No abstract

Framed by questions about "hydrocitizenship" in the 21st century, this co-produced, interdisciplinary arts and humanities-centred research explores the (re) weaving of local knowledges, experiences, perceptions, and values of water and place through the concept, process, and practice of "daylighting hidden rivers." Located at the nexus of three theoretical frames-"participation," "hydrocitizenship," and "daylighting," it engages reflexively with strong and weak "hydrocitizenship" and with paradigms of "daylighting." Working with diverse communities and organisations in South Bristol (UK), this eco-social research project discovered community concerns and needs, and positioned itself in relation to these in co-production. This involved older people, children, and professional stakeholders in a place-specific, "catchment" setting, using novel arts-led, creative, narrative mapping processes. We critically examined the value, opportunities, and tensions of this multi-method approach to people's past, present, and future connections and relationships with their local (water) environment, their senses of self and community. Our iterative processes of seeking out "lesser heard" voices were conceived and played out around a braided cascade of "openings": emerging, connecting, enacting, imagining, and reflecting. Thinking critically about our oblique, emergent processes, we identify 15 "top tips" concerning the creative participatory daylighting of lay knowledges and values, and "river visioning." These can inform co-working with communities to enable and empower citizen engagement with places and local water issues for resilient futures. Our findings contribute new understandings of "hydrocitizenship" and creative participatory "daylighting" in combination, when urban spaces are construed as "water cities," cascading both water and narratives. Importantly, our coproduction processes with lesser heard groups also exemplify "higher-order participation" in co-visioning resilient futures, with all the messiness, complexity, and conflicts exposed.

This article sets out an understanding of the emergent practices collectively referred to as ‘deep mapping’. It adopts Mike Pearson’s view that the optimal deep mapping takes ‘region as its optic’ (2006), while also recognizing the value of smaller-scale approaches. It draws on Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism to underpin deep mapping’s environmental and social dimensions and provide a productive counterpoint to its ethno-autographic element and its focus on a ‘militant particularism’ able to facilitate ‘the passage from memory to hope, from past to future’ (Harvey 1996). Critical Regionalism is taken here as a ‘post-disciplinary’ poetics that interweaves a multiplicity of ‘creative’ and ‘scientific’ material to enact, in the socio-geographical domain, John Wylie’s understanding that ‘landscape is tension’ (2007). Deep mapping is presented as offering a multidimensional understanding of place that enacts these tensions through our engagement with a second, specifically cultural, space-between, understood here as a metaxy. It is only in this space that we are able to put into practice Geraldine Finn’s insight that, while we cannot do without categorical thinking, ‘we are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us’ (1996). The argument put forward here locates this active social space between the institutional worlds of art and of the university as that with which deep mapping specifically engages as a discrete practice. It posits that an ‘open’ deep mapping draws on the resources ‘managed’ by each institutional world so as to maintain a critical solicitude towards both professional worlds while remaining non-aligned with the presuppositions of either.

ASTRACT The paper examines the concerns of the art critic and environmentalist Rebecca Solnit with the myth of Eden in the book of Genesis, the assumptions of a Judaeo-Christian monotheism and its secular inheritance, as a means to introduce the need for a 'polytheistic' psychology to advance a genuinely radical understanding of the relationship between issues of place, identity and contemporary landscape art. Drawing on the work of Peter Bishop and Edward S. Casey to identify a body of thinking related, via issues of metamorphosis and ambiguity, to both art historical and geographical contexts relating to a 'conversational' aesthetic are identified. This is seen as making possible a polytheistic conception of art based on imaginal space as an alternative to the dominant traditions of conceptual and Minimal art since the 1960s. Finally, the approaches of specific artists, and in particular the world of Sian Bonnell, are examined in relation to garden traditions in the UK.

No abstract