Title: Disobedient Buildings
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Abstract: Against the backdrop of the rise in health and safety incidents in decaying and retrofitted high-rise buildings worldwide, this project explores how the inhabitants of aging tower blocks are striving to create safe and comfortable homes. The project examines how ordinary citizens, conceptualise and confront macro-level concepts such as welfare, health and wellbeing on the ground within the context of widening inequalities and insecurities that seem to characterise contemporary urban life. Our main outcomes will be a participatory exhibition held at a major museum in London, an edited book/exhibition catalogue, three academic articles, a visual methods toolkit, three documentary films to be screened in festivals worldwide, a website, and an advisory document for local governments. We will conduct a comparative, visual ethnography of creative practices of care and maintenance inside one block of flats in three European countries: the UK, Romania and Sweden. Each fieldwork location represents a different type of European welfare state epitomised by the degree of implementation of neo-liberal reforms over the past three decades. By comparing everyday lived experiences inside housing infrastructure, we will explore the impact of the weakening of the welfare state on ordinary citizens' health and wellbeing. Our focus on cultural specific material practices of maintenance and care will also question popular understandings of architecture and infrastructure as large-scale, technology-led projects that are single-usage across cultural contexts. Theoretically this research will synthesize recent social science literature about infrastructure that stresses the intertwining of technological and environmental issues with political aspirations and symbolism with the latest anthropological thinking about the house and home. Methodologically we will combine social science approaches based on participant observation and interviews, with arts and humanities methods such as film, photography and archival research. However, what makes our inquiry ground-breaking is the holistic research design centred around the production of a participatory exhibition, that invites research participants and museum visitors, whether lay people or professionals linked with the housing industry, to become active contributors to the study. By making an exhibition central to our research process we will record, assess, test, and share a huge variety of concrete practices and responses of ordinary citizens to ongoing economic austerity and precarity. The project will challenge the assumption that exhibitions are primarily final products to disseminate research findings with. It will test the hypothesis that exhibitions are unique forms of knowledge production by examining the potential of these dynamic spaces to generate new thinking beyond the initial research context. We will focus on the exhibition from the start of the project in order to recruit research participants and collect and analyse data and objects, but also to enable multiple creative collaborations and cross-fertilisations with research participants, academics, museum professionals, art practitioners, urban planners and the general public that continue long after a show has finished.


Research activity codes: 3.2 INTERVENTIONS TO ALTER PHYSICAL AND BIOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS;7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE