What time does this place start?
I enjoyed UD108’s topic of The Spaces in Between, dealing with those marginal spaces, often overlooked by planners and developers, but sustaining a wide range of vital human activities. The literature of placemaking usually concentrates instead on more formal urban locations. They have well-known names which appear on maps, and they are pretty much unchanging. If you went back there twenty years from now there might be a few details different but it would be recognisably the same place. Red Square, Times Square, Trafalgar Square….. public places, permanent places, fixed nodes in an urban landscape. The Urban Design Group’s The Good Place Guide is an admirable collection of such places. In his foreword to the book, John Worthington does mention the importance not only of formal space and material character, but also of experiential quality in the making of a good place; “…..memories of an event in a place or a feeling of well-being…..”. And while most of the photographs in the book are populated (several are eerily deserted like a de Chirico painting), they of course are all conventional permanent urban enclosures.
There is another kind of place, which would make a different book, in which the placemaking is temporary, created entirely by an event. The event is set up in a non-place, and for the duration of the event, its inhabitation by people, and the intense life they live there, creates a memorable place through a shared experience. Then the event ends, the people disperse, and the place ceases to be. In August I had two such memorable place-experiences. Firstly I went to Cropredy in Oxfordshire, to the annual Fairport Convention festival. For three days we sat in a field. For the rest of the year it is a totally unremarkable field among thousands. But for those three days, 20,000 of us, many bands, and a great variety of places to eat and drink, together created a distinctive place. We belonged there; it was our home, we all sang Meet on the Ledge. It had Lynchian paths, edges and sub-districts. But if I went back to Cropredy now, I might not even recognise the field. The place has gone.
Later in the month I went to the annual production of the wonderful Birmingham Opera Company, directed by Graham Vick. The company has a policy of not performing in theatres, but instead temporarily inhabiting a disused building, which it dresses for the occasion. This year it was doing Mozart’s Idomeneo, in an empty rubber factory in Ladywood. The audience hung about under a Belfast-trussed loading bay by the canal until the factory doors opened, and then filed in to the gaunt, lofty space punctuated by great steel stanchions. There are no seats; the audience occupied the space with the singers, actors and chorus, and walked about following the action; an earthen hill on one side, a platform with a big mirror over here, a big sacrificial table over there. Vick, in an old jumper, walked around among us, mouthing every line of song. For three hours or so, a few hundred people, joined together by an intense experience, transformed an old industrial building into a memorable public room.
After the final night’s performance, everyone walked out into the night excited and exhilarated. The next day the orchestra platform was dismantled, the lights unbolted, the big mirror removed, and driven away. Once more, just an empty, disused factory, nowhere special.
Joe Holyoak
Endpiece, Urban Design, Winter 2009, Issue 109