Angela Connelly

Catalyst : reimagining sustainability with and through fine art

How might we begin to explore the concept of the “sustainable city” in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable.

Insurance as maladaptation: Resilience and the 'business as usual' paradox

Insurance and compensation are cited as critical elements of resilience to natural and non-natural hazards alike. As a strategy of risk management, it emphasises peace of mind, financial recompense and the swift restoration of a ‘business as usual’ status for civil, social and commercial life. Yet despite the contribution of insurance to risk management, the synergies with progressive or adaptive articulations of resilience are not sufficiently explicated. This paper explores the fundamental contradictions of insurance as a form of resilience through a study of flood risk management. It demonstrates how insurance regimes serve to structurally embed risky behaviour and inhibit change after detrimental events. As such, transformative interpretations of resilience conflict with the long-standing principles and operational norms of insurance that privilege normality. The paper concludes that, despite its currency within resilience discourses, insurance is maladaptive and that insurance regimes reinforce exposure and vulnerability through underwriting a return to the ‘status-quo’ rather than enabling adaptive behaviour.

You want me to do what? Teach a studio class to seventy students?

Abstract Amidst widespread recognition of the need to enhance the student experience, built environment educators are facing increased pressure on their time and resources for teaching. Studio-based education, in which students apply ideas to a real site, has been seen as key to a well-rounded education in the built environment and planning professions. At the same time, traditional methods require a high degree of tutor time to be spent with students, which is increasingly impractical given resource constraints and increased class sizes. Drawing on research exploring the challenges posed by sustainable development and participatory processes in ecological planning, a core second year studio-based module at The University of Manchester was re-designed so as to meet these challenges. Key elements of the redesign include: use of the hands-on toolkit, Ketso, for creative thinking and synthesis of ideas within and across groups; mapping and layered spatial analysis; simulating aspects of community consultation, without directly contacting the community; effective use of Graduate Teaching Assistant time in giving feedback and assistance to students; and including an individual reflective learning journal as part of the assessment. The innovations trialled in this module enable an interactive studio experience with a high degree of feedback to be created for large classes. Feedback from students has been very positive. The innovations in the module re-design described in this paper jointly won the 2011 Excellence in Teaching Prize of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).

Continuity and Adaptation: Archway Central Hall, 1934–2010

Abstract Around one-third of Methodist Central Halls were located in Greater London. They catered for religious worship as well as providing community spaces in a programme of activities that drew on both sacred and secular references. Yet they are entirely neglected in the academic literature. Archway Central Hall is one of the few remaining examples of the Methodist Central Halls built throughout the capital in the early twentieth century that also remains in use as a place of worship. Drawing upon approaches to the study of buildings that emphasize the fluid networks that comprise them, as well as recent scholarship into geographies of religion, this article presents a detailed case study of its genesis and evolution. In doing so, the study contributes to this scholarship by setting the building within its wider context and considers how the structure and its users have adapted to changing social, cultural, and environmental circumstances.

The working-class suburb: social change on an English Council Estate, 1930–2010

tary and civilian shelters, as well as the destructive consequences of the Atlantic Wall. Its construction as a vast militarized zone resulted in the erasure, especially in The Hague, of whole sections of Dutch built and social landscape. The text is well illustrated by survey drawings and archival images. As documents of destruction, the latter can be harrowing, particularly those which concern the condition of the population in the face of such violence: underground, in the cages of Morrison shelters, scurrying for shelter, or simply dead – poisoned by gases, or charred and shrunken. The latter, as Bosma explains, was one of the characteristics of the furnace-like conflagrations of Hamburg, and elsewhere. Whatever the local tactics to provide shelter were – and there are portrayals of both underground and above-ground interventions – the basic strategy for dealing with the ever-increasing firepower of aerial bombing involved the accumulation of blast-absorbing mass: in earth, concrete or both. But the story of air raid protection was never merely the pure confrontation between the technology of ordnance and thickened architecture. In all the countries described in the book, shelter was dependent on other social, economic, and political factors. Total warfare requires the supply of armaments a priori, and the limitations of remaining materials meant that provision of shelter was often at best ad hoc, materially inadequate or exclusive to particular groups, such as the occupiers in the Netherlands or members of the Nazi party in Germany. Towards the beginning of Shelter City, Bosma cites Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from Underground (1864), where the Russian author compares his domicile, a cellar, with another building in the same city, a ‘Palace of Crystal’. The detailed studies represented in Bosma’s book – outlining the pervasive impact of war on the built environment – reinforce the notion, suggested by Dostoevsky’s examples, that the underground bunker, couched in tons of concrete, is as emblematic of architectural modernity as the department store, the great exhibition, the skyscraper, or machine-like domestic spaces advocated by Le Corbusier. Shelter City is probably more than one book. There are inconsistencies in approach between the more generalized discursive writing on Britain, Germany, and elsewhere, and the closer reading of sites and phenomena in the Netherlands. The impacts on their apparent relevance to each other. Finally, the continual reiteration of the term ‘Shelter City’ throughout the work represents an unnecessary insistence while the titling of a chapter ‘Gimme Shelter’ lends an unfortunate glibness to a thorough, scholarly, and, at times, poignant piece of research.

A pool of Bethesda: Manchester's first Wesleyan Methodist Central Hall

Methodist Central Halls were built in most British towns and cities. They were designed not to look like churches in order to appeal to the working classes. Entirely multi-functional, they provided room for concerts, plays, film shows and social work alongside ordinary worship. Some contained shops in order to pay for the future upkeep of the building. The prototype for this programme was provided in Manchester and opened on Oldham Street in 1886. This article offers a first analysis of it as a building type and looks at the wider social and cultural contribution of the building. It continues the narrative by discussing changing use and design during a twentieth century that witnessed the widespread contraction of Methodist congregations.