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’s User Not Found (2018). While Karen engages the participant through a standard app, User Not Found takes place in an actual café (that fulfils the role of stage and audience) and is narrated by an actor. Both the actor and participants share the same screen through mobile phones with a custom interface developed for the performance and provided by Dante or Die to each participant. It unfolds as a critique and reflection on our social media legacy, which uses social media as its main media form to relay the narrative. Karen and User Not Found demonstrate
folded into Bristol was folded into Leicester was folded in Wolverhampton was folded into London. And all these spaces were repeated over and again on television, social media, in newspapers; so this riot space is not only concrete, but also narrative, verbal, fictional and institutional. A space that 292 Destruction is remade each time we reperform and reproduce the riots through language, court sentences, documentaries and stories. The riots began with a specific set of circumstances in Tottenham – the shooting of Mark Duggan, the poor policehandling of a peaceful
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
reality, augmented reality, robotic technologies, Internet-enabled mobile phones, social media apps and cameras with laser scanning technology (LIDAR). The future machines conceptualised by performance art assemble these technologies with cultural references and speculative scenarios to imagine the future of urban living. These future machines – speculative and intangible as they may be – are important probes to think about the ethical, social and spatial consequences of emerging technologies. Online virtual worlds, social media and data-mining coupled with vast
Manchester: Something rich and strange Sculpture – Natalie Bradbury In the summer of 2018, a swarm of giant bees appeared across Manchester. Sponsored by organisations and businesses and decorated by artists, schools and community groups, the Bee in the City sculptures took the city symbol of Manchester – newly prominent in the public consciousness in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bomb attack – and combined it with visual imagery from Manchester’s sporting, political and cultural heritage (see ‘Bee’, p. 285). For months, social media feeds were full of
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.
, which refers to informal networks and the sense of belonging (Wallace et al., 2017 ). Putnam ( 2000 ) included this in his definition, but he did not take participation through the Internet and social media into account. Johansen and Fisker ( 2020 ) found that social media does not alter how interaction in rural communities unfolds but rather that it is being used in the same
. Diamandis , P.H. , and S. Kotler ( 2015 ) Abundance: The Future Is Better than You Think . New York : Free Press . Fuchs , C. ( 2014 ) Social Media: A Critical Introduction . London : Sage . Galloway , A. ( 2004 ) Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralisation . Cambridge
harbour arm), with work beginning on site the following Monday and the first refugees arriving, remarkably, just a week after that. The fact that the residents would be free to come and go as they pleased (albeit with a voluntary 10 p.m. curfew and signing-in scheme) raised local hackles. Social media was abuzz with rumour and anxieties about the possible security implications of housing asylum seekers in the town. A decade or so before, I had listened to and read the objections of villagers in Newton, Nottinghamshire, faced with the prospect of a local ex-RAF base