Heterotopics: Getting the Public Involved

In my previous post I introduced the project I'll be undertaking as the Bookmobile's writer-in-residence. To briefly recap, I'll be writing an imagined folk history for a utopian community that emerges on the 'Eastside' development site (also known as 'The Island') between Sneinton and London Road in Nottingham, imaging the day-to-day occurrences in this 'anarchist' autonomous zone.

Or at least that was the plan. And it still is, but it's no longer the whole plan. For whilst working in the Bookmobile on Saturday I had an idea I'm really quite excited about.

The seeds had actually been sown earlier in the day when I read the chapter on Nottingham in Owen Hatherley's* A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, a book which ruthlessly dismantles New Labour's architectural legacy. In light of my criticisms of the neoliberal development plans put forward for the tract of land I'll be writing about, the subtitle of this chapter- 'The Banality of Aspiration' seemed strangely appropriate. I also thought of Hatherley's observations of a similarly derelict piece of wasteland in Bradford (itself the subject of hopeless redevelopment plans). Here,

[t]he planned shopping district has been indefinitely shelved, turned into a municipal park, albeit a temporary and slightly shabby one. It would be very tempting to claim this as a small victory, an example of failure transformed into something worthwhile. Yet its first appearance in the national press occurred when the English Defence League staged a "static demonstration" there in August – a first sign of the horrible weeds that might be growing out of the ruins.

My utopia, I thought, was an attempt to imagine a different kind of weed that might grow in the crack.

My train of thought then naturally progressed on to consider what Owen himself might make of my plans. He's a writer and thinker I admire greatly, and I'm thrilled by his criticisms of Blairism's architectural legacy (which, of course, can be used as a metaphor for the whole New Labour project). I don't, however, fully agree with his solution. Whilst I'm a huge fan of the aesthetics of the brutalist architecture he adores, I'm too much of an anarchist to fully get behind his paternal, state-centric socialism. I didn't imagine my utopian plans for Eastside containing any brutalist blocks, or even any of the smaller scale resident-controlled cul-de-sacs he has also advocated.

But do my misapprehensions mean they shouldn't be allowed on my utopia? Why not? These misapprehensions could just as easily be misconceptions, after all. And besides, I like to look at such architecture, and many people like to live in them. Not everyone wants to be in one of the self-built houses that I'd envisaged springing up (of the kind eulogised by Colin Ward, Dennis Hardy and John Turner), and that I myself am so fond of (like many things in my life, this can perhaps be traced back to the Titfield Thunderbolt, but that's perhaps for another time...).

At this moment I realised I was quite scared. I didn't want the responsibility of writing this utopia on my own. I am, after all, totally against the hierarchical, blueprinted nature of the traditional utopian text (or the common reception of the traditional utopian text, at least) in which the author plays God. I've previously mentioned Albert Meister's the so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg as offering a possible solution to this problem, but even this is troubling: what can't live in the imagination of the author can't live in that author's utopia. And I'm not sure my imagination is up to the task.

My decision, then, was to invite people to co-produce this utopia with me. Initially, I thought I would invite specific people to contribute and help develop the utopia. I hastily began typing a list of who I wanted to contribute. Owen was on there, as were a number of other people whose work inspires me. In no time at all, I had twenty-five names: feminists, music theorists, anarchists, artists, popular educators, Marxists: implicit or explicit utopians all, and all people I'd want with me in a utopian community.

This still wasn't enough though. These people were hand-picked by me. I don't agree with all of them, but they are people whose politics I generally feel safe with. There was no-one there who was going to push my utopia into troublesome areas. It was too safe, too cozy. My concept of 'nomadic utopianism' does not allow for such things: that way authoritarianism and perfection creep in round the back door, and hierarchies emerge to suck the life from your utopia. I want to create what Foucault might call a 'heterotopia'; I want to test the limits of disensus.

I made the decision, then, that this utopia is to be constructed by the public. I will still invite certain people to contribute, but there will be an open invite too. These contributions won't have to be textual: people could, if they wanted, produce artifacts from the utopia (pieces of jewelry, paintings, music....).

This presents certain logistical problems which I'm working on with YH485, but I'm optimistic they can be overcome. The current plan is for me to write the text as originally planned and then invite interventions. I guess this still makes it more 'my' utopia than anyone else's, but hopefully 'The Island' will be pulled far from where I imagined it might go. And of course if you come and see me in the Bookmobile while I'm writing, you might be able to get your contribution in earlier.

*Co-incidentally, Owen's got an essay on Warsaw in YH485's new paper, Inside.