Future Histories - Shane Sugrue

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ABSTRACT This thesis investigates an experimental approach to participation in architectural design and planning, using a case study of the Brisbane Urban and Regional Network for the Arts, a nonprofit community association producing participatory arts events in and around Brisbane, Australia.

Key Words: Participation, Expertise, Immediacy, Planning, Gentrification, Festival, Placemaking, Claim-staking, Democracy

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This research was conceived on the stolen Country of the Jagera, Turrbul and Bigambul nations.

I pay my respects to these Traditional Custodians and their elders past, present, and emerging.

Sovereignty over these lands was never ceded.

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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... 9 PREFACE ..................................................................................................................................... 10 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 15 Research approach and content................................................................................................ 20 Pig City ...................................................................................................................................... 23 Brisbane’s Radical Houses ........................................................................................................ 25 1 PARTICIPATORY URBANISM: Place-making or claim-staking? ..................................... 31 The participatory turn ............................................................................................................... 32 Place-making ............................................................................................................................. 33 Staking claims ............................................................................................................................ 35 Making sense of participation.................................................................................................... 37 Protest or parade: a taxonomy of participation......................................................................... 39 Administered participation ........................................................................................................ 44 The problem of expertise .......................................................................................................... 45 Transformative Participation .................................................................................................... 49 Slipping through the cracks ....................................................................................................... 52 Blending in ................................................................................................................................ 54 2 METHODOLOGY................................................................................................................ 57 Research objectives ................................................................................................................... 57 Participatory Action Research / (auto)ethnography ................................................................. 58 Design research ......................................................................................................................... 60 Brief development ................................................................................................................. 60 Design approach.................................................................................................................... 61 Fieldwork ................................................................................................................................... 64 3 SPECULATING ON THE NEW WORLD CITY: From coercion to curation .................. 69 A rapidly melting iceberg .......................................................................................................... 69 6

Coercion ................................................................................................................................ 71 Construction .......................................................................................................................... 71 Curation ................................................................................................................................ 72 EPISODE 1: I scream, you scream [coercion] ......................................................................... 73 Keep West End Weird .......................................................................................................... 77 Shifting goalposts ................................................................................................................... 80 Copycat urbanism ..................................................................................................................... 81 Speculative government ............................................................................................................ 85 EPISODE 2: The tragedy of ‘The Common’ [construction] ................................................... 87 EPISODE 3: Backyard reckoning [curation]............................................................................ 91 Untouchable innovation ............................................................................................................ 96 We all scream?........................................................................................................................... 98 4 CONSPIRACY THEORY .................................................................................................. 101 EPISODE 4: The End is High! ............................................................................................... 101 House conspiracy .................................................................................................................... 106 Tactical carnival ...................................................................................................................... 112 5 INFRASTRUCTURES OF RITUAL: Faith, firmness, and the cult of the high rise ......... 119 Rituals of emplacement ........................................................................................................... 121 Immediacy [de-commodification] ....................................................................................... 123 Trust and Care [De-structuring] ......................................................................................... 125 Emplacement [De-familiarisation] ...................................................................................... 128 Unmasking the infrastructures of ritual ................................................................................... 130 Setting the stage................................................................................................................... 130 Theatricalising the lobby ..................................................................................................... 131 Extending the lobby ............................................................................................................ 134 Undeniable plausibility ........................................................................................................ 134 Cultural exchange ............................................................................................................... 136 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 139 7

(en)Countering a pirate utopia ................................................................................................ 141 EPILOGUE: FUTURE HISTORY TOURS ........................................................................... 145 Brief & concept ........................................................................................................................ 146 Constructing the future histories ............................................................................................. 147 Project collaborators ................................................................................................................ 147 LIST OF FIGURES and TABLES ............................................................................................ 149 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 152

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the considerable support I have received in preparing this thesis. In particular I would like to thank: My supervisor Nick, for tasting unmixed future pancakes MAUD course director Ingrid for suggesting blueberries My partner Amy, for actually making pancakes The Future Histories team, whose hard work and enthusiasm is hardly reflected in this paper – Aleea Monsour, Amanda Haworth, Joseph Burgess, Thomas Oliver, and most especially Leonor Gausachs, and Tom Hamlyn; also Michelle Kipnis, Mo Shak, Evey Skinner, Megan Keene, Jacob Viel, Beau Sandford, Karl Richardson, Saara Roppolla, Emma Neakous; Jonathon Sri, Anna Carlson and everyone else who contributed to the event.

The management committee of BURN Arts Inc, in particular Marisa Georgiou, Chris Holt, and Tanya Kirkegaard, and the wider Modifyre community; The staff at the University of Queensland, particularly Kelly Greenop and Deborah van der Plaat for accommodating me at ATCH; John Macarthur for his insightful comments; Antony Moulis for keeping me busy; and Joanna Brugman for all the positive encouragement.

A special thanks goes to Stirling Blacket and Sophie Speer; Meg Chadwick, Karlos Stone and Alfie.

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PREFACE

This research started life as an innocent certainty that community gardens, traffic clowns, and public dancing were intrinsically good things and that this could and should be empirically proven to the world. In the intervening 18 months, my strident stance on these irrefutably positive forces has not changed. The stakes, on the other hand, seem to have risen considerably.

I begin with an account of the current bushfires because it is impossible proceed without acknowledging the existential anxiety that has rudely interrupted daily life in the Lucky Country.

Although this study does not deal directly with issues of environmental design or disaster resilience, in the Australian context issues of spatial justice – issues that necessarily go to the heart of any architectural critique – are inseparable from those of environmental management. With a political economy built upon agricultural production, resource extraction, and property speculation, all fundamentally tied to an indiscriminate intergenerational seizure of land – arguably the most comprehensive plantation in European history – debates over housing affordability, gentrification, and the privatisation of public space inevitably become entangled with arguments over fossil fuel dependence, environmental degradation, and questions of Indigenous land and water sovereignty. This can be seen in Brisbane’s cultural institutions, where the conversation often appears to sit within the messy intersections of contemporary critical discourse, although, as I shall argue, this discourse is undermined by the bureaucratic impulses of a state deeply invested in its own myth.

Decolonisation, queer activism, intersectional feminism, relational aesthetics, pre-figurative politics, green anarchism – these terms and the ideas they connote emerge from the woodwork under houses in Brisbane’s inner suburbs. They find their way into the public consciousness through a constellation of conversation: art, music, pamphlets, radio, reading groups, dance troupes, marching bands and poetry slams. For some, they are scary terms – terrifying, terrorist terms that should be silenced, locked up, and never spoken of because, if they aren’t, things might begin to unravel. For others they are fascinating points of theoretical discussion but wholly impractical, for reasons obvious to any sober polemicist. For others still, however, they are not a matter of choice, they are simply making dinner – with whatever ingredients are in the fridge.

For my (still incomplete) understanding of these terms I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to a great number of people, most especially the formidable intellectual forces of Brisbane Free University and Radio Reversal. These folks’ capacity for tea consumption and boundless good humour in the face of impending apocalypse are nothing short of inspiring. Elsewhere and at 10

other times, the misfit inventors and life-hackers of HSBNE have shown me the power of creative autonomy, and the under-appreciated martyrs of BURN Arts have taught me how to cultivate safe spaces where that autonomy might be expressed and experienced at its fullest. Long after I have abandoned them, these self-appointed caretakers of imagination continue their thankless work. I am also particularly grateful to my wife Amy, the most truly care-full and attentive architect I know. Without her practiced knowledge of building in Brisbane it would be far more difficult to connect the dots between the esoteric fantasy of architecture as an emancipatory critique of late capitalism and the ‘common sense’ economic expediencies of a construction industry consumed by its own monumental machismo – a daunting endeavour under any circumstances. Amy’s reputation amongst her former teachers at the UQ School of Architecture has played a significant part in easing my path through this research.

The sites, spaces, and events discussed in this paper are close to my heart, and were thus long before I embarked upon this programme of study. This has been both a blessing and a curse. In the methodology section, I discuss the specific significance to the research of such an intimate positionality with respect to my subject matter. However, I wish to preface that reflection briefly here. In a previous paper I described the five years of community organising and design practice that lead me to write a research proposal as “accidental” (auto)ethnography and design theory – if assembling large stacks of timber in geometrically pleasing arrangements can be called design. I was forgiven for my error and told that anything prior to the period of formal study was of course mere biography – distinguished from ethnography and theory by intent and reflexivity.

However, if community-building and conscious critique of the world we live in are unintentional and non-reflexive practices, and yet appear to actively change the world by changing the people in it, while standing to the side making unwarranted observations of those at the coalface is intentional and reflexive, yet appears to result in alienation and emotional detachment, then I certainly have a long way to go in understanding the role of the researcher. Perhaps next time I will know better.

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Invisible boundaries: (un)mapping Brisbane’s historic boundary streets

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And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison— and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.”

And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.”

And he put it in my hand.

And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”

-- My Dinner with Andre

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INTRODUCTION

Australia is burning. Since September last year, catastrophic bushfires have been sweeping across the continent. States of emergency have been declared successively in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria after record-breaking high temperatures and severe drought conditions have led to the worst bushfire season on record. At the time of writing an estimated 3.6 million hectares of land has burned, over 2000 homes have been destroyed, and at least 23 people have been killed.1 Ecologists profess that some species will be driven to extinction by the fires.2 Less than a decade ago, Queensland experienced some of the worst flooding in its history. Partly caused by record sea surface temperatures, the 2011 floods inundated over 20,000 homes in Brisbane, the state capital.3 Lives and homes are mercilessly destroyed; cycles of drought and flood threaten the existence of cities; entire ecosystems collapse. As things turn biblical so too do Australia’s politicians, with evangelical backbenchers in the Federal Parliament (former Prime Minister Tony Abbott) declaring that the world is in the grips of a “climate cult”4, and equally evangelical frontbenchers (current Prime Minister Scott Morrison) trumpeting their charity with self-satisfied party-political ads.5 Meanwhile, in capitals around the country people have been taking to the streets.6 Battling against oppressive heat and an ever-present blanket of smoke, they are demanding accountability and action on climate change from their municipal, state and federal governments.7 People are calling on those in power, elected officials and bureaucrats, to at least acknowledge that climate change is a problem and, better still, to take some responsibility for addressing it.8

1 SBS News, “The Numbers behind Australia’s Catastrophic Bushfire Season.”

2 Readfearn, “‘Silent Death’”; Brulliard and Fears, “A Billion Animals Have Been Caught in Australia’s Fires. Some May Go Extinct.”

3 “2010–11 Queensland Floods.”

4 Drury, “Former Australian PM Says World Is ‘in Grip of Climate Cult’ – as Deadly Bushfires Consume Swathes of the Country.”

5 Weedon, “Morrison Slammed for Running Political Ads during Fire Crisis.”

6 ABC News, “Thousands Protest against Climate Change Policies amid Bushfire Emergency.”

7 Kovolos and sanda, “‘Sack ScoMo’”; ABC News, “Thousands Protest against Climate Change Policies amid Bushfire Emergency.”

8 Kovolos and sanda, “‘Sack ScoMo’”; ABC News, “Thousands Protest against Climate Change Policies amid Bushfire Emergency.”

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Figure 1 Climate protest in Brisbane, September 2019 Image Source: the Courier Mail. https://www.couriermail.com.au/

Figure 2 A thorn in Brisbane City Council's side: Councillor Jonathan Sri leads a climare protest in Brisbane's CBD 16 Image Source: ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/

Many local councils, particularly those in Victoria and New South Wales have been responsive, passing motions declaring a climate emergency, 9 while increasing numbers of individual Councillors and MPs from all parties have come out with statements of personal commitment and condemnation of their more intransigent colleagues. In Queensland however, the most decisive action taken by the government of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has been to try and silence the protest10 – and to continue approving coalmines despite mounting international pressure against them.11 In October 2019, the Legislative Assembly passed new laws giving police expanded powers to search “suspected activists”, a term lacking in close definition.12 The new laws also criminalise “dangerous” locking devices such as those used as part of the ongoing campaign against the Carmichael coal project – arguably the world’s most controversial coalmine.13 Soon afterwards, Brisbane City Council (BCC) followed suit, seeking to prevent a demonstration against the new legislation, by refusing the required permit on the basis that the gathering would disrupt city traffic.14 This is worth pausing to consider – a protest defending public protest, refused on the grounds that it would be disruptive to the public. This is one of the world’s flagship liberal democracies.15

The demonstration was organised by Jonathon Sri, Councillor for the Gabba Ward, an innercity electorate with a proud history of dissent. The Gabba has long regarded itself as a symbolic periphery to Brisbane’s core, a contested territory where the dominant narratives of place are called into question, and troublesome histories are not readily forgotten.16 In keeping with this outsider status, Councillor Sri is the only Green Party representative ever elected to local council in Queensland. He has been a thorn in the side of the conservative-dominated city council since he was elected in 2016, frequently drawing attention to systemic flaws in the machinery of municipal governance 17 and openly endorsing civil disobedience 18 . For this, he has been

9 Aidt, “Climate Emergency Declarations in 1,385 Jurisdictions and Local Governments Cover 815 Million Citizens”; SBS News, “More Australian Councils Declare a Climate Emergency.”

10 Brisbane Times, “Green Light for Laws to Limit Queensland Protests.”

11 Cox, “Adani Cleared to Start Carmichael Coalmine Work as Groundwater Plans Approved.”

12 Smee, “Queensland Police to Get New Powers to Search Climate Change Protesters.”

13 Fickling, “Analysis | The World’s Most Controversial Coal Mine Doesn’t Add Up.” 14 Smee, “Brisbane City Council Loses Court Bid to Prevent Protest March.”

15 The Economist Intelligence Unit, “The Economist Democracy Index, 2019.”

16 Capelin, “A Streetwalker’s Guide to West End - No. 2 - Beyond the Boundary”; Kerkhove, “From West End to Woolloongabba: Indigenous Camps and Brisbane’s Parks”; Kerkhove, “Idigenous Sites of Woolloongabba.”

17 Refer various articles on Sri, “Jonathan Sri, Councillor for the Gabba - Blog.”

18 Sri, “Can Roadblocks Help Change the Political Climate?”; Sri, “Not Just Any Old Council Election”; ABC News, “Five Anti-Adani Protesters Arrested after Gluing Themselves to the Road”; Smee, “‘Bold’ Call to Break into Brisbane’s Empty Buildings to House Homeless.”

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rewarded with a persistent smear campaign on the part of Queensland’s most popular daily newspaper, the Courier Mail.19

However, as the State government’s new protest laws come into effect, politicians spurn peaceful demonstrators as ‘extremists’,20 and the authorities invoke traffic laws to refuse march permits, many across the political spectrum see the “ghost of Joh” 21 - that is Sir Joh Bjelke-Pieterson, Queensland’s famously despotic State Premier from 1968 to 1987. Despite the disownment of Bjelke-Peterson’s fascistic regime by his successors, the governmental propensity for quieting political dissent remains strong. In this thesis I argue that a political obsession with control and consensus is leading Queensland blindly towards environmental and social catastrophe. A former penal colony with a dark history of repression, governance in Queensland is founded upon cultures of displacement, erasure, and denial.22 Cultural amnesia is thus deeply embedded in the utopian vision of a New World City, Brisbane City Council’s ubiquitous place-branding slogan.

Designed to portray an emerging global capital and attract international tourism and investment, the slogan invokes an idealised narrative of Brisbane’s ‘enviable subtropical lifestyle’ and ‘creative economy’ that overlooks important aspects of the city’s history and culture – the uncritical use of the phrase ‘New World’ unapologetically evoking a continuing project of dispossession whilst disavowing the many conflicts and complex identities that underpin the city.23 As the authorities have come to realise that police brutality is bad PR, this deep-seated cultural coercion has simply taken on a less palpable form. Overt criticality is now kept in check through the careful management of public space and the activity that occurs there.24 In order to maintain an impression of democracy, policy-makers involve citizens in shaping this curated urban environment in a variety of ways. Community consultation and public notification periods are

19 Killoran and Viellaris, “Despicable Sri.” 20 Crockford, “‘You’re the Extremist.’”

21 Smee, “‘Nothing Has Changed.’”

22 Bond, “Still Here”; Moreton-Robinson, “I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society”; Kerkhove, “Barriers and Bastions: Fortified Frontiers and White and Black Tactics.”

23 Brisbane Marketing, “Brisbane | Australia’s New World City”; Brisbane Marketing, “Living in Brisbane - Choose Brisbane”; Brisbane City Council, “Creative Brisbane, Creative Economy”; Greenop and Darchen, “Identifying ‘Place’ in Place Branding.”

24 The recent (2009) renovation of King George Square is a case in point: replacing grass and trees with an expanse of bare concrete, the makeover effectively turned one of the city’s most symbolic public spaces – the traditional starting point for Joh-era ‘right to march’ rallies – into an inhospitable heat sink. (Dennehy, 2009) The only available shade is under the canopy of a café, while permission to hold events in the square is administered through a third party security contractor, making it all but impossible to host political gatherings there. Other examples abound, from busking ‘auditions’ to public space activations in which the ‘public’ is separated from the ‘activation’ by a plastic white picket fence and security guard. Surveillance is pervasive: If one dares to ride a bicycle down the pedestrianised Queen Street Mall, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, a disembodied voice immediately comes across loudspeakers commanding the cyclist to desist, or face sanctions.

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frequently prescribed steps in the planning approvals process,25 while an assortment of arts and cultural programmes invite public participation in various public spaces.26 However, there is a considerable gulf between the ideal and the reality of this participation. As I will show, initiatives that are superficially empowering often serve to reproduce and reinforce the inequalities against which they are ostensibly promoted, merely aiding the expansion of the property market together with the extension of administrative control. Central to this are the figures of the planner and the architect, the curator and the artist, whose technical and creative expertise in reimagining the space of the city helps to gloss over an approach to urban development ultimately favours the interests of capital over those of people or the environment, supporting the stranglehold of a destructive economic consensus.27 In a context where the democratizing power of participation is weakened and discourse is restricted to the production of consensus, critics must find other ways of getting their messages across. This research has examined the participatory spatial practices of Brisbane’s contemporary grassroots arts and political movements. Focusing in particular on the application of festive practices such as street parades, immersive theatre, and large-scale art installations, I argue that these practices provide an alternative arena of civic engagement and politicising action, asking the question: Can the experience of transformative participation in the design and production of festive events provide a model for architectural design and planning? And if so, how might this be integrated into an approach to more equitable and sustainable urban development?

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Sustainable Planning Act 2009; Queensland Government, South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009.

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Brisbane City Council, “Brisbane City Council, Public Art”; “Experiences and Culture.”

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Millington, “From Urban Scar to ‘Park in the Sky.’”

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Research approach and content This thesis investigates an experimental approach to participation in architectural design and planning, using a case study of the Brisbane Urban and Regional Network for the Arts 28, a nonprofit community association producing participatory arts events in and around Brisbane. I draw in particular on Jeremy Till’s conception of transformative participation – that is, participation that transforms the futures and expectations of participants.29 I begin with a literature review situating my argument within the broader discourse on participation in art, architecture, and urban planning. Drawing on recent histories of subaltern spatial politics

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and socially engaged art

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I note how participatory practices appear

particularly vulnerable to co-optation into neoliberal economic policies. Highlighting the difficulty of evaluating participation as a surface-level attribute, I suggest it is the quality of these practices that denotes their true political function. Accordingly, I turn to the theory of relational aesthetics and Ranciere’s conception of politics as dissensus32 in order to draw a distinction between processes of ‘place-making’ and ‘claim-staking’ in the context of urban renewal. Thus I propose a simple ‘taxonomy’ of participation upon which to build the analysis that follows. I suggest that place-making can be understood as a form of administered participation, borrowing from Theodor Adorno’s ‘administered culture’33; while claim-staking is understood in the terms of transformative participation, Till’s model of embedded expertise,34 which invokes Antonio Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’35.

Suggesting a gap in Till’s model, I propose an opportunity exists to expand upon it. Introducing an anthropological perspective on value, play and protest,36 from which arises the conception of architecture as an ‘infrastructure of ritual’. Till emphasises the cultural values of institutional 28 Burn Arts Inc., “Burn Arts.”

29 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

30 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789 - 1848; Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia”; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”; Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject”; Shepard, “Play as Prank: From the Yippies to the Young Lords.”

31 Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art Andthe Politics of Spectatorship; Beyes, “Fictions of the Possible: Art, the City, and Public Entrepreneurship”; Sachs Olsen, Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City; Luger and Ren, Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape; Khonsari, “Contemporary Initiatives in Participatory Art and Architecture Practice.”

32 Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.

33 Adorno, “Culture and Administration”; Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered.”

34 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

35 Santucci, Antonio Gramsci.

36 Graeber, “Three Ways of Talking about Value”; Graeber, “Imagination”; Shepard, “From Play to Panic: Ludic Organising in Absurd Times.”

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expertise as the major impediment to participation in architecture and design.37 However, the question is left open as to what specific cultural values might run counter to those that are problematized. I suggest that tacit knowledge of transformative participation in the production of BURN Arts events constitutes an alternative expertise imbued with its own set of countercultural values. By recognising creative expertise itself as the mechanism by which critical practices are absorbed into institutional frameworks of administration, I argue that artists and community organisers can make their work less vulnerable to co-optation into neoliberal processes of place-making. Furthermore, by embedding specific counter-cultural values within their design and production processes, I propose that they can begin to shift the cultural values of the institutions they critique, staking a claim the New World City as a place of radical and plural democracy.

To mount this argument I make a two-part case study of West Village, a controversial urban renewal scheme in Brisbane’s inner city. The first part illustrates the model of administered participation as it occurs on three levels – coercion, construction, and curation – demonstrating how critical art and design practices are co-opted into neoliberal processes of place-branding and financialisation. Drawing from literatures on the geography of global financialisation, gentrification, and urban development 38 I describe the slide of Brisbane’s democratic institutions into authoritarian forms of governance, showing how this is filtered through the strategic planning and cultural policies of the New World City. The second part illustrates the model of transformative participation. Examining in detail the practices of BURN Arts Inc, I outline an approach to design practice that intentionally seeks to enact transformative participation through the production of large-scale artworks and events.

But first, I will return to the ‘protest for protest’. On this occasion, the magistrate’s court did not accept Council’s grounds for refusing permission to Councillor Sri and the demonstration went ahead.39 However, this isn’t the first time Queenslanders have had to fight for their right to demonstrate.40

37 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

38 Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities; Goldman, “Speculating on the Next World City”; Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi”; Büdenbender and Aalbers, “How Subordinate Financialisation Shapes Urban Development: The Rise and Fall of Warsaw’s Sluzewiec Business District”; Lees, Shin, and López-Morales, Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement; Millington, “From Urban Scar to ‘Park in the Sky’”; Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City; Deutsche, “Introduction.”

39 Smee, “Brisbane City Council Loses Court Bid to Prevent Protest March.”

40 Smee, “‘Nothing Has Changed.’”

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Figure 3 Guardian headline, 27th August 2019 Image Source: the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/au

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Pig City In the 1970s, under the National Party government of Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson, ‘right to march’ protests became a defining feature of Brisbane’s political landscape. 41 Against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam War, anti-apartheid, Aboriginal rights, and nuclear disarmament movements, the Premier gave his personal endorsement to ever-increasing police violence against public demonstrations. He directed the Queensland Police Special Branch to report directly to his office,

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prompting contemporary commentators to compare Queensland to Nazi

Germany. 43 Described as a ‘police state’ with Bjelke-Peterson as its “Hillbilly dictator” 44 , Brisbane was unofficially renamed “Pig City”.45 In September 1977, in response to growing anti-nuclear protests, the right to free assembly was effectively suspended, as Bjelke-Peterson proclaimed: "The day of the political street march is over. Anybody who holds a street march, spontaneous or otherwise, will know they're acting illegally [...] Don't bother applying for a march permit. You won't get one. That's government policy now!"46 This policy was enacted through a change made by the Queensland Parliament to the Traffic Act, abolishing the right of appeal to a magistrate by any applicant refused a permit by the police. This right is now protected under the Peaceful Assembly Act (1992), a reform made after Bjelke-Peterson’s regime came to an unceremonious end surrounded in controversy over corruption.47 Significantly, BCC’s court challenge to Councillor Sri is the first time that any local authority has attempted to prevent a protest march under the Act since it was introduced,48 signalling to some the return of “Joh’s War”49.

41 O’Malley, “Taking It to the Streets Historic March Remembered 50 Years On”; Smee, “‘Nothing Has Changed’”; Feilding, “Remembering the Revolution | John Oxley Library”; Lund, “The Making of Civil Liberties”; Davies, “Remembering Brisbane’s ‘Big March’ — It’s Still a Simple Case of Freedom.”

42 Wikipedia, “Joh Bjelke-Peterson.”

43 Wikipedia.

44 Evan Whitton quoted in Robinson, “Issues That Swung Elections.”

45 Stafford, Pig City.

46 Joh Bjelke Peterson quoted in Smee, “‘Nothing Has Changed.’”

47 Smee; Queensland Government, Peaceful Assembly Act 1992; Moore, “Lord Mayor, Premier ‘speak with Forked Tongues’ over Brisbane Protests.”

48 Smee, “‘Nothing Has Changed.’”

49 Wikipedia, “Joh Bjelke-Peterson.”

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Figure 5 The front line: 1977 civil liberties protest march in Brisbane Image Source: the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia

Figure 4Joh's ploce-state: police amass to break up 1977 civil librerties protest Image Source: the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia

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Brisbane’s Radical Houses

Situated on the unceded Country of the Jagera, Turrbal, and Yugarapul Nations Meanjin/Brisbane is Australia’s third largest city with a population of 2.4 million (Brisbane City Council 2019). Characterized by spacious neighbourhoods composed primarily of the ubiquitous and much-loved Queenslander – a single-storey timber house, raised on stumps, and wrapped in shaded verandas against the subtropical heat – the city famously enjoys 300 days of sunshine per year (Brisbane Marketing 2017). Conventionally regarded as something of a ‘big country town’, since hosting Expo ’88 – the year after Bjelke-Peterson’s tenure came to an end – the city and state governments have made a determined effort to re-brand Brisbane as a sophisticated cosmopolitan capital. The city is now in the throes of a construction boom with a proliferation of high-rise developments, master plans, and major infrastructure upgrades rapidly reshaping the inner suburbs.50 As in many contemporary cities, public discourse around these developments is polarised, with some residents expressing dissatisfaction at a government that appears to put the interests of property developers ahead of their own, 51 while others welcome change as a departure from Brisbane’s parochial past.52 Nevertheless, the “Pig City” years left an indelible mark on Brisbane’s cultural identity.53 In a context where explicit dissent wasn’t tolerated, artists and activists increasingly looked for other ways of making their voices heard. They turned to street theatre, public pranks, ‘zines, mail art, and community radio (Figure 8, Figure 7). The indie media and agit-prop theatre they produced are steeped in anti-authoritarian satire. Meanwhile, the scrappy music and grotesque visual art of the time exhibit all the negatory sensibilities of early punk movements, mobilising a DIY aesthetic of survival or self-destruction that has persisted in Brisbane’s alternative culture.54 In fact, pioneering local band The Saints are counted by music historians alongside the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as being at the vanguard of punk rock,55 making Brisbane an outside contender for the title ‘home of punk’.

50 “Brisbane Development.”

51 Crockford, “Brisbane Streets Shut down as ‘fed up’ Residents Protest over ‘Ignorant’ Council”; Atfield, “West End Residents Protest ‘overdevelopment’ of Suburb”; Moore, “Protesters Plan Park ‘occupation’ to Protest Brisbane’s New Casino.”

52 See Bernard Salt interview in marketing video for West Village: Sekisui House, West Village, Brisbane.

53 Stafford, Pig City.

54 Collie et al., “Radical Houses: Identity and Public Life in the Queensland House 1975-1989.”

55 “Punk Rock.”

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Figure 6 the Gabba Ward, Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia

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Central to this activity was the distinctive Queenslander. Cheap, inner-city, and spacious, the house became a test site for new ways of living and community-building, alongside artistic production, exhibition, and performance. Against the backdrop of a suffocated civic realm, share-houses and their under-crofts were a place to make new publics in the relative safety of the domestic realm, lending radical politics in Brisbane a particular intimacy, warmth, and openness that carries on today. So celebrated is the Queenslander as a site of political action and cultural identity-making that it became the subject of a forum and exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane in June 2019 (Figure 9). Many of the panellists made a direct connection between the political environment and their lived artistic responses, positing that having something to fight against galvanised young people into action. For many of those involved, the scope of radical politics under Bjelke-Peterson was simply the freedom to be oneself and to express one’s creative impulses.56

These pioneers laid the groundwork for a thriving culture of backyard radicalism in Brisbane with an enduring DIY sensibility. In recent years, radical artistic movements have once again begun to emerge from the underbellies of rented and ramshackle inner-city Queenslanders.

These include such events as Roving Conspiracy (Figure 10), an itinerant art and music night that became the springboard from which Councillor Sri made his successful bid for local office in 2016, and organisations like the Brisbane Urban and Regional Network for the Arts (BURN Arts Inc.), a non-profit promoting participatory arts and culture. Calling for a more just and sustainable approach to urban development, these groupings seek to re-imagine the city as a space of radical and plural democracy through a variety of pre-figurative practices, playful protests, and ‘creative occupations’ of public space.57 Organisers often prioritise radical care and self-expression over any other specific outcomes. In fact, the parallels with the stories of the Radical Houses forum are uncanny – people open their homes for gigs and exhibitions, theatrical pranks are plotted on cluttered verandas, the art and the music are scrappy and unfinished, and the politics are personal. Although the ‘right to march’ remains in tact for now, the evidence suggests that the present political climate more closely resembles that of the “Pig City” years than anyone might care to admit.

56 Collie et al., “Radical Houses: Identity and Public Life in the Queensland House 1975-1989.”

57 Osborne, “For Still Possible Cities: A Politics of Failure for the Politically Depressed”; Osborne, “The Right to the City: In Pursuit of a More Just, Sustainable, and Democratic Brisbane”; Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now.”

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Figure 8 The Cane Toad times - a key 'zine produced by Brisbane's punk counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s Image Source: UQ e-space. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/collection/

Figure 7 Lockhart Street, 1987. Home of the Cane Toad Times Image Source: UQ e-space. https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/collection/

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Figure 9 Brisbane's Radical Houses - exhibition and panel discussion at the Museum of Brisbane, 2019 Image Source: Museum of Brisbane. https://www.museumofbrisbane.com.au/

Figure 10 Roving Conspiracy, West End, 2015

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1 PARTICIPATORY URBANISM: Place-making or claim-staking?

In this chapter, I situate the argument within the broader discourse on participation in art, architecture, and urban planning. Drawing on recent histories of subaltern spatial politics

58

and socially engaged art

59 ,

I note how participatory practices appear

particularly vulnerable to co-optation into neoliberal economic policies. Thus highlighting the difficulty of evaluating participation as a surface-level attribute, I suggest it is the quality of these practices that denotes their true political function.

Accordingly, I turn to the theory of relational aesthetics and Ranciere’s conception of politics as dissensus60 in order to draw a distinction between processes of ‘placemaking’ and ‘claim-staking’ in the context of urban renewal.

58 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789 - 1848; Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia”; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”; Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject”; Shepard, “Play as Prank: From the Yippies to the Young Lords.”

59 Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art Andthe Politics of Spectatorship; Beyes, “Fictions of the Possible: Art, the City, and Public Entrepreneurship”; Sachs Olsen, Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City; Luger and Ren, Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape; Khonsari, “Contemporary Initiatives in Participatory Art and Architecture Practice.”

60 Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.

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The participatory turn The impetus for participation in planning and design originates in the radical artistic and political movements of the 1960s, with their calls for more direct, inclusive, and equitable forms of governance. In many ways, the present-day processes of community consultation owe their existence to these egalitarian demands. 61 In particular, the student revolts of May 1968 in France, inspired largely by the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, left an indelible mark on the thinking of urbanists and the practices of municipal authorities, as well having as a lasting legacy in popular culture. 62 In his seminal essay Architecture’s Public, Giancarlo De Carlo situates architecture students at the vanguard of May ‘68 with their calls for radical change in deeply entrenched and politically vacant institutions.63 His scathing critiques of architectural education and practice – and the ambiguous ethical values they espouse, encapsulated as “faith in ‘how’ and ignorance about ‘why’” – are still pertinent fifty years later, undermining many of the assumptions by which architects still operate.64 De Carlo describes architecture as a superstructural discipline65, invoking the language of Antonio Gramsci to illustrate a profession acting as an “operative appendage”66 of power. Disavowing the implicit political functions of their work, architects uphold a “cultural and aesthetic class code”. He calls for a total dissolution of the disciplinary boundaries whereby “all barriers between builders and

61 Krivý and Kaminer, “Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism.”

62 Marcus, “The Long Walk of the Situationist International”; Knabb, Situationist International Anthology; “Situationist International”; “May 1968 Events in France.”

63 De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public.”

64 Blundell Jones, “Sixty-Eight and After.”

65 Santucci, “The Prison Notebooks.” Santucci offers a succinct interpretation of Gramsci’s work while imprisoned by the fascist government of Italy between 1922 and 1935. During this time Gramsci developed his core theories of cultural hegemony, building from a reflection on “common sense” – a concept that recurs throughout this thesis. Gramsci’s critique of historic materialism – the dogmatic interpretation of Marxism emerging from the Soviet Union at the time – became the basis for his conceptions of structure (material or content) and superstructure (ideology or form). He argued that the ‘philosophy of praxis’ was a more appropriate way to interpret Marx’s writings, pointing out the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure – an idea directly echoed by Giancarlo De Carlo in his interpretation of architectural theory and practice as co-constitutive.

Praxis in this sense does not attempt to resolve contradictions in the way that “pure” ideology does, nor does it deny the agency of ideas in the way that a purely materialist view does. Instead praxis is the very expression of contradictions in material form – the condition of architecture – and thus becomes an essential tool for understanding and addressing them in an ever-unfolding process. This conception appears to be at the root of subsequent calls for participation in architecture, with the architect as ‘embedded’ expert.

66 De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public.”

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users must be abolished, so that building and using become two parts of the same planning process.”67 Thus outlining a radical approach to participatory design De Carlo announces the choice that architects face: stay on the side of the power structure, or go to the side of those overwhelmed and excluded by it.68

Place-making The ‘participatory turn’ in art since the 1990s is similarly attributed to the influence of the avant-garde and the events of 1968.69 Claire Bishop suggests that the disruptive, absurd, and often antagonistic methods of the Situationists, and their Dadaist and Surrealist predecessors, paved the way for much of today’s participatory, temporary, and socially engaged art practice.70 However, in contemporary cities, these practices have come to be understood as instrumental to processes of urban renewal. Artists and designers are often engaged by municipal authorities to produce temporary ‘activations’ and ‘interactive’ installations in order to introduce a sense of atmosphere to areas of the city flagged for regeneration. This pre-emptively fuels property speculation by establishing places themselves as recognisable products that can be easily marketed to tourists or investors. In Brisbane this can be seen in the proliferation of temporary arts events, laneway activations and interactive art festivals that have accompanied the city’s self-declared transition from ‘big country town’ to New World City.71 The policies and strategic plans that underpin these events make explicit the aim of manufacturing a new ‘creative class’ of ‘knowledge workers’ by promoting Brisbane itself as a lifestyle brand and its river as a cultural destination.72 The writers of these documents use the language of participation to convey a sense of critical value in the events they promote: ‘Temporary Activation’ becomes synonymous with cultural vibrancy; ‘Participatory’ with democracy and inclusion.

67 De Carlo.

68 De Carlo.

69 Krivý and Kaminer, “Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism.”

70 Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art Andthe Politics of Spectatorship.

71 See, for example, “Brisbane City Council – Temporary Art Program – Brisbane Art Guide”; Brisbane City Council, “Brisbane City Council, Public Art”; Brisbane City Council, “City of Lights Strategy 2017”; Brisbane City Council, “Creative Brisbane.”

72 See, for example, Brisbane City Council, “Creative Brisbane, Creative Economy”; Brisbane Marketing, “Brisbane | Australia’s New World City.”

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Figure 11 Brisbane’s New World City brand, and some examples of current Brisbane City Council cultural policy Images Source: Brisbane City Council. https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/

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Staking claims

Although many of the ideals of 1968 remain unrealised, recent protest movements such as Reclaim the Streets and Occupy carry its counter-cultural spirit into the present, renewing the call for a radical democratisation of urban space and a fairer distribution of resources. The democratic impulses of these movements have deep roots. Katrina Navickas suggests parallels between contemporary anti-globalisation protests and the anti-enclosure protests, Luddites and Swing Rioters of early nineteenth century England 73. Doreen Massey makes a similar connection, arguing that historic agrarian struggles and modern environmental movements have in common their opposition to the capitalisation of land and over-extraction of its resources 74. All of these seek in some way to protect the identities of places and people defined by particular cultural practices, customs, and localised economies.75

In the Australian context these historic struggles form the backdrop to European settlement. Unsurprisingly, many of the ‘undesirables’ transported to the early penal settlements brought with them their radical sensibilities and a deep-seated scepticism of authority.76 Traces of their claims to customary and common landownership can be found embedded in Australian planning and property law – not to mention the national mythology of pioneering frontier squatters77 and outlaw bushrangers.78 These claims sit awkwardly against those of Australia’s Traditional Owners, the 500 or so Indigenous Nations 79 who claim, justifiably, that their sovereignty over the land has never been ceded. 80 81

73 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789 - 1848.

74 Massey, “Landscape/Space/Politics.”

75 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789 - 1848; Massey, “Landscape/Space/Politics.”

76 Welsh, Great Southern Land.

77 Wikipedia, “Waltzing Matilda”; Wikipedia, “Squatting (Australian History).”

78 Wikipedia, “Ned Kelly”; Wikpedia, “Bushranger.”

79 Agency, “Our People.”

80 “Aboriginal Sovereignty—Never Ceded.”

81 Questioning the territorial sovereignty of the Crown would have been a favourite pursuit of some early settlers too, particularly those of Irish extraction, many of whom traded their republican struggles for transportation Moore, “An ‘Indelible Hibernian Mark’? Irish Rebels and Australian Labour Radicalism: An Historiographical Overview.”. It is perhaps no small accident that many Indigenous Australians today also claim Irish ancestry McGrath, “Shamrock Aborigines: The Irish, the Aboriginal Australians and Their Children.”.

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Discussions of spatial politics in this context are thus particularly fraught.

Consequently, contemporary advocates for spatial justice in Brisbane rescind the Lefebvrian claim for a ‘Right to the City’,82 instead theorising their struggles for justice and equality through the lenses of de-colonisation,83 eco-feminism,84 and queer activism 85. In their common resistance to dispossession and displacement by market forces they find resonance across the intersections.86 Noting that the activities of Brisbane’s subaltern political groupings bear many of the hallmarks of the classic ‘détournement’87 – that is, the ‘re-routing’ or ‘hijacking’ techniques pioneered by the Situationists – I suggest that the aesthetic they mobilise also appears particularly vulnerable to ‘recuperation’.88 In the case studies, I show how these culture-jamming antics are easily reincorporated into the structures they oppose. Under a neo-liberal paradigm, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between Debord’s ‘spectacle’ and its subversion.

In what follows, I examine this contradiction, focusing in particular on participatory design as both the subject and method of critique. To begin this examination, it is important to recognise that participation takes a multiplicity of forms, from pacifying critique to politicising action, 89 and that its critical dimension therefore may be explicit, implicit, or a mixture of both. In order to understand its true political function, it is first necessary to assess the quality of participation. Next, it is essential to acknowledge the role of aesthetic and technical expertise in facilitating the uptake of participatory practices. The artists and designers engaged by municipalities act as an intermediary between culture and administration, becoming a conduit for the latest critical ideas to enter into the machinery of government and bringing with them their own systems of value. In order to reformulate a critical conception of 82 “Right to the City - Brisbane.”

83 Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty.

84 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

85 “Queer Anti-Colonial Action Bitchez.”

86 Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now”; Osborne, “For Still Possible Cities: A Politics of Failure for the Politically Depressed”; Osborne, “The Right to the City: In Pursuit of a More Just, Sustainable, and Democratic Brisbane”; Thompsett, “Learning by Doing by Learning: Reflections on Scholar Activism with the Brisbane Free University”; Thompsett, “Pedagogies of Resistance: Free Universities and the Radical ReImagination of Study.”

87 Debord, “Definitions.”

88 Debord.

89 Udall and Holder, “The ‘Diverse Economies’ of Participation.”

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participation, it is thus necessary to identify and examine the cultural values of creative expertise.

Making sense of participation As the once subversive and critical practices of participation are co-opted into neoliberal economic policy, in the wake of a dismantled welfare state,90 artists and designers find themselves positioned either as high-end marketing consultants or, at the other end of the spectrum, as providers of basic social services through community arts programmes91 For this reason Bishop condemns the excessive use of utilitarian criteria such as ‘social impact,’ in the evaluation of socially engaged art and participatory design practices, arguing that they must be assessed first and foremost as aesthetic practices .92 Accordingly, I turn to the theory of relational aesthetics, and in particular Ranciere’s notion of “the partition of the sensible”93, examining some of the rhetorical, visual, and spatial expressions of the New World City in order to unpack contrasting political visions for Brisbane’s future.

Referring to the ways in which forms of expression and experience are divided between legitimate and illegitimate persons or activities, the ‘partition of the sensible’94 is a way of thinking about aesthetics as a political phenomenon, and vice-versa.95 Ranciere refers to this configuration of the sensible as the police order – not the literal civil enforcement agency, but rather the whole spatial, social, and material order of the polis.96

90 Tomlin, “Chapter 1: Historical and Cultural Background.”

91 Quigley, Interview with Kath Quigley (CEO + Artistic Director, Backbone Inc.).

92 Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art Andthe Politics of Spectatorship.

93 Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.

94 Ranciere.

95 The term ‘sensible’ here has two distinct connotations. The first is that of the ‘sensory environment’ – what is seen, heard, felt, thought, or perceived – ie. aesthetic experience. The second, arising from the first, is that of ‘common sense’ – what is normal or accepted within the sensory environment – ie. that which “makes sense". Similarly, ‘partition’ has a double meaning, translated from the French term partage signifying both ‘sharing’ and ‘division’.

96 Dikeç, “Police, Politics, and the Right to the City.”

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Building on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt,97 Ranciere suggests that politics consists of disruptions of the established police order through contestations over the common space of the polis, whereby those who are excluded seek to establish their identity by striving to be seen and heard.98 Conceived in this way, aesthetic practices – including architecture – are inherently political, a means of ‘sense-making’99 that serves to either interrupt or reinforce a given configuration of the ‘sensible’100. By embracing or rejecting a set of exclusions, design can either uphold or challenge the status quo – building consensus or fomenting dissensus.101 In Ranciere’s estimation, democracy is reduced to assigning individuals their ‘proper’ place in the police order through the administration of conflicts.102 Important to this is the idea that even exclusion from political power is itself a form of inclusion in the broader order.103 The visibility afforded to climate action group Extinction Rebellion (XR) in Brisbane, for instance, with its distinct ‘brand’ of activism, serves to affirm the place of ‘extremists’ within the established order. Protestors are characterized as so marginal and dangerous as to make their appearance usefully negative to existing regimes of power104 105. The group becomes a pariah, providing politicians with a clear-cut example of supposed ‘extremism’ that allows them to leverage support for their increasingly authoritarian control measures.106 107

97 Schaap, “Hannah Arendt and the Philosophical Repression of Politics”; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction.

98 Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.

99 Forester, “Designing: Making Sense Together in Practical Conversations.”

100 Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia.”

101 Boano and Kelling.

102 Mecchia, “The Classics and Critical Theory in Post-Modern France: The Case of Jacques Ranciere.”

103 Ruez, “‘Partitioning the Sensible’ at Park 51: Ranciere, Islamophobia and Comon Politics.”

104 Jameson, “Interview with Horacio Machín.”

105 This image is fostered by mainstream media, whose line of questioning at protest actions in Brisbane has tended to focus on the personal circumstances of participants, rather than the reasons they are protesting, drawing attention to the ‘otherness’ of protestors in relation to the ordinary citizen: “it’s a Tuesday, why aren’t you at work?” (ref – personal communication).

106 Moore, “Lord Mayor, Premier ‘speak with Forked Tongues’ over Brisbane Protests”; Crockford, “‘You’re the Extremist.’”

107 I would argue the usefully negative role of XR goes even further – by inviting participants to put themselves forward for arrest at protest actions, the group validates the deployment by the State of coercive force as a legitimate response to peaceful assembly, endorsing the police order in both its literal and figurative forms. This works against those for whom encounters with the police are potentially dangerous or deadly – ie. people of colour. As such, XR’s approach is a contentious issue amongst activists in Brisbane.

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Protest or parade: a taxonomy of participation Protests, occupations, marches and rallies are easily understood in Ranciere’s terms as political events, a means of staking a claim to visibility and legitimacy. By the same logic, however, cultural activities such as festivals, parades, street theatre or large-scale installations may also be understood as implicitly political events, in their capacity to dispute accepted uses, invent or resurface place narratives, or temporarily reconfigure the symbolic order through radical transformations of space.108 In short, an event may be political explicitly or implicitly, by virtue of its message or its means.

Conversely, any attempt at re-establishing order must be read as an act of depoliticisation.109 For instance, through the administration of public space – both its design and the activity that takes place there – urban planning and cultural policy in Brisbane serve to establish a spatial and social order that assigns to particular people, functions, or events their ‘proper’ time and place.110 Through a suite of permit applications, auditions, approvals, and acquittals, cultural and political activity are channeled into a set of tightly controlled times and spaces, effectively neutralising their disruptive potential. 111 This is often presented under the benign guise of ‘placemaking’, concealing underlying motivations such as selling apartments, preventing congregation, or excluding entire social groupings. I propose a tri-axial system of classifying events in order to produce a simple ‘taxonomy’ of participation for the purposes of the analysis that follows (Figure 12).

108 Deutsche, “Agoraphobia.”

109 Dikeç, “Police, Politics, and the Right to the City.”

110 Dikeç.

111 Osborne and Right to the City Brisbane, “The Problem with Park(Ing) Day.”

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Figure 12 Taxonomy of Participation

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X-axis: Participation type [administered – transformative] I make the distinction between ‘place-making’ and ‘claim-staking’ as a means of interrogating the underlying political function of participation in a given context. This distinction can essentially be thought of in terms of whether an event is solicited or unsolicited. Overlaid on this is the additional lens of implicit and explicit modes of critique.

Place-making is understood here as a form of participation geared towards the production of consensus. Serving primarily to facilitate the “administration of conflicts”112 among participants, this is framed as an effort to project spatial coherence. Drawing on the ideas of Theodor Adorno113, I refer to this as administered participation.

Claim-staking on the other hand is understood as a form of participation that encourages disagreement and dissent through radical transformations of urban space. Participants challenge spatial coherence by resurfacing or reinventing suppressed narratives of place, staking a claim to legitimacy. This I align with Jeremy Till’s114 notion of transformative participation.

Y-axis: Political operation [implicit – explicit] Administered and transformative participation are discussed in greater depth later in this chapter. However, so it is clear from the outset, I do not propose the distinction as a strict ‘black-or-white’ binary of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ participation. As I show in the case study that follows, cultural producers can and often do play conflicting roles, simultaneously supporting and subverting the institutional structures they set out to critique. Marisa Georgiou describes her dual roles of community organizer as Chair of BURN Arts Inc. and

112 Mecchia, “The Classics and Critical Theory in Post-Modern France: The Case of Jacques Ranciere.”

113 Adorno, “Culture and Administration.”

114 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

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public art curator as Co-director of people+artist+place with the phrase: “poking from the inside and poking from the outside”.115 This is where the additional overlay of implicit and explicit modes of critique becomes useful. It is difficult for a solicited participatory event to be ‘political’ by Ranciere’s definition, as its means are already a part of the established institutional order and thus controlled. Compromised in this way, however, the event is less threatening to the status quo and thus may have more potential to be explicit with a political message. Although it is already ‘co-opted’, by leveraging the legitimacy of its platform it can potentially achieve greater reach.

Meanwhile, an unsolicited participatory event can be more easily ‘political’ in Ranciere’s terms, disrupting the established order by reconfiguring social, material, or spatial relations in dramatic ways. Posing a fundamental challenge to the status quo, however, it is often necessary for such events to disguise their explicitly political message in humour, irony, or theatricality in order to appear less threatening. In so doing, the message may become opaque or have limited reach. An event that is both unsolicited event and explicitly political is likely to prompt a coercive response from the established order, thus becoming ‘usefully negative’ 116, as in the example of Extinction Rebellion.

Z-axis: Design [process and product] Whether solicited or unsolicited in its means, implicit or explicit in its message, participation in architecture can open space for transformation both in content and in form – or in Gramsci’s terms: structure and superstructure.117 The material, social and spatial configuration of an event and the means by which that configuration is arrived at both provide an opportunity for disruptive critique. Design itself becomes a means of disrupting the established order by

115 Georgiou and Blacket, Interview with Marisa Georgiou (Chair, BURN Arts Inc; Director, p+a+p) and Stirling Blacket (Town Planner, Modifyre; Unqualified Design Studio).

116 Jameson, “Interview with Horacio Machín.”

117 Santucci, “The Prison Notebooks.”

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opening the processes of planning and production to participation. In prefiguring alternative sets of social and spatial relations within the existing structural realities of a site, designers can make previously invisible and inaccessible spaces appear visible and accessible and at the same time raise questions about the distributions of power and resources that underlie them, thereby opening space for the renewal of superstructures. As De Carlo asserts: “Structural transformations can create space for the renewal of superstructures. But in order for such renewal to become a reality, it must be produced within the superstructures themselves, creating room for yet further structural transformations.”118 By unlocking new possible sites and points of politics, the design process itself becomes a means of staking new claims through discussion, dispute and speculation; empowering participants to collectively imagine the improper, demonstrate the disordered, and enact the unauthorized – in John Forester’s terms, where design is ‘sense-making’, participatory design becomes “Making sense together”.119

118 De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public.”

119 Forester, “Designing: Making Sense Together in Practical Conversations”; Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

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Administered participation

I suggest that Queensland’s historically authoritarian culture of governance reveals itself anew through ‘administered participation’. Maeder et al 120 question the capacity of artists and designers to remain critical when the main concern of the institutions from which they receive their funding is to avoid public controversy. Perennially cashstrapped arts producers cannot afford to jeopardise their survival by proposing work that will offend the political sensitivities of their state funders, while architects and urban designers claim political neutrality as they service the needs of a profit-driven development industry.121 Council won’t risk losing face; creative producers can’t risk losing funding.122 Mutual risk aversion thus extends the reach of government into the material culture of the city, shutting down critical cultural discourse.123 This reflects a condition referred to as the ‘post-political’ 124, whereby the public sphere is voided of dispute and disagreement, and replaced with a consensually established frame of “unquestioned and unquestionable axioms concerning social relationships, how the economy should be organised, or the city built”125. Within this frame, participation serves to uphold an image of democracy in which superficial involvement in the decision-making process conceals power relations that limit the scope of conversation to a set of pre-determined, superficial choices.126 I argue that this illusion of choice is potentially even more damaging to society in the long run than the manipulative suppression of dissent by executive power.

As it is codified in the planning instruments and cultural policies of the New World City, market logics are extended into the public discourse, to the point where they

120 Maeder, Piraud, and Pattaroni, “New Genre Public Commission? The Subversive Dimension of Public Art in Post-Fordist Capitalism.”

121 Quigley, Interview with Kath Quigley (CEO + Artistic Director, Backbone Inc.); Georgiou and Green, Interview with People Artist Place co-directos Marisa Georgiou and Jenna Green.

122 Quigley, Interview with Kath Quigley (CEO + Artistic Director, Backbone Inc.); Georgiou and Blacket, Interview with Marisa Georgiou (Chair, BURN Arts Inc; Director, p+a+p) and Stirling Blacket (Town Planner, Modifyre; Unqualified Design Studio).

123 Quigley, Interview with Kath Quigley (CEO + Artistic Director, Backbone Inc.); Georgiou and Green, Interview with People Artist Place co-directos Marisa Georgiou and Jenna Green.

124 Mouffe, On The Political; Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology.

125 Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia.”

126 Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation.

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become the very essence of ‘common sense’ – something akin to a self-evident natural law. By creating just enough of a sense of open dialogue, participation of this kind can subdue the critical instincts of moderate constituents, permitting a gradual erosion of institutional accountability that goes unnoticed until it is too late or too difficult to reverse. I suggest therefore that the policy-writers of the New World City unconsciously facilitate a shift back towards the authoritarian populism of Brisbane’s recent past.

The problem of expertise Central to the hollowing out of critique through administered participation are the figures of the planner and the architect, together with the curator and the artist, whose technical and creative expertise in reimagining the space of the city helps to gloss over a municipal approach to urban development ultimately favours the interests of capital.127 Addressing the very real challenge of providing space for an ever-growing population, politicians in Brisbane tend to frame intensive inner city regeneration as the most equitable and sustainable approach to urban development. The oxymoronic language of ‘sustainable development’, which emanates from the institutional bodies of professional expertise, becomes a trump card in over-simplified political debates.

Dissenting political voices are dismissed simply as ‘anti-development’ – the implicit suggestion being that they are somehow opposed to ‘progress’ – resulting in an inversion of conventional conservative and progressive political positions. This gives credence to a claim that the high-density, high-yield schemes of commercial property developers are both the most forward-thinking and the most common-sense solutions to the problem of urban sprawl. The appeal to such absolute grounds of meaning shelters these arguments from any deeper political interrogation. 128 Lacking the specialist knowledge required to articulate plausible alternatives, communities are left without any real choice but to accept what the experts say. The role of architecture in this process is necessarily called into question.

127 Millington, “From Urban Scar to ‘Park in the Sky.’” 128 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”

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The hegemony of the market helps to explain the close alignment of interests observed between the public and private spheres.129 By governing the boundaries of what is or is not the subject of debate, participation reduces the scope of politics from negotiating conflict to identifying consensus within an economically determined frame.130 What is ‘useful’ in economic terms – ie. physical, productive, profitable – comes to define the very scope of governance. Meanwhile, what is ‘useless’ – ie. intangible, intellectual, irrational – is siphoned off as culture, allowing it to be more easily repackaged in the form of place-branding strategies like the New World City. As Adorno asserts: “Culture is looked upon as thoroughly useless and for that reason as something beyond the planning and administrative methods of material production; this results in a much sharper definition of the profile upon which the claim to validity of both the useful and the useless is based.”131 The transformation of culture into something ‘external’ to everyday, practical life makes it more easily incorporated into the institutional order from which it distinguishes itself, ironically setting up the conditions for cultural hegemony to be established.132 In its separation from the material processes of necessity, culture allows for a clearer distinction to be drawn between what is ‘useful’ and ‘useless’.133 In so doing, both are opened up to more effective administration and thus co-optation into the machinery of governance.134 Owing its very existence to institutional support, art becomes a kind of performance of criticality sufficient to fulfil its designated role in the established order by creating the appearance of an open dialogue.135 Meanwhile design is reduced to an uncritical technical pursuit – a problem-solving exercise geared towards making improvements in productive efficiency.136

129 Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century.”

130 Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia.”

131 Adorno, “Culture and Administration.”

132 Adorno.

133 Adorno.

134 Adorno.

135 Adorno.

136 Adorno.

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Adorno’s assessment bears a striking resemblance to Gramsci’s 137 discussion of ideology as the separation of “useless” political ideas from the practical reality of material things. This sets up a direct link between ideology and culture. Both are dismissed as “useless”, removed from view and then co-opted back into the economic machinery as a means of generating productive value. In spite of their almost innate critical impulse towards the status quo, creative producers become instruments of the established order.138 In order to develop and implement cultural or planning policy, administration must necessarily defer to their expertise 139 – pre-supposing, by definition, an inequality of knowledge that undermines the claim of bureaucracy to impartiality. The technical and aesthetic judgement of the expert can only be affirmed by other experts, producing a self-referential language of expertise that detaches itself from context. State authority is replaced with institutional expertise, functioning as a conduit for the uptake of critical ideologies into the frameworks of administration.140 This helps to explain how the well-meaning language of ‘sustainable development’ can so quickly appear to take on the status of jargon. Or, for example, how critical practices of participation can so easily be co-opted into neoliberal economic policy.

In the separation of useful and useless,141 the architect’s role is exorcised of its political implications. The schismatic conception of their profession (is it a functional art or a science of form?) leaves architects in an ideological vacuum. Recalling De Carlo’s critique of “faith in ‘how’ and ignorance about ‘why’”142 – the ‘how’ of technical achievement is conflated with the ‘why’ of aesthetic judgement, such that the judicious application of technical solutions to artificially derived aesthetic problems becomes reified as a cultural achievement in its own right, without reference to the broader social and political framework in which it occurs. 143

137 Santucci, Antonio Gramsci.

138 Adorno, “Culture and Administration.”

139 Adorno.

140 Blundell Jones, Petrescu, and Till, “Introduction.”

141 Adorno, “Culture and Administration.”

142 De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public.”

143 This point is illustrated by the example of the fetishized abstractions of architectural photography which De Carlo calls a “falsification with no equivalent.”

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“The political dimension [of architecture] is too often avoided by differentiating between the functional and the aesthetic, treating the former as a purportedly objective terrain of ergonomics and efficiency, and seeing the latter as a kind of private language, supposedly above political debate”144 Walter Benjamin posits that the critical discourse set in motion by the expert is a necessary vanguard to social progress – the expert is someone who defends the ‘public interest’ even against ‘the public’ itself.145 By contrast, Gramsci proposes that the distinction between the expert and the public should be collapsed entirely, outlining his notion of the ‘organic intellectual’ who democratises themselves by becoming “an organiser of practical aspects of culture”.146 Thus he arrives at the philosophy of praxis – as both producers and products of the material and cultural environment in which we operate, our ideas and our practices are inseparable from each other – a reunification of ‘useless’ and ‘useful’; form and function; ideology and practice.

144 Blundell Jones, Petrescu, and Till, “Introduction.”

145 Adorno quoting Benjamin in Adorno, “Culture and Administration.”

146 Gramsci arguably prefigures Participatory Action Research as a philosophy of knowledge production here. As Santucci describes it: he is a “concrete philosopher” who does not limit himself to arguing about the world, but works to change it by political action”

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Transformative Participation

In his essay The negotiation of hope147, Jeremy Till outlines a vision of the architect not as a producer of built form, but as a facilitator of spatial agency. He describes a devolved expertise in which the architect acts as an embedded ‘citizen-expert’, enabling and empowering people to proactively design and construct their own everyday environments.148 Instead of being seen as an inconvenient obstacle to be negotiated in the process of acquiring planning approvals, participation is seen as an opportunity to expand design practice.149 Till calls this ‘transformative participation’ – that is, participation which is “realistic enough to acknowledge the imbalances of power and knowledge, but at the same time works with these imbalances in a way that transforms the expectations and futures of participants.” 150 The key features of transformative participation as set out by Till are as follows:

•

Bringing forward moment of reality (challenging the suspension of disbelief)

•

Devolution of creative agency (undermining expertise)

•

Embedded knowledge (praxis – theory & practice)

•

Negotiation of hope (as opposed to problem-solving)

•

“Making sense together” (making best sense – intent)

•

Urban story-telling – conversation & narrative (assuming equality of intelligence)

•

Contingency (embracing unpredictability)

Till suggests that mainstream architectural culture is in a state of denial, disavowing its political function in order to suppress the fundamental threat posed by participation.151 He suggests this threat arises from a tension between the reality of architectural practice and the idealised model of its cultural values, encapsulated neatly in the Vitruvian triad: commodity, firmness, and delight (Figure 13).152

147 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

148 Till.

149 Till.

150 Till.

151 Till.

152 Till.

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Figure 13 Commodity, Firmness, Delight: architecture’s professional values

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Commodity: Design requires efficient problem-solving and economical use of resources. The risks involved in any architectural project demand that financial success be as close as possible to guaranteed. It thus falls to the architect to ensure control and predictability in the design process. By introducing uncertainty or contingency to the design process, participation exposes the client to risk. As such it must be tightly de-limited so that it does not produce unexpected results or derail the project.

Firmness: Design implies incremental progress. It requires the establishment of “speculative, controllable parameters” 153 and the deployment of ever-more advanced technical solutions in addressing them. This necessarily puts the designer in a position of power, as the person with the expertise to both identify and apply the design criteria.

Participation by contrast implies devolution of creative agency, whereby the designer actively subverts their own position of power in order to open the process up to unpredictable inputs and interactions.

Delight: Finally, design assumes an aesthetic proficiency. However, the sensibilities of the profession are often at odds with prevailing tastes – a kind of self-perpetuating elitism upheld by unspoken cultural codes and an impenetrable use of language. Architecture is thus intimately caught up with the ‘partition of the sensible’154, suspecting the disavowal of its political function. Participation necessarily implies disruption by opening space for aesthetic expressions that do not conform to the established order.

Till sets out an approach to transformative participation that, he argues, overturns these idealised cultural values in order to reassert a realistic model of politically responsible practice.155 However, he leaves open the question what cultural values, if 153 Khonsari, “Contemporary Initiatives in Participatory Art and Architecture Practice.”

154 Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.

155 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

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any, can be said to underlie the model of transformative participation. I suggest that without explicitly identifying a set of values that directly counters commodity, firmness, and delight, any model of design practice remains vulnerable to co-optation via precisely the same mechanisms of creative expertise discussed.

Slipping through the cracks In Ranciere’s terms, expertise determines who is ‘authorised’ to speak. 156 Till conceives of transformative participation in this vein as a mode of dissensus that gives people a voice in the development of their built environment. By thinking of design not as a finite commodifiable product but as a critical terrain for negotiating how society structures itself through spatial organisation, it ought to be possible for architects to challenge destructive attempts to depoliticise the social and economic forces that shape our built environment. But there is a catch. Till borrows his conception of transformative participation from John Friedmann, the American urban planning theorist.157 The genesis of Friedman’s use of the term ‘transformative’ lies in Rousseau’s classic theory of democracy, in which political participation is part of an educative process geared towards the production of an informed consensus 158 – ie. directly contradicting Till’s own assertion of transformation as dissensus.

I suggest that this root contradiction exposes the model of transformative participation to co-optation. Adding to an increasingly high-resolution image of critical discourse, it is in fact still contained within the frame of consensus. You may have a transformative experience, as long as it agrees with the terms and conditions. This potential appears to be acknowledged by Till when he notes that the earliest attempts at facilitating transformative participation in architectural design simply replaced one impenetrable form of expertise with another: CAD.159 Combining the new disciplines of systems theory and cybernetics 160 with design theory and participatory rhetoric, 156 Hallward, “Jacqes Ranciere and the Subversion of Mastery.”

157 Friedmann, Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action.

158 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory.

159 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

160 Cybernetic theory quickly raises issues of ethics as it moves from first to second to third order systems. The first order system has its goals imposed from the outside. Two such systems together will produce interaction – they will push each other. The second order system observes itself and thus has the capacity to adapt its goals. Two of these systems together will produce a

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early computer aided design modelling was seen as a means of devolving creative agency amongst an ever-wider group of users.161 Much of what eventuated, however, was simply a new medium for making choices within a predetermined framework, developed to the designer’s specifications.162 This raises the inherent ethical question of who, or what, determines the framework of rules governing conversation about goals and means – ie. the very scope of design possibilities.163 It is still the expert who creates the framework for engagement, and thus in a sense still ‘plays god’ to the users of the system, the participants. My argument seeks to show that the key to transformative participation is to explicitly identify this framework to participants and to equip them with the means to reproduce and thus manipulate it. This aims to make redundant the traditional role of the designer altogether, by divulging the very means of producing architectural ‘knowledge’.164

conversation about goals and means – politics; design; etc. The third order system determines the rules governing conversation and how to change them – the rules of debate; planning and design codes. The early ‘participatory’ CAD systems highlight the ethical conundrum of the third order system.

161 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

162 Till.

163 Till.

164 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”

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Blending in While intellectual or artistic critique may play a role in undermining the power of institutions, expertise is still itself a self-replicating form of hegemonic power that needs to be questioned.165 Many of Brisbane’s critical artists and designers occupy dual roles as grassroots community organisers and creative professionals acting on behalf of the state. In so doing, they provide a conduit for critical ideas to enter the framework of governance. However, they also provide a mechanism by which critical practices can be instrumentalised by processes of neoliberal financialisation.

Benjamin’s vanguardist model of expertise assumes an alignment between institutional values and the cultural values of a wider, historically conscious society.166 However, in the absence of clear ethical bearings, this serves simply to endorse a form of professional hubris, exemplified by the architects and planners of the great technocratic experimentations of last century. In his unapologetic critique of the Modern Movement, De Carlo calls for a wholesale re-evaluation of architectural expertise along the lines of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’167 – the precursor to Till’s vision of the citizen-expert.168 Nevertheless, fifty years later, claims of a vocational calling to work for ‘the greater good’ still permit architects to graft their politically agnostic values onto the entrails of power.169 Like a chameleon, the cultural values of architecture can blend themselves seamlessly with those of the prevailing economic ideologies of the day – in this case, the neo-colonial, late capitalist ideologies of the New World City (Figure 14).

165 Santucci, Antonio Gramsci.

166 Adorno quoting Walter Benjamin in, “Culture and Administration.”

167 De Carlo, “Architecture’s Public”; Santucci, Antonio Gramsci.

168 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

169 Canetti, Crowds and Power.

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Figure 14 Commodity, Firmness, Delight – architecture’s colonial values

I argue that the only way to ensure the integrity of transformative participation as a critical spatial practice is to clearly identify and circumscribe the counter-cultural values that underpin it, and to build these values back into the framework of the design process intentionally and continually. In so doing, a transformative ‘counterinstitution’ can be imagined that doesn’t just shield its own cultural values, but perhaps begins to shift the values of the institutions it mirrors. “whoever makes critically and unflinchingly conscious use of the means of administration and its institutions is still in a position to realise something which would be different from merely administered culture”170 In the case study that follows, I illustrate how radical arts and political groupings in Brisbane enact transformative participation through the planning and production of their artworks and events, potentially offering a scale model for a similar process in architectural design and urban planning.

170 Adorno, “Culture and Administration.”

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2 METHODOLOGY This section discusses the key methodologies employed in pursuit of the research objectives, outlining how these methods have been directed through the design development and theoretical analysis in order to refine the research question.

Research objectives •

Articulate a conceptual framework for participatory design in architecture that mediates between current theory and practice.

•

Demonstrate an applied methodology for ongoing design practice that challenges current approaches to urban planning and development under a neoliberal model of governance.

•

Develop and test this methodology in the context of a 1:1 spatial intervention, as a scale model towards a thesis design brief

•

Set forth an argument in support of this model of architectural practice as an essential tool for fostering critical cultural dialogue.

Core methods:

•

Participatory Action Research / (Auto)ethnography

•

Design research

•

Survey / archival work

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Participatory Action Research / (auto)ethnography This study forms part of an ongoing project of Participatory Action Research (MacDonald 2012) aimed at articulating an approach to participatory design practice developed by members of Unqualified Design Studio (UDS 2019) through the activities of BURN Arts and other grassroots community initiatives. Inquiry based on PAR principles attempts to make sense of the world through collective efforts to actively transform it (“Participatory Action Research” 2019). In the context of a community design process, this means first mobilizing creative responses to constraints as they arise, often with severely limited resources to hand, and then understanding these responses through documentation, reflection, and dissemination (Norrie 2018).

Although many of the key ideas presented here have come through extensive reading around participatory spatial practices (see chapter 1), applied design practice remains the primary vehicle through which these ideas have been developed. Thus while I am responsible for the specific content of this paper, much of the conceptual framework has been produced collectively with fellow participants and co-producers.

I am a founding member of BURN Arts Inc and served on the management committee during its first two years. I have been involved with Modifyre since its inception, co-leading the design and construction of the first effigy in 2015 with my partner Amy Learmonth, and acting as communications and engagement lead for the event alongside Amy “Delphi” Richardson between 2016-18. I have been involved with the design and construction of major installations at similar events around the world since 2014. I have also had involvement as a participant and organiser with many of the grassroots organising projects described in this paper, particularly People’s Pride Festival, Roving Conspiracy, and various Right to the City Brisbane creative activations and public performances. Much of this work formed the backdrop to my initial research proposal.

The two-year period of development for this project has been used as an opportunity to step out of these roles in order to take a position as researcher. I have sought to maintain sufficient critical distance to allow for documentation and reflection, whilst still participating in the practical delivery of projects in order to have as full an understanding as possible of the specific challenges faced in each case.

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The results are generally mixed – comprising damaged personal relationships and incoherent data. When combining ethnographic research, participatory action research, and creative practice-led design research philosophies, the potential for burn out is considerable. The extent to which this cocktail of research methodologies leads to foundational extra-disciplinary ethical questions is not conducive to focused research. The inherent difficulties of positionality with respect to one’s subject are compounded by emotional investment in the context and the collaborative relationships. This has led me to the conclusion that architecture, activism, and academia are not entirely compatible with one another, at the very least in a deeply familiar context.

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Design research Alongside ethnographic interviews with key subjects, survey work and select archival research, speculative architectural design forms a core part of the research methodology. This provides primary source material in the form of project documentation accumulated through 1:1 design tests carried out in collaboration with members of Unqualified Design Studio and BURN Arts Inc. These have enabled me to develop an applied theory of participatory design as a pre-figurative political practice, a means of surfacing particular cultural values and fostering critical dialogue around issues of spatial justice. The result is a synthesis of this design work with a theoretical and contextual analysis of the topic that opens up several possible avenues for further academic and/or practice-based inquiry.

The primary role of design within the broader research framework has been to test a number of approaches to participation in spatial politics, in order to assess and illustrate the potential of architectural thinking and practice to transect the complex entanglement of social, political, economic and cultural forces at play within the context of Brisbane and the Gabba Ward. Thus design has been conceived as a form of speculative fiction, used in a propositional manner first to generate an initial hypothesis, and then to test and further refine this hypothesis. In this sense it forms part of an abductive process, a series of ‘best guesses’, moving towards the formulation of a design brief for the final thesis project. This brief is only provided in indicative outline form at the end of the paper, for reasons I discuss below.

Brief development This paper functions as a springboard for the final design investigation – a written argument that both underpins and augments its own further articulation in the form of an urban planning proposition. It details the key social, spatial, and material characteristics of the Gabba Ward and the role of planning, architecture, and other critical spatial and aesthetic practices in this context. The argument draws on key academic literatures consulted during the design process in order to define a specific theoretical approach and situate the design investigation within a wider critical discourse on participatory urbanism.

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The design project as it currently stands is a provocation revolving around the devolution of the role of the architect into that of a facilitator of ‘spatial agency’ among a group of participants. This takes the form of a fictional community consultation process and a re-formulation of urban planning as ‘culture-led development’.

Design approach In the case studies that follow, I conceptualise staged events in public space as ‘rituals’ in which the symbolic order of place is re-constituted. I use the term ‘infrastructures of ritual’ to denote the material, social, and spatial frameworks that underpin these events, a conception I borrow from David Graeber’s anthropological theory value.

My definition of ritual for these purposes is broad: a recurrent theatrical of performative spatial practice by which meaning is generated, power symbolised, or cultural values transmitted between generations. With this research I am specifically interested in rituals in which the imposed narrative or accepted use of a particular public space is contested or temporarily suspended, such as:

•

Protests, marches, political rallies, debates

•

Unsolicited public performances, street theatre, parades

•

Festivals, street parties, creative occupations, ‘activations’

Using the metaphor of the theatre, the infrastructure of ritual is the theatre itself – the stage and set (ie. the material infrastructure upon which the action takes place), the tower, wings, rigs, and back of house (the spatial infrastructures), and finally the technicians, makeup artists, costume and prop teams, etc (the social infrastructures).

My core hypothesis is that transformative participation can be understood as the revelation of this infrastructure to participants in a ritual, through their involvement the process of producing the ritual itself.

Type, Form, Context

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In arriving at this approach, I have drawn on the theories of Josef Albers (Duberman, Diaz), in which design is an empirically controlled, and thus repeatable, experimental process of iteration, without specific outcomes in mind. In this sense it can be thought of as a pre-figurative ‘means without end’. Added to this are the ideas of Bernard Tschumi, whose conception of architecture as the ‘construction of situations’ offers a useful precedent for engaging with the theories of Guy Debord and the Situationists.

Thus through a series of overlapping paper collage and physical modelling tests I have experimented

with

strategies

of

superimposition:

de-commodification,

de-

familiarisation, de-structuring. Drawing this out across sites and scales in the chosen study area, I developed a typological approach to analysing ‘ritual’ in the Gabba Ward, classifying events under architectural terms of Type, Form, and Context. This provided the initial basis for my theorisation of artists and activists working in the ‘fold’ between formal and informal cultural sectors, and thus subverting there own work – a theoretical dead-end overcome using Giancarlo De Carlo’s work on participation, from which stemmed the ‘taxonomy’ of participation arrived at in the literature review.

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Figure 15 Design research methodology – theatrical model

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Fieldwork Fieldwork data collection: •

Design tests o Drawings, sketches & collage o Models o Photos o Film / animation o Project documentation o Interviews (audio recording) with collaborators and participants o Presentations

•

Ethnography o Interview questions & transcripts with key subjects o Fieldwork journal – participant observation

•

Survey work o Site drawings / mapping o Photos

•

Archival research o Historic photos & site plans o Historic accounts / anecdotes & stories o BCC / QLD policy documents, city plans, strategic plans, etc o Other project specific documents

Design tests I set out to undertake two major design tests during the fieldwork, bookending the period with one at the beginning and one at the end.

•

The Temple at Modifyre – a large-scale installation at a community arts festival

•

Future Histories – o Backbone Festival (EBBC) – site design for a community theatre festival o ‘Before the Flood’ (Vulture Street) – an immersive theatre event

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The parameters of the first test were determined by the pilot study, conducted in Cambridge prior to departure and presented in summary form in the opening chapter(s) below. This includes a selection of precedents from within the field of enquiry – that is, cultural or political events occurring in Brisbane that overlap in some way with those examined in this thesis, and in particular those that: a) Involve some of the same actors or organisations whose participatory methods form the basis for this inquiry; and/or b) I had direct involvement with as an organiser or participant prior to embarking upon the research These precedents are situated within a wider heritage of similar events through an examination of the relevant literature around art and spatial politics, particularly as it relates to ludic protest, public spectacle, and various forms of ritualised spatial practice. They are thus organised into a simple taxonomy of participatory spatial events, providing a benchmarking matrix against which design tests have been conducted.

The period in between the two tests was spent analysing the outcomes of The Temple project and gathering the necessary background materials in order to set up Future Histories. In addition, I attended and documented several more related events to add to the body of precedents and case studies against which the design tests were to be gauged. In this way the terms of the second test were determined directly by the findings of the first – although it should be noted that there was a considerable overlap in time between these processes.

I sought to describe in detail the methods deployed on The Temple project, reframing these as a specific set of implementation strategies for Future Histories.

This was imagined in the terms of prototyping – taking a full-scale model from the lab to the field. The theory, methodology, and hypothesis, remained essentially the same, but the context became considerably more complex, with more unknown variables, and a greater interface with ‘real world’ parameters in the form of a client and functional brief. As these processes of methodological analysis and experimental setup

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were occurring simultaneously, the terms of the latter test were being continually adjusted as I trended towards an ever more didactic understanding of the former.

The intention for this thesis was to undertake an analysis of Future Histories, the site design for a community theatre festival in East Brisbane, in order to set forth a design proposition. After the funding for this project was not approved, I attempted to undertake an analysis of the reasons the project fell through. This became the basis for my focus on the role of expertise at the interface of administration and culture.

However, reference to the test itself is omitted as the bulk of the data gathered became unusable.

Given the nature of the topic there was always a possibility that one or more design tests might fail or produce a dataset lacking in cohesiveness. In testing a framework for design practice premised on perpetual uncertainty and contingency I have discovered where the practicable threshold of transformative participation lies along a spectrum of decentralised creative agency.

The project was re-worked as a separate event on another site near the original location, without client or brief. This was conceived as an immersive theatre event inviting participants to embark on a walking tour of the Gabba Ward, culminating in a multi-media performance staged on an abandoned derelict site. This event, which included a fictional community consultation for a redevelopment of an adjacent site, enacted in the context of the theatrical performance, forms the basis for a reformulated thesis design brief for Future Histories.

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3 SPECULATING ON THE NEW WORLD CITY: From coercion to curation This chapter uses a case study to examine how the aspirational vision of the New World City filters down through Brisbane City Council’s planning instruments and cultural policy to have a direct impact on the space of the city. Discussing West Village, a controversial urban regeneration scheme in the Gabba Ward neighbourhood of West End, I illustrate how municipal and state institutions slide into a form of market driven authoritarian populism. Drawing on literatures from the geography of global financialisation and urban development,171 I argue that placebranding not only drives gentrification and the displacement of community, but also poses a threat to democracy, by supplanting the discursive relations of the public sphere with the market relations of global finance. 172

Given the present

environmental challenges, I suggest that this raises the urgency of developing alternative modes of political participation and spatial organisation, making a case for the inquiry into participatory spatial practices that follows.

A rapidly melting iceberg With the ‘protest for protest’, the State took to coercive administrative manoeuvring in its effort to silence dissent, taking Councillor Sri to the magistrates court. However, this is just the coercive tip of a proverbial ‘iceberg’ dissolving at an alarming rate into a damaging political, spatial, and cultural consensus beneath the surface of civil society. I use the metaphor of the melting iceberg to illustrate three levels on which administered participation operates: coercion, construction, and curation (Figure 16).

171 Roy and Ong 2011; Goldman 2011; Ghertner 2011; Büdenbender and Aalbers 2019; Lees, Shin, and López-Morales 2015; Millington 2015; Smith 1996; Deutsche 1996 172 Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere”; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.”

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Figure 16 A rapidly melting ice-berg of control - coercion, construction, curation

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In this I illustrate these levels of administrative participation using a detailed case study of West Village, a controversial urban renewal scheme in Brisbane’s inner city, summarised here in general terms.

Coercion The action of the State in the case study reveals precisely the limits of ‘acceptable’ participation, as outlined by Jeremy Till: “If participation acts as a palliative to ensure [the stable authority of the state], then that is acceptable. If participation acts as an agent in the transformation of the values of the state, then it is not acceptable.”173 When community consultation process fails to produce the desired result, the State steps in to silence a dissatisfied community organisation by withdrawing its permission to participate. A legal instrument designed to ensure the accountability of elected officials to the public serves instead to enforce the political consensus.

Construction However, this overtly coercive manipulation is a last resort when the other less visible strategies of constructing and curating consensus have failed. Community consultation aims to prevent the desire for protest by creating a “feeling of participation”.174 Typically amounting to little more than placation (see Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’ 175), this aims to give people just enough input to keep the system stable, a kind of ‘pseudo-participation’176 that allows those in power to appear responsive to residents’ concerns without changing the underlying decision-making processes that drive development.177 Written into the planning policies that govern the design and provision of public space, this contributes to the construction of a spatial consensus.

173 Till, Architecture Depends.

174 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory.

175 Arnstein, “The Ladder of Citizen Participation.”

176 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory.

177 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

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Curation Arts and culture then serve to demonstrate that the public is still engaged in a critical dialogue.178 Where community consultation seeks to quieten dissent by creating a feeling of participation, public art programmes create an appearance of participation. By commissioning curators to produce its arts and cultural programmes, and more recently taking curatorial decisions in-house, 179 Brisbane City Council (BCC) takes control of the cultural conversation through the suite of applications, permits, insurances, and acquittals that accompanies its cultural programmes.

Although these administrative instruments are geared towards the maintenance of public safety and financial accountability on the part of cultural producers, their tacit effect is to turn artists, designers, and curators into self-censoring watchdogs, rather than custodians of critique, gradually limiting the scope of public discourse to a curated cultural consensus.180

The pantomime of community consultations and stakeholder engagement reports is followed up with a feel-good sequel of cultural vibrancy and creative ‘atmosphere’.

Taken together, these performances constitute a rolling revue with a complex but ultimately circular narrative – the illusion of citizen input is conjured through a masquerade of carefully administered participation that subverts its own self-declared role as a champion of social equality.181

178 Paddison, “Some Reflections on the Limitations to Public Participation in the Post-Political City.”

179 Georgiou and Blacket, Interview with Marisa Georgiou (Chair, BURN Arts Inc; Director, p+a+p) and Stirling Blacket (Town Planner, Modifyre; Unqualified Design Studio).

180 Georgiou and Green, Interview with People Artist Place co-directos Marisa Georgiou and Jenna Green; Georgiou and Blacket, Interview with Marisa Georgiou (Chair, BURN Arts Inc; Director, p+a+p) and Stirling Blacket (Town Planner, Modifyre; Unqualified Design Studio); Quigley, Interview with Kath Quigley (CEO + Artistic Director, Backbone Inc.).

181 Millington, “From Urban Scar to ‘Park in the Sky.’”

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EPISODE 1: I scream, you scream [coercion]

On 8th March 2017, the Courier Mail reported “outrage” as free tickets to the inaugural Brisbane Ice Cream Festival ‘sold out’, leaving many would-be ice cream eaters out in the cold.182 The event was organised as a publicity exercise for West Village, a major new development currently under construction in Brisbane’s West End. In a press release on behalf of Sekisui House, the Japanese development firm responsible for delivering West Village, Project Director Andrew Thompson described the Ice Cream Festival as: “a great day of fun, creativity, and sense of community, but it was also a celebration of the history of the site.” 183 It was an inspired piece of marketing. The history Thompson refers to is that of the former ice cream factory that occupies the site, Peter’s Arctic Delicacy Co, a muchloved local icon. The festival took place in and around the two heritage-listed 1920s buildings of the Peter’s factory. Despite the grumblings of those who missed out on tickets, the organisers described it as a ‘resounding success’.184 However, this was not the first time that West Village had whipped up controversy. Four months prior, on the morning of 23rd Nov 2016, a small group of protestors gathered under a small gazebo on Mollison Street (Figure 17). It was a characteristically sweltering summer’s day and at ten o’clock, when the protestors stepped out to blockade the West Village construction site, it was clear they would not last long – without the protection of shade, public demonstrations in Brisbane can be toilsome affairs.

182 Kidd, “Ice Cream Festival ‘Outrage.’”

183 “Brisbane Ice Cream Festival Set to Become an Annual Event for West Village | Sekisui House Australia.”

184 Property Observer, “Brisbane’s West Village Brings Peter’s Ice-Cream History Back to Life.”

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Figure 18 Ice-cream outrage - Brisbane Courier Mail headline 8th March 2017 Image Source: the Courier Mail. https://www.couriermail.com.au/

Figure 17 Protesters blocking entrance to West Village Site Image Source: the Courier Mail. https://www.couriermail.com.au/

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The aim of the protest was to “show opposition to unsustainable development and the lack of affordable housing” 185 in the scheme. 186 The master plan had received preliminary approval just two weeks earlier

187

and demolition work was already

underway. Shortly after midday, drained by two hours of fist-shaking against the oppressive heat, the protestors gave up and retreated to the air-conditioning of a nearby café. Ice-creams were passed around.188 After 18 months of campaigning, it had been a last ditch effort. In a social media post, Councillor Jonathon Sri stated:

“If we let [Brisbane City Council] and the State government approve developments like West Village without protesting, they will continue to ignore the legitimate concerns of Brisbane residents for years to come.” 189 West Village represents a major regeneration opportunity for one of Brisbane’s oldest suburbs. The site comprises two and a half hectares of former industrial brownfield fronting directly onto Boundary Street, West End’s main commercial thoroughfare and a popular entertainment strip. One kilometre from the Central Business District, walking distance to the cultural attractions of Southbank, and a stone’s throw from major health and education facilities, the Mater Hospital and the University of Queensland, it is a prime location – in the words of one commentator, it was “ripe for development”.190 The approved master plan makes provision for 1,250 new apartments alongside an 18,500sqm retail complex and a further 6,500sqm of publicly accessible open spaces, making it one of the largest developments in West End’s history. 191 Valued at AUD$800m it is estimated the project will have employed 2440 workers during its construction and a further 860 once complete, providing a significant boost to the local economy. With phase one of the development now open, a new art gallery displays work by the appointed Artist-in-Residence, while a suite of new restaurants, 185 Notice of Permission to Hold a Public Assembly, Queensland Police Service, 18 November 2016 186 Jonathan Sri, Residents up the Ante with West Village Construction Site Blockade www.jonathansri.com/longestblockadeyet.

187 DA Approval Package, (DA A004115562), Brisbane City Council, 18 May 2016 188 Kidd, “Protesters Block West Village Site.”

189 ‘Jonathan Sri, Councillor for The Gabba' - Facebook posts 190 Ready, “The West Village Call-in - Trade Off or Tragedy?”

191 Macroplan Dimasi, “Economic Impact Assessment, West Village, West End (DA A004115562).”

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bars, and cafÊs provides a wealth of options for wining and dining.192 All things considered, West Village offers a fairly comprehensive package of benefits to the local area – jobs, housing, commerce, public space, even arts & culture. The Economic Impact Assessment and Stakeholder Engagement reports that accompanied the development application reflect this, highlighting extensive community consultation as part of the design process. 193 Had the protestors not participated in this process? Why were they so opposed to a plan contributing so much to the local economy? In order to answer these questions, it is useful to understand a little more about West End.

Figure 19 West Village site in West End

192 Macroplan Dimasi, West Village Economic Impact Assessment (DA A004115562), April 2015 193 West End Joint Venture, West Village Stakeholder Engagement Report (DA A004115562), April 2015

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Keep West End Weird

Long regarded as a symbolic periphery to Brisbane’s core, the neighbourhoods of the Gabba Ward have been home to many marginalised groups during Brisbane’s short European history, including Indigenous, migrant, and homeless communities. South of the river, a place of exclusion and dissent, people here have made a point of celebrating difference and diversity in the context of a city that has not always been tolerant of those things.194 African-American navy troops stationed during World War II were confined to this side of the river, while sizeable Greek, Serbian, Lebanese, and Russian communities settled across West End, Woolloongabba and East Brisbane immediately after the war.195 Significantly, three of the city’s four historic boundary streets traverse the Ward – Boundary St, Vulture St, and Wellington Road. Acting as borders between the colonial city and the Aboriginal encampments that encircled it in the 19th and 20th centuries, these represented a zone of exclusion for Indigenous people and other so-called “nuisances”, enforced by stockmen patrolling on horseback and cracking whips.196 As such, the areas around the boundary streets have been and remain key sites of cultural resistance and contestation into the present day197 and most of the events and sites discussed in this paper occur around these streets.

Known for its thriving arts and music scene, and its vocal community representatives, West End is one of the Gabba’s most distinctive neighbourhoods. With a community that prides itself on a rich tradition of social engagement and political activism, it is seen as a contested territory where the dominant narratives of place are called into question and uncomfortable histories are not readily forgotten. 198 Hence the oftgraffitied catchcry: “keep West End weird”.199 The Peter’s ice-cream factory opened in 1928 and was an employer to several generations of West Enders, including many of the post-war migrants who settled in the area (Figure 20). After the factory closed in 1995, the site played host to Absoe, an office supplies wholesaler and the landlord to

194 Welsh, Great Southern Land.

195 “Brisbane History.”

196 Kidd, “Aboriginal History of the Princess Alexandra Hospital Site.”

197 Kerkhove, “Idigenous Sites of Woolloongabba.”

198 Steve Capelin, A Streetwalker’s Guide to West End - No. 2 - Beyond the Boundary (Brisbane: West End Community Association, 2012).

199 “Keep West End Weird Facebook Group.”

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thirty or so independent businesses. This included several performing arts companies, a free live music venue, recording studios, food vendors, clothing swaps, and a thriving weekly night market. Occupying such a prominent site at the heart of the neighbourhood, Absoe was a fulcrum of local culture, a place where West End’s creative community could convene around itself.

Given its size, location, and local cultural significance, it should come as no surprise that when fresh proposals for Absoe were revealed in 2015, the local community had strong views on the matter. A concerted campaign against the plan resulted in the development application being called in for review by the State Minister for Infrastructure, Local Government and Planning, Deputy Premier Jackie Trad – also the MP for South Brisbane, the State electorate. However, instead of sending the developer back to the drawing board to come up with a plan that aligned with the community’s vision for the site, the Minister simply changed the applicable planning criteria – simultaneously approving the development and removing the community’s voice from the process altogether.

Figure 20 Peter's Arctic Delicacy co. - historic photo of the West Village Site Image Source: Brisbane Times. http:// www.brisbantimes.com.au

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Briefly, the controversy unfolded like this: 14 May 2015 Development Application (DA) submitted seeking preliminary approval for the West Village master plan. The sketch design indicates: Site coverage of up to 95% (Local neighbourhood plan allows for 80%) 7x residential towers of up to 15 storeys - density 500 dwellings per ha (Local neighbourhood plan assumed density of 75 dwellings per ha) 4500sqm retail tenancy (Zone Code allows max 1500sqm) May 2015

Community campaign against proposal commences: 115 submissions are made to Council: 104 oppose the development

18 May 2016 Brisbane City Council approves DA despite opposition.

21 June 2016 West End Community Association (WECA) files an appeal in the Planning and Environment (P&E) Court against Council’s decision.

27 June 2016 Councillor Sri writes to Queensland Deputy Premier and MP for South Brisbane Jackie Trad, in her role as Minister for Infrastructure, Local Government and Planning, requesting she exercise her powers under the Sustainable Planning Act 2009 to ‘call in’ the DA. 26 July 2016 In response to sustained community pressure, Deputy Premier Trad gives written notice of her intention to call-in the DA due to its impacts on ‘State interests’. She receives 736 representations from industry and community stakeholders – industry commentators describe the proposed call-in as “unwarranted political interference”200.

14 Sept 2016 DA called in.

7 Nov 2016

Deputy Premier issues decision notice. The DA is given preliminary approval subject to new conditions: Restricted to 80% site coverage, as per the neighbourhood plan; Required 500sqm ‘community uses’ Change in zoning to remove height limits – now up to 22 storeys; Change in Use Code to allow for a 4500sqm tenancy Change in assessment level from Impact to Code assessable, meaning the developer was no longer obliged to seek community input on any future DAs submitted under the master plan.

200 Jewell, “Brisbane’s Controversial West Village Development Faces State Call-in - The Fifth Estate.”

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Shifting goalposts

When the West Village master plan was first called in, many in the community hailed it as a victory for people power – participatory democracy was alive and well, they claimed and Deputy Premier Trad was commended for standing up on behalf of her community. However, when the decision notice was issued approving the development, it became clear that this was premature. While the approval included new conditions that made some concessions to the community’s demands, such as the 500sqm of ‘community uses’, the overall outcome was strongly in favour of the developer.201 The process by which the master plan came to be approved might be thought of in terms of ‘shifting goalposts’. Although the developer was now restricted to the original 80% site coverage, the re-zoning of the site from High-density Residential Zone to District Centre Zone under the City Plan removed any height restrictions, allowing the scheme to go up to 22 storeys – in an area of predominantly two- to three-storeys.

A change in the Use Code made provision for a 4500sqm retail tenancy where the previous limit was 1500sqm. A relaxation of the Heritage Overlay removed restrictions on all but the two 1920s factory buildings, facilitating the immediate demolition of all other structures on the site.202 Meanwhile, the change from Impact to Code assessment removed the requirement for a public notification and submission period on all future development applications under the master plan, eliminating the need for further community consultation. Crucially, the call-in had the effect of cancelling the West End Community Association (WECA) appeal that was under consideration in the Planning and Environment Court, and prohibited any future appeals.

Taken together, these measures effectively excluded the local community from any further participation in decision-making about the site, a ‘slap on the wrist’ for an over-zealous residents’ body and a non-conformist local Councillor. It was a clever

201 Jackie Trad, Decision Notice, 7 November 2016, https://dsdmipprd.blob.core.windows.net/general/decision-notice-westvillage.pdf.

202 DA Approval Package (DA A004115562), Brisbane City Council, 18 May 2016

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manipulation of the planning system – what began as an apparent deferral to the community became a re-writing of rules to silence them.

But how is this able to happen in a representative democracy? Does the community’s voice not count? In whose interests do the State and City governments act? In what follows, I examine some of the larger forces at play in order to address these questions.

Copycat urbanism

The vision of West Village, like other urban renewal schemes in Brisbane, is often articulated in relation to the city’s branding as Australia’s New World City . At the core of this rhetoric is an emphasis on creating ‘vibrant iconic places’ to attract people and capital. The South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan Code,203 in which Absoe was identified as a ‘key development site’, defines as a key feature of such ‘vibrant’ places the design of built forms that emphasise visible, open consumption (Figure 22), distilling the notion of ‘vibrancy’ into a set of easily marketable tropes – street dining, boutique shopping, craft beer, and so on. This negates the conventional conception of place as a set of complex social and physical entanglements between diverse identities204, replacing it with the singular vision of a consumptive global citizen inhabiting a generic ‘world city’. 205 And although this ‘new world city subject’206 appears as an aspirational fantasy of the New World City narrative to begin with, the fantasy is ultimately realised through architectural schemes like West Village, whose glossy marketing materials become a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy in built form (Figure 23).

203 South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan Code, Brisbane City Council, 2014 204 Harvey, “The Right to the City.”

205 Massey, “Landscape/Space/Politics”; Koolhaas and Mau, S, M, L, XL. 206 Goldman, “Speculating on the Next World City.”

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Figure 22 Visible open consumption enshrined into local planning codes - South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Excerpt from the South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan Plan Image Source: South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan,

Figure 21 ...And into marketing material for the West Village Development Still from West Village marketing video Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2E8vvb2VHo

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This branding-led approach to planning and development is characteristic of ‘worldclass city’ making, or simply ‘worlding’, a trend in which ever-more spectacular development proposals and ‘iconic’ cultural attractions are leveraged by municipal and state governments to compete for the attention of investors and skilled migrants in a global marketplace.207 This results in a kind of copycat urbanism208 whereby cities directly reference and reproduce each other’s most recognisable built forms in an effort to be seen as part of the elite class of world cities. Brisbane’s Southbank cultural precinct is a good example – built in the years following the 1988 World Expo, it pays direct homage to London’s Southbank, complete with Brutalist architecture, a range of high-profile cultural attractions, and the more recent addition of the ‘Brisbane Eye’ (Wheel of Brisbane) ferris wheel. West Village itself offers another example, with marketing materials that make direct reference to Shoreditch and Brooklyn as benchmark examples of ‘creative quarters’ adjacent major city centres. 209 In Brisbane’s case, this tendency can also be understood as a function of ‘subordinate’ financialisation, whereby cities occupying a semi-peripheral position in the global economy act to absorb excess capital produced in core economies.210 This trend is marked in part by a shift in the focus of global finance since the 1990s towards the emerging markets of Asia,211 with cities such as Singapore, Dubai, and Shanghai coming to prominence as powerful financial centres in their own right – a change reflected in Brisbane City Council’s marketing material: “The closest major Australian capital city to Asia, Brisbane hosted the 2014 G20 Leaders Summit and is a thriving, progressive, multicultural city. It is a global hub in scientific innovation, mining and resources, technology, higher education, meetings and incentives and cultural attractions.”212

207 Roy and Ong, Worlding Cities.

208 Rowen, “Culture, Capital and Copycats in a Globalising Burnerverse.”

209 See interview with Bernard Salt in West Village Marketing Video: Sekisui House, West Village, Brisbane.

210 Büdenbender and Aalbers, “How Subordinate Financialisation Shapes Urban Development: The Rise and Fall of Warsaw’s Sluzewiec Business District.”

211 Ong, “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global.”

212 Brisbane Marketing, “Brisbane | Australia’s New World City.”

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In the drive to attract capital, cities are locked into a self-reinforcing cycle of speculation - attracting investment requires large-scale urban transformation; financing this transformation requires large-scale investment. Hence the prosperity of a city comes to be gauged by the transience of its built environment - the number of cranes on the skyline becomes a reliable predictor of economic health.

Figure 23 A selection of marketing materials from current and recent Brisbane developments Clockwise from top: 1: Brisbane Quarter marketing material Source: Brisbane Quarter website: http://www.brisbanequarter.com.au/ 2: Marketing for the Highline, West End Source: BPM website: https://www.bpmcorp.com.au/projects/highline/ 3: Brisbane Quarter marketing material Source: Brisbane Quarter website: http://www.brisbanequarter.com.au/ 4: The One marketing material Source: The One website: https://www.theoneresidences.com.au/

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Speculative government

Financialisation causes a fundamental shift in the relationship between government and citizen, such that municipal and state governments are reoriented towards the global economy and away from their own constituents, resulting what Michael Goldman calls ‘speculative government’. 213 Symptomatic of this are institutional guarantees to capital investors. The approval decision by Deputy Premier Trad is a case in point, amounting to a guarantee in her capacity as both Minister for Trade & Investment and Minister for Local Government, Planning and Development that the State government is committed to ensuring an environment conducive to profitable investment, irrespective of her constituents’ concerns.

Speculative government thus implies an inversion in the role of public authority, where talk of accountability to the public is combined with action resembling that of a private economic actor, rendering the ‘public good’ synonymous with profit (or austerity).214 Where these interests do not neatly align, elected officials may exercise executive power to secure favourable outcomes for investors, as with West Village.

Under Queensland’s Sustainable Planning Act 2009 a development may be called in to ensure a ‘transparent and accountable planning system’.215 Yet, the actual effect of the call-in was to eliminate accountability to the public altogether, by cancelling the existing appeal and preventing further community participation in decision-making.

This political manoeuvre aligns with Stuart Hall’s conception of ‘authoritarian populism’, that is, the mobilisation of democratic discourses and populist rhetoric to legitimise shifts towards state authoritarianism.216 Read in this way, the action of the State in the West Village controversy becomes a fundamental threat to democracy, executively supplanting the discursive relations of the public sphere with the market relations of global finance (Habermas 1992; Fraser 1992).217

213 Goldman, “Speculating on the Next World City.”

214 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”

215 Sustainable Planning Act 2009.

216 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”

217 Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere”; Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.”

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Figure 25 ...The Common: the promise West Village marketing render of The Common Image Source: West Village website. https://www.westvillage.com.au/

Figure 24 ‌And the reality Photograph of The Common take shortly after it opened to the public

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EPISODE 2: The tragedy of ‘The Common’ [construction]

Authoritarian populism has been linked to a proliferation of pseudo-public spaces across contemporary cities.218 Open commercial spaces imbued with a civic air, these ‘malls without walls’ 219 may contain all the signifiers of public space while in fact being privately owned and operated. The Common at West Village is one such space.

Billed as a generous addition to West End’s public realm, the promise and the reality of The Common are at considerable odds with one another (Figure 25, Figure 24).

To explain this divergence, it is useful to consider the process by which placebranding specifically impacts upon the provision & use of public space. Place-brands are political creations220 that attempt to identify and promote the unique ‘selling points’ of a place in order to package and market them to an audience of global investors. Ironically, in so doing, the specific attributes that make a place genuinely unique are often overlooked in favour of those that will have the broadest market appeal. The design of public space to meet the principles of the New World City Design Guide, for instance, implicitly discourage political activity by promoting only passive, consumptive forms of social activity.

Although accessible twenty-four hours, The Common appears to be designed expressly to discourage congregation – its street-facing half is so heavily landscaped as to effectively prevent access while the remaining open space behind offers virtually no shade or seating and is under constant security surveillance. The result is a dead space: A once thriving centre of cultural activity replaced by an over-priced art gallery and a collection of sterile food and beverage outlets – nothing resembling the “vibrant community hub” promised in West Village marketing materials.

In the effort to be seen as globally competitive, places are often reduced to the lowest common denominator, resulting in a trivialising reduction of ‘public space’ to an

218 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”

219 Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City.

220 Madgin and Rodger, “Inspiring Capital? Deconstructing Myths and Reconstructing Urban Environments, Edinburgh, 1860-2010.”

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outdoor leisure facility – a place to eat lunch. This goes beyond simply creating spaces of consumption, but aims to actually transform space itself into a commodity for consumption, or indeed trade. In order to market this commodity to potential investors, it is necessary to present a singular image of place as a coherent brand.

However, as Rosalyn Deutsche asserts, place “can be construed as naturally or fundamentally coherent only by disavowing the conflicts, particularity, heterogeneity and uncertainty that constitute social life”.221 West End prides itself as a home to cultural producers from diverse backgrounds – artists, musicians, political activists. Meanwhile, West Village aspires to create a new class of cultural consumers. This shift from cultural production to consumption reveals the fundamental contradiction at the root of place-branding: In aspiring to create a vibrant, cosmopolitan neighbourhood, West Village promotes a vision for the area that excludes the very people who make it attractive – and marketable – in the first place. This is a classic case of revanchist gentrification222 – the non-conforming artists, musicians, and political activists are literally “generating the cultural capital to price themselves out of the area”223.

The political tensions prompted by West Village can thus be interpreted as a reaction on the part of an established community to the perceived marginalisation of its existing place identity by another, future community. Any conception of place or identity implies differentiation. In simple terms, the existence of ‘us’ requires a ‘them’ by which to define itself.224 Henry Staten calls this the ‘constitutive outside’.225 While this relationship is not necessarily antagonistic, it is pertinent to recognise the possibility of conflict arising wherever ‘them’ is perceived as putting into question the identity of ‘us’. As political theorist Chantal Mouffe asserts: “while we desire an end to conflict, if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and provide an arena where differences can be confronted.” 226 This is the basic argument in favour of agonism 227 , a political 221 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”

222 Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.

223 Georgiou and Green, Interview with People Artist Place co-directos Marisa Georgiou and Jenna Green.

224 Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.

225 Graeber.

226 Mouffe, “Public Spaces and Democratic Politics.”

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philosophy that emphasises the positive aspects of certain forms of political conflict.

Calling into question the traditional liberal conception of the public sphere as a negotiation amongst diverse interests towards compromise,228 agonists suggest that such consensus-building politics undermines critical discourse and thus negates any plural conception of democracy.229 Public space is the arena of agonistic pluralism that Mouffe envisage.230 True public space in this sense is implicitly unstable, contingent, and impermanent. It is the place where society convenes, generating roles, provoking actions, and constantly redefining itself 231 – perhaps like the cultural hub of the Absoe site prior to redevelopment. By this definition, The Common becomes the antithesis of public space, in more than just the literal sense of being privately owned and managed. Enforcing normative patterns of passive behaviour and silencing dissonant voices, it ultimately threatens to shut down the democratic public sphere altogether. By preventing the community from freely convening around itself, the space presents a fixed, superficially harmonious image that disavows the many conflicts and complex identities that underpin this place.

227 Wikipedia, “Agonism.”

228 Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.”

229 Mouffe, “Public Spaces and Democratic Politics.”

230 Mouffe.

231 Harvey and Van Rhey, “Burning Man and the Art of the 1990s, 1997.”

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Figure 27 Audio artwork Ba c k y a r d R e c k o n in g by artist Sally Molloy in Th e Co m m o n Image credit: Dave Kan, Source: people + artist + place. https://www.peopleartistplace.com/

Figure 26 Audio artwork Ba c k y a r d R e c k o n in g by artist Sally Molloy in Th e Co m m o n Image credit: Dave Kan, Source: people + artist + place. https://www.peopleartistplace.com/

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EPISODE 3: Backyard reckoning [curation] The ideal of the New World City overlooks important aspects of Brisbane’s history and culture. The unapologetic use of the phrase ‘New World’ in government literature evokes a continuing project of colonial dispossession and erasure.232 This is uncontroversial. However, Mouffe suggests that every stable order is susceptible to being challenged by that which is suppressed, calling for critical arts practices that foment dissensus by making visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure.233 Along these lines, several recent literatures offer a positive re-interpretation of ‘worlding’ as a de-centering of culture from the institutional cores of the city to the peripheries of marginal and intersectional identity.234 Luger and Ren discuss this in the terms of the ‘critical artscape’, a new way of thinking about aesthetic practices that goes beyond oppositional delineations of left and right, radical and reactionary, in a context where new contestations across spectrums of political ideology are emerging globally.235 “The spatiality of artistic practice, the “artscape,” transcends traditional landscapes. Like the urban, the contours of the artscape are being shaped by political contestations, actors and ideas of criticality that demand a closer investigation.” 236 In July 2019, Brisbane-based artist Sally Molloy presented an audio work entitled Backyard Reckoning in The Common (Figure 26 - Figure 28).237 Conceived as an exploration of ideas surrounding place, identity, and colonial history in Brisbane, participants were invited “to contemplate deeply [their] personal relationship to originary and ongoing colonisation”238 in the everyday space of the city.

232 Greenop and Darchen, “Identifying ‘Place’ in Place Branding.”

233 Mouffe, “Public Spaces and Democratic Politics.”

234 Luger and Ren, Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape; Lees, Shin, and López-Morales, Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement.

235 Luger and Ren, Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion through a Critical Artscape.

236 Ren, “Introduction - Disruptions of a Critical Artscape.”

237 Molloy, Backyard Reckoning.

238 Molloy.

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Figure 29 Chai served to participants of Ba c k y a r d R e c k o n in g by artist Sally Molloy in Th e Co m m o n Image credit: Dave Kan, Source: people + artist + place. https://www.peopleartistplace.com/

Figure 28 discussion of Ba c k y a r d R e c k o n in g by artist Sally Molloy in Th e Co m m o n Image credit: Dave Kan, Source: people + artist + place. https://www.peopleartistplace.com/

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Molloy states that her practice is concerned with “interrogating her relationship to place and critiquing the colonial legacy that shaped/s her white suburban social reality.” 239 The event took place as part of Brisbane City Council’s (BCC) Temporary Art Programme (TAP), an initiative designed to transform the city’s public spaces through a series of “public outdoor contemporary creative activations” 240. Part of a suite of temporary arts events, laneway ‘activations’, and ‘interactive art’ festivals that has accompanied Brisbane’s self-declared transition from ‘big country town’ to New World City, the TAP was conceived by the BCC Creative Communities team as a means of introducing a cultural “atmosphere” to designated parts of the city.241 The curators of the programme, people+artist+place (p+a+p), declare their mission to be the stimulation and support of socially-engaged, participatory, and site-specific art projects that “expand community perceptions of art in public space”, and that “embrace the ability contemporary art has to enhance, critique and celebrate the places we live in” 242. Backyard Reckoning was not the first foray that p+a+p has made into such uncomfortable territory as the injustices of colonialism.243 Having delivered the TAP since its inauguration in 2018, co-directors Jenna Green and Marisa Georgiou244 take it as a core part of their role to promote critical dialogue around issues of place and identity. “[We] are passionate about Brisbane harnessing art as a tool to better understand its identity, the histories that have brought us to today, and the futures we’re planting now. [We] believe this type of experience to be a positive

force

in

fostering

healthy

minds,

communities and

urban

environments”.245

239 “Backyard Reckoning | Peopleartistplace.”

240 “Brisbane City Council – Temporary Art Program – Brisbane Art Guide.”

241 Green, Interview with Jenna Green (artist, director p+a+p).

242 “BACKYARD RECKONING | Metro Arts Brisbane.”

243 See, for example, Digi Youth Arts, All That Remains; Weatherall, Single File.

244 Gorgiou stepped down from this role in 2019 245 “BACKYARD RECKONING | Metro Arts Brisbane.”

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In this regard their work to date has been unfailingly thoughtful and provocative, actively raising the voices of those who are marginalised in society – people of colour, women, queer and non-binary people, young people, and intersections of all of the above.246 In this sense they use the relative privilege of their position of curatorial expertise to contest perceived norms around who can and who cannot ‘legitimately’ speak in public space 247, disrupting the everyday urban reality by supporting these artists to express themselves in the public realm.

The choice of location for Backyard Reckoning is significant. Arguably the only real deference to the local community’s demands resulting from the call-in process, The Common comprises the bulk of the publicly accessible open space provided as part of the West Village development. With the narrative of displacement and dispossession that the development represents to many locals, there is a pointed irony in presenting a work dealing with colonialism in this contentious space, fronting directly onto a former boundary street. However, Maeder et al have argued, the critical potential of public art initially emerged through unsolicited interventions in public space, such as those of the radical political movements of the 1960s.248 With the shift to neoliberal ‘creative city’ policies249 and public art programs like the TAP250, socially engaged practice can appear to adopt the subversive methods and aesthetics of grassroots movements while in fact neutralising much of their critical power. In Backyard Reckoning, the explicit content of the artist’s work is undeniably thought-provoking.

However, in its relationship to the site, the implicit effect of the work is more ambiguous. Images of the event on the p+a+p website depict people engaged either in quiet contemplation as they listen to the piece on headphones, or chatting congenially as they sit around on picnic rugs, drinking the tea provided as part of the experience (Figure 26Figure 28). This apparent injection of life to the deadened space of The Common can be interpreted in two distinct ways:

246 people artist place, “People Artist Place - Projects.”

247 Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia.”

248 Maeder, Piraud, and Pattaroni, “New Genre Public Commission? The Subversive Dimension of Public Art in Post-Fordist Capitalism.”

249 Brisbane City Council, “Creative Brisbane, Creative Economy.”

250 “Brisbane City Council – Temporary Art Program – Brisbane Art Guide.”

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Greenop & Darchen251 have argued for an alternative approach to Brisbane’s placebranding, where its histories of violence and exclusion are explicitly acknowledged in order to reconcile disparate resident groups, as well as providing a genuinely unique sense of place for the city.

“Only through acknowledging the contemporary political social and cultural identities that are already present in Brisbane, and their roots in its historical past, can the city hope to re-brand itself and come to terms with the haunting spectre of its history”.252 On the one hand, Backyard Reckoning could be taken as an indication that the Creative Communities team has taken this argument on board, a reclamation of the space for the benign municipal forces of creativity and community. The work is after all, an authentic, place-specific, and locally-sourced artwork. Moreover, it calls into question the very regimes of governance that have brought it into being, by surfacing repressed narratives of place. On the other hand, the photographs portray a fairly small and homogenous-looking crowd, comprising predominantly young white people. Many of those who appear in the photos are also recognisable to the locally trained eye as artists and activists who have been engaged in some way with community organising in Brisbane, including the campaign to save Absoe. The artist is preaching to the converted. Not that this invalidates the message – it is just safe to assume that this audience is already relatively familiar with debates around decolonisation, and thus questionable what the impact of the work is.

By one reading, the presence of these artists and activists in The Common signals a reintroduction of the creative energy that was lost when Absoe was shut down. By the other, they are made complicit in the whitewashing and displacement they so vehemently oppose. Irrespective of whether the conversations underway in the photos are of genuine critical merit, the portrayal of such a lively atmosphere against the recognisable backdrop of the Ice Cream Factory is conspicuously consistent with the aspirational vision of ‘vibrant’ and ‘iconic’ places articulated in the New World City

251 Greenop and Darchen, “Identifying ‘Place’ in Place Branding.”

252 Greenop and Darchen.

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Design Guide. 253 It would seem that this is precisely the atmosphere of critical cultural vibrancy that the TAP is designed to project.

Untouchable innovation

The work of p+a+p is described in the affirmative language of inclusivity and innovation. “Producing innovative and accessible projects in the public realm, they strive to connect diverse audiences with artists and their work” 254. This statement is fraught with ambiguity. To whom are these projects accessible? And in what ways are they innovative? Indeed, what does ‘innovation’ in a socially engaged artwork mean?

As Rosalyn Deutsche asserts: “Affirmative site-specific art, endowed with an aura of social responsibility, naturalises and thus validates the social relations of its sites, legitimising spaces as accessible to all when they may be privately owned or when, tolerating little resistance to corporate or state-approved uses, they exclude entire social groups.” 255 In economic terms, innovation denotes a new invention that is in some way disruptive to the norm.256 Invention meanwhile is an act of intellectual creativity undertaken without any thought given to its possible economic import.257 In artistic terms then, innovation is taken as an unquestionably positive progressive attribute, a critical oversight acknowledged by p+a+p co-director Jenna Green when she refers to the “cult of novelty” in contemporary art.258 Anything new is good and, by extension, anything old is bad – or at least ripe for innovation. By this logic, the redevelopment of West Village is implicitly a good thing, a fact reaffirmed by the presentation of ‘innovative’ cultural programmes in The Common.

253 Brisbane City Council, “New World City Design Guide - Buildings That Breathe.”

254 “BACKYARD RECKONING | Metro Arts Brisbane.”

255 Deutsche, “Tilted Arc and the Uses of Democracy.”

256 Śledzik, “Schumpeter’s View on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.”

257 Śledzik.

258 Green, Interview with Jenna Green (artist, director p+a+p).

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Discussing accessibility, former co-director Marisa Georgiou reasons that the primary goal for their artists is to produce conversational outcomes in the public realm, “so if they’re going to make something that’s too in your face, it’s not really going to have the goal of getting healthy discussion around a certain topic.”259 Implying a kind of universal inclusiveness, for an artwork to be accessible in this way suggests that it is accommodating and available to all, virtues that are hard to contest.

However, this universalising rhetoric also suggests an appeal to the lowest common denominator, requiring the artwork to be broadly inoffensive and palatable to ‘mainstream’ (often shorthand for ‘white middle class’) sensibilities, thereby subduing its critical potential at least in part. This carries echoes of the absolutist language of the revanchist city – the repressive, homogenising impulse that mobilises notions of common-sense and universal values in pursuit of a particular, exclusionary vision of ‘civil society’.260 An attempt to banish to the urban periphery those ‘undesirables’ who do not conform to that vision, revanchist logics are often seen to underpin processes of gentrification. 261 While Backyard Reckoning attacks this homogenising impulse in the colonial city, it ironically contributes in spite of itself to the unitary vision of the New World City.

The presentation of the TAP within the space of The Common serves to gloss over the displacement of Absoe, thus validating the new spatial and social configuration of the site. By appearing to fulfil the promise of a “vibrant community hub”, critical art helps to legitimise the claims of West Village and consigns any dispute over the space to the past, substituting it with an apparent harmony – as Henri Lefebvre concludes, late capitalist urban space is: “simultaneously the birthplace of contradictions, the milieu in which they are worked out and which they tear up, and, finally, the instrument which allows their suppression and the substitution of an apparent coherence.” 262

259 Georgiou and Green, Interview with People Artist Place co-directos Marisa Georgiou and Jenna Green.

260 Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City.

261 Slater, “Gentrification of the City.”

262 Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

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We all scream?

In this chapter I have used the case of West Village to show that political tensions prompted by programmes of urban renewal in Brisbane can be understood as a reaction on the part of established communities to the perceived marginalisation of their existing place narratives. The governmental reaction to these tensions hints at an unsettling trend towards authoritarian populism that threatens to shut down democracy by supplanting the discursive relations of the public sphere with the economic relations of global finance.

I have argued that place-branding initiatives like the New World City must therefore be understood not simply as marketing strategies, creating an image of stability and certainty as the essential counterweight to the uncertainty of speculative urbanism, but as deeply political projects. Without any contribution to the aspirational core of the New World City, those on the periphery are unlikely to accept its conditions. As Ghertner posits, the vision of a world-class city cannot endure without a democratisation of rights and space: “As expectation of improvement deepens, it can crystallise into new demands and points of politics, threatening to turn the promise of the world-class city into political demands for world-class citizenship.”263 Artists and designers therefore play a decisive political role, manifesting the vision of the New World City in planning documents, architectural schemes, cultural policies, and artworks. Does our persuasive imagery and self-assured rhetoric just open a chequebook, or can it open a debate? How might we speculate on a different kind of New World City, one that is open not simply to trade, but to distinctive, diverse identities? 264 How do we imagine a city premised on the “democratisation of aspiration”265, and who is allowed to participate when we do? I turn to these questions in the next chapter, examining participation as a means of constituting civic spaces where a plural conception of democracy might be fostered. 266

263 Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi.”

264 Greenop and Darchen, “Identifying ‘Place’ in Place Branding.”

265 Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi.”

266 Mouffe, “Public Spaces and Democratic Politics.”

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4 CONSPIRACY THEORY

In this section I introduce BURN Arts Inc, a community arts association working to promote participatory arts and culture in Brisbane and surrounding regions. I argue that through the production of their events and artworks, BURN Arts enact a form of transformative participation, making a conscious effort to resist the closure of debate under the policies of the New World City.

There was some small compensation for the artists displaced from West Village.

Owing to the controversy, Lord Mayor Graham Quirk put aside a special fund to identify an alternative space somewhere on the Kurilpa Peninsula where a community ‘creative hub’ could be established. The result was Outer Space, a disused office building now hosting a gallery and offices for artists and other community groups. I went there in September 2019 to interview Marisa Georgiou in her dual roles as former co-director of p+a+p and chair of BURN Arts.

EPISODE 4: The End is High!

“Let’s have a ‘booooo!’ for the winner!”

Councillor Sri encourages a crowd gathered at the lizard statue on the corner of Boundary and Russell Streets. A moustachioed, aviator-shaded, high-vis clad project manager steps up to collect the prize for best float at Kurilpa Derby 2019. Offering a firm handshake to Councillor Peter Matic, Chair of BCC’s Community, Arts and Lifestyle Committee,267 he elicits hysterical jeering and hissing from what had been a rather cheerful assembly up to this point.

267 Brisbane City Council, “Paddington Ward.”

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Figure 30 A moustachioed project manager about to claim his prize from Councillor Matic at Kurilpa Derby

Figure 31 Th e En d is Hig h ! participants, Kurilpa Derby

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Even amidst the colour and chaos of West End’s favourite family day out, the winning float does somehow manage to stand out from the crowd, if not necessarily for its sophistication then for its palpable air of exclusivity: A tower of plastic milk crates is adorned in gold, the letters “LUXXURY $$” scrawled in duct tape down its façade – twice, just to be sure it is seen. A defunct toilet with plants growing from inside the bowl forms the piece de resistance. Miniature houses balance on the heads of a colourful-looking bunch hanging around the base of the tower – makeshift replicas of the wonky Queenslanders so ubiquitous in the streets around here. An amped up assortment of caricaturised estate agents and construction managers yabbers incoherently into over-sized cardboard telephones. Approaching unsuspecting onlookers in the surrounding bars and cafes with tape measures and clipboards, they size people up for a milk crate and yell across the street at each other every time they shift another unit.

Before the real action of kids’ bike races and squid rallies begins, this motley crew sets off on a victory lap of Boundary Street flanked by gold-flag-waving standard-bearers, (some of whom appear to be dressed as pineapples). Bringing up the rear is a skateboarder wearing a placard – the kind teenagers are paid to wear outside car showrooms and fast food joints – on each side, a phrase: “THE END IS HIGH!” “RISE UP NOW!” Now in its 13th year, the Kurilpa Derby is the West End peninsula’s annual celebration of “playfulness and togetherness”268. The event includes a street parade and novelty races on a temporarily closed Boundary Street, followed by the ‘Beggars Banquet’, a community feast.269 Organised by the West End Community Association (WECA), the Derby is entirely volunteer-run and non-commercial, relying on a strong DIY ethos. All the organisers, performers, marshalls, first aid crew, and emergency services volunteer their time and labour, and all the parade floats must be people or

268 “Kurilpa Derby – West End Community Association.”

269 “Kurilpa Derby – West End Community Association.”

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Figure 32 Th e En d is Hig h ! Participants model their house hats in front of the house under which they were made

Figure 33 developers on oversized phones shift units in Th e En d is Hig h !

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pedal powered – typically the result of much surreptitious tinkering underneath houses in the days and weeks leading up to the event.

The unofficially named Cult of the High Rise was created by members of the Brisbane Urban and Regional Network for the Arts (BURN Arts Inc), a small not-for-profit community association dedicated to the promotion and development of participatory arts and culture in Brisbane and surrounding regions.270 Acting as a vehicle for the propagation of participatory artworks and events, they provide access to tools and resources, workshops and training activities, legal auspicing and microgrants for artists. These activities are geared towards fostering a culture of critical thinking and social activism, empowering people to exercise creative agency and take on roles as active convenors rather than passive observers of social space271.

Figure 34 Th e En d is Hig h ! float and the West End house under which it was built

270 Burn Arts Inc., “Burn Arts.”

271 Harvey and Van Rhey, “Burning Man and the Art of the 1990s, 1997.”

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House conspiracy

BURN Arts forms part of a constellation of pre-figurative community organising projects concentrated in and around the Gabba Ward.272 In response to the policies of the New World City, these social justice movements have emerged in recent years calling for a more equitable, accountable, and sustainable approach to urban development – one that raises the rights of citizens above the privations of capital.273 Through projects such as Brisbane Free University (BFU),274 Radio Reversal,275 People’s Pride, 276 and Roving Conspiracy, 277 a group of self-styled “urban activist-scholars for the Just City” has pursued a radical agenda of ‘creative occupations’ and ‘tactical urbanism’ across the city 278 . Many of these projects emphasise care for organisers, participants, and places over any other specific outcomes, prioritising “joyful, relational organising”279. As Shepard asserts: “For many in these movements, this spirit of cultural production and creativity functions as a social intervention in itself.”280 In the case of the Cult of the High Rise, the legibility of the message is less important than the simple fact of momentarily taking up space with creative expressions of identity – staking a claim to be seen and heard, and perpetuating the legacies of dissent and contestation that make particular places important as public space, such as those around Brisbane’s historic boundaries.

272 Osborne, “The Right to the City: In Pursuit of a More Just, Sustainable, and Democratic Brisbane.”

273 Osborne, “For Still Possible Cities: A Politics of Failure for the Politically Depressed”; Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now”; Thompsett, “Learning by Doing by Learning: Reflections on Scholar Activism with the Brisbane Free University”; Thompsett, “Pedagogies of Resistance: Free Universities and the Radical Re-Imagination of Study”; see also various blog posts and articles on Sri, “Jonathan Sri, Councillor for the Gabba - Blog”; Floodmedia, “Floodmedia.”

274 Brisbane Free University, “Brisbane Free University Website.”

275 Radio Reversal, “Radio Reversal.”

276 People’s Pride, “People’s Pride.”

277 Sri, “Roving Conspiracy.”

278 Osborne, “For Still Possible Cities: A Politics of Failure for the Politically Depressed.”

279 Osborne.

280 Shepard, “Movement of Movements: Toward a More Democratic Globalization.”

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This goes to the heart of a pre-figurative conception of politics. Showcasing a stubbornly creative spirit in spite of limited of resources, these artists and activists negate any conception of creative production as a process geared towards a specific outcome.281 Indeed, mediocrity is often a source of pride amongst Brisbane artists, satisfying a deep-held need to differentiate their work from the supposed sophistication of their southern counter-parts, Melbourne and Sydney. The cardboard props, stolen milk crates, and homespun outfits of The Cult of the High Rise belie what in Queensland parlance might be termed a “she’ll be right” 282 attitude, denoting an unwillingness to “separate the political ‘ends’ from means”283 . Or in BURN Arts terms: “process over product”284.

BFU convenors Carlson and Walker285 emphasise the importance of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘locatedness’ in these projects. Situated beyond explicit political agendas, yet populated by many of the same organisers, BURN Arts events become a test bed for this mode of organising. Encouraging creative collaboration, they provide a blank canvas on which to experiment with design, planning, and project management across a range of sites and scales, giving participants an opportunity to collectively imagine and enact alternative futures as present fictions. Promoting an ethos of ‘radical care’ and ‘radical self-expression’ 286 , they open space for marginal and intersecting identities to be centred and celebrated through art, music, and participatory performance.

281 Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence.”

282 Can be translated roughly as “That’ll do ” 283 Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now.” 284 Burn Arts Inc., “Burn Arts.”

285 Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now.” 286 Burn Arts Inc., “BURN Arts.”

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Figure 35 The constellation: A selection 108 of events emerging out of the constellation of pre-figurative community organising projects born in the Gabba Ward

Figure 36: Mapping the constellation Mapping a selection of pre-figurative community events against ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ (solicited and unsolicited) sites of 109 cultural production and potential future sites.

Piecemeal and perpetually unfinished, these projects reflect the houses in which they are hosted – the iconic and oft-butchered Queenslander, a never-ending DIY project for the suburban enthusiast. Echoing the notion of counter-publics forming in private spheres, 287 the house-as-venue facilitates a particular kind of civic participation characterised by intimacy, warmth, and openness, neatly summed up by Haraway as “care-full care in the here and now”288.

The Derby float was built in just such a house on Russell Street, within yelling distance of the lizard statue. In this context, the implicit message of fragile cardboard houses being shoved aside by a milk crate monstrosity takes on a specific, located significance. With its habitable under croft and large, shared garden this setting provides a valuable resource to local artists and activists who use it for community meetings, classes, working bees, and storage of communal equipment, along with public gatherings like Roving Conspiracy. These spaces are used as outdoor meeting rooms, only partially enclosed from the street by timber slats and greenery, blurring the threshold of the public and the private realms. Conversely, this domestic attentiveness has also come to characterize public events like Kurilpa Derby, as well as the creative occupations of public space by Brisbane’s radical groupings – cups of tea, home-cooked meals, rugs, cushions, coffee tables and pot-plants emerge from underneath nearby participants’ houses, temporarily turning the street into a communal living room. With so much community organising happening in this domesticated realm, the removal of houses and loss of traditional neighbourhood fabric further threatens the civic life, equating to a loss of cultural identity in a city already struggling with its historical demons.289

287 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.”

288 Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now.” 289 For an illustration of the ways in which the traditional Queensland housing fabric defines part of Brisbane’s cultural identity, refer to Malouf, “A First Place: The Mapping of a World.”

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Figure 37 Traditional festive practices

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Tactical carnival

According to Bakhtin’s conception of the carnivalesque, community festivals and parades like Kurilpa Derby manifest temporary worlds in opposition to the ordinary or everyday.290 Traditional festivals in medieval Europe acted as the “fool’s mirror”, a metaphoric looking glass through which society stepped in order to reflect back upon itself.291 Foucault uses the same metaphor to articulate his theory of the ‘heterotopia’, an alter-reality that lies beyond the material conditions of the present, and yet simultaneously exists within them – a mirror on society.292 In Bakhtin’s estimation, the carnival also had an important political dimension.

Collapsing established social hierarchies and disrupting familiar patterns of behaviour, it often challenged the status quo by overtly lampooning authority, cultivating an atmosphere of playful spontaneity.293 The deployment of such ludic tactics in political protest is well documented in the playful and often absurd pranks of twentieth-century counter-cultural movements from Dada294 to Punk295; the Yippies296 to Ya Basta297.

This has seen a recent resurgence with climate action group Extinction Rebellion drawing attention for their antics in cities around the world, including Brisbane298.

In contrast to conventional demonstrations, ludic protest emphasises collective and individual creativity with a “free-flowing multivocality” 299, an essential difference between the static ‘occupying space’ model of conventional protest and the more dynamic ‘opening space’ model. Described as ‘tactical carnival’300301, much of the power of this approach lies in its dispersed and celebratory nature. Broad-based

290 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.

291 Graeber, “Manners, Deference, and Private Property: Or, Elements for a General Theory of Hierarchy.”

292 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”

293 Shepard, “From Play to Panic: Ludic Organising in Absurd Times.”

294 Bishop, “Artificial Hells: The Historic Avant-Garde.”

295 Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.

296 Shepard, “Play as Prank: From the Yippies to the Young Lords.”

297 Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography.

298 Sugrue, “Business as Usual.”

299 Bogad, Tactical Performance: Serious Play and Social Movements.

300 Slater, “Revanchist City.”

301 The conflation of carnival and protest has frequently been made explicit, as with the ‘Carnival Against Capitalism’, an international day of protest in June 1999, coinciding with the 25th G8 Summit in Cologne.

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participation makes it harder to pin down while a festive atmosphere negates any conventional conception of protestors as dangerous, fist-shaking insurgents.

“The central idea behind the carnival is that protests gain in power if they reflect the world we want to create […] a world that is full of colour and life and creativity and art and music and dance. It’s a celebration of life against the forces of greed and death”302 Central to the construction of the temporary world of the carnival are the performative and participatory spatial practices of street theatre, costume and mask parades, large-scale puppetry, and effigies. As well as featuring in many continuing carnival traditions such as Mas303, Fasnet304, and Samhain 305, these practices also form a core part of the repertoire of contemporary political protest, exemplified by the likes of New York’s Bread and Puppet Theatre.306 In Brisbane, the influence of pioneering groups such as The Popular Theatre Troupe and the Street Arts Community Theatre Company are still evident in marches and rallies today (Figure 38). 307

302 L.A. Kaufmann (2004) quoted in Shepard, Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution.

303 Ferris, “Incremental Art: Negotiating the Route of London’s Notting Hill Carnival.”

304 De Soto, “Reading the Fools’ Mirror: Reconstituting Identity against National and Transnational Political Practices.”

305 Kearney, “Revisiting Samhain: Two Directions on a Theme.”

306 “Bread and Puppet Theatre.”

307 Capelin, Challenging the Centre: Two Decades of Political Theatre.

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Figure 38 Giant ‘Elders’ puppets, usually found at Woodford Folk Festival, join the Global Climate Strike in Brisbane

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Taxonomising Kurilpa Solicited / Unsolicited: Although it draws on carnivalesque traditions, the Derby is conceived by WECA first and foremost as a day of family fun, not a protest, and Cult of the High Rise was devised simply as a humorous parade float. The reaction to the hand-shake with Councillor Matic was not pre-meditated; the booing and jeering a spontaneous, collectively performed theatrical scene on the part of the assembled crowd. Nonetheless, Kurilpa Derby stakes its claim to the contested space of Boundary Street in the name of ‘keeping West End weird’, so it is unsurprising that the Cult of the High Rise was so well-received by WECA organisers – the very people who had spearheaded the campaign against West Village.

Implicit / Explicit: The implicit irony of the piece was lost on many of the well-heeled onlookers sitting in the cafes and bars lining Boundary Street. Even when approached by clowning real estate salespeople, few appeared to realise that the joke was on them – playing their appointed role in the drama as ‘ignorant gentrifiers’ to perfection. This is a classic Situationist tactic, flipping the frame of the spectacle so that it is no longer clear who is the spectator and who is being spectated.

In order to fit the brief of a community celebration (rather than a protest), explicit political commentary is couched in a fictional narrative. However, there is always a danger that the message simply becomes opaque. One spectator detected an objection but couldn’t manage to put their finger on precisely what it was, asking participants what the ‘protest’ was about. They read the visual cues of a protest but couldn’t read its message. A positive take on this is that the interaction prompted conversation – as per the p+a+p

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philosophy of producing ‘conversational outcomes’

308

. However, the

spectator’s failure to see the symbolism of a ruling party Councillor shaking hands with a ‘developer’ while being enthusiastically booed by a crowd directly across the road from West Village reveals the major weakness of implicit messaging: to the uncritical eye, the Cult is just another crowd of colourful West End weirdos. This is precisely the kind of vibrant culture you might expect if you buy an apartment in West Village. As if to hammer this point home, the day after the Derby, the Cult of the High Rise appeared on the front page of WestEnder, a local society magazine.309 Like Backyard Reckoning, the image produced by the work dovetails perfectly with the place-making strategies of property developers and Council.

Product / Process: Despite – or perhaps because of – the negation of its DIY suburban aesthetic, events like Kurilpa Derby remain particularly vulnerable to co-optation.

Generating a truly ‘vibrant’ culture in a truly ‘iconic’ Brisbane setting, their visual and spatial tropes are readily co-opted into the New World City aesthetic. The ubiquitous faux-pallet furniture and plastic white picket fences of officially sanctioned street parties lay testament to this. However, it is not simply the imagery that is incorporated into the New World City, but artists and activists themselves, whose creative expertise is precisely what municipal and state institutions require in order to conceive, develop, and realize their arts and cultural programmes.

As such, many of these experts live in the fold between grassroots organising and the formal knowledge and cultural sectors, debunking any notion of a clear-cut separation. Moreover, their knowledge of the subversive and critical aesthetic practices that characterize Brisbane’s radical arts and political movements, and the skills acquired in learning to facilitate these practices, are precisely the expertise that these creative producers bring to the table. The 308 Georgiou and Blacket, Interview with Marisa Georgiou (Chair, BURN Arts Inc; Director, p+a+p) and Stirling Blacket (Town Planner, Modifyre; Unqualified Design Studio).

309 Major, “Change Is Happening for West End.”

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result is a cognitive dissonance between criticality and complicity.310 In order to overcome this, it is necessary to interrogate the underlying cultural values that these creative experts bring to their work, by examining the processes they employ, rather than the products they yield. Considering design in this way, I suggest it is possible to stake a claim for place-making itself as an essential mode of critical practice.

I take the account of Kurilpa Derby as the starting point for inquiry into the cultural values of BURN Arts. In the final section, I will show how these values run directly counter to the institutional values of creative expertise, and thus undermine the administered participation it supports.

310 Sachs Olsen, Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City.

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5 INFRASTRUCTURES OF RITUAL: Faith, firmness, and the cult of the high rise

In this chapter I examine the cultural values of BURN Arts. Borrowing from the ideas of Carlson and Walker,311 I propose that transformative participation at BURN Arts events emerges through cultures of trust, care, and emplacement. Invoking the notion of the ‘infrastructures of ritual’, I add to this the proposition that these cultures in turn rely upon a relational infrastructure of immediacy – that is, social interactions unmediated by transaction or exchange, a foundational principle of BURN Arts.

The artworks and events of BURN Arts evoke Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘heterotopia’ – an alter-reality that “inverts, suspects, or neutralises”312 the prevailing social relations of the world it reflects. By reconfiguring familiar environments with non-hierarchical organisational structures, I suggest that BURN Arts organisers set in motion a set of alternative social, material, and spatial relations that aligns closely with Till’s conception of transformative participation313. I argue that this represents a deliberate inversion of the transactional social infrastructure of the New World City, presenting a direct counter to the dominant colonial cultures of displacement, erasure, and denial upon which governance in Queensland is built. Although this occurs primarily through the design and construction of theatrical events and festivals, I suggest that these events provide a scale model for the practical implementation of transformative participation in architectural design and planning.

BURN Arts concept of immediacy derives from the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists, whose core critique revolves around the idea that modern society lives in a mediated form of reality referred to as the ‘spectacle’. The only way to overcome the alienation of capitalism, Debord argues, is to subvert and negate its social relations in order to return to an almost mythic form of ‘immediate’ subjective experience.314

311 Carlson and Walker, “Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Learning to Care in the Here and Now.” 312 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”

313 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

314 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

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Thus, in illustrating the ways that trust, care, and emplacement emerge through a set of constraints that require immediacy in their negotiation, I trace a common theoretical ancestor between Till’s transformative participation and the methods employed by BURN Arts.

Relating the key characteristics of transformative participation as it occurs through BURN Arts activities to a set of specific design strategies superimposition: decommodification, de-structuring, de-familiarisation (Figure 39) borrowed from Bernard Tschumi, whose conception of architecture as ‘the construction of situations’ also draws heavily on Debord’s ideas.315 I suggest that the conscious deployment of these strategies amounts to a form of counter-institutional expertise imbued with its own set of cultural values that unsettle the institutional values of architecture commodity, firmness, delight Thus, I set forth methodology for collaborative participatory design as a pre-figurative political practice and a means of fostering critical cultural dialogue.

Figure 39 Decommodification, destructuring, defamiliarisation

315 Martin, “Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s Architectural Theory”; “Bernard Tschumi.”

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Rituals of emplacement

I suggest that the key characteristics of participation as it occurs at BURN Arts events align closely with Till’s conception of transformative participation. In what follows, I show how the practical implementation of BURN Arts projects creates the conditions for this to occur by purposefully cultivating each of these key characteristics through design strategies of de-commodification, de-structuring, and de-familiarisation316.

Table 1 BURN Arts' and Till's key characteristics of transformative participation, core values and key strategies

Core value

Key characteristics BURN Arts Theatricalising the lobby

Immediacy

‘Embracing contingency’ ‘Bringing forward the

Low barrier to participation

moment of reality’

knowledge’ ‘Negotiation of hope’

Self-interest = group interest

‘Citizen-Expert’

Shared narratives Recurrent ephemerality

De-commodification

‘Embedded

Detachment from outcome

Connection to place Emplacement

Till

Navigation of order & chaos

Devolution of creative agency Trust / Care

Strategy

De-structuring

‘Making sense together’ De-familiarisation ‘Urban story-telling’

316 Harvey, “The 10 Principles of Burning Man”; “Bernard Tschumi”; Martin, “Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s Architectural Theory”; Edensor and Sumartojo, “Reconfiguring Familiar Worlds with Light Projection.”

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Figure 41 Aerial view of Modifyre during setup, 2019 Image credit: Ismaan Ameer

Figure 40 Th e Bu g , Modifyre 2019 Image credit: Ismaan Ameer

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Immediacy [de-commodification]

The design of the Kurilpa Derby float was led by Stirling Blacket, an architectural graduate based in West End and Town Planning Lead at Modifyre, with responsibility for permit applications to QPWS, site layout, infrastructure provision, and traffic management.

BURN Arts was created as a legal entity in 2016 for Modifyre, an annual festival of participatory arts held on Bigambul Country, about 300km west of Brisbane.

Modifyre is officially endorsed as a ‘regional event’ of Burning Man, a globally recognised phenomenon that attracts over 70,000 attendees to the Black Rock desert of northern Nevada.317 Although incomparable in scale – attendance in 2019 was capped at 500 – Modifyre is built upon the same principles of community autonomy and de-commodification that underpin its notorious parent event, and features installations and fire art, theme camps, mutant vehicles, and large-scale immersive participatory performances.318 The event draws on a rich countercultural heritage in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. Many of its core constituents have come from more established events such as Woodford Folk Festival and Lismore Lantern Parade, events which trace their origins to the Nimbin Aquarius Festival of 1973 – “Australia’s Woodstock”. Bringing a growing number of dedicated attendees to a remote paddock in Yelarbon State Forest for one week each July, the event is built around two focal artworks, the Bug and the Temple. The design and construction of these effigies acts as a gateway for new participants at the event, and a vehicle for the experience of transformative participation.

Like Kurilpa Derby, Modifyre runs on a shoestring, relying entirely on volunteers and participants for everything from cleaning toilets to legal advice. In line with a radically de-commodified ethos, the event seeks no corporate sponsorship and allows no commercial vending. The total combined budget for the Bug and the Temple typically amounts to less than AUD$2000.

319

Monetary transaction among

participants is effectively suspended and artists are encouraged to work with salvaged, 317 Burn Arts Inc., “Www.Modifyre.Org/About.”

318 Burn Arts Inc. 319 Burn Arts Inc.

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recycled, or found materials insofar as possible – both to save on cost and in consideration of the environmental implications of new material production. This instantly poses a conundrum for the designer, neatly summarized by Leonor Gausachs, Design Lead on the Temple in 2019: “How do I decide on materials without knowing the budget? How will they allocate the budget without a design? How can I design without materials?”320

Figure 42 The BURN Arts conundrum: design, budget, materials

320 Gausachs, Interview with Leonor Gausachs, Temple Lead, Modifyre 2019.

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This triangular puzzle sets up the conditions of relational immediacy that lie at the heart of the BURN Arts philosophy. The tension between the need for resources and an ethos of de-commodification is the core driver of participation. Without money to facilitate the acquisition of materials, or materials to guide the design, the designer is obliged to engage directly with the people around them in order to set their project in motion. In other words, without the usual medium of transaction, they are compelled into interaction.

Trust and Care [De-structuring]

The only factor within the control of the designer at the outset is their capacity for imagination – their ‘expert’ knowledge thus becomes the medium that facilitates interaction. However, in order to set the project in motion they must share that knowledge, publishing concept designs as early as possible, inviting input, and creating a feedback loop between designer and participants. Design becomes a matter of making sense out of many and varied inputs – and then submitting the results for further input so the process can repeat itself.

As the designer submits their expertise to that of the group, they devolve creative agency among the participants. For instance, ‘design team meetings’ for the Cult of the High Rise consisted of people getting together over a drink or meal, sharing and discussing ideas, which Blacket would then take home and synthesise ahead of the next meeting. The process of developing the Modifyre site layout was almost identical (refer Figure 44), just with a few more pragmatic constraints, like where to put the solar trailer and how to separate vehicles and pedestrians. However, discussion is not limited to the pragmatics of designing the float or laying out a site – narrative plots and theatrical scenes emerge, along with characters and costume ideas, developing into a collectively composed fiction through which participants can define their own roles on a given project.

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Figure 44 Modifyre site planning meeting 2019 with BURN Arts Indigenous Liaison and committee member, Tanya Kirkegaard discussing Bigambul Country

Figure 43 Early site layout sketches by Blacket

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Through the process of collective imagination, a community of shared purpose forms around the designer’s vision. With no brief fixed in advance, all inputs are valid and no idea is too farfetched. The role of the architect becomes that of facilitating what Till calls the ‘negotiation of hope’ 321 , drawing out the spatial implications of participants’ imaginings and re-presenting them for further speculation. In the context of a design that has no purpose beyond its own realisation, this negotiation process can extend to full-scale production. Conceived as 1:1 models, the effigies, camps, and the event as whole represent just another iteration to be tweaked and modified as it develops on the paddock, and from one year to the next.

Till refers to the premature sharing of design concepts as “bringing forward the moment of reality”322. He suggests that this forces the designer to engage with realworld constraints that may not be compatible with their ideal vision. This begins to unravel the idealized values of commodity, firmness, and delight, premised on the authorship of the designer. By introducing contingency and uncertainty to the process, the designer relinquishes control over the process, implying a detachment from the final outcome. Thus design becomes a navigation of order and chaos, setting up a condition of mutual trust and care among participants which kick-starts the recruitment of volunteers and the gathering of materials. When people see or hear about a compelling design concept, they become excited and inspired to contribute.

As materials accumulate they feed back into an ever-evolving design. As they become more invested in the endeavor, responsibility for creative decision-making is increasingly spread among participants, negating any conception of individual authorship. As the designer becomes detached from specific outcomes, a growing community of participants attaches themselves to the vision.

321 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

322 Till.

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Emplacement [De-familiarisation]

The Bug and the Temple are partially pre-fabricated at HSBNE, a large makerspace near the Port of Brisbane. However, without substantial haulage options available it is impractical to gather cladding materials in the city. Instead, the structures are typically clad using hardwood flitches (bark offcuts) from a local hardwood mill near Inglewood. Aside from being more commodious, the use of local materials signals the return of the event, enacting emplacement with a small but appreciable contribution to the local economy. The architecture of the two pieces thus becomes a tangible expression of the event’s relationship with place.

The two structures are ceremonially burned as the central events of the festival.

Symbolising release and renewal, the burning clears space for the process to unfold again. While the structures are obliterated, they imprint their image both on the landscape and on the collective memory of participants, denoting a place of pilgrimage and gathering – exemplifying detachment and emplacement, absence and presence in one gesture.

The removal, physically and psychologically, of Modifyre from its place of origin amplifies the experiences of immediacy, trust and care. The challenge for the designer is amplified as the task of providing for one’s basic needs, and those of one’s crew, is added to the task of delivering a construction project under the adverse conditions of a paddock without readily available water, power, or shelter. The combination of remoteness from everyday comforts and proximity to one another produces a mode of social interaction that rewards cooperation and sharing.323 Over time, the place where this occurs is made increasingly visible and accessible to a growing number of people, taking on a specific significance for those who make the journey and dislodging established understandings of that place in terms of its economic and cultural value.324

323 Rohrmeier and Starrs, “The Paradoxical Black Rock City: All Cities Are Mad.” 324 Mariani and Barron, Terrain Vague..

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Figure 45 th e Te m p le , Modifyre 2019

Figure 46 Te m p le burn, Modifyre 2019

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Unmasking the infrastructures of ritual

Setting the stage

Participants on the Bug and the Temple witness the full lifecycle of the project from conception to destruction. The ordinary temporal relationship between the individual and the work of architecture is reversed. Through the implementation of the project, the social, material, and spatial infrastructures that underpin the manifestation of cultural significance through ritual practice are thus made apparent to participants. I argue this experience equips and empowers people to realise their own creative agency. However, it also opens the process to manipulation, and thus implies significant responsibility on the part of those who enact and facilitate it – architects and designers.

In other words, it raises the ethical question of third order cybernetic system, like those early CAD softwares – the question of who or what determines the framework for decision-making, the rules governing debate about goals and means within a given.

In the same way that the Town Planner negotiates a physical infrastructure for Modifyre, BURN Arts negotiates a legal infrastructure that, while invisible to most participants, acts as an interface between the temporary world of the event and the ‘default world’ outside. Building a framework of risk management plans, emergency services liaison, insurances and permits, BURN Arts clears space for participants to weave the fictional narrative in which they can perform their chosen roles.

In his work on political imagination, David Graeber325 invokes feminist theories of labour that highlight the invisible work of ‘setting the stage’ on which political life unfolds. If the physical space of the polis is the stage upon which visibility is claimed then architects are its set designers, their creative and constructive processes manifesting the common spaces in which theatrical dramatisations of dissensus can be enacted – temporary ‘fictions of the possible’326. The planning and execution of Modifyre can be regarded as a temporal and spatial scale model for this architectural

325 Graeber, “Imagination.”

326 Boano and Kelling, “Towards an Architecture of Dissensus: Participatory Urbanism in South-East Asia.”

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process. A temporary redistribution of the sensible in miniature, the festival is a means of testing new ways in which particular parts of society might relate to each other and reconfiguring the ways in which subjects are seen and heard. By directly involving people in this creative process, not just the in the resulting ‘scene’, the architect can reveal to participants the extent of their stakes in the present configuration of space.

At the same time they acquire the capacity to create their own scenes, and thus the permission normally reserved for the producer or the critic, to challenge the very means by which scenes are created. In other words, participation gives away the ‘tricks of the trade’. ‘Place’ is understood as an entanglement of physical space with social and cultural meaning – ie. collective memory. By inviting people to enact an alternative set of social relations through the production of space, the very process of design itself becomes part of a shared, located memory. Thus, through the design and construction of the festival space, it is possible to challenge or change the accepted meaning of a place, reclaiming the process of ‘place-making’ as a mode of critique.

Theatricalising the lobby

Like the best theatre, the extent to which a group can collectively suspend their collective disbelieve often determines the success of the endeavour. Georgiou speaks of devising activities with a ‘low barrier to participation’327. This draws directly on the same Situationist rhetoric of ‘spectator and performer’328 that underpins Burning Man and much contemporary socially engaged art. The production of Modifyre attempts to make the boundary between spectator and performer so spatially and temporally diffuse as to render it nearly invisible, blending the fictional with the real.

Felix Barret, founder of Punchdrunk, a pioneering immersive theatre company, uses the concept of “theatricalising the lobby”329 to denote this dissolution. As a liminal space between the street and the theatre, the ‘lobby’ negates binary conceptions of inside-outside. Based on her experience of Kurilpa Derby, Gausachs describes three tiers of participation (Table 2).

327 Georgiou and Blacket, Interview with Marisa Georgiou (Chair, BURN Arts Inc; Director, p+a+p) and Stirling Blacket (Town Planner, Modifyre; Unqualified Design Studio).

328 Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organisation and Action.”

329 Tomlin, British Theatre Companies 1995-2014.

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Table 2 Tiers of participation in BURN Arts events330 Position

Type of participation

Location

Core crew

Responsible, indispensable; cannot leave

Theatre

Casual volunteer

Help out as directed; come and go freely

Lobby

Onlooker

Observer, spectator, accidental participant

Street

I suggest the mid-tier corresponds with Barret’s ‘lobby’, a space of potential encroachment from the imaginary world inside the theatre. Participants occupying this space are open to diversion – they have bought the proverbial ticket and are willing to take the ride331. It is here that we experience “raw, naked theatricality at its most dangerous.”332 The potential of the ‘lobby’ is exploited by devolving creative agency as early as possible – for example, with the premature publication of a concept design. This strategy is replicated at every turn, in community design workshops, in the collection of materials and construction detailing, in the planning of a performances and artworks, in the configuration of camps, and finally in the invitation for participants to make their mark on the two effigies, thus distributing responsibility for the project so thinly as to negate individual claims to authorship. In the same that way Barret’s lobby dissolves the boundary between spectator and performer, so self-interest dissolves into group-interest during construction of the event. This has echoes of Adam Smith’s333 moral philosophy which holds that all economic activity is motivated by self-interest, the root theory behind free-market logics of capitalism.334 The crucial difference lies in the fact that Smith’s economy is transactional, mediated through exchange, while the temporary economy of the paddock is not. As ordinary hierarchies of exchange value collapse in the face of daily survival, utility emerges as a single, shared value335. Without the infrastructure, there can be no ritual.

330 Gausachs, Interview with Leonor Gausachs, Temple Lead, Modifyre 2019.

331 Thompson and Steadman, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

332 Centre Phi, “In Conversation with Felix Barret.”

333 Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

334 Conlin, Adam Smith (Critical Lives).

335 Graeber, “Three Ways of Talking about Value.”

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But without the ritual, there is also no need of infrastructure. The meaning of one is defined by the existence of the other. Thus the entire significance of the Bug and the Temple is both embedded and revealed in their implementation; the ‘setting of the stage’ is the show, and everyone is both an actor and an audience member. As the means become the ends, utility value collapses into symbolic value336, and participants become entirely detached from the final product of their labour. This exemplifies the BURN Arts mantra: “process over product”337. In this context, the rapid destruction of the two main artworks makes perfect sense. Without further work to do on the structures there is no further meaning to be derived from them. Once everyone has made their mark, there is really nothing left to do but burn them down. In the words of Andy Price, a veteran of the Modifyre community and serial Build Lead: “it’s about the journey, not the destination.”338

336 Graeber.

337 Burn Arts Inc., “Www.Modifyre.Org/About.”

338 Price, Conversation with Andy Price (former Temple lead, Modifyre 2017) at Burning Seed 2019.

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Extending the lobby

The metaphor of the ‘lobby’ can be understood in Foucault’s terms as “the system of opening and closing that both isolates and makes penetrable”339 the alter-reality of the heteropia. I suggest that this liminal space equates to the very process of transformative participation. It is in crossing this space that transformation occurs.

However, to ‘step across’ this threshold is not simply to move from one space to another, but to actively participate in its construction. Significantly, it is not two dimensional, but has a spatial character of its own and in this regard the lobby presents an opportunity. It may exist underneath a Queenslander, inside a makerspace, on a temporarily closed street, or in a briefly reclaimed private park, but wherever it is, participants are invited to dwell in this space-between and, while there, to imagine the world they are building and other worlds besides. As they linger, contemplating the material and social characteristics of the temporary space they are building together, participants have conversations about the possibilities for more theatres with more lobbies.

This is the essence of transformative participation, the diversion of the lobby. A sense of disorientation on the way in or out that leads one to question their previously accepted reality upon stepping back out into the default world. The aim is to reveal to participants the theatrical nature not just of the fantasy space but of the default as well, to equip them to see behind the façade of the everyday and thus to question its legitimacy – asking our default assumptions to validate themselves and thus challenging the hegemony of our own consensus.

Undeniable plausibility

The heterotopia is conceived as a ‘fiction in reality’340, a simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live. In the case of BURN Arts, the fiction being enacted is a world in which interaction rather transaction is the dominant relational logic. The effect of this is two-fold:

339 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”

340 Foucault.

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First, it draws attention to the fact of transaction as a governing principle that can be called into question, making visible and accessible that which is normally invisible and inaccessible. In so doing, it implicitly raises questions as to the legitimacy of this governing principle. Second, it equips people with a set of tools or experiences with which to create further ‘fictions in reality’, thus reproducing the experience of transformation and perpetuating the implicit critique. With each iteration the alternative configuration of political space comes to seem more commonplace in its own way – in its construction, its social relations, its aesthetic, its distribution of resources – and thus with each iteration its plausibility grows as well. The fiction becomes a world in its own right, with its own mythologies, its own culture, its own institutions, and its own alternate partition of the sensible.

Upon returning from Modifyre, participants form geographically dispersed networks bound by their shared experiences of trust, care, and emplacement, integrating these values into their own lives and therefore into the social and economic functioning of the city. As demonstrated by Kurilpa Derby, the logic of the BURN Arts alter reality begins to infiltrate or permeate the default world as an ‘outside within’341, extending the lobby beyond the excitement of immediacy at the event. In this way, the suspended relations of the participatory design process permeate the everyday interactions of participants – the imaginative conversations that were possible in the liminal space become possible more generally.

As the lobby enmeshes itself with both the theatre and the street, its boundary with each become increasingly indistinct. This effect is supplemented through the communications, workshops, and meetings leading up to and after an event, which make it difficult to distinguish the fictional narrative from the factual information required to participate. Different actors and audience members have entered the lobby from different directions and at different times, making the layout and limits of the space even more diffuse. At its logical vanishing point, this extension of the lobby equates to a dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, what Till calls embedded expertise,

341 Sebregondi, “Deleuze’s Fold as Urban Strategy.”

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the “citizen-expert/expert-citizen”342. Turning architecture itself into a site of political contestation and dissensus, through a conscious devolution of agency within the design process transformative participation becomes an ever-unfolding process of claim-staking, an ‘infinite dissolution of the lobby’.

Cultural exchange

As the alter-reality of transformative participation permeates to the point of plausibility, it raises again the question of common sense. To imagine that the social relations brought about by immediacy are in some way immune to co-optation by the force of capital is to ignore history. Cognitive capitalism and the modern ‘knowledge economy’ are firmly rooted in the transcendent aspirations of the counterculture that Debord helped to stir into action. At what point does the heterotopia simply reintegrate itself with reality and become part of the normative utopian imaginary of an aspirational place beyond the problems of now?

A settler nation built on a mythic tabula rasa, Australia might be described in Foucault’s terms as a ‘compensation heterotopia’343, a space of such aspirational perfection that it borders on the utopian: “another real space as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled.”344 The purpose of the colonial endeavour in Australia was two-fold: First, it served to extract from the United Kingdom those ‘undesirables’ – criminals, political radicals, the poor, and the destitute – who could be transported; and second, it transformed these people into a productive labour force who could exploit the vast ‘new’ continent’s resources in order to produce commodities for an ever-growing commonwealth. The entire endeavour can be understood in economic terms as one of simple transaction – human capital for commodity capital. The ‘value’ of each factor

342 Till, “The Negotiation of Hope.”

343 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”

344 Foucault.

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in the equation is determined fundamentally in terms of its market exchange rate, an abstraction that distorts any conception of the intrinsic qualities of either, de-valuing both human life and the land upon which it depends.345 “Quality is inevitably reduced to quantity via the price mechanism.”346 I argue thus, that the foundational social infrastructure of Australian society is thus one of transaction, supporting cultural values premised on expansion, extraction, and exchange. The power that derives from these values is necessarily maintained by expressions of culture that normalise the distorted logic of transaction underlying them – hence the legal fiction of Terra Nullius, a denial of humanity that justified the initial displacement and dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous people,347 and the subsequent establishment of a hegemonic colonial order of rationalised administrative control that endures today. As these values are transmitted from one generation to the next they have contributed to the emergence of a collective cultural amnesia that permeates the institutions of state, leading to a destructive detachment from place and history. Characterised by the insatiable need to create coherent narratives of place and silence dissent, this cultural amnesia is inseparable from the vision of a New World City.

345 Welsh, Great Southern Land.

346 Scott, “Introduction.”

347 Kerkhove, “Barriers and Bastions: Fortified Frontiers and White and Black Tactics.”

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CONCLUSION In this thesis I have argued that the experience of transformative participation can support the maintenance of an essential critical dialogue around the means by which we currently produce and manage our urban environments. In the Australian context the need for this dialogue is becoming ever more urgent as intractable federal, state, and municipal governments seek to dictate the very scope of public discourse by administrative, curatorial and, where necessary, coercive means. I have specifically examined transformative participation as it occurs through the process of designing and constructing theatrical public events, suggesting this as a model for wider participation in architectural design and urban planning. Illustrating the particular mechanism by which this process operates – that of immediacy – I have argued that participatory design forms a kind of training ground, a space of theatrical praxis in which participants enact an alternative mode of social organisation that refutes ‘productivity’ as a narrowly defined, economically determined, and defunct cultural value.

Participatory design methods alone will not avert the crisis of capitalism. Nonetheless, they do form an integral part of any approach to addressing the issues of spatial justice that arise from that crisis and which underlie the fundamental existential questions facing us today. With the implications of inaction on climate change now coming to be fully understood, Queenslanders simply cannot afford to have a government that is unwilling to listen to its citizens. If the vast colonial appetite that has led to this continent’s desecration continues unabated, where shall it go next? And who, or rather what cultural values, will it take with it?

I have argued that events of BURN Arts and other community organisations in Brisbane act as an essential counterweight to the cultural hegemony of the New World City. By directly opposing and contesting the established narratives of neoliberal capitalism, they play the role of constitutive outside to the institutional cores of the state. At the same time, by engaging with such institutions in a professional capacity, the artists and activists of BURN Arts work to embed a set of countercultural values into the framework of governance, endeavouring to institutionalise a 139

critical culture of dissent as a safeguard against authoritarian populism – a fascistic form of consensus politics that poses an existential threat to society.

I have proposed that by unpacking BURN Arts’ participatory approach to the planning and execution of their theatrical events – an approach in which creative agency is devolved among many different actors – it is possible to unveil the specific mechanisms by which they both contest and embed particular cultural values.

Applying literature on spatial agency, it is possible to identify the mechanisms by which cultural co-optation can happen and thus begin to formulate a response and strengthen the cultural values they seek to propagate. Having defined these cultural values, I have argued that it is possible to deploy the same approach to design itself as a mode of speculative fiction or prefiguration, by treating the event as a scale model socially, spatially, and temporally for architectural practice. Thus it is possible to contest the role of architecture itself in upholding the vision of the New World City, and similar worlding projects and instead assert its potential as critical spatial praxis – a means of pre-figuring alternative future histories.

By interpreting the BURN Arts approach through this lens of spatial praxis, I have proposed that architecture offers a means of imagining their events across a range of sites and scales, creating a ripple effect that suggests the possibility of a wider devolution of spatial agency and a formulation of architecture that becomes directly relevant to an ongoing struggle for egalitarian politics.

Finally, I have tested this idea through the design and production of an immersive theatre event centred around a novel community consultation process unfolding in the context of a fictional narrative on an urban terrain vague site. Using the findings of this test to reflect on and refine key aspects of the process, in the final phase of research I situate the model of transformative participation at the core of a thesis design proposal for a community arts hub in the Gabba Ward, providing the springboard for a radical urban planning proposition.

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(en)Countering a pirate utopia

Australia’s leaders are sleepwalking into an apocalypse. In Queensland, the State displays all the symptoms of late colonial rule as the markers of a society heading for catastrophic social collapse – that is: the rational ordering of nature and society; an authoritarian government willing and able to exert itself in pursuit of that ordering; an apathetic civil society upon which to act; and finally, a blind, uncritical faith in the power of creative innovation to transcend the problems arising from the above.348 As I have shown, administrative order in Brisbane runs far deeper than just refusing permission for the occasional protest. Colonial projects are often characterised by a persistent need to ‘start again’, creating model societies that imprint an idealised image of the colonising society onto a clean, fresh slate. This perhaps begins to explain the cultural origins of the obsessive need for order and control in Brisbane’s planning, culture, and politics. Suppressing configurations of space, place, or identity that do not conform to the rationalised colonial model, to build utopia is to concentrate power and to exclude. But no ecosystem, biological or social, can survive without essential diversity. The neo-colonial ambition of a New World City in which the police, the bureaucracy, the experts and the artists all speak with the same voice is bound to selfdestruction.

Foucault suggests the ultimate heterotopia is that of the boat, the “greatest reserve of the imagination”.

“In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates” Once occupying a special place in the Australian imagination, the nautical creation myth of the First Fleet has given way to the shameful xenophobia of ‘Stop the Boats’.

Without the prospect of a horizon, society turns inwards and control asserts itself as a downward pressure within the minds of individuals, separating us from each other and the world around us.

348

Scott, “Introduction.”.

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This is the end point of unmitigated cultural hegemony – fascism – and it is precisely why criticality is so essential. Prising open the dialogue, starting an argument, thinking out loud, contesting space, staking claims – these expressions of dissent lie at the core of any true conception of democracy. The recognition that debate has intrinsic value as an end unto itself goes to the heart of a conscious society. To strive for consensus is to seek the closure of debate. The moment that society thinks ‘as one’ is the moment it goes to sleep and ceases to exist. And that seems like a good enough reason to keep arguing for the sake of argument – protesting for the right to protest.

Architecture, as a profession, has the capacity to uphold this essential diversity and complexity in the context of a political system that strives towards singularity, by fostering critical dialogue around issues of sustainable development, and by using our expertise to challenge rather than uphold reductive place-branding narratives like the New World City.

To do this, however, architects must work to value culture above use or exchange, by reembedding care into the design process itself and regaining the trust of the communities we serve. We must recognise that our cities are not built upon a blank slate, as in the fiction of terra nullius, and that our communities are not static entities to be defined in economic impact assessments – a footnote to the planning process or an inconvenient obstacle to ‘progress’. Ultimately, we must embrace the reality that imagination is more durable than timber, concrete or steel and that our stories last far longer than our houses.

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143

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EPILOGUE: FUTURE HISTORY TOURS Future Histories is conceived as a 1:1 design test, applying the methods of transformative participation as set out in this paper.

Having identified the key characteristics of transformative participation as it occurs at Modifyre, I set out to speculate on how those mechanisms of immediacy might be fostered in the urban context, taking as a further case study the design and execution of an immersive theatre event. I consider in particular the question of how the experience of immediacy might begin to spill beyond the frame of the event into the everyday ‘default’ world of participants, and thus become directly relevant to questions of participation and spatial agency in the context of the city. In so doing, I reflect on how critical design practices might become less vulnerable to co-optation by processes of financialisation – or begin to plant the seeds of their own counter-cultural values into the soil of a system they wish to change.

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Brief & concept Future Histories combines set design, audio-visual installation, documentary and story-telling in order to take audiences on a journey through the memory of the Gabba Ward. The project is conceived as an immersive theatre event unfolding across multiple locations, inviting participants to enter a fictional near-future world in which a cataclysmic event has caused collective memory loss.

Participants were invited to contribute to the design, construction, installation and animation of a theatrical set on a derelict vacant lot in the Gabba Ward. Through the process of designing and building the installation the team gathered together stories of the locality, both real and imagined, drawn from the past and the future. The fictional stories and imaginings of participants are put into conversation with the remembered stories of local residents – thus fantasy and reality are brought together as part of a new mythology of place. As a point of departure for the design, I took the floor plans of several houses removed during the most recent widening of Lytton Road, in East Brisbane, which were relocated to a storage facility. The project team documented these in-situ at the yard and gathers construction materials from demolished houses there. These materials were reassembled at HSBNE into ‘fragments’ of the Lytton Road houses as a backdrop to the event.

The resulting narrative became the basis for a public walking tour in which a further group of participants was invited to learn about the ‘future history’ of the neighbourhood around the vacant site, collecting ‘memories’ and ‘visions’ en route. At the destination they were interviewed about their experiences and asked to share their own visions for the New World City. This fictional ‘community consultation’ will be embedded in my final design proposition – a radical reconfiguration of urban planning as a form of ‘culture-led development’.

Key collaborators were assigned fictional characters within the narrative, conceived as the constituent parts of the role of the architect, thus attempting devolving creative agency through the narrative format.

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Constructing the future histories The design and construction of the outdoor activation was documented through film, photography, drawing, and writing – telling the story of the activation itself from concept to completion. This includes concept development, gathering of construction materials, fabrication and installation, and documentation of the final product.

Alongside this story, the fictional narrative unfolded in two key events:

•

Future History Tours #1: In search of the New World City – Atlas Homes, Pinkenba, 26th Nov o Gathering “fragments” – both materials and footage – for use back at EBBC

•

Future History Tours #2: Before the Flood – Vulture Street 24th Nov o A screening (live video & audio mixing) of assembled materials, ‘community consultation’ and meal

Project collaborators A project team was assembled in order to approach the project through three disciplines – theatre, film, and architecture. These equate with three perspectives or scales of engagement – event [type], documentation [form] & setting [context].

Type: •

Aleea Monsour

–

participant engagement

•

Amanda Haworth

–

narrative development

•

Joseph Burgess

–

audio-visual producer

•

Thomas Oliver

–

documentation lead

Form:

Context: •

Tom ‘Bundy’ Hamlyn

–

construction lead

•

Leonor Gausachs

–

design lead

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LIST OF FIGURES and TABLES

Figure 1 Climate protest in Brisbane, September 2019 .............................................. 16 Figure 2 A thorn in Brisbane City Council's side: Councillor Jonathan Sri leads a climare protest in Brisbane's CBD............................................................................... 16 Figure 3 Guardian headline, 27th August 2019 .......................................................... 22 Figure 4Joh's ploce-state: police amass to break up 1977 civil librerties protest ......... 24 Figure 5 The front line: 1977 civil liberties protest march in Brisbane ....................... 24 Figure 6 the Gabba Ward, Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia ........................................... 26 Figure 7 Lockhart Street, 1987. Home of the Cane Toad Times ............................... 28 Figure 8 The Cane Toad times - a key 'zine produced by Brisbane's punk counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s ........................................................................ 28 Figure 9 Brisbane's Radical Houses - exhibition and panel discussion at the Museum of Brisbane, 2019 ......................................................................................................... 29 Figure 10 Roving Conspiracy, West End, 2015 .......................................................... 29 Figure 11 Brisbane’s New World City brand, and some examples of current Brisbane City Council cultural policy ......................................................................................... 34 Figure 12 Taxonomy of Participation ......................................................................... 40 Figure 13 Commodity Firmness Delight ..................................................................... 50 Figure 14 Commodity Firmness Delight - Exchange Extraction Expansion ............. 55 Figure 15 Methodology ............................................................................................... 63 Figure 16 A rapidly melting ice-berg of control - coercion, construction, curation .... 70 Figure 17 Protesters blocking entrance to West Village Site ....................................... 74 Figure 18 Ice-cream outrage - Brisbane Courier Mail headline 8th March 2017 ...... 74 Figure 19 West Village site in West End ..................................................................... 76 Figure 20 Peter's Arctic Delicacy co. - historic photo of the West Village Site ........... 78 Figure 21 ...And into marketing material for the West Village Development ............ 82 Figure 22 Visible open consumption enshrined into local planning codes - South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan .................................................................... 82 Figure 23 A selection of marketing materials from current and recent Brisbane developments ............................................................................................................... 84 Figure 24 ‌And the reality ......................................................................................... 86

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Figure 25 ...The Common: the promise ...................................................................... 86 Figure 26 Audio artwork Backyard Reckoning by artist Sally Molloy in The Common .................................................................................................................... 90 Figure 27 Audio artwork Backyard Reckoning by artist Sally Molloy in The Common .................................................................................................................... 90 Figure 28 Chai served to participants of Backyard Reckoning by artist Sally Molloy in The Common ........................................................................................................ 92 Figure 29 discussion of

Backyard Reckoning by artist Sally Molloy in The

Common .................................................................................................................... 92 Figure 30 A moustachioed project manager about to claim his prize from Councillor Matic at Kurilpa Derby ............................................................................................. 102 Figure 31 The End is High! participants, Kurilpa Derby ....................................... 102 Figure 32 The End is High! Participants model their house hats in front of the house under which they were made..................................................................................... 104 Figure 33 developers on oversized phones shift units in The End is High! ............. 104 Figure 34 The End is High! float and the West End house under which it was built ................................................................................................................................... 105 Figure 35 The constellation: ...................................................................................... 108 Figure 36: Mapping the constellation ........................................................................ 109 Figure 37 Traditional festive practices ...................................................................... 111 Figure 38 Giant ‘Elders’ puppets, usually found at Woodford Folk Festival, join the Global Climate Strike in Brisbane ............................................................................. 114 Figure 39 Decommodification, destructuring, defamiliarisation ............................... 120 Figure 40 The Bug, Modifyre 2019 .......................................................................... 122 Figure 41 Aerial view of Modifyre, 2019 ................................................................... 122 Figure 42 The BURN Arts conundrum: design, budget, materials .......................... 124 Figure 43 Early site layout sketches by Blacket ......................................................... 126 Figure 44 Modifyre site planning meeting 2019........................................................ 126 Figure 45 the Temple, Modifyre 2019 ..................................................................... 129 Figure 46 Temple burn, Modifyre 2019 .................................................................. 129 Table 1 BURN Arts' and Till's key characteristics of transformative participation, core values and key strategies ............................................................................................ 121 Table 2 Tiers of participation in BURN Arts events................................................. 132 150

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———. “Thousands Protest against Climate Change Policies amid Bushfire Emergency.” ABC News, January 10, 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-10/bushfires-australia-protestsnationwide-sack-pm-scott-morrison/11857556.

“Aboriginal Sovereignty—Never Ceded.” Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 91 (October 1, 1988): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314618808595786.

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