Taking Place Seminar Cambridge University

John Wylie (University of Exeter)

Abstract

What can the practice of en plein air landscape drawing bring to cross-disciplinary understandings of spatiality, materiality and self-world relations? To address this question, this presentation will draw upon a year-long visual arts-based collaboration between John Wylie and a contemporary fine artist, Catrin Webster. The collaboration has involved a primary learning process, ongoing professional practice, and extended conceptual conversation. After setting the scene for this collaboration, the talk will focus on the embodied skills and habits of visual and spatial apprehension which the incorporation of painterly practice affords. The exemplars of painting and drawing will also be used to elucidate a developing sense that distance and dislocation are distinctive elements of landscape as a mode of spatial experience, imagination and presentation.

Therapeutic Landscapes: The Use and Design of Gardens and the Wider Landscape by Nineteenth-Century Psychiatric Institutions in England

Dr Clare Hickman (Welcome Fellow in Medical History and Humanities, King's College London)


Abstract

A man of rank comes in, ragged and, dirty, and unshaven and with the pallor of a dungeon upon him; wild in aspect, and as if crazed beyond recovery. He has passed months in a lonely apartment, looking out on a dead wall; generally fastened in a chair [...] Liberty to walk at all hours of the cheerful day in gardens or fields, and care and attention, metamorphose him into the well dressed and well bred gentleman he used to be." John Connolly, 1856

Large tracts of land surrounded nineteenth-century psychiatric institutions. This could be highly ornamental, agricultural or wooded in nature and was often a combination of all three. The elite private institutions reflected their domestic counterpart, the wealthy country house estate. Their gardens contained a wide range of ornamental features, from ornate thatched cottages to aviaries, and Gothic summerhouses to ornamental pagodas. Two famous examples of this type of elite institution, which will be explored in detail in this paper, are Ticehurst Place, Sussex and Brislington House, Bristol. These were by no means typical of the type of pauper institution catering for the majority of those categorized as insane but their overt interest in the design of the gardens indicates the significance attached to the physical environment at the time.

Other institutional gardens that will be interrogated in this paper will explore in more depth issues of class, gender and the therapeutic approach. These are three nineteenth-century institutions based in Northampton – the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper Classes, Abington Abbey Retreat, and Northampton County Asylum.

Within all these institutions, where the basis of moral therapy was the re-education of the mind, it seems likely that the superintendents consciously employed the external environment as a vital part of this process because of its perceived effect on the imagination and emotions. This paper will explore this close relationship between the landscape, the mind and the therapeutic approach as employed in the nineteenth-century asylum.

Claire Mercer (London School of Economics) and Rachel Spronk (University of Amsterdam)

Dr Kamna Patel (Lecturer in Development Administration, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL)

Abstract

The in situ upgrade of slums is widely considered global best practice in approaches to urban poverty management. This paper presents some of the findings of an investigation into the effects of in situ upgrade on conceptions of tenure security and insecurity, and practices of access to land and housing in low income settlements in Durban, South Africa. Drawing on the grounded experience and lived realities of 24 shack dwellers, and the creative uses of aspects of their identity and social relations, the paper argues the conception and execution of slum upgrading in South Africa reveals two major flaws in upgrade convention. The first flaw is that tenure security can be conceptualised in a way distinct from other securities that affect claims to property, and the second, that slum upgrade can forge a basis on which to renegotiate relations between (informal) citizens and (the formal) state. These findings have wider implications for current trends in urban poverty management.

Dr Austin Zeiderman (Research Fellow, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science)

The majority of the world’s population is now urban, and the future of cities is increasingly becoming the focus of intense concern. Amidst heightened anxiety about global warming, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks, issues of risk and security have become central to how urban spaces are planned, built, governed, and lived. Such changes are evident throughout the so-called “megacities” of the global South, while similar logics of planning and governance are also circulating among the “modern” cities of Europe and North America. In response to this widespread phenomenon, this paper considers what happens when the rights of urban citizens are reconfigured by the political imperative to protect life from threats. It examines such situations by focusing on how the emergence of risk as a technique of government shapes urban politics in Bogotá, Colombia. Investigating the frames of political engagement within which claims for recognition, inclusion, and entitlement are made, I argue that it is within the domain of biopolitical security that poor and vulnerable populations engage in relationships with the state. To become citizens with rights, they must first be recognized as lives at risk

Dr Jon Lawrence (University of Cambridge)