Human Cities Festival

Who is building what when it comes to public spaces? How do collective and participatory art projects contribute to the shaping of the public realm? Where does the social become spatial? What does it mean for art and architecture collaborations?

The focus of this session is the spatial or the architectural within the social or the contextual, and the intention is to raise our awareness of those spatial realities and constructs.

The session is to look at collective, bottom up approaches and self initiated cultural projects that take place within larger scale regeneration environments. This intention is to develop a better understanding and subsequent recognition of the spatial production that is going on in relational practice, both within concrete examples and across the field of the practice.

Public works is going to show some of their recent projects to introduce the session:

• Folk Float – a mobile local archive for the town of Egremont, which has become part of a longer term and larger scale planning, and addresses issues of local participation and culture (see also www.diyregeneration.net)

• International Village Shop is an ongoing collective initiative by public works, myvillages.org, Grizedale Arts and Somewhere to connect locaul producersa and productions across a pan-national network of urban and local spaces.

Public works is a London based artists and architects collective who has been collaborating in different constellations since 1999. Public works projects include participatory public realm design schemes, interdisciplinary debate and publications. Ad hoc design plays a central role in producing immediate change on a small scale, and presenting and testing 1:1 proposals for the longer term and larger scale. The use and promotion of local resource, from material-based, cultural and social resources, are integral to all projects.