Maps
A lot of the time we probably just see maps as simply about helping us get from point A to point B. They are practical aids and hopefully they help us to get around the world that we live in. However, they can also tell us a lot more about that world and the Farrell Centre on Claremont Road, Newcastle is arguing that maps are also about power and control.
This is because maps could be about certain places being prioritised over others and about deciding who is allowed to go where. As a result of all this, maps have been used historically by those with power to control those without power.
For the past ten years geographer Mike Jeffries, who is an associate professor at Northumbria University has been exploring how this imbalance can be reversed. He has done this by providing young people on Tyneside with the opportunity to create their own maps representing their own worlds. Working in collaboration with John Swords, reader in creative industries research at the University of York, architect Sebastian Messerand, and a range of community groups, Jeffries has helped a wide range of schoolchildren, university students and community groups to create their own personal experience maps of Tyneside.
Mapping Byker
The Farrell Centre in Newcastle is currently running a project called Concretopias. This is exploring how the lives of children at three local schools have been shaped by the famous modernist developments of the 1960s and 1970s which are still with us today. Jeffries has worked with the Year 5 cohort from Bker primary school, helping them to reimagine the local area where they live through the lens of their own life experiences.
They started by tearing up a tourist map of Newcastle which was understood as a way of looking for what other people think is important. The children were then invited to consider what they think is important to them. In this way, they were able to replace well known cultural icons with their own real world of homes, family and pets and in some cases mixing the physical streets they live in with virtual media and computer games. The maps produced were often funny and poignant, but had an important story to tell as well. They were not the maps as imagined by those with power but rather how Byker is experienced by those whose voices are experiences that are rarely heard, but should be heard more.
What the children did
As part of this project children from Year 5 at Byker Primary School have been looking at the history of their own estate, where the school is located where many of them live. The children have been taught about the way that the Byker estate was designed to be socially inclusive, how it’s had a major influence on planning policy in the fifty or so years since it was designed and have explored what all that means to them as young people today.
During the project, the children worked alongside artists, creative practitioners and academics. They also took part in Cap-a-pie’s Canny Planners workshop and it was in these workshops that the children stepped into the role of decision makers. They would question how neighbourhoods are shaped and why certain functions are in certain places. With the help of Silvie Fisch they took on roles as oral historians and interviewed their fellow classmates about their experiences of Byker. In this way, the children have been able to create important contributions to the Byker living archive.
What is more, with help and guidance from geographer Mike Jeffries they’ve been able to create maps which are on show at the Farrell Centre until the end of August.
The children also took part in special workshops both at the Farrell Centre and at school and in these workshops they created artwork which responded to the Byker estate’s distinctive colour palette and materials.
At the Farrell Centre you can see a number of collages created by the children. They were able to turn images of Byker estate’s striking architecture into simple shapes and colours and then they laid them on a flatbed scanner. In so doing they were able to create images which reflect just how they see and understand the estate and their place within it.
Democratisation
This project is a great example of the democratisation of the planning sphere, which the 1970’s Byker estate at its best still represents. It proves again that the best planning is not done for people, but with people. It is to be hoped that the future of Byker and so many of our other housing estates in the North East can benefit from similar work, which can give young people a real stake and sense of ownership in the place they live. But that will only happen if sufficient funding is made available for local people to be able to have their voices heard and then their ideas acted upon and turned into realities.
Comment
Too often in the past, our urban maps, both real and mental, have been determined by the wealthy and powerful. Even when avowed socialist T. Dan Smith was collaborating with chief planner Wilfred Burns in the early 1960’s in their development of what Smith claimed was going to be the ‘New Brasilia’, the planning was very much for the people of Newcastle, rather than with the people of the city.
Similarly, when Durham County Council brought in their post-war plans in the 1950’s, with their controversial designation of letters A, B, C or D to different towns and villages in the county, they were also very much planning for people, rather than with them. While closing down D villages in the west of the county, where the coal had become exhausted and moving them en masse to new towns like Newton Aycliffe, next to the new A1(M) Durham motorway and with their new factories providing work, must have made perfect sense to William Geenty poring over his map in the old county hall in Durham, but it made no sense at all to the people living in those villages, who had built up community groups, football teams, associations, allotments and many other close-knit community enterprises, which would be lost if they moved to a new town, to live with neighbours they simply didn’t know.
Anything that encourages young people to be interested in the development of their neighbourhoods and in the planning process when they get older is to be applauded. This exhibition shows that young people can be interested in topics such as these if given the chance and they are approached in the correct manner. It is well worth a visit.
Concretopias and Beyond is at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle, until 31st August. For more information please see here and here.
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