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

The direction that we are wanting to experience is the surreal, absurd and the silly, investigating the informal urban practice within these elements will give us a better understanding of how to appoarch this project. we will be testing and looking at installations that provoke thought, graffiti vs. art and swap shop. we will experiement on all these areas so we can express the final outcome. the projects will be conducted within the city centre, as we will experience all types of people that will be beneficial to our final results.

Gift Exchange Systems and Bartering Exchange Economies

The concept of bartering exchange has been around for thousands of years, well before the first forms of currency came about in China and Ancient Egypt. In war-torn parts of Eastern Europe and Russia during WWII, counterfeit notes were introduced in high quantities by German military forces under Hilter’s orders. This caused confusion over the value of the currency and caused people to adopt a more primitive method of trade without the use of modern money. The Zulu people of South Africa still trade commodities with others in their tribes and other tribes in nearby areas without the use of any form of currency. The value of items are often recognized and understood without much confusion or dispute. The British Columbian (Canada) based tribe Kwakiutl are a small group that traditionally partook in potlatch ceremonies involving the exchange of gifts improving tribe-to-tribe relations in the future aid of commodity exchanges.