common-places
common-places was commissioned by Site Gallery in Sheffield for the City of Ideas project. Timely with the processes of urban regeneration happening in the city, the project offered the opportunity to think new approaches that art and interdisciplinary practices could bring to processes of urban change.
common-places was conceived as a participatory workshop to engage with the local community in order to understand the things they ‘hold dear’ of Sheffield's city center. The premise was to question, identify and discuss forms of immaterial value that were important to the community and to find a methodology by which these could be mapped and ultimately protected.
Currently, there are no legal mechanism or frameworks to protect forms of value to a community. ACV or Asset of Community Value is perhaps the only legal instrument by which land or property of importance to a local community is subject to additional protection from development under the Localism Act 2011. The project, therefore, questions the importance of recognising the value of the immaterial in processes of regeneration, so change can happen embracing the complexity of place by recognising its forms or use-value to the local community.
Pleasant Title
our dear Sheffield.
Two areas of Sheffield´s city center were explored by common-places: the Cultural Quarter and the Castlegate area. On each occasion the process consisted on doing a collective walk were each participant would highlight 'things they hold dear' by using a pvc sticker and writing over a brief description. These 'tags' were documented and the images shared through a collective googlemap (see map).
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The walks were followed by a debriefing stage where 'tags' where categorised in relation to three concepts: experience, space and phenomena. These concepts derive from expanding the relational triad: people, places and things, commonly used to describe aspects of cultural heritage. By expanding the concept of people into experience, place into space and things into phenomena the intention was to capture aspects of the immaterial as well as the material.
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The diagram below uses Patrick Geddes' 'Notations of Life' structure to build a relation between concepts –as it was done during group discussion. The results are six different categories derived from the potential combinations between the concepts of experience, space and phenomena: experiential space, experiential phenomena, spatial phenomena, spatial experience, phenomenal experience, phenomenal space.
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From grouping 'tags' according to the possible combinations and topics, six types of cities can be identified: City of use-value, Experimental City, City of Memory, City of Diversity, City of Surprise, and City of Nature. See what each one means and the reasons why those different cities are 'held dear'.
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mapping immaterial value
Would you like to contribute to common-places?
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Share what you 'hold dear' from Sheffield by doing the following:
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1. Identify a thing you hold dear
2. TAG IT (by adding a note in a sticker)
3. SAVE IT (take a picture - make sure you have the GPS activated)
4. GRAM IT (share to using the following hashtags
#commonplacessheffield, #thingsyouholddearsheffield)
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A collective google map is built with all contributions.