North Kensington team members awarded Citizen Science certification
Maysa Mahamoud, Sarah Smoured and Aisha Tahliil from the Good Life North Kensington team have successfully attained the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, awarded by the UCL Office for Open Science.
Speak Up!
Sunday 7 April 2024
Anthony Burgess Centre, Manchester
As part of PeopleFest, a public celebration of anthropology held in venues across Manchester, we presented Speak Up! exploring how residents and housing campaigners in Manchester and London are getting their voices heard through theatre and participatory research.
Showcasing the participatory research and creative methods at the heart of the High-rise Landscapes project, the event asked, what happens when communities start speaking up about issues in their neighbourhoods? Why are their voices sometimes silenced? How can theatre be a form of action and debate in housing issues?
Excavation | Elevation: Precarious verticality in Nairobi
7 February 2024
Research Seminar, Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham
This research seminar presented the Excavation / Elevation visual research and exhibition undertaken in collaboration with James Muriuki. Moving from quarries where stone is cut to construction sites, prestige developments to dense tenement housing, building collapses to salvage economies of scrap, the collaborative fieldwork has so far led to three short films, photographic series and sculptural installations, as well as two exhibitions in Nairobi. The seminar reflected on this multi-modal research and how visual methods helped to engage with both the surface and the underneath of Nairobi’s emerging verticality.
Rock>>City>>Rock: Exhibition opening
2pm, 18 November 2023
Kamene Cultural Center, Ngong Road, Nairobi
What will the footprint of human action be long after we are gone?
Rock>>City>>Rock explored architecture as a geological actor. Reflecting on urban transformation in the age of the Anthropocene, it traced the everyday ways in which human efforts engage with earth’s materials to build urban worlds – but also, how uncertain these processes can be.
The exhibition is part of the ongoing collaboration between James Muriuki and Constance Smith. Through photography, installation, video, sound and a joint discussion, we bring our work into conversation with Nairobi-based architects Cave Bureau whose work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the African city in the Anthropocene.
The Cladding Crisis: Research and Performance
26 April 2023
12.00-1.30pm, Contact Theatre, Oxford Road Manchester M15 6JA
Join us as we start a new initiative exploring the politics of high-rise housing, the cladding crisis, performance and activism. Co-organised with Creative Manchester.
Our starting point is the powerful documentary play Dictating to the Estate, written by Nathaniel McBride, which tells the backstory of the Grenfell Tower fire, its botched refurbishment and residents’ attempts to hold the Council to account. It places these events in a wider context of austerity, deregulation and estate regeneration.
After a very successful run in London, we aim to rework the production to speak to the UK-wide cladding crisis, and in particular experiences in Greater Manchester, which has the highest number of buildings affected by flammable cladding outside of London.
The Cladding Crisis: going beyond the layers of the façade
24 February 2023
The Architectural Association, AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square, London
The Symposium brings together different voices to discuss one of the most tragic failures of the built environment: the Grenfell Tower fire. Organised by Giulia Rosa and Liam Ross.
Constance Smith is speaking as part of the opening panel, ‘The politics of the facade’, with Peter Apps (Deputy Editor, Inside Housing) and Prof José Torero (Head of UCL Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering, UCL, and Grenfell Inquiry Expert Witness), chaired by Giulia Rosa.
‘The politics of the facade’: Grenfell’s story sits between a social and relational problematic of governing public housing and a tragic performance of deceitful layers that escape their performative original nature. In this chapter we delve into the material and architectural composition of the facade in order to display layer after layer meanings, materials and motions.
Assembling the sustainable city: from sedimented injustices to just urban futures
31 May – 3 June 2023
European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) 2023 (Cologne): African Futures
Call for abstracts: In the context of enduring ecological and imperial injustices, what might sustainable urban assemblages look like? How do techniques of planning, expertise, finance and service delivery intersect with material landscapes and everyday practices of city-making to shape ideas about desirable urban futures?
Not Set in Stone: Public Art in Urban Space
21 September 2022
Whitworth Gallery, Manchester
What’s the future of urban monuments? How can art transform the connections between memory, race and colonialism that haunt urban spaces?
Inspired by Grenfell activists’ connections with the Movement for Black Lives and the way the white wrapping of the tower has become a canvas for visual campaigning, ‘Not Set in Stone’ was a public event exploring the reimagination of urban monuments in times of social and political change.
Afterlives of Monuments and Alternative Urban Futures
21 -22 September 2022
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester
This two-day workshop explored how problematic landmarks are imaginatively and materially reconfigured for the future. Drawing on the interdisciplinary study of placemaking, materiality and temporality, and on the compelling work of artist-activists, we examine how urban landscapes are dynamic, affectively charged places that can help to constitute social and political change.