Co-chair and co-organiser of two sessions: Peripatetic Architectures: Collective Movement and Urban Life.
What is a city but its people? The latent question here is not necessary concerned with who but when. The diversity and temporality of places, their differences, and reinterpretations reminds us of their ‘open and provisional’ character (Massey, 1994). Thinking further about the nature of urban space raises issues of belonging, identity, and appropriation through the mutuality between place and behaviour (Cresswell, 1996). Peripatetic architectures are redefined here not as buildings on the move but as mobile organisations of people that through their interaction with urban space shape its meaning and determine its future use. This session is concerned with how collective life is constructed, performed, and what it affords. Collective movement here is positioned as a method for activating space with all the cultural, political and social implications such a process brings with it. The ‘situational spatiality’ that evolves through the interaction of bodies, collectively mobilised in urban space provides new narratives for that place through what can be done in it rather than what it appears to be (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Sharing knowledge of different approaches to how collective movement builds urban life and vice versa from a range of disciplines enables us to redefine our sense of place in the world and develop new practice for how it can be transformed in conceptual, temporal and material terms. Key to this is the plurality of different experiences and critical readings constructed through imaginative and creative engagement with urban places presented across the session. It will examine the complex interrelationships between authority and authorship, and how these formulate and are informed by spatial practices and narratives. To explore these themes holistically we have assembled a panel of activists, academics and practitioners. This multi-disciplinary collective brings contributions from the fields of architecture, anthropology, cultural tourism, events management, geography, and urban design.