Nutopia: Exploring the Metropolitan Imagination
April 22, 2009
Posted by victoria in: Events | Trackback
At the beginning of April I attended the second day of the Nutopia: Exploring the Metropolitan Imagination symposium. The symposium formed part of the wider Arcades Project by artist Jennie Savage.
Nutopia aimed to cross the boundaries between, town planners & artists, activists & architects, social/workers, regeneration agencies and academics, to create a compelling new conversation on the 21st Century City. The symposium explored the ways in which we can reinvent our cities, challenging the idea that city centres are purely spaces of consumption. It looked at possibilities for non-economic exchange and examined tensions between resistance and commodification and how this impacts our personal lives.
It was a great pity I was only able to attend the second day of this event. The mixture of people and ideas that Jennie brought together, formed the basis of some really interesting conversation and comparisons.
The session that particularly resonated for me, was entitled Future Cities…Utopias, Dystopias and making it up as we go along. During this session Dr Rachel Armstrong (teaching fellow at The Bartlett and part of the SmartLab initiative), discussed the possibilities for future architectural models based on biological research - basically living buildings that would be grown, and would be capable of working to combat the problem of rising CO2 emmissions - truly fascinating, but also quite scary.
In contrast to this, we also heard from artist and activist Anne Marie Culhane. Anne Marie leads ABUNDANCE with apple tree diviner and gardener Steven Watts and artist Jo Salter. It forms part of Grow Sheffield and involves the mapping of fruit trees across the city of Sheffield in the UK, harvesting any unharvested trees then giving the fruit away to the community.
The two areas of research and activity had such differing approaches, but both worked to address the socio-economic and environmental challenges our cities are facing on a global scale. These two practitioners created a really interesting juxtaposition, and some exciting conversations were begun.
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