John Bingham-Hall
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I am a researcher, writer, and cultural organiser based in Paris and Marseille. My current work focuses on the ways how climate adaptation strategies are transforming the cultures and politics of the urban public sphere, engaging critical humanities, creative research methods, and artistic works to address sonic, choreographic, and narrative dimensions of change. I draw on a training in music and urban studies, as well as a decade of work connecting arts and urbanism with Theatrum Mundi, to explore the complex dynamics that shape public life in cities through a series of cross-cutting threads including ecology, infrastructure, sound, movement, culture, and voice.

 

I work with universities, cultural organisations, and private practices to lead learning programmes, international knowledge exchange, and collaborative, cross-disciplinary research around these approaches. See my LinkedIn or Instagram for more, or email me to contact me about working together.


Website: CC-17

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Infrastructure

In the most classical sense, the concept of infrastructure describes the technical systems engineered by public bodies to shape and support the processes that underpin cultures, economies and societies – mobility, communication, production, and so on. Beyond the most obvious manifestations of infrastructure – like rail lines, energy and data cables – there is a much broader set of infrastructural conditions that facilitate and delimit the everyday actions that make up public life, and its complex dynamics.

Throughout my work – and connecting with threads on culture, voice, and movement for example – I have looked to articulate what are the infrastructures for different aspects of public life. In this sense, infrastructure can be thought of not only as the stage on which public life is performed, but also all the processes that operate in the backstage to allow that performance to take shape.

As well as academic research on these questions, I use creative approaches such as soundscape recording and literary writing to explore more sensorial and emotional dimensions to my relationships to infrastructures as both a researcher and an inhabitant. My approach to teaching combines the more theoretical approaches above with these creative methods that allow for important aspects of human experience to be articulated, in ways that are often missing from more technical frameworks for infrastructural design.

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