Re-Imagining Portland Works

In small groups, you will develop and present a proposal for a creative industries project to be funded by the business council of (Ipsky) a fictional Queensland town. This proposal will be based on opportunities, which as you will demonstrate as part of the proposal, exist within the current creative industries environment in the town as well as within the overall regional, state, national, and international creative industries environment. The proposal may suggest creative initiatives, research projects, policy developments, or other relevant developments to be undertaken by the business council, and will include basic funding and staffing requirements as well as a timeline. In addition to the written proposal, your group will also submit an electronic copy of an A3-size poster presenting the project, which will be exhibited in Z2 level 3 during week 7. Groups will be expected to identify individual group members’ contributions to the proposal. See the Group Work Declaration from the OLT site. Length: 1500 words + presentation = equivalent to 2000 words Weighting: 40%

Environment & Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper examines the economic practices of maker spaces-open workshops that have increased in number over recent years and that aim to provide access to tools, materials and skills for small-scale manufacturing and repair. Scholarly interest in such spaces has been increasing across the social sciences more broadly, parallel to a growing interest in craft and making in economic geography. However, to rectify the 'capitalocentrism' of much existing work, the paper examines the case of a workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, through the dual theoretical lens of diverse economies and social practice theory. This conceptual approach sees the space as a novel form of economic 'being-in-common', providing diverse and contradictory opportunities for post-capitalist practice. The paper draws conclusions regarding the limits and potential of such spaces for sowing the prefigurative seeds for a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic urbanism.

European Planning Studies, 2018

IDEA Journal: Design Activism: Developing Models, Modes and Methodologies of Practice , 2015

Capital & Class

Cultural work attracts much sociological interest and is often seen as typifying ‘precarity’. However, this scholarship rarely examines how ‘placemaking’ policy interventions affect the concrete conditions of cultural work. We study a major recent public/private policy intervention in the United Kingdom: Hull City of Culture 2017. This intervention embodied a multifaceted set of policy logics, combining the desire to boost arts participation, with a market-facing imperative to bolster the city’s ‘brand’. We examine what happened to the city’s ‘cultural projectariat’ (meaning those workers whose career depends on assembling sequences of discrete, time-limited funded cultural projects) during this event. The influx of funds created opportunities for good-quality work, but specific sources of insecurity persisted and in certain respects intensified: including the need for significant unpaid work and permanent competition for resources. City of Culture’s nature as a market-oriented ‘pla...

Rethinking Craft Neighbourhoods as Authentic Urban Places for Productive Cities of the Future: The Case of Galata, 2023

2021

Handbook of Diverse Economies, 2019

I explore three sites that I was involved in commoning in a post-industrial working class neighbourhood in Montreal: a garden on a city-owned plot of land, a mural on a stock-corporation-owned viaduct and a community-owned industrial building “expropriated” from a capitalist developer after a 10-year grassroots campaign. In each of these sites new property relations were forged, ones where a commoning-community manages the space and benefits from how the space has been shaped. Each community is engaged in a continuous process of making and re-making as it is confronted with powerful forces that seek to enclose or uncommon the property it has taken responsibility for. Commoning is thus always about struggle-negotiation, and a commons is more durable if its commoning-community is able to adapt to changing contexts, to push-back against exploitative and oppressive forces, to build on historical commons and traditions and to make strategic yet ethical choices about enrolling a diversity of actors into its midst.

2017