Thursday 15 December 2011

These receding spaces

What to do with disused space is a daily task local authorities ask. Developers would normally move in or fees could be quickly reaped from the quick-fire solution of a car park. Space can be used and does get used in an independent manner. Art squatters, performers and people at play have long been documented. Guerilla gardening is creeping in, orderly though it may seem is closely related to us wanting nature to reclaim unwanted spaces.

Whatever it may be it puts its mark back into the urban swirl of change and domineering zones of commerce. There is a growing trend of not-so-much nostalgia but of the need for something that summons a past, a story, a history...something that shows us that something has gone but not forgotten. Ironically it is some of the spaces with traces of before lives that is just about left. We see the beauty in derelict things and we are able to reflect or meditate, for now at least.

The zones of our cities are new, calculated, clinical and carefully mapped for instruction so that space recedes and all pasts with it too...

Thursday 8 December 2011

Wastelands pose questions about what Manuel Castells calls space of flows; the internal city rhythm of commodity, high finance, technology, communication, distribution and production...The wasteland is a closed zone to this capitalistic generated network.

New things can begin from nothing but in this way a neglected, forgotten or disused space can turn off any impending investor/developer, especially if an area in need of regeneration is stretched over a long period. Unblessed towns without the fast track of elusive investors slip back in times of recession to their former rugged selves. Some authorities in Lancashire such as those in Preston have been holding on to the dream of investment from major companies but are tied until it happens. In an area closely overlooked by the city's impressive brutalist structure that is the bus station, is a block of varying wastelands. Some have laid waiting since the recession of the 1990s. And new pockets are opening up.

Locked gates

Locked gates

Bridge at Vernon's

Bridge at Vernon's

Percy St, Preston

Percy St, Preston
Once: a social club

Church St tiled walls

Church St tiled walls

Wasteland

Wasteland