Caring for the Infraordinary Neighbourhood - Palmers Green

Sammanfattning

Palmers Green is a faltering neighbourhood; a place that continually settles on temporary fixes, such as shop changes that suit only select groups, coupled with an absence of communal facilities or activities. The result is a lack of overarching sense of community - perhaps a natural manifestation of the co-presence of multiple diverse cultures. But does it have to be this way? A more engaged community involved in activities and with access to places or facilities to meet and interact, could give the neighbourhood greater inclusivity and vibrancy. An alternative path of designing for the future not reliant on temporary fixes: ‘Value what is there → Nurture what is there → Define what is missing’ (FIOR). This study explores the needs of different residents from various cultural groups and how they use this neighbourhood. How can this community as a whole grow in strength and realise a future where it feels like home for all residents? This is not about making an extraordinary neighbourhood of large, high-visibility landmark projects, but rather an ‘infraordinary’ one, centred on everyday life, where all the small things that you may not notice at first glance are working together to benefit the people that live there. Focusing upon the infraordinary through mapping, observation and interviews, will reveal the multitude of small key spaces that make up a lived space. These spaces are often lost, swamped by the extraordinary and the ‘eye catching’. So what are the small things that are key to the everyday make-up of this neighbourhood? What are the things people do not see? How can we conceptualise the infraordinary in the neighbourhood context? And how can this inform a greater understanding of its successes and failures? My goal is to provide a platform to strengthen Palmers Green as a neighbourhood and in turn enable a participatory framework that can increase place-based community engagement; a future development path that adds to, rather than detracts from, the neighbourhood’s civic life. Helping residents see, understand and use their neighbourhood from an alternative perspective through mappings, stories and temporary interventions (follies) across the neighbourhood. Initiating discussions about the potential of spaces, in the hope they can have a lasting and more meaningful impact on the neighbourhood. A gesture, such as a folly, gives an apparatus for appropriation and enables a discussion where meaningful ideas can be harvested. The soft, simple and playful nature of a folly suggests more is to come. However to place it successfully requires a deeper level of understanding of place. The neighbourhood is a scale intimate yet public, hard to fully grasp as an outsider lacking years of lived experience. Is there a role for a community architect to take care of the neighbourhood? To understand its inner workings and infraordinary features. Is there potential for genuine participation from residents if a platform is put in place? One which can involve residents in the process in a playful idiosyncratic way, rather than the continued exclusion characterising traditional approaches.