Rapid urbanisation is drastically reshaping our environment, destabilising traditional connections to place and notions of community, and with these the relationship between place and identity. In this context, how do we make sense of such change and how do we orient ourselves when prior notions of place and identity are disrupted or lost? To address such questions this paper will draw upon Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, and through themes of mutuality, simultaneity, malleability and mobility examine concepts of cultural landscape, nature and ritual.To pursue our study of this condition we have sited ourselves in the dramatically and rapidly transformed landscape of urban Shenzhen. The scale and speed of economic shifts and morphological transformations of the landscape have resulted in the contemporary phenomenon of the urban village, a trace of the past that remains within the present day city. These urban villages will be a focal point for our discussion, advanced through the use of narrative inquiry examining the viewpoints of those inhabiting Shenzhen, and reinforced through a review of discourse on cultural landscape. Through this, insights are revealed into the dialogical nature of the relationship people have with landscape.Exploring further, we find that landscape both as a physical construct and as a concept is malleable, both shifting in response to and representing social aspirations and needs. This suggests that the way people orientate themselves or identify themselves can often be understood by the performances they pursue in engaging with landscape.

This paper explores an argument for community-situated spaces of encounter – acting as thresholds – between community and academia, through which: learning can be enhanced; a greater sense of identity and efficacy can be fostered, and a defined agency can be enabled. This proposition prioritises a dialogic relationship in a shared ground of agency and discourse, whose potential is reinforced through a rediscovery of the local arising from the COVID pandemic. The rediscovery of the local has pushed civic-minded universities pre-existing interrogation of their community-based learning practice in the context of marginalised communities; a key challenge is how to foster a dialogic relationship with a community when academia is not really part of the community? A concurrent question considers the spatiality of such practice? Proposed here is a situating of the civic university directly within the community offering opportunity for everyday dialogue on and experience of local life. This proposal re-sites the university’s civic initiatives outside the academy in community-based campuses. Central to this campus would be the coming together of the community and academia to envision and action joined-up approaches to multivalent issues. This initiative would simultaneously afford an innovative education while enabling students and staff to contribute to the wider community; at the same time the community campus would serve as an active agent in bringing the community together and reshaping its future. The community campus would act as a dialogic threshold between academia and the community, a space grounded in its social nature, mutual embrace and exchange.

In this paper we explore convergences between personal experiences with water and film-making. Employing a cross-disciplinary collaborative dialogue, Latham and Ward create a virtual stream, that explores the language of each other’s praxis, in architecture and film. McLuhan’s notion that: “The reader is the content of any poem or of the language [s]he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, [s]he must put them on,” (McLuhan 1971, 520) provides a signpost for the immersive experience we seek in our understandings of river, and in our approaches to disciplinary practice.During lockdown in the UK, a displaced, virtual riparian conversation evolved. Through online exchanges of particular ways of seeing and using film as method, new flows in the space between film and architecture, making and experiencing, emerge as a site for experimentation and interrogation. Through remediation and overlay of individual and shared embodied water experience, a conflated flux of differences point towards a new river paradigm.