informal urban practices

Our Place is a traveling stall that invites you to take part in an interactive face-to-face and online investigation of space and its manifestations.

Keywords/Concepts:
• Space and Place
• Interaction
• Ownership
• Investigation
• Behaviour
• Community
• Temporality
• Commitment

Themes:

The ‘Our Place’ project will investigate how people engage and think about public space by encouraging people to interact and leave their mark in any way that they feel comfortable.

‘Our Place’ is interested in generating longer-term awareness about the spaces individuals inhabit commitments and documenting how the public reacts to this. It will encourage the public to engage and become active in the space, observing the transition of ‘space’ to ‘place’. They will be invited to take ownership of the project, and share its outcomes, thus learning something of their personal creative abilities that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.

‘Our Place’ is a dynamic and responsive project; the outcomes may vary depending on the site and engagement with individuals.

Methods:

‘Our Place’ will take the physical form of a nomadic stall, spending up to three days at each space. Interaction will take place face-to-face with the assistance of objects, consultation, swapping, conversation, documentation, sharing. Later, the communication, exploration and interaction will continue online, assisted by much documentation.

Regular updates in the form of text, photographs, videos and audio, as well as links to relevant websites will be employed to keep the public interested, informed and tempt them to participate. It will also make the experience more permanent and provide a source of ongoing inspiration

Group 5: Nicholas Rebstadt, Sophie Bain and Lucy Fraser

Informally Practiced from Nick Rebstadt on Vimeo.

Placing Space attempts to transform public ‘space’ into a public ‘place’. Personalising the generic. It’s about becoming activated in your surroundings.

Individuals come across the Placing Space pop-up market stall, they engage with the stall creating something – anything – with the random selection of materials provided. Once the object has been created, the experience of creating the object ‘experienced’ the object then becomes the individual’s property with one condition – whatever is done with the object, wherever it ends up, good or bad, it must be photographed and the images emailed back to the Placing Space market stall to be placed online (a non-place).

amazing

gets really relevant at around 1min 30secs

wallpaper: augmented city click here

Over two separate days Amy and I headed down to St Kilda to occupy an area and see if we could engage the people of this beautiful bay side suburb in a simple game of noughts and crosses.

Through this Informal Urban Practice we hoped to gain a greater knowledge of the residents of St Kilda as well as the visitors to the area. We set ourselves up on a wall just inside the arcade that lead to Woolworths on Acland Street on a busy weekend afternoon. Immediately we had people stopping and looking. We encouraged people to join us and in the end played over 20 games of noughts and crosses.

We then went back during the week and set up in exactly the same spot. Acland street was less busy and most people were residents doing their everyday shopping and therefore we found it a lot harder to find people that were willing to play with us as most of them had somewhere to be or something to be doing, as a result we only managed to play around 5 games vs. the 20 that we were able to play the day before.

It was clear in the end that the visitors and residents of St Kilda were a lot more willing to give us their time and enjoy a simple game with us on the weekends as apposed to a weekday. We did however have a lot of fun over the two days.

Laura Black & Amy Carlwell

Chris, Lucy, Nick, Sarah and Sophie
Music “I think I like u 2″ by Jamaica

People seem to be quite afraid of other people. So, for our public interaction, we removed the need to interact with other people, and left the public to interact with much less intimidating, stationary, objects. We discovered people quite liked leaving their mark on the world.

Majority of the people who engaged with the activity where in groups. We left the posters exposed for 2 hours. People seemed to feel a bit daunted because the posters were in open spaces where everyone could view each other drawing on them. We also found that the same name or characature appeared on 2 of the posters. By chance these people had walked past all the posters.

The trip to Doncaster was interesting in that this area has no lack of space. This meant that nearly every activity has its own space that is devoted to it. However the biggest informal practices were generally to do with a lack of space in a key location, and thus open spaces such as car parks and nature strips were sometimes used for things other than there intended purposes. Activities of a sporting nature, as well as those of a shopping nature proved to be the most common.

However in better weather I have a feeling that many more spontaneous activities would have taken place in the streets.

Ryan O’Donnell

Miranda Nesci

By Phillip Pille & Daniel Kerris

When walking along Sydney road in Brunswick you soon become aware of its strong and unique culture.  There are great places to eat, many trendy shops and a sometimes quirky alternative community. There are people of all age groups doing a range of activities, from people doing their shopping to meeting friends for a coffee or a beer.

There appears to be a strong appreciation for graffiti and other various forms of street art. This is supported by local business’ commissioning their shopfronts to allow artist to paint beautiful pieces on them. In amongst Brunswicks suburban areas different types of gardening occurs in the personal, guerrilla and communal realm.

Brunswick almost seemed like an incubator for alternative practices and this is reflected by the types of shops, houses, public space and people interacting within it.

The urban interior suburbs of northern Melbourne have been influenced from many different cultures and antiquities. Collingwood has a very diverse culture and in recent years it has become one of the prime property locations in Melbourne due to the diverse ethnicities and economic demographics living and working in the area.

The first examples of informal urban spaces in Collingwood we discovered were around the Collingwood Commission Flats. Although many of the urban spaces surrounding this area are formal in their approach, some have been appropriated for other purposes. The example of yarn bombing that we found was also quite interesting and shows how the urban environment can be appropriated for purely artistic purposes.