johnbinghamhall

[johnbinghamhall]

I was invited by Amica Dall of Assemble to co-lead a weekly residential module at Cittadellarte in Biella, Italy. The programme was part of Fondazione Pistoletto’s UNIDEE (University of Ideas) and took the form of a week-long iterative design inspired by the parlour game Extraordinary Cockroaches, deriving meaning, encoding it, passing it on, and reforming it. 

Documentation and write-up of the week can be found here.

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Visualising Social Media in a Community

Along with creative developer Jimmy Tidey, I was invited to produce a visual essay for Visual Communications journal, looking at the means we’ve been developing to represent hyperlocal media geographically. 

This image shows the density of locations mentioned on the hyperlocal blog Brockley Central over a year, overlaid with a map of streets that show darker the more accessible they are from Brockley station. It shows how spatial and media data can be combined to reveal that the production of locality online and through urban morphology are closely related. 

Read it in full here

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Can We Design the Conditions for Culture?

As part of my work at Theatrum Mundi I have been convening a series of workshops bringing architects and urbanists together with artists from different realms of cultural production: performance, making, and the virtual. 

The aim has been to respond to issues raised by the Mayor of London’s plan to develop a Cultural Infrastructure Strategy, guiding the use of the planning system to support the arts in London, by asking: can we design the conditions for culture?; and how do different art forms relate to space?

50 fantastic artists, performers, scholars, architects and activists took part. Read on to find out more.

Theatrum Mundi is bringing together three expert round tables to debate issues raised by Sadiq Khan’s plans to create a Cultural Infrastructure 2030 plan for London, asking if and how we can design the conditions for culture.

There is no doubt that this is a critical time for the future of the arts and creative industries in London. However, we must also ask questions beyond the necessity for arts spaces. What kinds of urban activities can be seen as culture, and which should be included in planning for provision? Along with cultures generating visitors and economic value, how should commercially unproductive cultures, or ones without audiences, be provided for? Beyond economics, what other benefits does cultural infrastructure bring to the city? What kinds of value are artists expected to create, and what do they get in return? What is special about spaces for culture and the conditions they create, beyond spaces for other types of production and gathering?

It has been well recognised that artists’ studios, live music venues, and so on, must be protected. In these discussions we would like to ask artists to think more widely about the urban conditions that facilitate the development of cultures, and to ask architects and planners whether those conditions be designed. With these questions, and others, in mind, we are hosting three discussions bringing makers of culture together with makers of cultural infrastructure.

Infrastructures of Performance 27th October 2016 Siobhan Davies Studios, 85 St George’s Road SE1 Performance is by its nature temporary, and is focused on the body, meaning it is mobile and does not always leave a trace. In theory, then, everywhere could be an infrastructure for performance, but beyond the stage what else in the city enables performance to be made, and by whom?

Provocations: Orlando Gough; John Bingham-Hall; Siobhan Davies; Efrosini Protopapa

Infrastructures of Making 10th November 2016 The Triangle, SPACE Studios, 129 – 131 Mare Street E8 The makers of objects require stable, safe spaces to protect the tools and products of their labour, and are therefore implicated in the politics of the places they inhabit. Is there a special kind of space required for ‘cultural’ making, and does it add anything to places that manufacturing cannot? What if instead of artist’s studios we built factories?

Provocations: Katriona Beales; Richard Sennett; Anna Harding; Deborah Saunt & David Hills

Infrastructures of the Virtual 15th December 2016 The Trampery, 239 Old St, London EC1V Virtual cultural artefacts – texts, designs, illustrations, and so on – can be produced and viewed anywhere, meaning their makers are often extremely mobile. Should there be special places in the city for virtual culture or does it need a new kind of planning for infrastructure everywhere?

Provocations: Shumi Bose; Tom Keene; Adam Kaasa; Alice Honor Gavin

Participants

Richard Wentworth Artist

Anna Harding Director, Space Studios

Edwin Heathcote Architecture Critic, Financial Times

Richard Sennett Professor of Sociology, LSE

Adam Kaasa Director, Theatrum Mundi

Deborah Saunt Architect, DSDHA

David Hills Architect, DSDHA

George Henry Longly Artist

Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad Artist

Stefania Donini Doctoral Researcher, Guildhall School & Barbican Centre

Adrian Lahoud Dean, RCA Architecture

Wilf Langridge Senior Cultural Strategy Officer, GLA

Henry Ward Head of Education, Freelands Foundation

Katriona Beales Artist

Emmanuel Balogun Writer & Filmmaker, Visual Ideation

Kathrin Böhm Artist

Rachel Causer Artist

Karen Davies Artist, Artist Development Manager, Space Studios

Florence Magee Head of Artist Development, Space Studios

Philippe Castaing Community Director, Peckham Levels

Eleanor Lakelin Maker

Will Jennings Artist, Activist

Lauren Wright Programme Director, Siobhan Davies Studio

Marianne Forrest Artist, Director, Auto Italia South East

Sarah Wigglesworth Architect, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects

Siobhan Davies Choreographer

Susanna Eastburn Director, Sound and Music

Michael Keith Director, University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy and Society

Mel Dodd Programme Director, CSM MA Architecture

Robert Ames Conductor, London Contemporary Orchestra

Efrosini Protopapa Choreographer & Scholar, University of Roehampton

Orlando Gough Composer

Sean Gregory Composer, Director of Creative Learning, Guildhall School & Barbican Centre

Helen Frosi (Freelance) Artist-Producer, Founder, SoundFjord

John Sloboda Research Professor, Guildhall School

Brian Brady Head of Theatre Programme, Trinity Laban

Katye Coe Dance Artist, Senior Lecturer in Dance, Coventry University

Teal Triggs Associate Dean & Professor of Graphic Design, RCA School of Communication

Richard Martin Curator, Public Programmes, Tate Visiting Lecturer, King’s College London

Alice Honor Gavin Lecturer in Fiction & Writing, Sheffield Writer (Fiction & Creative Criticism)

Shumi Bose Co-founder, REAL Review Senior Lecturer, CSM BA Architecture

Justinien Tribillon Writer, Editor, Migrant Journal

Jordan Rowe Centre Manager, UCL Urban Lab

John Davies Research Fellow, Nesta

Edward Saperia Founder, Newspeak House

Tom Keene Artist, Researcher, Activist

Matthias von Hartz Director, Berliner Festspiele

Will Mercer Head of Strategy, The Trampery

Molly Strauss Rachel Brain Larissa Heinisch MSc students City Design & Social Science, LSE

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Imagined Community and Networked Hyperlocal Publics

Lucy Bullivant invited me to write about my research on hyperlocal media in an article for Architectural Design. I drew on my PhD and added in some media history to reflect on the way the spatial distribution of the infrastructure of communication networks turns physical space into cultural territory, and argued that the importance of social media in neighbourhoods might be as much the way it enables people to imagine themselves as part of a group as any literal sense of connection to one another. Read it here 

[johnbinghamhall]

Through the Streets Darkly: strange communions of art at night

Art Night is a new annual contemporary arts festival that takes over a different part of London for one night each year. In 2016, in partnership with the ICA, it brought performance, installations, and video, to unusual spaces across the West End, including a disused platform at Charing Cross Underground station. 

I was invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book that’ll be launched alongside next year’s festival in Whitechapel, reflecting on the project. I wrote about the way Art Night re-oriented its audience to familiar streets by opening up thresholds that were usually impermeable, and how art has become so closely linked to a desire to consume the city through the exploration of territory.

[johnbinghamhall]

Public Art as a Function of Urbanism

In November 2015 Routledge published The Everyday Practice of Public Art, including a chapter I’ve written distilling my Master’s research on public sculpture in Lewisham. 

It used comparative spatial analysis to show in concrete terms how different typologies of urban space structured views and routes around the art objects, with fundamental implications for the kind of work they do independently of their aesthetic content. 

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Commoning and the Future of Cities

Last year I wrote an article on the potential for commoning as a new approach to conceiving of the relationship between citizens and shared space in the city, which has been published by the Government Office for Science Foresight Future of Cities project.

It was a reflection on both the background research I did for Theatrum Mundi’s Designing the Urban Commons competition, and the best ideas that came out of the entries we received. The competition was fantastic, but also raised serious questions about the degree to which design could ever have a role in the creation of real commons.

Have a read for a critical take on the fantastic opportunities and also limitations of commoning as a framework for thinking about the productive, collective use of urban space.

[johnbinghamhall]

Connected or Informed?

The first article from my PhD work on hyperlocal media in Brockley has been published in the wonderful (the reason it’s wonderful is because unlike so many journals it is free for everyone - academics and non-academics alike - to read and download all its articles) Big Data and Society .

Looking at the most popular community Twitter feed in Brockley I ask whether the network it creates can be thought of as a way for people to connect to one another socially, or more of a way for local news to be broadcast.

This fits into my wider interest in the way that public life is played out in cities, and my working conclusion here is that people don’t necessarily need to be in direct contact with those that live around them to experience themselves as part of civic life. What’s important for people is to be informed and have an awareness that they are sharing in the same information and the same stories as those that live around them.

[johnbinghamhall]

Designing the Urban Commons

Since January this year I have been working with Richard Sennett on his project Theatrum Mundi, a network of artists, performers and urbanists and a platform for discussion about public and cultural space in the city. As part of this I have spearheaded an ideas competition asking for spaces in London to be re-imagined as “urban commons” - places for co-production, sharing and collective ownership. 

It was a very challenging project; as I learned through researching the topic the powerful economic and social ideology of commoning cannot be distilled simply into design. It has three essential parts: a resource or asset to be commoned, the social process and organisational work of commoning, and the space in which commoning takes place. Which one of these is the common itself? Our brief had to be specific enough to bring about tangible designs that could show how commons could be built into the city, as well as open enough not to narrow the focus of commoning to simply an aesthetic design for public space. We also learned the critical difference between public and common, which is explored more by competition jury member Justin McGuirk in a Guardian Cities article that emerged out of this project.

The 10 winning submissions to the competition featured in an exhibition shown in both the London Festival of Architecture and Make City Berlin. As part of a programme of public events exploring the themes of the competition I also put together a panel discussion at LSE and lectures by Massimo de Angelis and Ash Amin. The lively discussions stimulated by this project are set to continue.

Image by Catarina Heeckt

[johnbinghamhall]

Deptford Land Use

On behalf of Anthology London, who are currently drawing up plans for the Arklow Road Trading Estate in SE14, I had a look around Deptford to see what amenities there are and where there are gaps that could be addressed by new developments.

Using a lovely base map from the Ordnance Survey I plotted non-residential ground floor building uses in some nice colours to create an easy visualisation of the spread of spaces for education, retail, culture, catering, industry and so on. The map was used as part of a public exhibition at Deptford Lounge and Harts Lane Studios inviting people to share their hopes for the changes taking place at Arklow Road.

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Kings Cross Filling Station

In 2012 and 2013 I commissioned and produced a free public cultural program at King's Cross Filling Station (KXFS).

KXFS is a high profile, meanwhile use project key to placemaking for the King's Cross Central development. It transformed an ex-petrol station into a social and cultural space, with a RIBA award winning design by architects Carmoady Groarke.

The program gave me the opportunity develop my Master's research in practice, exploring some innovative media to bring artworks and events to a public space and work with various fundings models including corporate sponsorship, developer sponsorship, and working collaboratively with arts organisations using their funds for offsite projects.

Highlights of the program included the Canal Commission which made a floating light work by projecting a commissioned animation by artist Max Hattler onto a giant water screen in the adjacent canal

and the Electric Xmas Tree, a giant technological Christmas Tree created by star set desgner Gary Card using parts from sponsors Vauxhall Motors' new electric car the Ampera

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How Now Sound City

Recently I was lucky enough to be asked by the newly relaunched Journal of the London Society to write an article for their inaugural issue. It was a privilege to feature alongside some people I have a lot of respect for including Adam Greenfield and Dan Hill. For the article I revisited research I did during my undergraduate music degree at Goldsmiths, investigating approaches to working with sound in public space. The Journal is available for members only (well worth joining) but you can read the text of the article below

Kyle Platts original illustration (C) Journal of the London Society

How now sound city?

John Bingham-Hall Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

 A decade ago, Ken Livingstone, as the Mayor of London, put forward an unusual proposition: a dedicated strategy to incorporate urban sound into City Hall’s planning decisions. The report, Sounder City, had a remit to address sounds in Londons ranging from aircraft noise to raucous neighbours to idiosyncratic neighbourhood ‘soundmarks’. It was the first strategy of its kind, and still remains unique – a time capsule of how London’s acoustic (that most marginal of urban aesthetics) was then, momentarily, duly considered.  

 As anyone who has reported a late night party to a local council will know, action on noise pollution is nothing new. Where Livingstone’s ‘Noise Team’ (Max Dixon and Alan Bloomfield) went further was to define sound as of something of cultural value. They spoke of ‘soundscapes’: understood in contemporary music circles but rare as an explicit concern in city building. The word was coined in the 1970s by R. Murray Schafer as part of his World Soundscape Project, which took stock of acoustic environments from across the globe, categorised them and identified imbalances with implications for human and animal health. In his 1977 manifesto The Tuning of the World, Schafer described sound as something “mythological”: a pre-literate medium “from the beginnings of earthly presence” and a means of defining space “much more ancient than then establishment of property lines and fences”. Amongst those who have made it their work to further the aims of Schafer it is generally accepted that modern culture, with its focus on written over spoken communication, has an overwhelmingly visual bias. Unlike ‘property lines and fences’ that are inscribed visually on maps or in architecture and be enshrined in law, soundscapes have no edges and change constantly. So no wonder that, undoubtedly, the design and preservation of soundscape remains slippery to grasp and to cement as a value in the urban planning conscious.

 Nevertheless, Livingstone’s Noise Team followed in Schafer’s footsteps, not only looking for ways to identify London’s different sounds, but also with a view to balance the soundscape, and enhance it to create a more attractive environment. Noise pollution mapping was already standard practice in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Sounder City took a step further by recognizing soundscape as part of the city’s distinctive historical character. It aimed to identify individual sounds that shape London’s unique acoustic. Canals and waterways stood out as a starting point as places of quiet compared to the traffic-clogged streets but also as home to the idiosyncratic sounds of locks, boats, wildlife, and moving water. Church bells, wind in trees and reverberant spaces such as railway arches and street arcades were also cherry-picked as soundmarks ripe for documentation and protection. The strategy went so far as to propose designating “Areas of Relative Tranquility or Special Soundscape Interest” for the most valuable of London’s sound environments.

 Sounder City argued for the conscious design of new acoustic experiences. Whilst private homes should be protected from noise, public spaces were thought of as places to be animated with “sequences of soundscapes characterised by diversity and special local interest”. They called for design that “pleases the ear as well as the eye”. But the ear and the eye are not always in cooperation. Many visually attractive building materials are sound reflecting, on top of which materials designed for their acoustic qualities are in short supply. In our visually oriented culture, where urban design is most often judged in a professional context through the camera lens rather than immersive multi-sensory experience, looks are bound to win out.

 So who is listening to London today? The 2011 London Plan makes fleeting reference to Livingstone’s vision for a well-tuned urban acoustic but dismisses the possibility of formal soundscape designation. It refers to the value of quietness but loses the focus on sound’s positive cultural contribution – and, so other groups and institutions have picked up that slack. Also in 2011, the British Library created the UK Soundmap with 350 members of the public uploading some 2,000 recordings. A quick glance suggests that that it’s not tranquil waterways that inspire amateur phonographers, but busy train stations, revving bus engines and rain on pretty much anything. These things Londoners are accustomed to, but perhaps we should also think of these “noisy” sounds as part of the energy of city life.

 Another collection of sounds, The London Sound Survey, painstakingly curates amateur and professional recordings and explores fascinating ways of examining their relationship to the city through scores of maps. In one, London’s canals and lesser rivers are represented in the style of the tube map with over 100 recordings taken at bridges, basins, locks and creeks marked out as stops along their routes. Not all sounds are ambient backdrops to the city’s visual aesthetic though; some also compel us. The London Sound Survey includes sound actions - “sounds designed to have an effect on others” – like the calls of markets traders, fundraisers, protesters and street entertainers. The soundscape of street voices, shaped by accents, languages and social practices, varies from one neighbourhood to the next and forms the acoustic evidence of social makeup. As such, local soundscapes are directly affected by powerful social forces – new immigration, and displacement from rent increases – population dynamics that can move much faster than changes to the built environment. What’s more, not all the sounds London has heard are still audible today. Unlike visual artefacts, writing and art that can be preserved on paper, or music that can be recreated through performance, there is a past that predates audio recording – a past that cannot be revisited.

In attempt to compensate for this, The London Sound Survey collects descriptions of sound from the last 1,000 years of London literature, news and personal account. The most common reference? “Ambient sounds of street and town”. The everyday noise of city life seems always to have inspired listening, though its quality is constantly changing. The rattling of wooden wheels on cobbles features regularly in these historical accounts, but has now been usurped by the internal combustion engine. Technology has always fundamentally reshaped our urban sound environment, and does so again as the fuel cell silences traffic: will this mean the more subtle acoustic nuances of social interaction, wildlife and building material can come back to the fore?

 The London Sound Survey is just the most prolific of a raft of projects making use of web technology to create publicly-sourced and accessible sound archives. The University of Salford’s Sound Around You project allows anybody to upload to its sound map, aiming to inform urban planners and homebuyers as they research urban areas. For Your Favourite London Sounds, Peter Cusack polled the London public and released a CD of the soundscape top 40 alongside a (now defunct) online map. Once again the prosaic sounds of train stations, markets and busy streets fared well. Through technology, the public has done the job Ken Livingstone wanted doing 10 years ago: the exploration and identification of soundscapes that make London unique.

 Sound mapping means we have a rich description of the relationship between sounds and the geography of the city. However, the rich potential of online resources to be exploited by architects and City Hall – for soundscape preservation or enhancement projects – goes unrealised, leaving them marginal interest sites for academics and amateur phonographers. To promote listening as a public activity – perhaps “site-hearing” to go hand-in-hand with sightseeing – this exploration of sound would need to be brought into the public spaces of the city itself, where it can be chanced upon by a wide audience. Specialist groups like London College of Communication’s Creative Research in Sonic Arts Practice project and Goldsmiths College’s Unit for Sound Practice Research occasionally promote “soundwalks”, guiding members of the public on an acoustic tour. Susan Phillipsz’s 2010 installation A Song Cycle for the City of London highlighted the “eerie quiet” of architecture in the Square Mile outside of business hours as “her unaccompanied voice resonated through empty streets around the Bank of England, across post-war walkways and medieval alleyways”. Beyond this though, no developments or permanent public projects have made soundscape a central feature.

Is sound perhaps too ephemeral and irrational to be a deep consideration in planning policy, as Livingstone would have had it? Whilst the look of the city can be literally set in stone through urban design, sound is less easy to control – especially in the public realm. By attempting to design the soundscape of the city we risk cleansing this most anarchic of urban sensory experiences of its richness and presenting an idealised version of urban tranquillity, or rigidly offering a provision of space for noise. Sound should no doubt be a consideration, and no doubt recorded for posterity, but life in a city may always mean learning to listen to and love all its noise and its sound.

[johnbinghamhall]

Spatialising Social Media Networks

As part of my PhD research I've been looking into ways to represent hyperlocal Twitter networks like the community of followers of Brockley Central. 

With the help of UCL colleague Steven Law, we created a network map of following relationships between all of Brockley Central's followers. We found out that a very few profiles account for a large number of the connections. A few local big players like businesses and journalists dominate the Twitter scene while the vast majority of individual residents have very few followers within the local network. 

As we explored this further we started to look into the location of these big players. Using network software Gephi we analysed the network to see how it naturally concentrates into clusters of following that in network science terms are thought of as modularity classes or "communities". For the 300 most connected profiles in Brockley Central's network we assigned them a latitude and longitude wherever possible, for example for businesses that have a specific location. Once we added in the community cluster data (as separate colours) and the number of connections (as size) for each location we saw some interesting results. The network communities, which as a reminder are determined purely as concentrations of interconnection on Twitter, were also geographic communities concentrated in places like Deptford & New Cross, and Peckham & Nunhead. Furthermore the profiles along Brockley Road (in pink) tended to be the most popular ones, presumably as they are the most visible in Brockley's focal public spaces (except for local Twitter behemoths Brockley Market).

This research was recently presented in full at Social Media and Society 14 and is hopefully to be published later this year.

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Architecture and Food

In 2011 I planned and led a walk for Fox & Squirrel exploring the relationship between London's architecture & food culture. You can read about the whole walk on Wallpaper magazine.

It took in a backstage tour of Smithfield Market, coffee demo at Prufrock, guerrilla outdoor dining and a dinner & talk at architect-run restaurant 6 St Chad's Place. 

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Cartography: Nike+ FuelMap

I was commissioned by Nike to create a map of London that translates the tube lines into overground walking routes and tracks the amount of Nike Fuel that can be collected by wearing their Nike+ FuelBand.

I planned and walked routes between every tube stop in zone 1 and brought in collaborations with James Cheshire / Olly O'Brien of UCL CASA and designer David Luepschen to visualise a geographically-accurate data map. More about the project on Wallpaper.com

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On the search for space in the digital city

The Smart/Future City discourse opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities for technologically-mediated forms of experience and social organisation. However, newness can often be over-blown, favouring radically transformative experiences of space and transmutations into the so-called digital realm. In this article, written for the UCL Urban Lab's inaugural Urban Pamhleteer I attempt to address from a first-hand perspective the  experience of using technology in concrete urban space and argue for the enduring importance of a stable notion of spatiality in future urban design.

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Stillspots: a series of almost entirely still urban scenes animated by their distinct soundscapes, drawing attention to the way sound can fill the static visual architectural forms of the city