leeds public’. That the then Leader of the Council should also add that such a common sense view ‘contrasts sharply with the airy fairy views of celebrities who don’t live within a hundred miles of the city,’ is significant of how Leeds, its public and hence its spaces were construed. The myth of the down to earth, common sense, anti-intellectual, proudly independent ‘salt of the earth' UK Northerner is one that is well documented as ideologically sustained within cultural and historical processes, for example as in Shields (1991). From the author’s experience this stereotype perception had some currency within the labourist orientated local Labour Party of the time, particularly with regard to contemporary visual culture. The suggestion is that an innovative, and at the time a bold and very high profile proposal did not accord with how the general public and hence public space was perceived by the ruling politicians, or how they thought the city by way of its public space and objects should be perceived. As well as being typically modernist in its paternalism, an appeal to a mythical and generalised down- to- earth common sense generalised Leeds public could be regarded as a manifestation of the Northern stereotype that has emerged historically from the construction of the industrial working class with its ‘demotic cultural style’ on the one hand, and the creation of a middle class identity in which the northern businessman is depicted as philistine on the other, (Rawnsley: 2000). The political implications of such are identified by Shields who states: These images and stereotypes, an imaginary geography of places and spaces, are shown to have social impacts which are empirically specifiable and located not only at the level of individual proxemics....but also at the level of social discourses on space which • (1) underpin the rhetoric of ideologues and politicians and • (2) pervade and subvert even the rationalistic discourse of planning and regional development policy..... (Shields 1991:6). Another possible sub-text, illustrating the politically nature of city space, is that a few years previously Leeds had experienced a traumatic period in which an infamous serial killer, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, had perpetrated a number of murders and violent crimes against women, creating an atmosphere of fear that pervaded the city. The presence of the Yorkshire Ripper also coincided with the growing political and cultural expression of feminism, particular strong in Leeds with regard to visual art. Some local feminists felt that even though visually its gender was equivocal, to have a huge image of a man towering over Leeds was inappropriate for a city whose women had been subjected to a particular brutal period of terror by a male. If titled differently, the project might have gained more support, especially among members of the District Labour Party, who were rightly sensitive to the concerns of women at that time. Thus the hitherto lack of contemporary public art development in Leeds might be regarded as a product of socio-political processes located within the cultural construction of urban meaning and city identity. Similarly it might be considered that any manifestation of change in Leeds’ civic attitude towards public art, would be determined by a change in construed city identity and meaning, (particularly if this involved a shift away from a protective paternalism). While not unequivocal, there are some signs that such a change might appear to be taking place, necessitated by the opportunities afforded by the British lottery and its grant support for the arts, but particularly by the official aspirations of Leeds to be regarded as an international city and the construction of new perceptions to further this. Of all he city’s stated objectives, there is one aim that is highlighted in most of its planning and economic development publicity material and which features in the growing number of press articles extolling Leeds’ virtues (Nicholson 1991: Williams, 1994). This is to be ‘one of the principal, progressive cities of Europe’ (Leeds City Council, 1994) For the observer trying to discern trends and patterns in the city’s current evolution, this ambition provides a recurring theme in a broad range of design initiatives. (Smales and Whitney:1996) Smales and Whitney also commented ‘that if there is one clear omission from these attempts to improve the quality of public space along European lines, it is the marked absence of meaningful and relevant public art and sculpture in the city.’ However, four years on there now appears to be some signs of change with an increasing number of public art proposals within the city and a growing recognition that contemporary public art might have a role to play in cultural and urban development, and in local economic and social regeneration. A new draft cultural strategy for the city acknowledges the role of art for the environment and the need for a commitment to the ‘highest standards of design and architecture’ and ‘better liaison between the City Council and the city’s visual artists,’ (Leeds City Council 1998). The action plan, Vision for Leeds of The Leeds Initiative (1999), a city council supported grouping of business, political, academic and cultural representatives formed to facilitate economic growth and regeneration for Leeds, lists as an important aspiration for development, ‘the use of public art to mark main entrances to the city.’ In the same year as the Smales and Whitney critical article appeared and as the Leeds Metropolitan University symposium on public art took place, The Leeds Initiative had already begun to promote as its Millennium project, Pride in the City. This was a major integrated proposal for the overall refurbishment and redesign of several Leeds’ public squares, as well as for the establishment of new ‘gateways’ to mark the main arterial routes into the city (Fig.10). The proposal was to involve co-operation among planners, architects, artists and craft designers, and to involve the local schools and communities, enabling them to take some ownership of the creative exploration of the designated sites. Although there were problems in establishing funding for the complete program, the proposal could be seen to mark the beginnings of a significant change in the city’s attitude to urban design and public art. Moreover, supported by the city council, the first major city square project is now under development with the creation of a new dynamic public space to be known as Millennium Square (Fig.11). The development of this space involves several short-term public art projects as a major contribution to the ambiance and cultural life of the new square. There are several other projects proposed or in progress involving resources and or the support of Leeds City Council, private developers and commissioning agencies such as Public Arts. For example, at Seacroft, a large working class estate in the east of the city, a major public art proposal involves a funding partnership between private and public agencies and the involvement of the East Leeds Family Learning Centred Educational Programme. Such a project is concerned not only with urban aesthetics but the role of public art in social facilitation, creating shared spaces and images to encourage social discourse and community well being. At the east end of The Headrow, one of the city centre’s central roads, a disused petrol station has been converted into a fountain to be operable at the beginning of the new Millennium year (Fig.12), a project supported by both the city council and the Scurrah Wainwright Charity, a trust which is involved in other public art proposals for Leeds, significantly involving new sculpture.x A new hotel, restaurant and retail centre, The Light, currently being constructed just off the Headrow will also involve public art. Given that applications for such as lottery funding for new public art and urban designs schemes for Leeds have not been helped by the city’s neglect of its Victorian public art heritage, the existing main City Square statues are to be re-sited in a design that will allow them to be more coherently visible in both defining and contributing to a major pedestrian friendly public space (Fig. 13). Although such projects are perhaps more indicative of an incremental and opportunist development rather than the result of any consistent strategic policy, there is some evidence that structural changes and processes are being put in place that will act as social and political drivers for public art developments within the city. These include a change in the role of the civic architect, given a more executive conceptual and creative role, and the establishment of a Leeds City Centre Urban Design Strategy (Smales and Burgess 1999). An important structural factor is the emergence of greater collaboration among business, design professionals, artists, planners and politicians, facilitated by the setting up of The Leeds Architectural and Design Initiative, LADI, one of several sub groups of The Leeds Initiative. The mission of LADI is to ‘enhance the appearance and quality of the built environment of Leeds’ with its first stated objective being to ‘promote the highest standards of design in the built environment, including architecture, landscape and public art.’ The emergence of LADI and its growing influence has demonstrated the importance of a structural mechanism for developing a strategic overview in the use of quality design and the incorporation of art in the environment. LADI in effect has begun to ensure that both creative design and aesthetic considerations are beginning to be part of public planning and urban development within Leeds. Its support for Signs of The City, a major public art proposal for Leeds developed by Public Arts, is indicative of a new commitment to environmental public art in Leeds. And while that proposal has still to find funds for its overall implementation, LADI had ensured that some city council funding is available to support the public art component of the Seacroft development, which in effect has been adapted to realise one example from the Signs of The City proposal. Currently, LADI is in the process of developing a strategic policy framework for public art in Leeds. A further important influence is the emergence in Leeds of organisations such as Concourse. Concourse, encouraged by LADI, brings together a number of professional, training and educational bodies with a common interest in promoting good design and creativity in the Leeds urban environment. In the Summer of 1999, its Leeds city centre symposium, Concourse On Capital, enabled a sharing of good practice in the realisation of art and design within architectural developments and identified issues in the securing of development funding for such, (Sandle and Roberts: 1999). Another organisation, which has some part to play in contributing to an increased consideration of public art issues within the city is Axis, a National organisation providing an information service on contemporary visual artists throughout the United Kingdom, and also internationally.xi Axis, located within Leeds Metropolitan University, strongly supports greater cooperation among artists, architects and planners. In facilitating such, it has organised a series of symposia, entitled Creative Collaborations. Significantly, one has been held at the Leeds City Art Gallery with Irena Bauman, a Leeds based architect, as one of the key speakers. Bauman is influential in bringing artists to work within her architectural practice, for example her collaboration with the artist Bruce Maclean in the creation of a new promenade for the town of Bridlington, a sea-side resort 120kms from Leeds. The award winning design was notable in that the artist was not brought in as an after- thought, but was involved in the conceptual stage of the project. His colour drawings (Fig.14 and Fig.15) were an integral part of the conceptual exploration of the project at the very outset of the design process. The final product is an illustration of how the visual creativity of the artist can be embodied in an architectural project, with architect and artist working closely together to realise aesthetic, design and social solutions. (Figs.16, 17,18 and 19). A key speaker at a forthcoming Creative Collaborations, to be held in the South West of England, will be Gail Bolland, Director of the Leeds Arts and Healthcare Programme. Bringing professional art and design to the hospital environment, whether as an integral part of the architecture, or as activities to facilitate well being among patients and staff, the programme is rapidly expanding within the Leeds Teaching Hospitals, the largest teaching hospital organisation in Europe Within the programme artists and craft designers have been commissioned to work closely with the architects in applying their work to the hospital environment to make it more interesting, creative and user friendly (Figs.20, 21 and 22). Such projects have included the creation of a relaxing roof garden and a large banner to welcome visitors to the hospital car park (Fig.23). Hospital staff, as well as patients, have been involved in art projects, such as in the creation of a mural photomontage that depicts in an amusing way the contribution made to hospital life by a diverse range of support workers, - cleaners, gardeners, kitchen staff, electricians, and so on. Those hospital staff involved in this project generally felt it had significantly contributed to raising appreciation for their work and in raising their profile in an otherwise elitist and hierarchical environment.xii In her research into the Brickman, Thompson ( 1991) concluded by asking if the failure of the Brickman project was symptomatic of an endemic Leeds’ civic indifference to public art, or whether the events around the Brickman itself contributed to the formation of such. Similarly it might be asked whether the examples given above are symptomatic of a shift in attitude and perceptions, or have happened in spite of the city’s governing attitudes. For although Leeds has the elements of a significant contemporary visual arts culture, - in an art gallery that has one of the leading collections of British modern art outside London, two University art departments and an art college that have had some notable roles to play in the history of British art, nationally recognised commissioning organisations for visual art such as the Pavilion and the nearby Wakefield based Public Arts, and is home of the internationally prestigious Henry Moore Institute, - it could be argued that this is in spite of a local cultural policy that has traditionally centred more on the performing arts such as music and dance. Any lasting development of public art in Leeds will need to be grounded within a broader and robust civic commitment to contemporary visual culture. For example, the current official dropping of the phrase ‘ public art’ in the Millennium Square project could be, as perceived by some, a sign of a continuing lack of civic confidence and a reluctance to offend that mythical down-to-earth northern Leeds public who might regard such as elitist. However, as city sources have claimed, it simply could be to open up the concept and application of public art as a more dynamic intervention that is broader than the notion of static public statues. Such a diversity is symptomatic of the need of the city authorities to gain the confidence of its art professionals and practitioners. Nonetheless, there are significant signs of change taking place, and in particular the role of LADI provides Leeds with new opportunities for a public art policy that could exploit the past hiatus as an opportunity to learn from the experience of others. The Axis Creative Collaboration symposia have not only demonstrated the role that public art has for social facilitation, but also have highlighted some of the problems and issues. As a recent report on the symposia stated, ‘ignorance of where the other side is coming from has been a regular theme. Fear of escalating budgets, uncontrolled schedules and public reaction is another. Misunderstanding and poor communications are commonly the undoing of projects,’ (Hainsworth: 1999). Such pragmatic concerns have also been nationally identified by research such as that by Selwood (1995) and as featured in Jones (1992), and accordingly Leeds could well benefit from the experience of others. There are of course broader cultural and ideological issues within public art, such as the implicit conflict between the sometimes conservatism of public communities or social institutions and the need to provide opportunities for creative experimentation and aesthetic risk taking. Cities and their spaces are constructs that are both defined by socio-cultural processes and which themselves determine social and cultural identities, and within such the role of public art can be paramount. Accordingly, the opportunity exists to develop a public art practice for Leeds that can radically raise notions not only of art, but of public space and the issues around conventional delineation of the domestic and the corporate, of public and private, and that address gender, age and class issues.xii This is not a plea for political correctness, but for a post modern diversity in which public art might not only express civic values, serve the needs for economic and social regeneration, and the desire for an international identity, but might also at times stand outside and critique dominant received assumptions through a publicly engaging inventiveness, creativity and aesthetic imagination. A major public art event, artranspennine98, involving several cities and towns in Northern England and curated by the directors of the Tate Gallery Liverpool and of the Leeds Henry Moore Sculpture Trust has left one lasting exhibit in Leeds, - a manifestation of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Eichen project, significantly bought by funds from the city council (Fig, 24). Although purchased more for its oak tree than for its art historical and aesthetic importance, perhaps the acorns of the Beuys inspired oak might eventually come to signify a real creative seeding for public art and visual culture in Leeds. NOTES i- Austin Wright was a Gregory Fellow in Sculpture of the University of Leeds. The University of Leeds is one of a few Leeds’ institutions, - the Department of Health and Social Security and the Leeds United Teaching Hospitals being others, - that have supported art within its own partially public buildings and grounds. Hitherto, there had been virtually no private sector public art development, although the Lloyds Bank Black Horse (1976) by Peter Tysoe was a notable exception. ii- Sculptor, Roger Burnett in his website www.sculpturestudio.co.uk states that ‘Leeds can claim to be the city of sculpture.’ iii- Public Art and Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan University July 5th 1996. The views expressed at the symposium was expressed in a letter to the City Council, and the concerns raised were supported by the then Member of Parliament for Leeds Central, the late Derek Fatchett and Michael McGowan, the then European MEP for Leeds. iv- The events surrounding the Brickman proposal are documented in Thompson (1991). v- According to Corinne Miller of Leeds City Art Gallery, the model of the Brickman (Fig.7) is the most popular exhibit at the gallery. Widespread critical and professional interest for such an ambitious project would have been guaranteed, and was the subject of published comment even before its realisation, as for example: vi- The proposal for a brick man at Holbeck Triangle, Leeds, by Antony Gormley, aims to capture the imagination in no uncertain terms....The concept itself is challenging. At 120 feet high it would certainly be seen. What feelings will it draw into itself, its dark interior lit by windows high up in the ears, a hollow cavern like an enormous and misshapen chimney. Perhaps, it is the hollowness that will stand for the twentieth century: a giant man made of dust, and empty. (Miles 1989:4) vii- That the public’s first two sculptural choices were rejected, one on the grounds of cost, the other on the grounds that its surface would cause dangerous reflections in the eyes of the drivers of incoming trains, clearly highlights the importance, sometimes neglected in public art commissioning, of ensuring that the artist’s brief is specific enough to take account of logistic and technical realities, as well as of creative expression. vii- Expressions of support were received by the Holbeck Triangle Trust from, among others, Derek Fatchett, then MP for Central Leeds, Mark Fisher, Labour Shadow Minister for the Arts, Merlyn Rees MP, Lord Gowrie of the Arts Council, Lord Harewood, Professor Richard Hoggat, Lord Rees-Mogg, and the architectural historian Dr. Patrick Nuttgens. Many had direct links with Leeds. iix The Plans South sub-committee of the Leeds City Council refused planning permission on the 7th November 1988 on the grounds that the proposal was out of scale and character with its surroundings, that it would be detrimental to surrounding buildings and the traditional city centre skyline, that the proposers did not provide evidence or firm proposals for its alleged contribution to future regeneration for the immediate community, and that there was no provision of public parking or of close up public viewing. ix The quotes are from the local newspaper, The Yorkshire Evening Post, 20th October 1988. x The Scurrah Wainwright Charity is supporting the development of a figurative sculpture of a Yorkshire couple and their child watching a French boules player, placed at a city centre boules court. It is also campaigning to commemorate Leeds by a new sculpture depicting a suitable person or symbol, for a major new city sculpture by the distinguished Leeds born sculptor, Kenneth Armitage, and for the development of a new sculpture garden near the University of Leeds. xi A version of the Axis database can be found at its website www.axisartists.org.uk, and a history of the organisation’s development and objectives can be found in Sandle (1998). xii Public art could, for example, contribute to both critical consideration and if necessary changes in the social and demographic utilisation of urban locations, for example the risk with increasing age ‘of a new urban confinement - especially for women - which, in large cities, tends to lead to the complete domestic mono-place confinement of the elderly’ (Bonnes and Secchiaroli 1992 : 197). See also Lacy (1995) for a consideration of public art as social and cultural critique. ______ References: Bonnes M., and Secchiaroli G., (1995), Environmental Psychology: A Psycho-social introduction, London: Sage. Hainsworth K., (1999), Innovate With Art, Public Service and Local Government, August. Jones S., (1992), (Ed) Art in Public -what, why and how, Sunderland: AN Publications. Lacy, S., (1995) (Ed) Mapping The Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Washington: Bay Press. Leeds City Council (1994), The Leeds Initiative: annual report 1993-4, Leeds: Leeds City Council. Leeds City Council (1998), Leeds Arts and Heritage Strategy, Leeds: Leeds City Council. Leeds Initiative (1999), Vision for Leeds: Action Plan Summary 1999 -2000, Leeds: Leeds City Council. Miles M., (1989), Art for Public Places, -critical essays, Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press. Nicholson, L, (1991), A Monument to brass and the good old days, The Observer No 10, in Smales L., and Whitney, D. (1996). Proshansky, H.M., Fabian, A.K., and Kaminoff, R. (1983), Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3. Rawnsley, S., (2000), Constructing the North: Space and a Sense of Place, in Kirk, N. (2000) Northern Identities, Aldershot: Ashgate. Sandle, D., (1998), Axis: broadening the constituency and extending the sphere of influence of visual art, Art Libraries Journal, 23 (2). Sandle, D., and Roberts, G., (1999) Concourse On Capital -investment, art, design and quality in shaping the environment, Leeds: Concourse. Selwood, M., (1955), The Benefits of Public Art: the polemics of permanent art in public places, London: Policy Studies Institute. Shields, R., (1991), Places on the Margin-Alternative geographies of modernity, London: Routledge. Smales, L., and Burgess, M. (1999), Tapping into Local Talent: The Production of the Leeds City Centre Urban Design Strategy, Built Environment 25 : (5). Smales, L., and Whitney D. (1996), Inventing a better Place: Urban design in Leeds in the post- war era, in Haughton, G. (1996) Corporate City, Aldershot: Avebury. Thompson, T., (1991), Brickman by Antony Gormley, Dissertation in part fulfillment of the MA Sculpture Studies, University of Leeds, Henry Moore Institute Library. Williams, G., (1994) New decor for Cafe du North, Guardian, March 5th, in Smales, L., and Whitney, D. (1996). Nr, 2 February 2000 Wiard Sterck Tale of Two Cities "Public Art", just these two magic words, appear in a checklist of design issues under the heading "Urban form and public space" in the report "Towards an Urban Renaissance" written by the Urban Task Force chaired by Richard Rogers (Lord Rogers of Riverside; page 74). It is also included as a condition in planning consents for commercial developments in Cardiff, usually as "Public Art should be part of this development", but lately also as "the developer should demonstrate a mechanism for the involvement of a professional artist in aspects of the development, before construction commences"(1). This latter phrase is an interesting one, though it still does not quite resolve two important questions: "What is Public Art?" and "What function does it have in Urban Regeneration?" In other words, why is it written into masterplans, since, in my experience not everyone is convinced of the benefits of Public Art and few agree on its manifestation. As a result of the Strategy for Public Art in Cardiff Bay, the Urban Development Corporation in charge of the regeneration of Cardiff's former docklands - Cardiff Bay Development Corporation - implemented in 1990 two important recommendations, to ensure that Public Art would become an important part of the new urban space. It required commercial developers to pay 1% of their development budget towards Public Art, through a condition included in the contract for sale of development land, and it established Cardiff Bay Arts Trust to manage these funds. The strategy document is still worth reading, if only to get an idea of the economic optimism in Britain in the late 1980's and the accompanying expectation of an enlightened approach to urban regeneration. It demonstrates a clear commitment to the integration of original works by living artists into the regeneration process, and how to provide the sums to pay for these works It did not answer the question of what and why, other than in the broadest of terms. The way those questions were resolved, as so often in cases where there are unclear or disputed answers, was through the various constraints: limitations on budget and time, availability of a site, physical constraints of that site, imagination and expectation of the client body, presumed reception by the general public and anticipated response of the planning authorities. Oh yes, and it must be durable, vandal proof and maintenance free. And because the function of art in the new urban infrastructure was unclear, it became often functional in other ways; seating, lamp standards, landmarks, landscaping, memorials, gates or railings. In fact, this became an easy way to make art in the public realm acceptable and understandable for the general public, the developers and their accountants alike and convinced them of the merits and benefits of accepting or funding these projects. It was often commissioned as a problem solver, to enhance a badly designed public space, to resolve social problems, to enhance unsightly utilities and to provide a marker of quality in a development otherwise lacking good design. The "art" of public art however was somewhat ignored or taken for granted. I have to be honest here, there are many projects in the public realm carried out under the banner of public art, in which for me the aesthetic is not always the prime importance. I remember a discussion with a developer who considered one particular project in Cardiff Bay not to be art. He was surprised to find that I was willing to agree, but that I felt it was an appropriate, amusing and memorable marker for a particular road junction. He than confessed that he had always directed his clients to his offices, by telling them to turn right at the junction marked by that particular work. The fact that I, an arts professional, was willing to accept his reading of the work as a mere orientation point, made him reconsider his view and accept the work also as art. It successfully and imaginatively fulfilled a function because it was a unique and bold creation and a good response to the complex nature of the site. He had unwittingly found access to the work and his perception of art had changed. Understand me well, I don't deny the artistic value of the work, but I am willing to accept that a public work adopts many functions and meanings, often beyond the intentions of the artist (2.). While this provides us with one answer to the need and function of public art in urban regeneration and some definition of what it is or could be, this kind of art only responds to a very specific aspect of the urban framework: the physical infrastructure. Of course, in an area of the city that is to be recreated, where the previous structures, social and physical, are no longer prevailing and new master plans are being implemented, this is all the artist is given to respond to. This art becomes a feature of the new infrastructure just like drains, pavements or traffic lights. However, there is another underlying force that demands further analysis and explanation. While public art is now written into most urban regeneration strategies set up by local and national governments, following the good examples of cities such as Barcelona, Boston, Rotterdam and even Cardiff, the funding for these major infrastructure projects is often secured from the private sector, and Pension Funds are increasingly the source of this finance. Traditionally in Britain Pension Funds have funded housing and office developments, but they are now increasingly involved in infrastructure and hospital projects through Private Finance Initiatives, or PFIs. Pension Fund trustees are cautious investors and seldom take the lead on a project (Clark, Gordon L. and Evans, John); they are the investing partner rather than the project developer, but they tie their partners in the project into detailed contractual arrangements, to protect their investment. This means that the project developer has limited room for manoeuvre and will have to demonstrate the return value for every expenditure. For their Quantity Surveyors, Public Art is hard to quantify, the artist is seen as a liability in the construction process and the commissioning agency as another party that wants a slice of the cake. Although the enlightened investor will be convinced of the quality and value that original and artist designed objects can bring to the development, they will need to see proof of this before they commit. The planning authorities may be committed to public art, but this comes way down the list of public benefit investments they seek to obtain from the developer and is, in Britain at least, often the most difficult to sell politically. I broach this subject at the risk of boring you rigid and I know these may not be the things art is made of, but if Public Art is or becomes a standard feature in urban regeneration processes, then indeed, these are the issues that the commissioners and artists have to deal with. Now let us consider an other aspect of regenerating urban space. Most of the time urban regeneration is concentrated on brownfield sites; former docklands (Baltimore, London, Gateshead, Rotterdam, Cardiff, Barcelona) or sites of massive heavy industry (the IBA projects like the Emscher Park, Duisburg and other major cities in the German Ruhr region). Once these sites were buzzing with the activity of industry and trade, which steadily declined until little of its former glory was left. The regeneration programmes are intended to revive their fortune, but in a contemporary concept: trade becomes retail and leisure, industry becomes office and multimedia business, storage becomes housing. The benefits to the existing and often disenfranchised communities of neighbouring residential districts are mostly indirect: jobs as "cleaning personnel, catering and security services" (sic.) (Mutual Benefit Project Team Publication, Kop van Zuid Development, Rotterdam), improvements to the surrounding infrastructure etc. But they have also to put up with the noise and the dust of the building work, while their marginal status is maintained and re-enforced. Jobs are often relocated from other areas, new residents (more affluent than the occupants in existing communities) move into the new housing and visitors are attracted by the hype, the new leisure facilities, retail outlets and entertainment centres. The area is reinvented and, to promote the regeneration, needs to be realigned in our imagination (Hall, Tim). This becomes another function of Public Art: "to commemorate the past and celebrate the future" (3.). In other words, to declare the traditional character of the area dead and buried and to hail a new king. Cardiff, Baltimore and Barcelona have reunited their cities with the waterfront, Rotterdam is aiming to "relocate" the southern bank of the river Maas in the city centre on the opposite bank. Public art is seen as one of the mechanisms assisting this "relocation" and reconnection, which, after all is a perception, not a reality, or a "re-imagination" of that space (Hall, Tim). But does this mean that all public art commissioned within these regeneration projects is automatically implicated in this deceit? Malcolm Miles certainly thinks so in the case of Cardiff Bay. (Miles, Malcolm) In Rotterdam the advisory committee of artists refused to give advise regarding artworks to be commissioned by the City Council in the Kop van Zuid development, because they could not find a meaningful response to the sanitised, well designed, well planned area, which includes a number of landmark buildings designed by major, international architects, but from which is removed most of its recent history and former character. Controversy surrounds every major infrastructure project, because it is bound to destroy, displace and obliterate. Every regeneration programme is aimed at uniting or reuniting two halves of a city; the undeveloped with the developed, the downtrodden with the well off. This could be seen as a colonial act, whereby the affluent city centre creates a new district for business and leisure, providing prosperity for the city as a whole and enhancing its national and international status, while marginalising the existing community, its culture and its character. But is not every act of creation also and act of aggression? Is this not the character of a city, that it will renew itself from time to time, either following acts of war, political change or severe economical decline? Artists deal with these issues, highlight them, question them, offer alternatives or make positive contributions in the hope of connecting past, present and future with respect and understanding and on an equal footing. Karin Sander in Münster during the Skulptur Projekte '97 demonstrated how a city centre is located in the mind and the experience of the city and its life, yet does not constitute a geographical reality (Bußmann, Klaus, et al.). This perceived centre can only be shifted by a relocation of the experience of that city. Krzysztof Wodiczko views the city as a massive creative process, to which the artist should contribute. He contrasts the opposite sides of the social construct of the city; the haves and have nots, the indigenous resident and the newcomer, the dominant order with a new and emerging order. Many of Wodiczko's projects aim to give a means of expression to the outsider, assisting them to cope and to communicate on a more equal basis with the dominant culture. Immigration, by the way, is a hallmark of urban regeneration. Docklands are traditionally the domain of the sailor who settled in a port he visited, initiating the establishment of an immigrant community, which attracted others of similar cultural background. Cardiff Bay for instance still houses the oldest multicultural community in Britain. Those that move into the new housing developments in the regenerated district are the next wave of immigrants, or, to come back to an earlier analogy, settlers in a new world. Andrew Leicester creates new infrastructure, creates physical space out of a social construct, while Mags Harries re-enforces and extends those social constructs in most of her work, offering a new experience of a familiar environment. In this paper I do not intend to discuss their work to any great length, because that would require more time than is now available and at this point I merely want to demonstrate that artists contribute, are part of, enrich and expand cities on all their manifestations and can respond to the complexities of regeneration, without alienating or ignoring the extant social complexity, the history, culture and character of the regenerated district, without merely placing pleasing and useful objects in ur ban open spaces. However, my question at this point is, will those responsible for the delivery of these regeneration projects dare to support this kind of contribution from artists? Within the realm of Private Finance Initiatives, Masterplans and Urban Planning I think this is quite unlikely; the functional object will prevail because this object can be drawn into a plan and quantified, even if it comes in rather expensive in some opinions. However there exist a number of regeneration projects where artists are brought in specially to help planners, scientists and engineers resolve problematic issues. The province of South Holland in the Netherlands invited Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison to assist in developing a policy on the preservation of the "Green Heart", a large area of open and agricultural land, enclosed between several of the largest cities in the Netherlands (Oerlemans, Hans et al.). They were asked to put forward a strategy that would protect this area from the urban sprawl and to maintain it as a natural resource and providing the area with a strong identity that would help it withstand the onslaught of urban development. And with such artists as Josef Koudelka, Olaf Nicolaï and Auke de Vries together with a group of scientists from various backgrounds, the Harrisons were invited by the state of Sachsen in Germany and the cultural programme of Siemens, to look at a massive area stretching from Leipzig south into the Czech Republic, which was devastated by Browncoal and Uranium mining (von Kraft, Predita et al.). The enormous open cast mines - abandoned not because the need for the raw materials had diminished or the mines were exhausted, but because the reunited Germany could politically no longer justify the destruction of its landscape on such a grand scale - will fill with water over a period of 30 years. A new landscape will emerge, dominated by large lakes and the artists were asked to give their vision of how this landscape should be given form and provided with a new identity, replacing the one that was obliterated with digging machines that seemed to come straight from the imagination of George Lucas. The title of my paper is a Tale of Two Cities, an overused analogy. However it seems to me that the major role of the artist in any regeneration process is in highlighting a divide and thereby suggesting ways of bridging this divide. The divide can be between many aspects; rich and poor, old and new, conventional and revolutionary, real and imagined, coded and re-coded, limited and full of potential. "Of course", you will say, "art is intended to communicate". But while it is a conduit for communication, art can also negotiate on its own terms Bibliography von Kraft, Predita; Aufriß, Künstlerische Positionen zur Industrielandschaft in der Mitte Europas. Verlag der Kunst, Amsterdam, Dresden, 1997. Oerlemans, Hans; Harrison, Newton and Mayer Harrison, Helen; Het Groene Hart, nu of nooit. Provincie Zuid-Holland, Culturele Raad Zuid-Holland, 1995. Hall, Tim; (Re) Placing the City, in Westwood, Sally and Williams, John; Imagining Cities, scripts, signs, memory. Routledge, London and New York, 1997. Clark, Gordon L. and Evans, John; The Private Provision of Urban Infrastructure: Finacial Intermediation through Long-term Contracts. Urban Studies, Vl. 35. No. 2, 301-319, 1998. Bußmann, Klaus; König, Kasper and Matzner, Florian; Sculpture. Projects in Münster 1997. Verlag Gerd Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997. Miles, Malcolm; Art Space and the City. Routledge, London and New York, 1997. Wodiczko, Krzysztof; Critical Vehicles. Writings, Projects, Interviews. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusets, 1999. Lord Rogers of Riverside and The Urban Task Force; Towards an Urban Renaissance. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1999. Public Art Consultancy Team, Strategy for Public Art in Cardiff Bay, Cardiff Bay Development Corporation, 1990. Notes 1. Planning Consent for building development by Stradform, 24 Windsor Place, Cardiff 2. The work in question is Pierre Vivant's Landmark sculpture for the Tyndall Street, Ocean Way roundabout 3. Project Brief, Cardiff Bay Arts Trust