Alice baseian first year

A group of consecutive moments: private to public through London Alice Baseian

Rasmussen, Steen Eiler. London: the unique city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

London Borough of Barking and Dagenham archives

Alice Baseian

“Women who eat on tubes” Facebook. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/groups/WWEOT/.

If we take a snapshot of the topography of London as it stands today not taking into consideration the chronology of buildings what we see is a flat plane of never ending 2-3 storey terraced houses and one small area ( the Square Mile) which stands as an erect phallace above the rest. The flat plane for the most part is an agglomeration of urban villages;these villages fan out radially away from this small area of vertical protrusion, mirroring the dissipation of capital and consequently power. In place of this power the further away from the financial centre (and also the geographical centre of the city) we stray the closer to the inhabitants of the city we are.

It is a well known fact that many of the most expensive apartments in the centre of London sit empty. They look like houses, they may have been houses at one time, but they are not currently houses. They are instead an ostentatious display of wealth of a few, designed to make those real inhabitants of the flat plane bow in comparison.

Let us return to the 99%; [she as a few million others make her way to work in the morning, she lives in the flat plane.]

In a Victorian terraced house. The flat plane is flat not only in topography but it is metaphorically 2-dimensional also, those who live there used to invest time and energy into their plane.Though now that time and energy is used to project themselves into the hologram of social media and day-dreamed maybe-if-but-when lives. The use-value of her house is based mainly on whether there is a plug socket in just the right place in each of it’s rooms; and consequentially the house becomes a resting place for electronic devices a “mobile-home” if you will.

[She locks the door on the way out. Inevitably in front of her house she will

pass through the front garden. Not much of a garden, she thinks to herself as she struggles to trolley over the bins from where the dustbin men left them, over cracked concrete. Her non-slip, non-sports, non-shoes allow her to perform this activity with no more comfort or ease than before.]

For the past 20 years overlooked television shows such as Changing Rooms and have depicted the front garden in the background, making one consistent change to ‘home makeover’,this is from the vegetated garden to a concrete clad patio; a

comfy resting place for dustbins and a disgusting ‘tataki’1 for post/delivery men. With promises of ease and efficiency over the traditional hedgerows of England, this is less than the case for the impact on the urban environment, the loss of vegetation in our cities firstly increase the risk of flash flooding and the reduction in vegetation leads to greater fluctuation in urban climate2 .

Like the Japanese genkan the front garden is bordered to suggest that the area inside is private and by law this may be the case but in practice this change from vegetation to concrete has only flooded the pavement all the way up to the front door, and with this flood comes the loss of buffer space between ones private abode and the public street.

The introduction of ‘Athleisure’ by big brands such as Balenciaga have risen to popularity due to their promise of ease and efficiency. Spread via millennial media such as Instagram and Snapchat.

Alexander Wang,the young newly appointed creative director of Balenciaga, himself states that “I live in gym clothes. When you go out in the street, it’s the uniform now”3 . What is the message this uniform conveys? This uniform conveys a loss of privacy, a lack of division (or loss of buffer zone) between public and private in the city much like the loss of the British front garden.

Pre-internet the front garden was extremely important to the social life of the British household. How well kept the front garden was in a way a manifestation of how influential a household was socially. As our social circle has grown the display of affluence and lifestyle is no longer in the neglected front garden but in the mobile phone, we sell ourselves as worthy of time and friendship through these virtual platforms and less so in reality. In fact almost the complete opposite effect has occurred; we are applauded for how nonchalant we can be in reality, and this attitude is the manifesto for the ‘Athleisure’ trend.

1

The tataki (

) is the concrete or tiled floor of the Japanese genkan (

).

2Low,

Harry, and Tom Heyden. "The decline of the British front garden." BBC News. May 19, 2015. Accessed November 20, 2017. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32780242.

3Studeman,

Kristin Tice. "From Alexander Wang to Beyonce, Everyones Doing It: A Look at How Gym-to-Street Became the New Uniform." Vogue. February 01, 2017. Accessed December 05, 2017. https://www.vogue.com/article/athleisure.

[She steps out onto the humble pavement. It is the Londoner’s first frontier between private and public when making their way across the city.]

[She as most children in London played the ‘don’t step on the cracks’ game when walking to and from school. This was her first measure of the city.The pavements themselves were and still are rectangular in shape with an approximate ratio of 1:1.85 between it’s shorter and longer edge. The step between the middle of one slab and it’s adjacent was approximately a foot. Each child knew the pavement of their own street and of the routes they frequented to playdates in the park and friend’s houses.]

What’s interesting about London pavements is how unpretentious they are in their ubiquity; the same slabs are laid in Oxford Street, one of the cities grandest and largest promenades, and in Peckham Rye, an area which to this day has a history of deprivation and crime. The same paving tiles even made their way onto the Millennium Bridge. This omnipresence makes them easily overlooked as an important feature of the city; merely the pavement around x,y,z great building.

Are our pavements a totally practical invention as they originally were when they were laid down originally by the Romans and then what we see today which was modernised by the Victorians. Or are they a subliminally controlling movements and our attention around the city?

In an age where the population of the city are constantly looking down at the pavement, and not to avoid the cracks, but as a blurry background marker to their bright shiny mobile phone screens, it is where ever the pavements lead you that you will go; that you are compelled to go. The age of experiencing the city is dead, it is currently a whimsical novelty to take a day just to explore the city and those who do are ironically publishing these explorations through social media to allow others to experience without having to pay attention and step off the pavement for a little bit.

The Highway Code: Rules for pedestrians Rule 1 “Pavements (including any path along the side of a road) should be used if provided. Where possible, avoid being next to the kerb with your back to the traffic. If you have to step into the road, look both ways first. Always show due care and consideration for others.4 ”

4

The Highway code

Pavements sit at a strange limbo between public and private they definitely refuse from being split up as private property, but are also not necessarily public property. They were made to be used, but their main use is to be walked away from and simultaneously walked towards. In this sense they are no-one’s space, both used all the time and never, not really public and not really private. [ Every week she as most Londoners take on average 4 tube trains every day.

That is approximately 28 trains a week and 5.5% of her time in the tube.]

Though despite the amount of time we all spend in it the underground train is often overlooked.

Regardless of our opinion on it’s efficiency or comfort the underground even to this day is an extremely radical and interesting way of transporting the cities inhabitants.

Despite the underground being man-made the layout of the route seems to have no geometric basis for the distance between stops or the relation of stops to one another. We could assume that the tube was planned out just as the American Arts Quad was; allowing the students/citizens to stomp out the most used paths and lay down gravel there. The real story is much less whimsical; the route was formed through the cheapest property; the slums of Victorian London and displaced thousands of people in it’s realisation: “the line will pass only through inferior property, that is through the densely peopled districts, and will destroy the abode of the powerless and the poor” -William Denton of St Bartholomew's Church, vicar5 Metaphorically the underground railway still has the power of displacement just in a much shorter scale of time. The anticipation, arrival, suspense, departure, absence…repeat. The tube creates its own rhythm and superimposes it onto the lives of its participants, who are many.The moving train is an embodiment of a continuous

present moving up to meet the future6. The passengers of the train are too compressed in time, with no viewpoint and therefore no context of the city above, and the psycho-geography of subterranean London becomes the image of water being forced out of a wet sponge. When the tube was first opened someone commented that it was a turbine “that grinds out human beings at all sides�7.

The future it pans out is a predictable one, stationary, open doors, suspense, close doors,acceleration repeat. The users of the tube sense this stability and see the tube as an extension of home and their fellow carriage-mates as a momentary urban village within the isolation of city life. This village has all the features of a small community, and the relationships and emotions that come with it. The intimacy of the Central line at rush hour, breaking bread together as the image above shows etc. It is all seen in the dark space between one place and another. [ The next stop is hers she coldly doesn’t acknowledge the carriage-community she leaves behind and gets off; or voluntarily ground out into the rest of her day in the city.]

6

Mead

7Wolmar,

Christian. The subterranean railway: how the London Underground was built and how it changed the city forever. London: Atlantic, 2004.

Bibliography Urry, John. Consuming places. London: Routledge, 2006.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of everyday life: the one-volume edition. London: Verso, 2014.

Mindell, Graham, and Sherry Turkle. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.

Wolmar, Christian. The subterranean railway: how the London Underground was built and how it changed the city forever. London: Atlantic, 2004.

Low, Harry, and Tom Heyden. "The decline of the British front garden." BBC News. May 19, 2015. Accessed November 20, 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32780242.

Garrett, Bradley L. "The privatisation of cities' public spaces is escalating. It is time to take a stand." The Guardian. August 04, 2015. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2015/aug/04/pops-privately-owned-public-space-citiesdirect-action.

YouTube. We Too. June 28, 2015. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://youtu.be/lYZLq4XvouY. "Posts from October 2010 on The Great Wen." The Great Wen. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://greatwen.com/2010/10/.

Facebook. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/ groups/WWEOT/.

Studeman, Kristin Tice. "From Alexander Wang to Beyonce, Everyones Doing It: A Look at How Gym-to-Street Became the New Uniform."

Vogue. February 01, 2017. Accessed December 05, 2017. https:// www.vogue.com/article/athleisure.