Le Pont du Nord and Urbanized

I’ve recently watched two psychogeography/urban space films that I really enjoyed. They are Le Pont du Nord, recommended to me by Geoff Nicholson, and Urbanized which I found online while looking for films about postmodern architecture. I’d like to tell you a little about the films, and also provide you with further information.

Le Pont du Nord (1981) by Jacques Rivette

This rather quirky, post-French New Wave film starts of a bit slowly but because of its peculiarity you feel compelled to continue, which is well worth doing, especially if you are interested in the city or are a psychogeographer. Starring a mother and daughter (Bulle and Pascale Ogier) we see their characters form a strange relationship in the cityscape around the playing out of an urban game and clandestine chance meetings with strange characters in abandoned spaces. And…the film has the mandatory psychogeographers’ rucksack in it, too!

The special edition includes a super booklet with lots of information about the film and also some interviews. This is what Serge Daney says about the film:

Le Pont du Nord is also in fact a political thriller with a hunt for a woman and an urban setting, a documentary on the state of Paris in 1981, an old modernist film composed out of an incomplete and undecidable tale . . . One should see it like one slides a finger (nervously) along a dial in order to tune in to free-radio stations. Free, that’s what the film is – Rivette is the needle, and we are the dial.

I didn’t know the actresses, so looked them up online. Tragically Pascale Ogier died of a drug overdose a few years after making this film. It seems she was a talented actress and at the beginning of a promising career.

Urbanized (2011) by Gary Hustwit

It’s nice to see a documentary film about urban space and architecture which doesn’t feel Anglo-centric (I mean this more in relation to the style of the film, rather than the places discussed). By the independent filmmaker Gary Hustwitt, it takes a rounded look at urban space, housing and planning. I guess on some level it is about people, but I suppose films about urban space always are, since we are the colonizers of macro space. One of the speakers says “Urban design is really the language of the city”, which reminded me of Roland Barthes’ essay ‘Semiology and Urbanism’: “The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it.” (2004: 168).

This is what Hustwit says about his film:

Before I started with urbanized I spoke with architects, city planners, academics, and developers. I went to conferences about urban issues, and soaked up as much information as I could about the state of cities today. For two and a half years, I filmed conversations with people who I thought were doing compelling work, and tried to document their creative processes.

You can click here to go to the website that includes information about all the films in the trilogy: Helvetica/Objectified/Urbanized

Deconstructing the Redbrick: Spatial Ordering, Ideology and Campus Aesthetics

If any human/cultural geography, urban planning, cultural studies departments are interested in employing me to do a guest lecture for their students and/or colleagues, please feel free to contact me via this blog or on www.schizocartography.org. A CV is also available here: Tina Richardson's CV

Thanks in anticipation!

The Psychogeography of Academia or…

...Negotiating Your Way Around the Hellish Academic City Centre Loop!

I got an email from the Staff and Departmental Development Unit at the University of Leeds this week, announcing a new programme of training for researchers at the university. This is the graphic that accompanies their new programme. It had an interesting effect on me, being both a psychogeographer but also a (pre)academic who is about to launch oneself into the academic market. The aesthetics of the image is intriguing and I wish I had the time to do a proper deconstruction of it, like I have with a number of university images, however I’ll just stick to my initial reactions, which were:

1 – What an interesting ‘logo’ to choose. The bold primary colours make it jump out at you. The image is well thought out, funny and pertinent. ‘Who came up with the idea?’ I thought. And, of course, because I am a psychogeographer, I found it quite delightful.
2 – But then I saw ‘No Idea City Centre Loop’ opposite ‘Dream Job’ and my heart sank. Not least because of the terrible market for higher education jobs, but also because of the university lecturers’ strike this week. How disheartening!

Recently I subscribed to Times Higher Education, which is the most depressing magazine for a pre-academic to read. And, it is not like some magazines where you only get one a month. It is weekly. So once a week I sink into an existential crisis, just pulling myself out of it before the next week’s edition arrives. Only a masochist postdoc would enjoy putting themselves through that weekly.

While it is a really well-written/edited interesting magazine, it does contain a lot of articles like:

‘Failure is an option as US enrolment stagnates’
‘Politicians, don’t bury your heads in the sand, cautions Andy Westwood: the fees issue will have to be revisited eventually’
‘Use genuine all-rounders to eradicate zero-hours contracts, Philip Roddis advises the academy’

...I do appreciate this just reflects the market, but it nevertheless requires endless bootstrapping to keep one’s self-esteem up, especially after 9 years of academic training and the relinquishing of all financial security – something I am beginning to think was extremely foolhardy for a middle-aged new academic to do.

Historically I have been inventive in job-hunting and some of my best positions I actually got by myself and were not even advertised jobs. In one, after having a bad day at work, I walked in off the street to a company’s head office and asked them for a job, and they gave me one there and then. In another job – my best paid and most enjoyable job to date – the company created a position for me after receiving my letter in the post. Academia does not work like this though. Since it is the ‘public’ sector there are processes that have to be adhered to. My ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ does not seem to apply in a system of tick boxes, key performance indicator-like structures and over-worked lecturers who can barely keep on top of their work, let alone respond to my speculative letters (although some of them have – a 25% return so far, pretty good). Not that I am job-hunting in earnest yet, having not quite submitted my thesis, but I am doing job-hunting research, one could say...

The most worrying thing, I am finding, is the demise of the very subject that got me interested in becoming an academic in the first place – Cultural Studies. I fell in love with it on my ACCESS course (A-Levels for mature students). You can’t even study Cultural Studies at A-Level in school, but you can at a Further Education college if you do an ACCESS course. Within 5 weeks of the course I knew that this was what I wanted to study for my BA. It was as if someone had created Cultural Studies just for me. I wanted to become a Cultural Studies lecturer. But the subject – especially as a ‘pure’ subject – has dwindled during that time. That, and the lack of undergraduates wanting to take the degree since the course fee rises, means that the subject is being abandoned around the country, being paired up with other subjects, or is awaiting a rebranding exercise of some sort (if anyone wants a Programme Director to rebrand their Cultural Studies degree, I’m your woman).

So, I am on that roundabout above, going around in circles, trying to avoid ‘No Idea City Centre Loop’ and hoping I will eventually get off at ‘Dream Job’! As the psychogeographer said: Watch this space!

Of Revolutionary Dogs and £1 Billion Surpluses

Today (31st October 2013) was the Halloween University Strike across the UK, with a joint strike in Leeds with Unite, UCU and Unison. We met on the Parkinson Steps at the University of Leeds (see above). There was sun, striking lecturers/tutors (and some students) and a revolutionary dog (see below).

Along with leafleting from the main unions involved, there was also a student leafleting in support of our strike and asking students to understand the implications in higher education of historic cuts in pensions and a lack of pay rises, despite the £1.1 billion surplus of money in higher education pockets! This is what the leaflet said:

But this dispute doesn’t affect me.
It definitely does. Even if you don’t work here, it is your tutors and support staff on strike today and they need your support. Moreover, it’s a labour market. Bad wages and conditions become an excuse to attack the living standards of all workers.

Well said! Here is the leaflet, so you can read it in full:

One comment on an article in The Ripple ‘UOL Staff to Strike on Halloween’, posted by Brian, says “Lecturers already have a rather lazy and easy job, so striking must come easy for them.” and a comment in response to it says “Well you obviously didn’t read the article if you think it’s just lecturers. Tit.” LOL

Related Links:
J30: The City is on Strike
Public Sector Strikes: The Situation at the University
J30, N30 ?30 Go!

Radical Spaces and Not So Radical Spaces in Stratford

Last weekend I went to the Radical Space Conference at the University of East London (UEL). The conference was held at the new building in the centre of Stratford that UEL share with Birkbeck based in University Square (see above), located right near the Theatre Royal. When booking my hotel online - the Ibis - I noticed it had a similar address to a building I used to work in in Stratford in the late 1980s. This was Solar House, 1-9 Romford Road and the Ibis is 1a Romford Road. So I really didn’t know what to expect when I got there.

When I arrived at my hotel, I found it had been stuck on the end just before Solar House (see above), hence the 1a extra number. Solar House used to be at the very beginning of Romford Rd, even as far back as 2000 when I used to power-walk down there, from Leytonstone. So, it appears that they’ve made a bit of extra space out of the one-way system and stuck on it the Ibis, Nandos, etc. Although, once you’ve seen the new space, it’s really hard to remember exactly what it looked like before.

I walked around the outside of my old office block, Solar House. It hasn’t fared too well and looks old and scruffy, although I’m pretty sure they have built that extra glass-fronted section recently, which improves it somewhat. It’s being rented for £16/square foot and according to a commercial rental site it is currently being refurbished. Wikimapia shows a good aerial shot of the two buildings next to each other. It was a little spooky revisiting a place I worked over 20 years ago, although I was only there for 10 months before being relocated to Wallington in Surrey, miles away from where I lived at the time, in Edmonton.

I didn’t get a chance to inspect the Olympic Park or the new shopping centre at Stratford (Westfield), which you can see from the train station and which dominates the area. I thought it had a quirky retro font and I wondered why the branding team chose it…

University as City

In his book The University in Ruins Bill Reading’s provides an eloquent analogy of the Italian Renaissance city by way of a suggesting how we might go about negotiating the posthistoric university we occupy today:

Like the inhabitants of some Italian city, we can seek neither to rebuild the Renaissance city-state nor to destroy its remnants and install rationally planned tower-blocks; we can seek only to put its angularities and winding passages to new uses, learning from and enjoying the cognitive dissonances that enclosed piazzas and non-signifying campanile induce. (Readings 1999: 129)

He later goes on to explain that we actually never leave the city, it is where we continually reside, even if some of its elements are from the past: “Even if the University is legible to us only as the remains of the idea of culture, that does not mean that we have left its precincts, that we view it from the outside.” (1999: 172) It is apparent from Readings’s spatial reference to the university as city, that this is potentially useful as a modus for a critique of today’s university (indeed, this is what my thesis is on).

Clark Kerr also uses the concept of the city to describe the model of the contemporary university, what he calls the “multiversity”:

The ‘Idea of the University’ was a village with its priests. The ‘Idea of a Modern University’ was a town - a one-industry town - with its intellectual oligarchy. ‘The Idea of a Multiversity’ is a city of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some rise to the top within it; most fashion their lives within one of its many subcultures. There is less sense of community than in the village but also less sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose than within the town but there are more ways to excel. There are also more refugees of anonymity - both for the creative process and the drifter. (2001: 31)

Kerr’s city analogy offers the positive and negative qualities of the contemporary university, also providing the model of the drifter as an individual who can move about university space and yet also blend into the landscape (the French for drift is dérive which was a method of exploring the city employed by the group of activists the Situationist International in their urban walking projects).

Related blogs:
Organ Pipe-clad Concrete and Lost Students
Negotiating Brutalist Space at the University of Leeds

Bibliography:
Kerr, Clark. 2001. The Uses of the University (Harvard: Harvard University Press).
Readings, Bill. 1999. The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press).

Finding the Antiuniversity: A Walk Through the Graffiti of Rivington Street

On 12 February 1968 a group of artists, writers and intellectuals started the Antiuniversity of London. The free university was led by people such as the ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing, the academic Stuart Hall and the Situationist Alexander Trocchi. Run at 49 Rivington Street in Shoreditch, London EC2, the group advertised education in the area of “Music, Art, Poetry, Black Power, Madness, Revolution”. The aim of the university was to open up education to more people in an effort to desinstitutionalise it (hence R. D. Laing’s involvement, since he was attempting to do something similar in the institution of psychiatry). Teachers at the Antiuniversity included Herbert Marcuse and Gregory Bateson. It was to be “a meeting ground for discussion, discovery, rediscovery and revelation. It [was] intended as an on-going experiment in the development of consciousness and [was] related to other revolutionary experiments in universities”. Unfortunately, even at the opening, there were arguments between the committee, students and teachers about press coverage. The Antiuniversity did not last long.

The above image of the building where the Antiuniversity was located was taken by Peter Műnder and dates from around that period. This blog takes you from the entrance to Rivington Street, from the Old Street end, via the graffiti and street art I spotted on the way. At the end you will see the building as it is today.

Today the building is the retail shoe outlet Fiorentini + Baker. It looks very different from its time as the Antiuniversity. This part of Shoreditch has been smartened up so much since I first moved to London in the late 1980s. It’s now a trendy, artsy, boho area. Although, thankfully, there is still something gritty about it in its scruffiness, especially when entering from Old Street.

Links:
Mayday Rooms on The Antiuniversity of London
Negotiating Brutalist Space at the University of Leeds