walking / writing act 1 

walking / writing act 2

walking / writing act 3

walking / writing act 4

Aylesburytenantsfirst [2015]

Fencing In Aylebury Estate Residents__[2015] 

 
Heygate Estate Timeline

Southwark Notes – whose regeneration?

The Death of a Housing Idea [2011]

Eviction Notices in a Demolition to Start  [2010]

Guardian: Haygate Estat __[2011]

Aylesbury, interview with an activist   [2010] 

A. 

W A L K I N G   /   A R C H I V I N G   W O R K S

Operators -acting archivists- undertook four walking-archiving sessions within Elephant & Castle, a conflicting, under gentrification inner London borough, each day from April 28 to May 1, 2009. Real-time archiving operations took place simultaneously in public space and in Raymond Roussel's novel. Operators used various methods - informal talks, interviews, readings, actions in the streets - while moving in-between social places - tenant associations, shopping malls, public laundries, autonomous spaces, parks or bus stops - to transcribe utterings. During their walks, archivists used the wiki support-surface to place the Elephant and Locus Solus findings and make them available for further recensions.

A specific action at the garage doors of the interior courtyard of Aylesbury block* Gayhurst 1-61 initiated a series of in-situ conversations with residents of the Aylesbury Estate, one of the largest social housing estates in Europe, now in the process of being demolished. The garage courtyard was used as publishing and meeting place for the archiving works.

B.

P E R F O R M I N G   A R C H I V E  -  

W R I T I N G   A C T S

Scribers from different locations and backgrounds, with no direct experience of the place, are invited to perform the archive. A ‘constraint parallel writing’ is initiated on the wiki’s common space.

Each scriber appropriates the space of one or more fragments and works on them. All writing processes (erasures, substitutions, additions, etc.) are operative in this wiki platform. Certain techniques (e.g. Roussel's literary method, and mnemeden scripts) are provided as writing-aids.

I N S T R U C T I O N S 

Go to any of the above 4 wiki walking / writing acts.  Inside any page of walking/writing acts 1-4, choose a one or more cells. Color the background. Use the same background color for all your cells.  < to color the background: right-click on your cell and choose: cell --> cell properties --> backround color >
Any re-writing process may be used for any archival process 

Tools for writing acts:
[ A  zeromemory machine]  [ Evolutionary method [Roussel]]  

In the UK this new urban colonialism, embedded in government policy on social mixing and the urban renaissance (see Lees, 2008), seeks to socially cleanse British city centres, what Wacquant (2008: 199) calls the ‘literal and figurative effacing of the proletariat in the city…’. In London the Aylesbury Estate – the largest social housing estate in Europe – is in the process of being demolished, as is its low income, ethnically and socially mixed community of council tenants, right-to-buy tenants, and asylum seekers, and being rebuilt as ‘socially mixed’ housing. On the day after New Labour’s general election victory in 1997 Tony Blair made a surprise visit to Aylesbury where he made a speech highlighting the estate’s residents as Britain’s ‘poorest’ and the ‘forgotten’; many of whom ‘play[ed] no formal role in the economy and were dependent on benefits’ (Blair, 2007). Very quickly afterwards the Aylesbury was given New Deal for Communities status and studies began on how the estate cools be redeveloped. They were given £ 56.2m over 10 years in order to lever in a further £ 400m as part of stock transfer to housing association tenure. But the local community rejected the stock transfer of the Aylesbury from Southwark Council in December 2001 because for the most part they were satisfied with their estate. But Southwark Council decided that the estate was too expensive to refurbish and that demolition was the most cost effective solution. They set about persuading the tenants that the estate was structurally unsound and not a pleasant place to live.

(Introduction, The Gentrification Reader, ed. L. Lees, T. Slater, E. Wyly)