I’ve bemoaned the lack of an entry statement for Aspley in other blog posts and in a letter to the editor of our local paper. The local area plan makes reference to Aspley as Brisbane’s northern gateway. As such, I think some kind of entry statement is warranted as the highway yields the usual suburban offerings of car yards, fast food, petrol stations and big box retail. Perhaps it’s a specially commissioned marker or planting of landmark trees which frame the road and bridge crossing over Cabbage Tree Creek. Perhaps it’s just some acknowledgement of here, of place, of entering somewhere (rather than a non-descript nowhere of suburbia). Perhaps it’s just recognising what already exists at that point and enhancing it, like the row of pines further up the road. While cycling along that stretch of road, I’ve noticed a crooked pine situated next to the bridge on the bank of the creek. It seems apt to acknowledge such trees given the association of that vicinity with forest, catchment rehabilitation and timber milling.The remnants of an older timber mill lie dormant in the neighbouring property, with stacks of massive logs.

Transmission Lines is a writing and mapping project that was commissioned by the State Library Of Queensland as part of an artist books project. It documents my father’s working life as a rigger and linesman with the Electric Power Transmission and its Italian parent company. He kept a photographic record of his working life and the photographs featured in on a map that reconstructs some of his journeys and power lines are his personal photographs from Australia and Italy in the period 1955 to 1974. He commenced work in Italy in 1954 with SAE, which sponsored his migration to Australia, and remained working with EPT until 1975. Since starting this project, several former EPT workers and their families have been in touch to send photographs, messages and documents, which I am posting to the blog. While never intended as a participatory project, I was compelled to respond to those communications and acknowledge the social dimensions of that history. A relational dynamic emerged beyond the project itself. Transmission Lines is now only one node in a network of remembrances and commemorations of EPT and our fathers (uncles, brothers etc).

One of the sons, Matthew Q, has decided to write a book and in his most recent email to me mentioned the various meetings and gatherings he has attended with the former EPT workers. He has also set up a facebook group where many of the former EPT workers have posted photos and other reminiscences as well as photos of more recent gatherings. Until recently my mother would attend EPT reunions near Brisbane as many of the wives and families of EPT workers formed strong bonds. The facebook group has an open and easy feel about it whereas Transmission Lines, as a blog based project, required more moderation and handling of the content. Through the facebook group, in particular, a small community and network emerged from this modest project of mine in which I simply sought to honour the work of my father as one of many who contributed to post-war nation-building. I’ve been quite touched and surprised by how this rippling has occurred as the facebook membership growing to 55 with many of the children of EPT workers (mostly post-war migrants) contributing photographs, asking questions, taking pride and reconnecting.

In my wandering thoughts this morning, I realised that, inadvertently, this dynamic seems to have contributed to my thinking about the kind of ‘community of change’ that I had hoped would take shape with Long Time, No See? Maybe it’s an Italian thing (whatever that means). There’s the sharing of experience and content; the potential to have conversations outside of the workshop and other organised events; there’s the multiple platforms of blog and facebook group which participants are free to use in ways that suit them. There’s also the opportunity to spring different projects out of the Long Time, No See? network (for example, our Community Catalyst process is about enabling communities to self-organise – not just contribute to Long Time, No See?). Others have seen potential for their own community projects such as a ‘chalk fest’, undertaking more walks, continuing conversations and the like. There has been a sense of project participants wanting to remain connected in creative ways. And, I think, it makes a point about how arts-led community engagement and capacity building can provide some cues for people to set their compass for futuring and resilience. Perhaps the comparison to Transmission Lines is a stretch, but that project seems to have reached into the hearts and lives of the people who have encountered it. There is, on a facebook group, a growing social archive of photographs and social network which tell us something of this country’s migration and infrastructure history (though the nation’s collecting institutions have shown no interest in acquiring this memorabilia).

While there’s much theory underpinning the participatory aspect of Long Time, No See?, there’s also experiences like Transmission Lines with the organic and surprising (re)emergence of a community that was once transitional and transitory. It tells stories of once hopeful aspirations for infrastructure, for migrants, for progress and for the nation itself. For Long Time, No See? the word ‘flourish’ keeps coming to mind: it’s written into my earlier texts about the project in terms of a ‘human flourishing’ that is borne of another kind of hopefulness and aspiration with futuring and changemaking at its heart.

The bats prompted a trajectory from my earlier post about a proposal for a writing project drawn out of architecture fiction. After reading much of the dystopic and utopic tendencies of architecture fiction, I had wondered about the possibility of an architecture fairytale or fable (or other mythic construct), given a current engagement with fairytales. Fairytales and fables tend to be about deeds and have a kind of moral imperative woven through their narrative. The geography and architecture of fairytales is often fanciful and diverse: woods, castles, villages, houses, caves etc. In one of my earlier experimental hypertext works, racconto, I had endeavoured to explore some of these possibilities with limited success, drawing on historical, literary, mythic, philosophical and other references and influences; notably this included The Decameron and the Hypnerotomachia as well as classical mythology such as Roberto Calasso’s interpretive work and Italo Calvino’s fictional works. Reflecting on the possibilities of architecture fiction may breathe new life into this work which remains incomplete. What might an urban or experimental fairytale be? One of my favourite quotes: “What will it feel like to live in a city, where houses court each other in springtime?” But what if all buildings were imbued with that kind of desire, longing and flirtatiousness? This is a truly enjoyable image. I also wonder about reading buildings.

And then, the bats which are, of course, mammals and which didn’t so much evoke this quote but my recent experiences of birds: a canoeing trip through mangroves to go bird spotting, the tawny frog mouthed owl, the black cockatoo, other cockatoos (sulphur crested, Major Mitchells and galahs) and lorikeets. Each are inscribed with their own myths and superstitions. Then there are the birds we just take for granted like the rosella and the crows: John A says that the crows, which circle the suburb, presiding over it from the highest points like the majestic gum trees and the roof over my desk are bringing me thoughts and ideas. I hear them scratch on the ceramic tiles as I type. Not so long ago, a murder of crows had taken a dislike of my mother, a tiny and stocky owl-like woman who is becoming more stooped and wide-eyed as she ages, and they would heckle and menace her whenever she crossed their path. We were concerned that one day they might figure out how to carry her away. John learned that crows, being somewhat intelligent, can take a dislike to people and also bear grudges. When asked if she had ever done anything to the crows, my mother said that she would shoo them away from her front yard. Did you throw things at them? I asked. No, not really, just sticks, she replied. And she would recount how she used a broom to scare off the one crow, somehow different to the rest, that would come knocking on her front window and would peck at the fly screen and pick at the cat’s food.

Even though bats are mammals, I am taking some liberties with dots through these chaotic and messy joins. On a tour of the restored City Hall, cloaked in netting to repell the pigeons from the ornately carved facades and masonry, we discover a hole in the netting.  There’s a point in the Long Time, No See? walk where the participant listens to their environment and takes notes about what they hear. On one walk, through Bowen Hills, Fortitude Valley and the City, I was sitting at the Riverside Centre ferry wharf listening and hearing ferries, people, talk, clattering and all kind of sounds. After about a minute I realised there were no bird calls – working from home, birds calls are common – and feeling this as an absence, even a loss. And as I sighed, a tiny twitter made its way through a convergence of silence. Two swallows had made a nest in a tiny gap in the underbelly of the structure above and, returning to their retreat, they greeted each other in a fluttering and chirping dance.

My fairytale, as a journey through the city, might involve a tracing of where the birds roost, sing and fly, and a tracing of the spaces and details of buildings involving all kinds of metaphors and allegories. When I was in Istanbul, I encountered Serdar Ozkan’s The Missing Rose, a poetic fable-like narrative, notably compared with The Little Prince, which is a contemporary work that subtly traces mythopoeic traditions and involves us in the story of a girl whose search for her lost twin culminates in a rose garden in Istanbul. The allegory can be stretched to consider this a commentary on a city – or nation – that is searching for and confronting itself among its own jewels, that is excavating and revealing lost and new stories and connections.

Yesterday, I caught up with Ben I at a lecture on sustainable building design in which buildings were talked about in terms of operation and functionality, performance and use. While such considerations are absolutely essential as was the lecturer’s call for systemic change in the construction industry and more integrated management and design of buildings, it was a far cry from those imagined and fabled buildings that desire and long and flirt. As we walked along George St to the city under the pink and grey dusk, we heard the call of a currawong: resonant, haunting and searching. I hear this call often when I walk around the bush and creeks in my suburb though it’s more like a cacophony involving many birds, even ocassionally in my backyard. Initially, we couldn’t ascertain where it was coming from and then there was a distant reply from another. So there was a back and forth of currawong calls across the city in this fading light. Ben I tells me about the birds in his backyard and I tell him of my recent bird encounters too. As we discussed it, recognising that bird calls seem rare, even out of place in the city, I finally discerned the shadow of the bird perched on a gargoyle on the old government printers building – a lone bird taking refuge on the shoulder of a grotesque stone creature and having found another to share a song …

In Places Journal, Rob Walker describes architecture fiction as referring “to stories inspired by, or imposed upon, buildings and the built environment … those buildings or environments don’t have to be real, and the stories don’t have to be a series of words: They can exist as plans, schematics, models, renderings.” It’s an easy definition that draws in the speculative, representational, hypothetical, material and real. I’ve often regarded planning as the creation of fictions, a meeting place of stories and the unravelling of narratives. I particularly liked Walker’s discussion of the real estate sign as a kind of urban fiction or storytelling reclaimed by the Hypothetical Development Organization. I’ve appropriated this idea for one of my proposals, recognising too, the work of SquatSpace in Sydney who also appropriated the ‘for sale’ trope for other ends. But what I like about using this kind of signage is how it brings the multiplicity of the word ‘speculation’ into play.

However, in scanning these literatures and writings about architectural fictions and sketching out this map, there’s no mention (yet) of Jorges Luis Borge: his library, his labyrinth and his garden, for example, are among the most stunning of architectural speculations. Perhaps, however, that is just an indication of the depth of my scanning and there is a need now to transition from scan to search …

Yesterday, John and I explored Nundah after poking around some markets. As a suburb that has received the village and SCIP treatment (regeneration), uncomfortably close to a major shopping centre in neighbouring Toombul, Nundah is well situated on a train line for transit oriented development. The suburb has reclaimed its high street after traffic was diverted to a bypass along Sandgate Road. For a Sunday, the cafes and shops seemed busy, though there is a notable shopfront vacancy rate. There’s also a mix of social enterprise, ethnic markets and vintage shops as well as remnants of heritage and fabric giving the area a lively feel, even if the last of the op shops has now closed down. Yet, the area still feels very much like it’s in transition.

Pedestrians ambled to the market next to the train station. The light industrial area situated between the main street and the train line is slowly being redeveloped for bulky apartment buildings with their large footprints and podiums hugging the street wall, set against the finer and older grain of the main street strip. John made a comment about the scale of some of the new buildings was imposing: a scale that, in his opinion, diminished the invitation of the building by creating a cavernous entry. While the area seems to have a comfortable and familiar kind of walkability, there isn’t anything new in its manifestation. There is, however, a definite sense of new streetscapes and local ecology emerging here out of incremental change and (re)construction.

A couple of things come to mind that segue from my studies on British new towns and Kelvin Grove Urban Village. In particular, some other level of figuring for the evaluation of masterplans: it’s not as easy as a handful of design or planning principles adroitly applied. In their paper A critique of Masterplanning as a technique for introducing urban design quality into British Cities, Dr Bob Giddings and Bill Hopgood argue:

A causal or even contingent association between Masterplanning and a high quality urban environment seems to be based on scant anecdotal evidence. Meanwhile, a number of concerns are starting to be raised. Included is the notion that such plans are starting to become an end in themselves and bear little relation to real urban settings; that the built environment aspects are only considered two-dimensionally; that the plans are deterministic, inflexible and based on the concept of a completed product whereas the evolution of the city is a process. Further analysis reveals that Masterplanning tends to be a broad-brush technique overlaid upon cities with fine-grained structures and a multiplicity of existing interconnected activities. These are often lost during the cleansing process to be replaced by coarse-grained structures that appear to adopt a static disposition often associated with property-led urban regeneration.

Then as we return to our car talking about the changing streetscapes and the emergence of this new kind of suburban hub (like Wilston and Michelton). We bemoan the state of the train station, with overgrown grass, austere fencing and design, and unwelcoming vibe. The transit facilities seem like the missing piece of the TOD puzzle.

This encounter with Nundah then prompted me to consider again the ways in which we critically engage masterplanning and cityplanning: professionally, publicly etc. What is the public conversation about masterplanning and what languages and practices come into play when we evaluate the efficacy, aesthetics or sustainability of a masterplan given that all plans, presumably, address regulatory priorities? In this morning’s Courier Mail, Kathleen Noonan, wrote:

Few architects will criticise another’s work publicly. Like doctors and penguins, they tend to stick together for survival. I get this. You never know where the next job is coming from. Yet architects and planners and design experts are exactly who you want in the public domain making informed critiques, saying things like “actually, that building is atrocious”.

And, while I appreciate fully the need for journalists to engage in critical and progressive commentaries about cities, they have to do more than quote Jane Jacobs if they are really to engage people in a citymaking process. It’s also not just about architects talking about each other’s work; it’s a public discussion that has to involve critics, journalists and academics as well as communities in the shape of our citymaking. This also requires that we stop making enemies of planners and architects in a complex and cumbersome system of urban governance, and recognise that planning and design are a means to an end that has generally been negotiated by some form of intersubjective, even collaborative, engagement. It also raises the question of ‘the plan’ as a non-human actor in a larger network of actors. Nundah, like Michelton and Wilston, isn’t the pinup of suburban/urban renewal that Kelvin Grove was: here, there is a sense of ‘pimp my suburb’ in the tract of property-led regeneration remaking the city. It appears, however, that there is some need to consider ways in which we can engage a critical discourse and practice of the kind of masterplanning that is rolling out all over our city.

The photographs from this trip are stored in a box somewhere, though my memories are of a salty ruddy earth, muted scrub and endless highway. For months, after returning, I refused to wash the red dust from my green boots. It was never, for me, the emptiness that is so often spoken of in descriptions of the desert and arid lands. My interest in the desert landscape has remained since then through many encounters with people, work and culture. At roughly the same time, a couple of years earlier, John cycled through the Sahara and worked in the Middle East. This remains something of a mystery to me and there is a sense of duration and endurance in this feat. A folder of photographic negatives, salvaged from ad hoc filing under the house, sits on a bookshelf awaiting attention. So to begin with, we will unearth this archive as the basis for a more speculative approach to desert geographies.

From our more recent engagements with settlement and sustainability, we are also addressing the futures of desert communities and towns. This country is mostly desert yet mainstream cultural imaginary and design seems to overlook this while romanticising the outback: though Aboriginal custodians keep culture and story alive. And so, this new project, rising from the ground of previous inquiries about place, change and field, is starting to take shape out of tangents and tendrils – restless memory, adventurous spirit, desire for change, recognition of climatic extremes to come – of experience, writing, travelling and futuring.

A bike ride to Sandgate market this morning in the bracing autumn cool as the sun slowly pulls at long shadows; returning with a jar of locally produced honey as well as a surprise for John. Buying the honey was a quiet laconic moment. Ambling along the line of stalls and not really looking at anything, just lingering.

This week, I wrote about my writing feeling somehow broken. Luke J asked “If you, or your writing, or your relationship to your writing, was a line (drawn or painting or traced or whatever) … what sort of line does it feel like now and what does it feel it wants to become?”. My reply: “If I was to think of my writing as a substance, rather than a line [which seems like such a certainty], it would be like honey at the point where it begins to crystallise and harden. A move from soft and flowing to hard and gritty – a change that can be partly reversed by warming the honey, though some of the grittiness remains.”

An unassuming man asked, carefully, almost apologetically, “Would you like to try my honey?”

The neatly arranged jars of honey were luminiscent in the sun: like amber, jewels or stained glass.

“Of course,” slightly breatktaken; though I might have said yes to anything as I was pulled out of my pensive meandering.

“It’s all local,” he explained as he dipped a small stick into a pot. Passing the stick to me.

And as I pressed it against my tongue, the warming sweetness of flowers felt as radiant as the jars themselves.

“Do you have a hive in your backyard?” I asked.

“I actually have six,” he responded with some pride. “Three in Bracken Ridge and three in Geebung.”

“So its very local,” I say affirmingly. “My husband and I have been considering getting a hive of native bees for our garden – not necessarily to harvest honey but to support the local ecology, especially the micro-ecology of our garden.”

“It’s a good thing to do,” he said. “The bees are important.”

With this moment of shared understanding and appreciation, I bought a jar of honey. He gave me the last jar with a fabric cover – slightly larger than the others. I asked him if he was sure he wanted to part with that jar or whether he wanted to keep it for display. “Oh no, you must have it,” he said as we completed our transaction and he pressed the jar and the change into my hands. Wishing him sweet luck with his honey enterprise, I ambled away, cupping the jar in my hands and enjoying the viscosity of its contents in that brilliant sun …

Strangely, or not, these breaking points come when I am enmeshed in a planning and policy discourse that countenances order, institution and security. Another kind of planning is needed: a random, rambunctious and rebellious planning for random, rambunctious and rebellious cities and places. Perhaps that’s not planning at all: a pointblank refusal. So coming to this breaking point – this fracture or puncture or fissure or wounding – is, again, like coming to writing, coming to place and planning as writing, as if recounting a kind of elusive fairytale.

And so, this week, enmeshed in other lives and conversations: struggling with a paper on regional program and policy evaluation; reading Perec’s text on Species of Spaces which triggered 11,000 words or thereabouts of conversation with Luke J;  consultations on regional development and cultural policy; a moment to reflect on the trajectory of Long Time, No See? and how I might need to rewrite some of that; and the hum and bubble of life and work with John. And, most importantly, a clean bill of health. Some years ago, I was in a good place – a breathing space – and one day I said to John, “I am happy”. At that very moment, that very realisation of happiness broke its own magic. A breaking of such force that it was all we could do to cling to each other. That breaking brought us ‘here’. While remaining ambivalent about ‘here’, it is the ground of that random, rambunctious and rebellious planning I am exploring. Since that time, I have cautiously approached expressions of happiness, as if to speak it would be to ressurrect that curse and conjure cataclysm.

There are a great many evocations, exchanges and connections in the texts woven with Luke J, perhaps to the nth degree (or power). Though these are the ones I need to work with, for writing place and place writing.

1. Timothy Morton
Very cursory reading so far. Noting his evocation of mesh and wondering whether that resonates with Ingold’s idea of meshwork. What can this do for planning? Ingold’s meshwork of story and Morton’s mesh of interdependence. Planning always commits to an exterior view, detached and disconnected. What of a planning – as practice – that works in, as, through and with the mesh of interdependence or commits to ecological thought? If planning cannot do that, what use is it?

2. Michel Serres
“We wander, outside all places.” I was reading Serres for another writing project some years ago. Not much at that time but enough to recall sinking into his ecstatic prose. Recently, I was revisiting his writing on topology for Fieldworking and Long Time, No See? “The global wandering, the mythical adventure, is, in the end, only the general joining of these [discrete] spaces, as if the object or target of discourse were only to connect, or as if the junction of the relation, constituted the route by which the first discourse passes.”

3. Rosi Braidotti (and the nth degree)
Something Luke J said made me question writing to the nth degree. A google search revealed Braidotti’s essay on nomadic subjectivity and eco-philosophical ethics. Freaking out a little, but it’s going places. “It [Zoe, as in animal life, an animal sense of radical alterity] is a constant challenge for us to raise to the occasion, to catch the wave of life’s intensities and ride it on, exposing the boundaries or limits as we transgress them. We often crack in the process and just cannot take it anymore.”

4. New myths
The Lady of the Lake was, I just read, treacherous and vindictive too, enraged by the parasitism and broken words of men. I had previously thought of her as phallic. As the keeper of Excalibur, she both emasculates and empowers men. Though her own power is never dissolute. Michel Serres might be useful here too as we call to the possibility of a new writing and language for new myths.

Each has a particular relationship to my questioning, working, breaking right now. “Writing is good: it’s what never ends,” says Helene Cixous. Although it might break or tear, it can also stretch and push to its edges. This is what a topological approach expects.

I was at the hospital today reading Species of Spaces by Georges Perec (full PDF online). It is both a work of writing space and a manual for doing so. Perec writes:

Spaces have multiplied, been broken up and have diversified. There are spaces today of every kind and every size, for every use and every function. To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.

The prose of this work prompted me to recall walking – a kind of retracing – through the hospital to rethink the different types of spaces – paths, halls, wards, waiting rooms, consultation rooms. Retracing, too, a relationship between walking and writing. Perec says: “decipher a bit of the town”. The influence of this work on Fieldworking is traceable as I interrogate the relationship between space and field: itinerary, inventory, invention. Recently, John and I started one of the Fieldworking walks – in our locality – to start to map a field. At first it seemed strange to do this, like the walking in Long Time, No See?, although the walking and our conversation loosened as we went. That day we only made it halfway through the proposed walk.

My walking at Battery Point in Hobart was solitary and deciphered differently, following a public art trail that traced the history and culture of the locality. Streets, neighbourhoods, parks, buildings, pathways, harbour. Then spaces within spaces, like the space around an artwork, the space of an artwork, or a tree. And spaces that are assemblages of spaces – space multiplied – as the panoramic view tends to show.

And an incitation to write.  “I write: I inhabit my sheet of paper. I invest it, I travel across it.”

And another writing experiment in and about places and spaces. Sprawling Places is a work by David Kolb. Here, he presents exposition and argument, as well as “narrative scenes of places today, and reflections about philosophical issues lurking in the background”. The city – place, space, suburbia, urbia – and its text as requiring navigation.

Pathmaking Overview

My Walk Overview

—<walk>—

Leaving Behind

I’ve stepped off the bus at the hospital interchange. I use an existing threshold to mark my beginning point, a crossing. Instead of taking two steps forward and one step backwards, I recognise the error of my ways. I just take three steps backward, lose the ground rather than waste energy and effort to fall behind. From here, however, there’s a vantage point. I can approach this threshold with a renewed sense of hope and care. That is my commitment to making a path for the future.

Planting Ideas

Opposite the hospital there is a well established park with many old trees. This is perhaps the remnants of an old science garden for acclimatising exotic species. Sitting in the shade of this old fig there’s a cool envelop, an embrace that makes for a clean breath. I’ve never sat here or walked through this garden before, just a step away from the main road.

Getting Closer

I’ve had terse exchanges today – with J and then L – where misunderstanding prevailed. Tomorrow I will make an effort to be more careful with my words and to listen to theirs, to find authenticity in our communication.

Taking Care

I have arranged to meet N at an inner city cafe. I am 15 minutes early having walked from the hospital to the Valley and beyond to a cafe-lifestyle strip that stinks of wealth and privilege. I love it and hate it here. It’s not ambient or potent. Just all consuming and consumed, almost excessive right down to the overpriced and perfect fruit in the market. So here, I wonder about care and the kind of delusion or lure that overwrites it. Maybe it is unreal or hyperreal in that way that Umberto Eco writes. Not quite grounded or in place. So care here slips between the fingers of those who think they can consume their way to caring and giving.

Giving More

It’s a small lane way, a reclaimed space and hub of cultural and indy business. It’s an oasis of creative energy and sensibility. Coffee and chat. I sense the vibe and hook into it easily. I’m not connected here – maybe a quick visit once or twice – but sense I could be.

Breaking Silence

By the river at the ferry stop. I am trying to listen ‘in sound’ in the way Tim Ingold describes – to be in it rather than to observe it. Music bounces out of a cafe, punctuated by conversations and laughter. Coffee making – grinding, tapping, steaming. Dishes are clattering. Another conversation nearby in Japanese. Two women quietly speaking and the popping of the keyboard as I write on my tablet. A ferry has just left, its engine powering up and churning river water. Laughter is like a bubble. And then it is quiet for a moment except the wind in my ear and the back beat of the musak. Bicycles whir along the pathway. And finally two small birds chirp from their nest tucked into the fold of a building. Footsteps pad along the ferry ramp. Leaving now, the brown river is silent.

Talking Point

In the foyer of Riparian Plaza, the Harry Siedler building. His last. From here, as I watch the comings and goings and as I feel the weight of this building with its treeless promenade as a burden, in response to the question of how we should act to the world and each other … NOT LIKE THIS.

Enduring Legacy

Support and care for metabolic systems.

Welcoming Embrace

The work of care needs doing.

—</walk>—