Happy? Unhappy?

Critical Interrogation of Practise

Video: 6'50"

Background

The current representation of urban life is framed by contradictions. On the one hand cities are said to be stressful and
alienating and given the choice many choose to retreat to the suburbs or minimise human contact by the use of personal
technology (Bull 2000). On the other, cities are seen as dynamic and creative with the interaction of cultures making
complacency impossible (Sennett 1988, Rogers 1997). From this viewpoint urban life is a catalyst for new ideas and fashions.
From a global perspective the economic ambitions of rural migrants and the attempt to preserve those ‘natural’ spaces
that remain suggest that urban development will inevitably accelerate (Amin and Thrift 2002). Yet this must be set against
the frequent failure of modern planning to steer development in a positive direction and the realization, since the 1960’s,
that it is people as much as physical factors that make for successful places (Jacobs 1961, Mean and Timms 2005). Finally
there are the differing perspectives of different individuals. Cities may be good for the young and single, but bad for families
and the old (Honore 2004, Putnam 2002). In this project you are expected to engage with the contradictions of urban life by
recognising what Jonathan Raban has called the hard and soft aspects of cities: ‘The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion,
myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs
on urban sociology and demography and architecture’ (Raban 1974:2).

The project

The aim of the project is to analyse the way in which contrasting public spaces in London–or the same space at different times
of the day- are experienced and to use this data to develop an intervention that changes the way a particular place is perceived.
The transformed place can be one of your case studies, though you might transfer your strategy to another locale, and the
intervention may take the form of a staged event, a sensory modification etc.