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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Cultural Infrastructure in London & Hamburg

What should new cultural spaces do for art and performance in cities? What can they do for the politics of civic life? How should they be designed?


This symposium brought together figures involved in the creation of art and its infrastructure at a time when the future of culture in cities is under question. In London, the legacy of the 2012 Olympics has created the opportunity to carve out a new cultural precinct from ex-industrial land on the fringe of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. In Hamburg, grass-roots work at Oberhafen has seeded a cluster of creative activity in warehouses in the city’s port, now being re-imagined as a cultural quarter for the redevelopment of the area.

 

The two cases present vastly different conditions: one in which an appointed authority creates newly formed spaces for culture from a tabula rasa condition but linked to adjacent cultural sites, and another in which artists find and transform existing spaces because of a need to produce, protecting those spaces in doing so. To begin a comparative conversation, we asked what might occur if their conditions were switched. That is, could the qualities of Oberhafen or Gangeviertel be built from scratch, and could the Olympicopolis be created in found spaces? If not, what are the qualities of found space that might inform the way Olympicopolis is designed?

PARTICIPANTS

Eleanor Fawcett, Head of Physical Regeneration & Design LLDC
Amica Dall Architect, Assemble Studio
Juliet Davis Senior Lecturer, Welsh School of Architecture
Christine Ebeling, Community Organiser, Gangeviertel/Oberhafen
Kate Goodwin, Curator of Architecture, RA
Anna Harding, Chief Executive, Space Studios
Harriet Harriss, Senior Tutor, RCA Architecture
Matthias von Hartz, Director, Berliner Festival
Edwin Heathcote, Architecture Critic, Financial Times
Catherine Ince, Senior Curator, V&A East
Mel Jordan, Reader in Art & the Public Sphere, RCA
Adam Kaasa, Theatrum Mundi
Torange Khonsari, Co-founder, Public Works Group
David Lan, Director, Young Vic
Andreas Lang, Co-founder, Public Works Group
Adriana Marques, Head of Arts & Culture, LLDC
Peter Maxwell, Head of Design, LLDC
Clare Melhuish, Co-Director, UCL Urban Lab
Lucy Oliver-Harrison, Executive Director, The Yard Theatre

OUTCOMES

Full report here

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