A life of its own
This essay employs site-writing as a form of critical spatial practice for engaging with The Public Inquiry into the Aylesbury Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO), held in ‘Arry’s Bar at Millwall Football ground from 28 April to 1 May 2015. In The Human Condition (1958) Hannah Arendt draws a distinction between labour, work and action, in which, labour corresponds to the biological life of humans and animals, work to the artificial processes of artefact fabrication; and where action – and its connection to speech – is the central political activity. My speech actions at ‘Arry’s Bar were interventions into existing institutional structures, performed to critique and activate them, and so could be described as forms of ‘critical spatial practice’. In this essay I also reflect upon how site-writing offers a way of both tracing those speech acts, as forms of testimony and witness to specific events, where writing operates as some kind of afterlife to the more transitory acts of speech, but also how writing exists before speaking, providing a series of prompts for another set of actions, yet to come.
In the autumn of 2014, as I was drawing to a close a book I was writing on architecture, psychoanalysis and social housing, I discovered that my flat in Southwark – and so the very desk at which I had been writing – was in the council’s ‘estate renewal zone’. 1 The property consultants Savills had been advising the council of the need to ‘unearth the potential’ of public land, including ‘brownfield sites’, a term which for them included fully occupied housing estates. 2 This raised for me uncertainties around my home. I had written before about social housing, but writing about the home in which I was living and the site of that writing itself, figured the relation of my life to my writing practice differently.
Jane Rendell, ‘Figures of Speech: before and after Writing’, Jonathan Charley (ed) The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and The City (London: Routledge, 2018).
