PLACING | writing place | place writing by Linda Carroli

Abstract Placing is a cultural writing project initiated in 2008 with funding from the Australia Councils Visual Arts Board. Placing is a critical and cultural exploration of place, writing place and place writing. The project has resulted in electronic writings and publications addressing the intersection of cultural and urban life. The objective of the project is to draw out emerging and changing ideas about urban environments with a particular emphasis on the role artists, designers, planners, architects and other urbanists can play as changemakers or changescapers. This paper engages themes from the project through the presentation of fragments from writing to reflect on the relationship between writing, design and place.

PLACING | writing place | place writing

BEGIN The Placing project is an ongoing critical and cultural exploration of place, writing place and place writing in the face of mounting need for change in the way we design, plan, create and live. I started work on the project in 2008 with funding from the Australia Councils Visual Arts Board. The project engages broad questions about city-making (poiesis) and dwelling (oikos) as well as ideas about care. In his TED lecture, James Howard Kunstler observed that many of Americas public spaces are not worth caring about and that the places that have been built have deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present.1 We dont have to look very far in Australia, particularly our suburbs, to see environments afflicted by a lack of care. Caring, for me, is an important idea to carry into our thinking about dwelling and city-making, and into practices of writing place. In this respect, I am referring to care, in the sense of cultivate and curate care-taking. In Sprawltown: Looking for the city on its edges, Richard Ingersoll discusses synoikismos as an ancient process of citymaking which involves agreeing to live together in dialogue.2 Writing and conversation are vital for establishing that process. In developing Placing, I started looking around and talking to people about options and alternatives for our cities and communities and this idea of synoikismos was a springboard for considering other ways of telling stories and of shaping narrative in and of the city.3 Placing considers both practices of place and practices of writing place both those of my own and those of others. Place is both a noun and a verb. This prompts an inquiry of place as something we do; something that is beyond placemaking and beyond the confines of single professions or disciplines. If place is something we do, then it is realised in or as our practices of place including those practices of writing place and place writing. Where and how we live is captured in our acts of representation as John Rennie Short says, space is turned into place through acts of discursive representation4 and place has particularity through our acts of description and evaluation. Short points out that regimes of representation can, sometimes, result in the foreclosure of alternatives. I note these can manifest in reductionist sloganeering rather than potent aphorism. Where do ideas of creative city or sustainable city sit for you? As Short says, who can argue with those powerful representations of urban renewal and revitalisation as life saving surgery? Now, as the shifting geographies of globalisation overwrite our cities imposing other images and imaginations, our private and collective acts of reading and writing the city seem more pressing almost begging for those alternative stories and gestures to emerge. This paper is comprised of several fragments extracted and rewritten from the Placing Project weblog, PlaceBlog.5

PLACING | writing place | place writing

ONE | RELOCATION

Several years ago, my partner and I relocated to the outer northern suburbs of Brisbane to live closer to my aging mother. Ive found it to be a fraught environment and I have fought with it, struggled against it. Ive tried to find and create ethical moments in what I consider to be an unethical environment. During this time, largely as a result of this experience, I was moved to commence postgraduate studies in urban planning and design. My local area bears all the hallmarks of outer suburban development characteristic of sprawl. During my studies, I had taken to reading course related material on my bus journey to work. Between reading descriptions of unhealthy sprawling environments in my textbooks, I would catch glimpses of it out the bus window. Can I imagine of write a future beyond this, other than this? So in the face of this question, my work is increasingly concerned with and engaged with suburban communities and lives in a broader context of culture, sustainability and resilience. This is the sort of environment that evokes quite starkly Tony Frys ideas of ontological design i.e. we design a place or a thing and that place or thing designs us. In suburban environments, we are designed as car dependent consumers fuelling a wasteful culture and economy of vapid consumption. In that circuit, we are ever more exploited and our resources are ever more exploited. In The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari proposes that we need to pay attention to our mental and social ecologies.6 In that work, he provides the example of a patient who spends all their days walking around in circles habitually reproducing their disorder until, one day, they do something else. That something else isnt a distraction; it is compellingly another course, another pathway, a rupture in the reproduction of the disorder. This, of course, doesnt mean that the disorder no longer exists there are other matters in the ecology of mind to consider. If we take care about how we are to live, then we also need to take care in how we design and build how we make. This means being cognisant of the relationship between design (designare) and designation, which has some specific inferences in terms of land use and the making of the suburbs and which, drawing on Paul Carter, alludes to ungroundedness and the application of moral hierarchies like suburban and urban. Carter states that we only appreciate the ground or the land only in so far as it bows down to our will. 7

PLACING | writing place | place writing

TWO | WRITING

3 Ive worked predominantly as a journalist or rather in a mode that is journalistic concerned with the middle ground, the documentary or the report and the interrogation of circumstances. For me, journalists are gleaners they map issues and current affairs in order to rearrange and tell various kinds of stories and elicit various kinds of responses. So I endeavour to bring a more interdisciplinary mode of thinking to my work and thinking in any of those fields. I am wary of evoking any particular professional identity, preferring instead to chart agency as a more trajective relationship between identity and practice. However, I have considered and do consider - that writing, even journalism, can be a built environment practice, especially when engaged in solutions-based processes and advocacy. It creates environments by marking, drafting, designing, mapping and narrating. It can also be a type of caring; it can elicit caring. It is a kind of caretaking (perhaps more obviously recognisable in historic relationships between our newspapers and cities). On reading a piece by Andrew Blum titled In Praise of Slowness: Thoughts on writing about the future of the city, I was struck by his comment, whats obvious is that the city is slow and we write too fast.8 Our writing overtakes, possibly overwrites the city. Does fast writing force the city to move too quickly, causing it to blur in some Virilioan fantasy? Or does writing mask slowness and incrementality? As Blum, an architecture journalist, notes how sharp the disconnect is between the immediacy required of journalism and the sheer evolutionary slowness of the city itself. As I re-read this piece, I am acutely aware of its structure as threaded thoughts where the writer self-consciously narrates an internal dialogue, drawing on other things hes read while trying to negotiate the possibilities of stories, buildings and cities. Its almost as if a journalism of the city is impossible: journalism is about today while the meaning of building in the city is in the future. Stories perish daily. In considering this and other points Blum raises, Id become aware of some currents encircling the idea of slow journalism, a proposition that draws on the Slow Food movement and means, according to Sasha Anawalt, that journalism is less mass-cultured and less celebrity-centred.9 A practice of slow journalism may not be like any kind of journalism weve seen before e.g. the

PLACING | writing place | place writing

narrative feature, languid prose or the investigative expose though these may certainly be part of it. We have new spaces and technologies to explore this idea and that, in part, is what the Placing project has set out to do through various social media platforms like blogging. It may mean something more fractured, assembled publicly and collaboratively over time, like the city itself. Stories in this sense can be finely grained and populated, like place itself, and the story of the story is alive. It impels us into the future. THREE | ENCOUNTER

Encounter is a word or an idea that I often return to and begin from. It is chance and happening; meeting and discovery; desire and hope. Encounter is a commencement of experience and revelation, of learning and exploration, of relationship and interpellation. My deep respect for this idea has filtered through my cultural writing and journalism for a long time. It came of reading Roland Barthes A Lovers Discourse and becoming entranced in the tremulous possibility of wonder: I am totally given over to this discovery (I tremble within it), to the point where any intense curiosity for someone encountered is more or less equivalent to love.10 The encounter is relational. It is a space an event, often fleeting a coming together of two or more things or elements, generally not pre-figured and with a generally indeterminate future. As if possessed by some strange aleatory conceit, I ordinarily write that which I experience in some way and that which I have had some cause to imagine beyond the encounter. Its not so much that I want to write myself into here, there or somewhere. The encounter becomes something other, something else. Rarely do I write of the encounter or the meeting itself, whether pleasurable or not. To encounter is to catalyse or to move, it is to conjure something anew or new. In the spaces of synoikismos, encounters abound and reverberate; through them taking care is potent. Recently, while walking along the main road, my partner and I were hassled by cars wanting to park on the footpath outside the big name franchise pizza shop. Its not the first time it happened and it was common for pedestrians to have to negotiate cars as they walked along here. There could often be six cars parked in this space rather than in car parks at the rear of the building or next to the building. This particular evening, as we walked, wed just had enough. The driver was particularly aggressive, a woman walking her dog had to walk on the main road (i.e. eight lane highway) to pass the parked cars and we had to walk single file to squeeze between them. A wheelchair or a pram probably couldnt get through. To walk in peace is a humble claim to make. So on returning home, I emailed the local Councillor to ask if anything could be done about it. I had in my mind that a combination of footpath improvement measures were in order: bollards, plantings, grassing etc, perhaps a shady tree or two, perhaps even a collaboration with the property owner to improve the streetscape, perhaps
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something that drew the community into the streets to participate. Even though the space is on a main road, it could be used and walked more comfortably. The more bearable it is, the more likely it is that people will walk. I was pleased when the Councillors office responded with a commitment that something would be done.

6 In a matter of weeks, a forest of 16 bare galvanised steel bollards was installed and that was it. While I thought, at the time, that it was better than nothing, I did feel that this small win for pedestrian safety was indeed a loss for urban design and community benefit. I then asked the Councillor if it was possible to paint the bollards, perhaps a community art project with local school children, just to have something happening at street level. It presented an opportunity to form some connections between the community and the physical/design of the space as a step, perhaps, to encouraging some kind of civic pride in our locality. However, Councils response was that it did not want the maintenance burden that painting the bollards would bring. It just goes to show how public works activity can degrade public and community spaces particularly in suburban areas where Council continually fails to invest in social and community life beyond the basics. 11 It reinscribes what Robin Boyd described in 1960 as the Australian ugliness12 and what we have come to experience as suburban degeneration while the urban is expensively regenerated. For me, that is a prevailing example of not caring, not caretaking.

PLACING | writing place | place writing

FOUR | UNSETTLEMENT

7 Imagine your grandmother and hold her image in your mind. There are quite a few retirement villages in this outer suburban world, clustered around the Aspley Hypermarket, yet severed from the surrounding landscape. While walking home from the bus stop, waiting to cross the main road, which at eight lanes wide can feel like a life and death undertaking. Ive crossed on the walk sign many times as cars whizzed by, oblivious to traffic signals and to me. Im not the only one: a white cross adorned with fabric flowers is staked into the traffic island, commemorating 15 year old Joline. Imagine your grandmother. An elderly woman paused beside me as I waited, then asked if she could walk across the road with me because its so wide. I was pleased to oblige and offered her my arm. So we chatted and she said that she had visited the doctor but wasnt sure of her way home. Where do you live, I asked her. And she replied with the name of her retirement village. As we stepped onto the road, I told her that I was sure that she needed to be travelling in the opposite direction. No, no, she said, its up there and she pointed in the direction that we were facing. So I suggested we ask at the pet shop on the other side of the road. There, they confirmed that the retirement village is located in the other direction. She was embarrassed and agitated, saying that she usually came out in the car. As I escorted her, I tried to be reassuring. It can happen to anyone, I told her as we returned across the road and headed to the next intersection where I suspected she might sight

PLACING | writing place | place writing

her destination unmissable next to the monolithic shopping centre set on its wide bitumen plane. After thanking me for my help, she turned away to walk safely home. Many elderly people are relocating or relocated to my local area, with little or no connection to the place, harbouring in the compressed walled or gated estates only to lose their way across the faceless terrain of roads and car parks, seeking refuge in cars because walking exposes frailty. Because there is both hope and fear in our current situation, I used the Placing project to search for paths, utterances and moments of hope. If that hope means the way we live has to change and so the way we plan, design and create - then the question is what are you/we/I prepared to change? The question was put during my participation in a series of seminars with Tony Fry on design futures.13 In a mix of poetry, philosophy, politics and performance, Fry situates alternative possibilities for design and the possibility of a future by design: he speaks of redirected practice and designing unnecessary or unsustainable things away. What I find most compelling about Frys commentaries is his assertion that the prevailing human condition in the current epoch is one of unsettlement. Increasingly, he says, individuals and communities will be ontologically insecure in the way and where they are. In large part, this unsettlement will result from climate change and weather events.14 If we are unsettled what does that mean for our sense of place, our relationship with the world and our connections to each other? How do we write place, how do we write for place how do we dwell, care and make? Is it another iterative experience of disengagement? In this seminar series, Fry asked, What will change you? In reflecting on the self, as practitioner or as someone who takes care, we begin to reflect on how things, more generally, are changed, where something different is brought into existence. For Fry, there is a need to change design and to change our understanding of design and reconsider how we might think, act, design and future for sustainment. He says, we dwell in our thinking and I think we also dwell in our writing, caring through it. I understand the idea of dwelling through the Greek oikos, which is the root for words like ecology, economy and ekistics. It tends to be translated as house or habitat. In terms of developing a rhetoric of sustainment, this idea of dwelling is pivotal. In addressing the words, the sound and image of sustainment, Fry points out that there is the danger of collapsing into rhetoric, into empty language. And we see this already in the various proclamations for sustainability (another process that Fry says produces more of the same i.e. sustaining the unsustainable). What are the statements we can make with and about art, architecture, urban design and planning that genuinely respond to social and ecological concerns and that genuinely create or design the future? For me, it means an emergent and disruptive rhetoric, an overwriting of criticisms and hegemonies that stubbornly resist change.

PLACING | writing place | place writing

STOP

8 Planning and design are about narrative as much as they are about form; about writing stories or scripts for the future. It involves writing place. There is no greater joy than being lost in the process of writing; to be immersed in every word and the spaces between them. So for me, if planning is one of those professions that tugs at a range of disciplines, including design, and if it casts lines across the past and future, then the range of storytelling opportunities and conversations has the breadth and depth of the landscape itself. In terms of the Placing project, this means looking at new kinds of practice based scenarios a different kind of ethos that is related to oikos and poiesis; care and design. So I am considering what stories I can or need to cast into the future. How will or can you be part of them? That is what writing place does.

PLACING | writing place | place writing

A walk around my suburb Photos: Linda Carroli Most days I go for a walk. The route I have plotted and now habitually follow around my suburb of Aspley, 12km north of Brisbane, follows Gympie Road and then across to Albany Creek Road, through some newish housing estates and then along a walking and cycling path through the park beside Little Cabbage Tree Creek. The photographs in this essay were taken during a walk on the morning of Saturday 5 February 2011. 1. Gympie Road at the bottom of my street 2. On the footpath next to Gympie Road 3. Aspley Hypermarket car park looking towards town centre 4. Walking and cycling path next to Little Cabbage Tree Creek 5. Barbeque in local park 6. Recently installed bollards on Gympie Road 7. Gympie Road 8. A family of ducks in Little Cabbage Tree Creek where it meets Albany Creek Road and the Aspley Hypermarket

1 James Howard Kunstler, James H Kunstler dissects suburbia. TED. May 2007, http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html (accessed 27 April 2010) 2 Richard Ingersoll, Sprawltown: Looking for the city on its edges. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 2006 3 The quality of our conversations is of concern to me as I work in private consulting and that much of my work is focused on community consultation and engagement about urban development. Its been pointed out to me that planners are often an early sign that a change is mooted for a locality; You know something is going down when the planners show up is how it was expressed to me. 4 John Rennie Short, Urban Imagineers: Boosterism and the Representation of Cities, The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later. New York: State University of New York Press. 1999. 38 5 Placing is at http://placing.wordpress.com 6 Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum. 2008, fp 2000 7 Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land. Melbourne: Faber & Faber. 1996, 2 8 Andrew Blum, In Praise of Slowness, Urban Omnibus. 21 January 2009, http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/01/inpraise-of-slowness (accessed 18 April 2010) 9 Sasha Anawalt, The Slow Journalism Movement -- heard of it?, ARTicles, 7 September 2008. http://www.najp.org/articles/2008/09/the-slow-journalism-movement-h.html (accessed 19 April 2010)

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Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, London: Penguin Books. 1990, fp 1979, 198-199

In response, I assailed those bollards with scavenged and found knitting. Others have joined in by wrapping streamers around the bollards. 12 Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness. Sydney: Penguin Books. 1980, c. 1960 13 See also Tony Fry, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Sydney: UNSW Press. 2009 14 This text was written before the flooding which struck 75% of Queensland in 2011. In Brisbane, 28,000 homes were affected by flooding. This was followed in February by a Category 5 tropical cyclone in Far North Queensland the worst in the states history which also resulted in widespread devastation of homes and communities.

PLACING | writing place | place writing

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