Apparantly I should vote Green.
From The Ideal Government Project, a collective project initiated by William Heath to create a user requirement of government. I posted my first article on there today, and it's called Common Law Marriage.
April 15, 2005
January 19, 2005
le parkour
A more famous example of anarchitecture is le parkour. ("The art of movement", or "free-running"). From World Wide Words:
Free-running treats the urban landscape as an adult playground. It treats man-made structures as an obstacle course that participants negotiate by daring feats of graceful gymnastics. It was invented by a group of childhood friends in Lisses, near Paris—as in so many suburban towns, there was little for young people to do, so Sebastien Foucan, David Belle and others created what they call le parkour (a deliberately un-French spelling to make the point that they were doing something different).
British television viewers will know about le parkour from the BBC adverts shot amidst the roof-tops of London, and a Channel 4 documentary. There's a collection of videos here, and here is an essay explaining the philosophy behind the art.
Anarchitecture
"Space Hijackers are Anarchitects who oppose the hierarchy that is imposed upon us by architects, planners and the owners of space.
Our work attempts to confuse the existing language of architecture, not to replace it."
This essay is a good introduction to the Space Hijackers, a group of anarchitects who's projects run from midnight cricket to the infamous Circle Line Party:
"The point of the event was to completely disrupt the way in which the train works in terms of codes of conduct."
..."As soon as we hit the station everyone was silent... People were asked to bring quick change outfits, so that they could transform from business like commuters into party animals and back again at a moments notice. As soon as we entered a tunnel, the band would start up, the DJ slip on a tune and the party people dance like no tommorrow. As soon as we hit a station everything stopped and we all tried our best to look like bored commuters."
I'm all for it, with an important qualification - the distinction between public/private space. Most of the Space Hijackers rhetoric is anti-capitalistic, lambasting the usual suspects (Nike, Starbucks, McDonalds etc). However their greatest successes stem from the manipulation of public space, and their desire to transcend passive acceptance. The seizure of other people's property is one thing, but redefining our shared environment is quite a glorious other.
July 22, 2004
Life's a Beach
When breakfast sweats and the day is empty there’s just one option: to the beach. On Tuesday four of us graced the golden sands of Bournemouth, enjoying a typically English pursuit. Watched by blue-rinse sandwich munchers, Ben and I kicked an inflatable ball along the shore, whilst the girls snoozed in striped deckchairs. Nothing had changed from summers past.
Charles Leadbeater writes in this months ‘Prospect’ about the beach as a social convention, one which he describes as ”giant blank spaces, washed clean every day, on to which all sorts of hopes are projected”
He traces the history of the beach holiday, and it’s influence upon architecture and literature. Most interestingly, he highlights the governance structure of a space commerce dare not intrude upon.
“Beaches are ordered without being controlled. There is no one in charge. They rely on mass self-organisation… Beaches are a model of civic space: tolerant, playful, self-regulating.”“Complexity theorists have a fancy name for this: they call it emergence, when an overall order emerges from a system with many players, in which no one person is in charge and everyone is adjusting to local conditions. Beaches are democratic and egalitarian in spirit.”
I agree. Whilst commercial centres erupt along the periphery, a beach is free from advertising and social competition is fairly redundant. Off shore yachts demonstrate status, but on the beach money loses value; people are literally stripped to their essentials. Some beaches may specialise as fashionable parades, but most are unrivalled as social levellers: class, sex and age intermingle. As Leadbeater says, ”Quite different people have always been able to get what they want from the same beach resorts: Queen Victoria and Karl Marx were both fond of the Isle of White”.
He concludes that
”..we like the kind of society we keep on beaches: civil, playful, active, open. The beach is the prime example of a successful collective self-organisation, without either the heavy hand of the state or the competition of the market. Our summer holidays are homage to the third way.”
The full article is here (subscription required).
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