Having carried out the groundwork pretty much according to my research plan over the past 12 months (with interesting visual developments and a range of new possibilities and partnerships along the way), it is time to take stock and produce a deliverable plan for the FMP. The theme remains community responses to urban regeneration, and the intention is to involve community members as collaborators in a way that builds on the relationships and local knowledge that has been built up over the past year. What follows does not constitute a fully worked through proposal. It just sketches out current thinking, with a view to getting the groundwork done as soon as possible. The earlier discussions of context, theory and methodology in the CRJ and coursework still hold. The focus for the WIP portfolio for the Surfaces and Strategies module remains open – I hope to be able to submit preliminary work for the project.
What
The project aims to explore the experience of urban regeneration across generations in areas that are going through unprecedented change. The work will involve collaboration with participants in making and editing their own images and then selecting these for the production of composites using channel mixing. I will also make portraits and provide archival images, developer literature and images, planning documents, maps and other material to draw on. As well as images, participants will produce short texts relating their images and their experiences and aspirations. In terms of the distinction between a study and a project made by Chalfen (2011), this tends towards being a project (there is no tightly defined research question, and images and accounts are not being treated as data; see, though, a critical note on this distinction in an earlier post), with participants taking a role similar to the co-investigator role described by Sinha and Back (2014).
Where
I am focusing on the housing regeneration programmes in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. These are amongst the most dramatic and ambitious, and in relation to existing communities and urban landscape potentially most disruptive, in London, and one (Barking Riverside) is the largest development in Europe. My work will focus on Barking Town Centre (dubbed by the leader of the local council as ‘Manhattan on the Thames’; it includes refurbishment of the Gascoigne Estate, which was the focus of my Sustainable Prospects WIP portfolio) and the Thames Ward (which includes Barking Riverside, dubbed ‘Barcelona on the Thames’ by the local council leader, the demolished Victorian Creekmouth Estate and the nearby 1960s Riverview Estate, which featured in my WIP portfolio for Informing Contexts).
How
I will work with six groups of collaborators, leading to four pop-up exhibitions and one consolidated exhibition. The groups span age ranges from 7 to 70+ and cover the two areas of the borough undergoing the most dramatic development.
The groups are:
Barking Riverside (‘Barcelona on the Thames’)
- New View Arts (7-11)
- Riverside Campus (11-18)
- Thames Ward Community Partnership (adult)
Barking Town Centre (‘Manhattan on the Thames’)
- Greatfields School (11-14)
- Barking College (16+)
- Barking and Dagenham Heritage Conservation Group (adult).
In each school and each community setting I will run six workshops (fortnightly) between mid September and mid December, during which we will produce and edit individual and collective images and texts.
Session 1: Providing context and giving overview. Briefing on production of images (more detail on this in a future post). Sharing of additional resources.
Session 2: Sharing, editing and selecting images. Selecting setting for rephotographing (large format for creation of large composites and animations for projection)
Sessions 3 & 4: Re-photography and participant portraits (for processing, scanning and printing).
Session 5: Mixing and re-mixing individual and collective composites.
Session 6: Pop-up exhibition and zine design.
Output
March 2020: Pop-up exhibitions in two schools and two community settings (Greatfields and Riverside, Sue Bramley Centre and Barking Hotel). Lo-fi publication. [Ideas. 1. collection of postcard size prints. 2. small format staple bound booklet. 3. Envelope with leaflets/packets for each participant, folded A4]. Reduce cost by involving participants in folding and collating.
May 2020: Consolidated exhibition, featuring all work from participants and projections (venue to be determined – possibly at Barking and Dagenham College, or Barking Theatre, or Valence House, or one of the settings available through LBBDfilm, for instance decommissioned power station). Possible publication (could design zines in such a way that these could be combined into a consolidated publication – for instance, as leaflets or packages for each participant and for collective work, put together in the slip case or envelope).
Next steps
July 2019. Discuss with Wendy and others at Falmouth. Set up and make arrangements with schools and community groups. Make preliminary arrangements for exhibitions. Experiment further with large format and channel mixing process (including use of low environmental impact processing and silver reclamation).
August 2019. Carry out background research and archival work. Workshop design and resources.
References
Chalfen, R. 2011. ‘Differentiating Practices of Participatory Visual Media Production’, in Margolis, E. and Pauwels, L. (eds) The SAGE handbook of visual research methods. Los Angeles, Calif: SAGE, pp. 186–200.
Sinha, S. and Back, L. 2014 ‘Making methods sociable: Dialogue, ethics and authorship in qualitative research’, Qualitative Research, 14(4), pp. 473–487.