Just received a mail from someone I came into contact with during the Bristol Ideas Festival, on his relaunched Street Party project. It’s a simple idea, but Chris executes it very well. Here’s the blurb for the umbrella site:
Streets Alive is a charitable group which promotes culturally thriving communities through traffic-free street events.
We have been working with residents and councils on street parties in the UK since 2001. We think street parties are an important way of developing neighbourliness as well as a rare chance to enjoy their street without traffic for a day.
Our vision is to make street parties widespread and a regular part of life. We are doing this by promoting best practice with communities, the media and councils.
There’s a very succinct video of one event in Bristol, and a deep cache of supplementary material, services, and methodologies. The evident joy, commitment and self-empowerment of Gittens’ street-party-goers is one route to a more playful public sphere. I’ve been contacted by a number of these ‘convivial activists’ over the years – most recently the people behind Brisbane Kids Markets, but also the social gaming of Bernie De Koven (Junkyard Games), as well as many others I’m planning to dig out of my e-mail accounts.
In London this weekend, the extended family and I went to a street event on a much grander (though arguably, less effective) scale...
The Sultan’s Elephant was a city-centre street-theatre event by Royal De Luxe, a French arts group. Within a whimsical fantasy narrative of a
little girl and her fevered imaginings, the streets around Trafalgar
Square and the Mall were disrupted and transformed by giant
marionettes, cars sewn into the pavement (see my camera phone clip (Quicktime, about 1.5 Mg) with the boys commentating, using their own 'granny' riff), and a giant
spaceship crash-landed into the Royal Guardsmen’s Square.
Unfortunately, on the Saturday we went, it was bucketing down, so the schedule for events slipped very badly. I was also annoyed that there was so much reliance on a sense of derive (as the situationists put it), or drift, in terms of encountering the artworks themselves. Yeah, I get the psychogeographic theory – but if you’ve trailed kids in on a wet afternoon, you want a handy street map with obvious icons, not some subtle hints in a dense short story in a badly distributed pseudo-newspaper (called the Elephant Times, I think).
Add this to the Joga Bonita event we toddled along to a few weeks ago, and it’s clear that someone in Mayor Ken’s administration has been reading their Illich and Bakhtin, and aims to turn London into a convivial urban playground (at least at the weekends). I’m all for it, and more power to it. Even though the Sultan event was quite badly organised and mediated – for what would be quite some expense, I’d imagine – it would be a shame if the London authorities lost their nerve over this. At least until the next terror attack, events like this give this great city back to its citizens (or at least give them the feeling of what that might be like).
Is it a domestication of the kinds of activist carnival that typified the anti-globalisation protests of the late nineties and early oughties? Yes, undoubtedly. But what should the system's response to emergent, street-level protest be? Panoptical security is surely one way to spend the tax dollars. Trying to build up the sense of civic attachment to the fabric of a city through gratuitous, open public events, with a combination of spectacle and participation, is another.
Recent Comments