Park Life

21 June 2007

I’m always willing to stock up on brain juice in order to better process the stakeholder experiences of people and communities. So in the interests of a thorough political consultation, this week I’ve been living in a tent in Victoria Park in the east London borough of Hackney, one of the most deprived boroughs in the whole of Europe. 

Actually my political consultant has been on at me for ages: “Get out and live like London’s homeless,” he says. “You can’t understand how they feel unless you catch pneumonia and get hooked on smack.” Monsieur C. Whole may be a bit outré at times (calls himself a “yogi”), but his intuition and mind-expanding methods have been helping me to redefine my presentational style recently through a series of carefully-coordinated seminars which, incidentally, I would particularly recommend to landscape gardeners. Actually when I say “carefully-coordinated” that’s not strictly true, since Mr. C. doesn’t believe in clocks and is into “random ideas generation”. Not surprisingly this is helping me to rethink, not just the meaning of time, but of patience.

Anyway, more on that next week. For now, here’s my log of the week’s consultation with the grassroots.

Day 1 The day starts well with a filmed jog around the park track – I don’t set my usual blistering pace as it’s crucial at a time of shocking air pollution (my daughter suffers from gruff ingested glob-hoop) to promote the virtues of Alternative Transport. However, the day hits a sour point when Hackney Council representatives order me to pack up my tent and leave on the spurious grounds that I hadn’t sought the proper permission to pitch. “So it’s alright for the drunks and homeless to make the place their own?” I protest. I don’t like getting boisterous with public officials, but these are the appalling double standards running through the public sector that so annoy me. I end the day with yoga and meditation.

Day 2 High time I start what I set out to do here – talk to the outdoorsfolk about the stakeholder experience of park life. What are the big issues for park dwellers? One chap called "Racket" (at least that's what I heard) confides in me that his problems would be solved at a stroke if the park could grow a "money tree". I'm not sure the technology's quite there yet, Racket! People are happy to talk and appear enormously receptive to my ideas. Cynthia’s “primal soundings booth” (an ingenious Tardis-contraption conceived by a pre-Socratic mannerist artist and friend of my wife, who goes by the name of “13H7FD&W790” – check him out!) hints at a 95% approval rating for my policy of practical recycling classes for remedial schoolchildren. That’s the kind of wavelength the electorate and I are on in 2007. However, one guy did take exception to my brainwave (too much brain juice today!) that the terminally obese could be found work flattening polyethylene terephthalate bottles by sitting on them. If people only knew how much carbon waste our plastics industry spurts into the atmosphere then they might opt for tap water. Still I took the guy’s details as this sort of open dialogue is crucial.

Day 3 Hackney Council come back with a gaggle of local hacks, saying I can carry on the experiment if my tactical mobile unit, housing a generator for the computer, portable kitchen appliances and electric shower, is taken off-site. Alright! Let’s downsize. Now I really am getting back to nature.

Day 4 Now I know how a homeless person feels. Tin opener snaps, sealing off the foie gras to feral enjoyment. Water supplies run thin, so I resort to drinking my own urine. Actually tastes very good, and makes me wonder why more homeless people don’t try it. Not mine, of course – theirs. Although naturally I’m open to offers. Finally start dozing off around midnight with visions of Doctor Who running through my head. Figure I must be dehydrated then realise it's some addict trying to make off with Cynthia's Tardis. I bluff him away in a funny Cyberman voice demanding he returns my spaceship. Now who's got the visions?

Day 5 Communications crisis. Wireless connection goes (don’t tell me a now-fashionable park in E9 isn’t a hotspot!), and then the battery on both the laptop and the mobile phone. Wander into Mare Street looking for solutions but find the patchwork of enterprises most unforgiving and the dialects too varied for my smattering of Urdu (I can order a Bombay duck but that’s about it). Luckily, I catch Rupert rocking up with a folder full of press releases and other material, so I start plugging myself back into the matrix. That’s how things can go out here, some days you just have to mark down as bad fortune.

Day 6 Wake up early to rummage through the bins as I know the others would get there before me given half a chance. Start devouring the remains of a can of White Lightning and a shish kebab before remembering that my stay with the down and outs, crack-drunks and general down-on-their-lucks is reaching natural closure. I quit the experiment, taking the chopper back to Bounce, their insights and opinions my companion. They have far too much pride and dignity to expect me to cart them off in the boot, but what I can promise them in the months to come is some concrete action and help from people who care, as I begin the process of engaging and facilitating engagement from an influential group of contemporary artists.

Let’s start thinking outside the box.

Comments

[Gurtler]

Bernard, you are smoking the rear legs off a flamingo ! I speak for myself alone and don't hide behind the clever postmodernism you accuse to me. It is clear the case that post-Bauhaus is more than just abstract modern art. And if you say to me to define what is abstract I will break your hairdryer you berk !

[B Schustermann]

Gurtler you always were a closet Deleuzian. Why don't you admit it and save yourself these theoretical backflips ?

[guss]

what r you planks on about???

[Gurtler Mathieuz]

Bernard, you are placing words in my mouth. I am not agreeing to this pre-modernist concept of design with the clear distinction between sociology and design. This distinction is prior to the setting off of the Bauhaus tradition. The ways people live is the fundamental point of design post-Bauhaus. It is not based on the abstract or aesthetic concept of on one hand the utilitarian use of space and on other hand great monumenatal works of art that light up our cities. One word explains what I am wanting to say and it is praxis. Sociology is one part of it, but only one.

[B Schustermann]

But I think Gurtler's point is valid from a sociological perspective. The anomie of the area inherent in the East of London isn't lessened any by the open space or architectural emptiness. I would go even further and say, non-architecture, that's the problem there but certainly not an inferior or absent form of modernism. The 'absence' of modernism does not equal a proto-baroque nor a neo-gothic rivalry with a city that does not have a alternative conception of civic space.

[Worthers]

it's clear that there is a lot of modernism in the city, more so than the west end. A patchwork. But isn't that the problem with modernism? It always reverts back to a kind of baroque isolation in the sense that you can only succeed in making utilitarian spaces. Comfort zones, or islands. Or even theme parks. That's what Gaudi represents. I can't see why Gaudi merits the title of modernist', if by modernism we understand the antithesis of romanticism.

[Name Withheld]

The idea that what today passes for "urban planning" (shoddy cityscapes admittedly, and parks that are little more than refuges for an urban overspill) can be responsible for soaring inner city crime is a suggestion that doesn't seem to hold water, or in any case would be nigh on impossible to prove one way or the other. How do you correlate someone's urge to rob a corner shop with the style of the local housing? Did he rob the grocer because his building wasn't designed by Gaudi?

[Gurtler Mathieuz]

I am writing a response as a German artist-designer living in Britain for the first time. Is there a better way to design your communities that doesn't create so much offence? If people must live in such awful conditions then they will have a natural tendency to revolt over their surroundings. I have been living in east London and have interest to hear from other residents about the design of the area. It is worse than Berlin and I am not surprised to know the crime here is higher !