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Latest from the Lab Projects Where Earth Ends

Where Earth Ends: Rediscovering and reimagining Scotland’s urban green spaces (Benjamin Ong)

 Map of St Andrews in the early 1580s, probably drawn by John Geddy (or Geddes)

While various sustainable landscape approaches are in motion — from edible gardens to wildflower meadows — biodiversity conflict (e.g., different expectations of landscape) remains a key obstacle to imagining and realising these alternatives. This conflict is evident around us, from so-called pigeon spikes to the debate around manicured vs. messy gardens. There is a fundamental need for reconciliation and a transformation of the human-nature relationship.

The University recently awarded School of Geography and Sustainable Development PhD student and RUL member Benjamin Ong a Scotland’s Future Series grant for a project titled ‘Where Earth Ends: Rediscovering and reimagining Scotland’s urban green spaces’.

This project aims to spark alternative, ecologically regenerative imaginations of future (urban) green space by exploring the deep(er) past and drawing on place-based approaches, alongside perspectives from history, literature, culture and heritage.

It ponders questions like:

  • How can attentiveness to nature be more strongly interwoven with(in) the urban fabric?
  • How can history and culture be brought to bear upon contemporary landscape practices?
  • What does it mean to be place-based in Scotland’s increasingly cosmopolitan urban spaces?
  • What might (urban) green space look like if informed by “multi-” — e.g., multifaith, multispecies, multisensory? How can we better honour our relationships with each other and with the “other”?

This project is expected to stimulate and facilitate interdisciplinary conversation and creation across geography, literature/language, history and theology, to name a few. It will involve “town and gown” collaboration with artists and community groups in St Andrews and beyond, culminating in an exhibition and/or installation (broadly speaking, and open to redefinition/reinterpretation), tentatively scheduled for Spring 2024.

This project takes inspiration from Ben’s past creative/participatory work (see The Kampung City / ImagiNasi), the philosophy of Patrick Geddes, concepts like ecosophy, and recent efforts to “time travel” and bring the past to life (such as the National Trust for Scotland’s Glencoe Turf House).

For more information, or to explore partnership opportunities (including loaning us a TARDIS), write to [email protected].

About the Scotland’s Future Series

The Scotland’s Future Series demonstrates the University of St Andrews’ commitment to playing an active role in developing Scotland’s future by enabling our staff and students to contribute to and facilitate wider discussions, helping to shape informed, respectful and productive discussion and debate. It will also enable the University to take a position of ideas leadership on how to meet the challenges of the future.

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Behind barricaded doors Projects

Behind barricaded doors: gender, class, and power in the London squatting movement  (Rowan Milligan)

I am exploring how gender and class condition power and hierarchy within the London squatting movement. Squats are a significant intervention in drawing the housing crisis out of an individualised, private sphere, and recasting it as a collective struggle. Many squats function both as a material solution to the housing problem through providing shelter and support whilst also functioning as social spaces, with cafes, bars, and other communal activities. As these are forms of resistance that are situated inside the home, I am examining whether these purportedly feminist and autonomous spaces subvert or replicate gendered/sexist divisions of labour and interpersonal relationships. Further, I am exploring how control and power are distributed within these spaces, and how class and gender condition power dynamics and interpersonal relationships. To do this I will be looking at several dimensions through which power and hierarchy are forged and maintained: aesthetics, language, decision-making, conflict, mutual aid, relationships, and more, and how class and gender affect these dimensions and thus the ability to access or maintain positions of authority and security. If power and hierarchy are conditional, even if you fulfil the conditions, to what extent are these alternative forms of living secure, freeing, actually self-determining? 

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Building Sustainable, Inclusive and Just Cities (Hons module) Latest from the Lab Projects

Building sustainable, inclusive and just cities (Antonis Vradis and Hons colleagues)

Antonis teaches a new Honours module at St Andrews, Building Sustainable, Inclusive and Just Cities.

In the module’s inaugural year (2020-21), Hons colleagues were asked to present a major urban challenge in a city that they were familiar with, and to explain how local communities could go about challenging this, without or against state intervention. The result was Community Power, a virtual special issue edited by Moriah Hull, Linda Eckefeldt, Mathilde Roze and Antonis Vradis.

The interventions of colleagues in the years ahead will be posted here. Stay tuned… The module is running again in the 2022-23 year.

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Projects

Is Gentrification the new Colonialism? Perspectives from Political Geography (Josh Hazelbower)

This research examines how enduring colonial attitudes and practices treat land in Canada as a financial instrument, at the expense of its economic functions, including the provision of affordable housing. This research further considers how such practices cause land use inefficien-cies, pushing development to sprawl outward into Indigenous land not yet under colonisation.

Aspects of these problems were identified long ago, in the era of Canada’s confederation (1867-1871), and were even then widely criticized for creating socio-economic inequality (George 1884). This earlier reckoning became known as the “land crisis” (Lough 2012). My re-search builds on a growing body of work that identifies today’s housing crises, and growing ine-quality, as a land crisis (England 2018; Levine 1993). Such research has proven successful in identifying policy alternatives that reduce inequality and and improve housing affordability (Ryan-Collins et al. 2017).

Despite these successes, no PhD has yet dealt with the articulation of historical and con-temporary meanings and facets of land crises in Canada in a systematic way. As Canada must both answer increasing calls to give Indigenous peoples their land back (Scobie et al. 2021), and experiences one of the worst housing crises in the ‘developed’ world, this work is very timely. Although western Canada is taken as a case study, the methods used are widely applicable to other parts of Canada and elsewhere.

References

England, Christopher. “Land Value Taxation in Vancouver: Rent‐Seeking and the Tax Revolt.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 77, no. 1 (2018): 59-94.

George, Henry. Progress and poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth, the remedy. W. Reeves, 1884.

Levine, Gregory J. “The Single Tax in Montreal and Toronto, 1880 to 1920: successes, failures and the transformation of an idea.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 52, no. 4 (1993): 417-432.

Ryan-Collins, Josh, Toby Lloyd, and Laurie Macfarlane. Rethinking the economics of land and housing. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Scobie, Matthew, Glenn Finau, and Jessica Hallenbeck. “Land, land banks and land back: Ac-counting, social reproduction and Indigenous resurgence.” Environment and Planning A: Econ-omy and Space

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Roaming the city of illusions: understanding migrant trajectories through their use of Information and Communication Technologies (Nerina Boursinou)

In 2014/2015, the EU faced one of the most severe border crises in its contemporary history, profoundly reshaping its governance structures and democratic values. Migrants crossing its land and maritime frontiers provoked a number of reactions from its institutions, politicians and citizens. Over the course of the following six years, the EU territory was re/formed through spatial contestations, severe border violence and xenophobic discourses. At the same time, the continent has witnessed unprecedented and decentralised solidarity actions toward these newcomers. In these ways, the continent’s ‘refugee crisis’ involved multiple dynamics between a range of actors and stakeholders, which were not always picked up by mainstream media. Today, a localised and largely invisible humanitarian crisis still unfolds as a result of hostile EU policies aiming to restrict migrant mobility by deploying militarised technology and personnel at its internal and external borders. These developments have created new complexities in the study of migrant mobility, border control, and resistance. Questions are raised around the impact that the EU’s emerging border regime has on migrants’ well-being on an everyday personal, and a more collective level.

In 2017-2018, I conducted original field research in three sites: a refugee camp, an occupied public building and an immigration detention centre in Athens, Greece. I looked at the ways in which (forced) migrants would navigate everyday life, as they were in a long-term mode of waiting to restart their life. I explored the role that smartphones and other Information and Communication Technologies (also known as ICTs) played in their life circumstances at the time.  


During my Fellowship I am focused on disseminating the findings of my research to a range of audiences which include academics but also – and perhaps more importantly- the wider societies.  Specifically, I am authoring research papers to be published in academic journals and I am also co-organising certain impact and engagement activities. These activities, include the production of a digital magazine (also known as zine) with the active collaboration of migrants, activists and artists where we will be presenting our shared ideas about social inclusion and the daily experiences of living together in the urban fabric. Additionally, I am producing a limited series podcast where I will be discussing with women researchers about their fantastic work but also the lived experience of being a woman early -career in today’s academia.  

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Projects

Critical Understandings of Predictive Policing (Evie Papada, Giorgos Mattes and Antonis Vradis)

Evie Papada, Giorgos Mattes and Antonis Vradis are part of an international team of researchers looking at the impact of predictive policing.

Critical Understanding of Predictive Policing (CUPP), is an international project running from 1 February 2021 until 31 January 2023 funded under the NordForsk Research and Innovation Programme on Digitalisation of the Public Sector (project no. 100786). It brings together seven partner organisations from five European countries – Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Estonia and the United Kingdom – to explore the digital transformation of law enforcement and its impact on crime detection and prevention. It aims to identify and critically assess the effects and impact of data-driven police technologies on society and end-users.

The St Andrews work package is looking at the Digitalisation of Policing and Urban Public Space.

The UK is a pioneering state in the integration of digital technologies in surveillance and policing, from smart borders (Amoore and Hall 2010) to monitoring through big data (Amoore and Raley 2017) and all the way to the management of recent security threats (Stevens and Vaughan-Williams 2016). Major cities in the country have seen a sharp rise in the use of facial recognition to monitor and control public spaces (The Independent 2019). Pancras Square in central London is at the forefront of the use of such technology. The Metropolitan Police apologized for secretly sharing images from its own database with the private corporation running the site (Metropolitan Police 2019), while the Mayor of London has written to the project owner (The Guardian 2019) over his apparent alarm concerning the use of facial recognition by the corporation’s CCTV system.

Our work package uses a range of mix methods, including field observation, semi-structured interviews with users and key stakeholders of the Kings Cross site, as well as a media discourse analysis of the coverage the site has received in the time leading to, and following the revelations concerning its use of facial recognition as a means of policing the site. Through a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, we are collecting visual data from the private corporation running the site and the police itself. The aim here is to better understand the interplay between public and private in relation to the governance of facial recognition technologies and practices, as well as the effect this has on the freedoms and the everyday experiences of the site users.

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Decolonising the City (DtC): co-designing a participatory arts-based research toolkit with migrant communities in Athens, Greece (Anna Papoutsi, Penny Travlou and Antonis Vradis)

Decolonising the City (DtC) is a Knowledge Mobilisation Award funded by the Urban Studies Foundation (USF). DtC follows on from our 2019 USF seminar series (Copenhagen, Barcelona, Athens), which brought together academics and practitioners to examine existing migrant welcoming practices and reached two findings. First: academic knowledge needs to be co-produced with the communities it addresses, in ways that are inclusive, relevant and useful to them. Second: this very idea of “urban belonging” is rapidly changing. In this moment of dual transition, migrants settle in European cities (often not their preferred destination) while receiving societies are faced with the legacies of their colonial past. 

PROJECT PURPOSE

With these two findings in mind DtC constitutes a series of small-scale field-based interventions aiming to reimagine, together with migrant communities, what “decolonising” urban citizenship means in practice. Our key aim is to generate a participatory arts-based methodological toolkit, co-designed with migrant communities, that will help explore how migrants practice urban citizenship. This KMA grant is focused on migrant communities of African descent in Athens, Greece. We believe this is a vitally important exercise vastly exceeding the city itself, potentially contributing to rapidly growing calls to decolonise the academy, this time from an urban and migrant-focused perspective. 

For this short study, we will collaborate with Ubuntu and Anasa: two cultural organisations representing the Afro-Greek communities active in central Athenian neighbourhoods. DtC focuses on Athens for two reasons. First, the city is both at Europe’s periphery and centre: the “birthplace of civilisation” in European imaginaries (Gourgouris 1996; Stenou 2019) is nevertheless at the continent’s edge – geographically, culturally and politically. Athens is therefore both an epicentre of the imagined geography (Said 1979) that gave birth to orientalism, and itself at the receiving end of ensuing colonial and post-colonial transformations. Second, Athens has accommodated thousands of migrants who are unable to move further across the continent, settling in a city itself rattled by more than a decade of consecutive crises (from debt to migrant reception and now Covid-19). In these two ways, Athens exemplifies how colonial imaginaries and legacies intertwine with urban exclusion today.

Figure 1: Map of DtC project neighbourhoods, organisations and key sites in Athens (Google Maps)

RESEARCH DESIGN

Following the theoretical trajectories of the “epistemologies of the South”, introduced by de Sousa Santos (2014), we will develop a methodological toolkit to decolonise urban knowledge. Our methodological toolkit will be constructed via an interdisciplinary, decolonial, intersectional feminist and participatory approach, together with the communities on the ground.

In DtC we will design and test out a participatory arts-based research methodology (PABR, see Nunn 2020) pointing to the contribution and transformative power of creative arts for advocacy and research on citizenship. The growing emphasis on participatory and interdisciplinary arts-based methods is nevertheless largely limited to the Global North. By contrast, DtC adapts this methodological approach to the context of the epistemologies of the South to decolonise academic research with migrants and to provide an inclusive and intersectional research tool for the study of urban citizenship.

The team of researchers includes Anna Papoutsi (Birmingham), Penny Travlou (Edinburgh) and Antonis Vradis (St Andrews).

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