I’ve been fortunate enough to have taken part in Birmingham’s first Still Walking Festival. It has included ‘Radical Truths’, a cycling tour of Birmingham’s former bike manufacturers led by the nice guys at the Birmingham Bike Foundry, Stirchley.

It has also included a walk of the Queensway ‘Concrete Collar’ that surrounds the city led by architect, urban designer and my PhD supervisor Joe Holyoak. Both events were a lot of fun, and I was asked to be a guest blogger for the Walk the Queensway event which you can read here.

Photo credit: Katchooo, Flickr

“First, we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us” (Churchill, 1943)

‘First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them again – ad infinitum. Function reforms form, perpetually.’ (Brand, 1994:3)

Stewart Brand’s reworking of both Sullivan and Churchill’s quotes is a very important observation. His book How Buildings Learn has undoubtably changed the way I think about buildings. Rather than just a focus upon the use of space, he stresses the need to understand buildings through the use of time. It is a verb and a noun, and it involves people.

Things change as are needs change, both people and buildings learn; neither are timeless, they both age. Some do it more gracefully than others. If a building can no longer be useful, it often ceases to be used. We cannot predict the future needs of a building nor of people, but we can make the possibility of adapting it easier or harder:

This dome leaks and its hardly the easiest building to make changes on - whether that’s dividing walls inside or adding an extension when you need more room. Plus I’d constantly by fearful of golf-playing giants (and judging by the owners’ UFO I would have thought that they are probably scared of that, too).

Of course this is an extreme example, but still, the argument Stewart Brand makes is build for change because not everyone wants to stick to the architect’s original plans:

Albeit a simple, somewhat prosaic, example, this nicely frames some of my recent ideas towards working. I do not wish to claim that I am saying anything new at this stage, but I want to build upon this.

Now it is worth noting that mobile working is not a new concept. Frank Duffy highlights this in ‘Work and The City’ through the example of Samuel Pepys, whilst the coffee shop has long been a place of work and discussion (thinking back to David Harvey’s ‘Paris, Capital of Modernity’ – one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time).

In a contemporary context, as a result of wireless technologies, a shift in much work towards ‘post-Fordism’ amongst other factors, work can no longer be conceptualised as, confined to or reduced to, a five-day week from 9am to 6pm (or occasionally 10am-4pm if you’re lazy like me). Mobile, flexible working allows (forces?) people to work on trains, in coffee shops, in hotels at what ever time they want or need to. Again, I’m saying nothing revolutionary, here.

I’ve currently been working in a co-working space in part  to think about my research about workspaces, but also to rejuvenate my own work and sanity. One aspect which I find fascinating is how the co-work space provides a location for all different entrepreneurs, mobile workers, students etc. whilst fostering an enjoyable environment and a pleasant atmosphere, all the while creating a network of friends and loads of interesting conversations. This has got me thinking, what does the future of office work look like? If co-location and synchrony are becoming less important for certain types of jobs, how will cities develop in relation to this? Industry shaped the urban fabric in the 19th century, and transport helped facilitate the growth of the suburbs in the 20th century. Cities often have business districts, quarters and similar focal points for specific types of working, which can often mean that they lie deserted at certain times and huge numbers of desks sit empty. Can new ways of working simultaneously make work more enjoyable whilst creating healthier cities both socially and environmentally?

Now, thanks to my aforementioned co-working friend, I was pointed in the direction of ‘The Idler’. I’ll properly read some of their publications, but from my brief overview, it appears to fundamentally question how and why we work. In a suitably idle way, I turned to Wikipedia to locate a nice quote:

[a] characteristic of the idler’s work is that it looks suspiciously like play. This, again, makes the non-idler feel uncomfortable. Victims of the Protestant work ethic would like all work to be unpleasant. They feel that work is a curse, that we must suffer on this earth to earn our place in the next. The idler, on the other hand, sees no reason not to use his brain to organise a life for himself where his play is his work, and so attempt to create his own little paradise in the here and now.

(http://idler.co.uk/notes/letter-from-the-editor-2)

The Idler has more control, freedom and choice over their work. Surely this autonomy is what we should all be looking for in order to make the inevitability of work much more enjoyable? For me, this involves a blurring of what is work and what is not (whilst not being exploited or trapped by this), and the spaces in which we can do this is a fundamental aspect.

I stumbled upon this website today, entitled, Paris vs New York. I’m a bit of a sucker for minimal graphic design and thought I’d share a few to brighten up the blog slightly.

Various prints and books are available from his blog, just follow the link. Click pictures for larger size.

Where would you rather live, and why?

Via @RachelGillies and @MoseleyExchange

Whilst this is due to a series of complex reasons, I would perhaps suggest that this is in part, the way in which geographic research is disseminated. I have become increasingly conscious that there is a need to discuss my developing research amongst a range of professions and disciplines, both to improve the quality of my research, but also to create discussion between different people.

This would most likely be quantified in terms of ‘impact’. I expect that the discipline of geography will increasingly seek to have wider impact in order to sustain itself, or indeed “stay relevant” (a phrase I’m hearing an awful lot of late). I don’t consider this to be a bad thing. I believe that geography and geographers have a whole host of useful ideas, tools and methods which can help explain and critique interactions and social habits within, across and over space and time. It may sound vague, but with the ability to look at a range of scales of human interaction, over and between spaces/places, this ambiguity, represents the possibilities of geography.

Is work and research becoming increasingly collaborative? Multi-disciplinary? Or as was suggested by Prof Alister Scott at the Great Regional Debate 2012 at Millennium Point, trans-disciplinary? I quite like the last suggestion.

Steering this back towards the practice of design, this was put quite nicely by Ian Oas at InformeDesign, created by the University of Minnesota. (http://www.informedesign.org/_news/geog01_07.pdf) The short introduction has got me thinking which is always considered useful. I recommend giving it a quite read.

To be continued… (*dramatic*)

Perhaps there is scope to start up a journal which runs in a different way – dare I say it, a 21st century way?

My research and my interests lie in the role of design. Now as a geographer, this discipline has got huge scope to look into the geographies of design. I’ve currently been enjoying reading through John Bryson (a professor in Economic Geography at University of Birmingham) and Grete Rusten’s book ‘Design Economies and the Changing World Economy – Innovation, production and competitiveness’.

It seems to me that there is a huge gap in the so-called ‘sub-disciplines’ of geography. ‘Geographies of design’ seems to be massively undervalued by geographers. Perhaps this is because there is often a notable seperation between cultural and economic geographies?

So what if I tried to start a ‘Geographies of Design Journal’? Could it be possible to create in an open access format in order to reach beyond the discipline of ‘geography’ to encorporate other people and ideas for urban design, architecture etc…? Perhaps it would need a different name? I might suggest this to some of the other design-obsessed geographers I share ideas with at work….

The above cartoon is of Dilbert by Scott Adams. Once I posted this image, WordPress set me a task to reach my 5th post (I know, I’ve been lazy) and oddly, used these inspirational words:

‘My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living’ — Anais Nin

It’s as if they knew how my research has started to develop before I even updated the blog. More to follow…

With my previous research project I used unstructured walking interviews around Kidderminster with artists talking about urban design. This in situ method allowed the built environment to act as a prompt for discussion. Moreover, I gave participants an instant camera to frame their ideas whilst making it fun. Who doesn’t like taking a Polaroid? Like much geographic research, it involved the verbal and the visual. It was looking at symbols and representation in the urban landscape and asking about them. These roaming-photographic-art-based conversations suited my research aims, including exhibiting the words and images together.

However, reading different literatures on the embodied, sensuous and haptic, I’ve been grappling with how I might consider the more-than-visual ways of experiencing and performing in the world. I’ve become interested in the recent discussions on non-representational theory. There has been a scattering of geographers and social scientists that have been developing ideas surrounding the non-representational, perhaps most notably Nigel Thrift (cf. 2007; for a collection of his publications on NRT). Such approaches are concerned with the performing of everyday practices which shape our interactions with ourselves, other humans and nonhumans. It goes a lot deeper than this, but I didn’t want to get into the nitty-gritty aspects here. Reading from this, I can see how this loose collection of ideas could help me deal with the embodied way in which we experience buildings as well as help tackle issues surrounding ‘affect’ (…insert a huge list of recent references regarding affect in geography and the social sciences).

I like Latham’s (2003)  ‘montage’ of research methods in order to tackle the seemingly infinite ways in which we experience, perform, play in, subvert etc… the world around us. The big question for me at the moment, is how can I get beyond solely the visual and the verbal in my reseach methodologies in an ‘authentic’ way? How do I develop a multi-sensory approach to research?

Engwicht was keen to expose certain myths about place-making, whilst at the same time, suggesting that paradox and conflict are good for exciting, working towns and cities. He asked what is it that makes a house become a home, and by extension, what makes a space become a place. One quote that got me thinking was a ‘home is a feeling not a location’. What is it that creates this sense of home? What makes us feel that we own an environment?

Engwicht suggested that communities should have the freedom to move street furniture, and even adapt the public realm, as and when they need to, so that it works as they want. This led me to think about Stewart Brand’s ideas of the ‘low-road’ and how buildings learn, where the most unassuming, anonymous buildings such as the workman’s shed is shaped over time by the user. It works just as the owner of the space wants it to.

The other point raised that I quite liked, was the idea that conflict and chaos is a good thing. It is the crossing over of all different narratives that make things exciting. The corridor is often somewhere between two spaces, maybe not considered as somewhere important, yet it is here where you physically bump into people, create ideas and get work done. Who needs meeting rooms?! The planning out of chaos can, in the words of David, ‘kill the humanity of a space’. Is movement and conflict between human mobility and the relative immobility of buildings (but perhaps not furniture), crucial to place-making both on the street and inside a building (and the links between inside and outside)?

Overall, an thought-provoking seminar, with David being a thoroughly nice guy to discuss ideas with.