Maps: Pop Ups and the making of Naturally Smart Places

One of my cherished childhood memories was sitting at a table studying a map with my dad, planning a summer camping trip. We would look at a map and decide together on a place we might like to go and camp. He would suggest a few requirements and then hand over the map to me. The preconditions included all the ‘good’ stuff we had talked about for the holiday, always camping, always involved a beach and preferably rock pools, a place for making a fire-pit, maybe a cove to play pirates, a short walk from a campsite to the shop, perhaps an old church or castle to visit, a place to ride a bike. These preconditions served as a basis for the holiday brief. It was then over to me. This was long before the arrival of the internet, and so it prompted trips to the library and discussions with people who we knew that went off on adventures of their own. I was the detective, the researcher, the reporter, it was a fun game to play for an inquisitive kid.

I began to recognise the map as an important basis of every adventure, it served as a focusing device, and against which further plans could be designed and developed. The reading of the map and the examination of possibilities it presented were events that took place long before the experience of the holiday itself, but it served as both a practical instrument of preparation and a virtual tool through which to imagine and explore an as yet unknown world. The map set some preconditions, and prompted early adaptations we needed in the form of kit to meet with the demands of the place we were going, determining what we might bring along on the journey, it also served to amplify a multidimensional place of possibility, a simple yet powerful device.

From this simple map reading process I learnt many lessons, flexibility, learning and acclimatizing to a particular set of signs and symbols that served to abstract a set of physical encounters. These lessons demanded skills of interpretation (is that a field, and is it likely to be marshy or dry?), of attention to detail (where are the shops?), of judgement (is that hill actually a cliff?) and how to visualise oneself into the location and anticipate in future and real time relative to the document. It is safe to say that I was, and I remain, far more fluent, comfortable and literate with maps than I ever have been with the reading of books.

I can pick up a map now of a region which hosted a childhood trip and still recall in great detail the place, as an image emerging from the abstraction on the page. Maps have the singular capacity to do this, they guide our recall of past journeys, with the many annotations which are often added, and the slight changes which invariably get added in the slow and steady process of personalising the map from the generic and impersonal to the particular. For example, I have a map of Iceland which has countless additions I scrawled all over it as I travelled there on a road trip on my own a decade ago, it doesn’t take much more than a pair of glasses and a good cup of tea and that map to have me drifting away to the wild expanse of the volcanic plateau in the north of the island, reimagining the icy wind in my face and the sulphurous air, the whirring sound of steam fizzing from the volcanic rocks, the map triggers this reencounter.

Maps act as time capsules, for the way that they represent a period of time, for example, look at a road map from 1950 of the UK and see a country with a completely differently structured transport system to the complex road networks we are used to today. You can almost see the different consciousness of Place on the page, what was once a quieter world, slower, much more parochial and much less connected. As a device the map plays a very important role in defining the story of the journey to come, they are social documents, from which groups of friends can gather to reflect, ponder, point, and fashion a plan of action, historical artefacts, political expressions of territory, cultural intpretations of reality and definitions of ways of seeing, classifying and charting our world. Their structure and design establishes a common code of meaning, a point of reference through which we can share information and enable our fellow travellers to follow known and explore as yet unknown routes. They can also be pioneering documents, breaking from the map and establishing new route ways, contributing small additions to existing formulaic designs. In this sense a map is an image of space, a mental representation of systems marking the physical space, and this has a long standing tradition. It is at the heart of aboriginal cultures where the mental map of Dreamtime classified the ecological and physical terrain, noting food sources, protective areas, and places for fuel. The physical and the psychic interaction ensured survival in difficult settings, it served as a communicative device, capable of conveying considerable detail rapidly to another person, to facilitate adaptivity and to ensure that life continued.

These observations lead to the assertion then, that the map is a manifest, and not the territory. My boyhood imaginings of place as promised on the map were never real, as a representation exists between the person and the map, a barrier based upon the relationship of the reason with the place being represented, and the mechanism of representation being chosen. I came to learn that the map is a device to see a world but it is invariably a particular viewpoint as provided by the cartographer, or increasingly with digital imagery the camera, or the networking device, each has a role to play, but we should not be deceived into thinking that this is an accurate representation of our places, nothing truly replaces the physicality of place, and the importance of knowing and being within a place. I conclude that if I am to really own a map, I need to construct one myself. As Tim Flannery observed ‘Without possession of a true, reactive and up-to-date map of the world, a sustainable future is impossible.’ (p236 Tim Flannery: Here on Earth 2010)

Possession of the right kind of map is an essential piece of the toolkit for solving the environment related challenges we face across the world, we have to form a new intelligence to do this.

These thoughts led me to broader considerations in the formative stage of defining Places. The early versions of this work with teachers and students using maps of the school site and surroundings have prompted generous colleagues to claim that it transforms their existing ways of seeing our urban space. What we create when we construct a map of our Place is, inevitably, our own version of a bigger picture of how to practically engage with the persistently tricky subject of sustainability, it attempts to put just another angle onto the existing ways in which we might interpret that particular space.

There are many ways that this is manifested in the Naturally Smart Places programme. In particular, Place is represented through some simple core concepts which serve as the basic framing conditions for our work on sustainable living, these are practically supported through the use of the card set we have designed to support the work of the manual.

But these are, as we will see, only the beginning of the journey, the basic outline of the map so to speak. In recent times I have longed for a new kind of app that can be locked onto the core concepts we have as our map, the app is one that captures nuances that the map of old has failed to provide us with — the name of the tree I have just passed, a map that can provide me with the detail I need to decide if the mushroom in front of me is the ones that will provide me with a lovely meal, or the ones that will out me in bed with a terrible stomach for days on end.

Leading to this point has been a decade or more of investigation where I was looking into the ways that communities might work together to construct understanding of the work they do, and in turn, investigating ways in which a narrative of change can be set within community context through some deliberately placed stimuli. In the formative work which we explored with Incredible Edible we began to imagine how our community might respond to simple yet strategic placement of natural stimuli in the form of food that were, for want of a better way of describing, unexpected in an urban setting. In the Incredible Edible project we placed vegetables in beds on the side of streets, mimicking the examples we had seen from as far afield as Vancouver, Mumbai and Detroit, not intrinsically to establish a food system but as a challenge to the prevailing consciousness, the way we do things in our public spaces.

In extending and deepening the learning, I have learnt that there are powerful consequences of such stimuli. And despite there sometimes being misleading conclusions the encounter of nature in places where we assumed a far greater human presence is on the whole capable of generating conceptual shift. . It enables people to literally see an alternative, and in so doing, they begin to imagine further possibilities, it breaks from the convention and in achieving this fracture from the prevailing way of interpreting urban space we can begin to build alternatives. It also can lead to an over-exaggerated sense of story which if not checked can habitually over-claim and underdevelop a basic instrument of change — the human imagination. I eventually left the Incredible Edible project because I could no longer recognise the story that was being told to the general public, and whilst there is no doubt that in creating a divide between the real and the imaginary we facilitate the possible for new insights, I was uncomfortable that we were in danger of promulgating false hope and illusions of certainty in contexts which are still under immense pressure to transform, the huge danger this brings is complacency — we have done that already, it is old news, before we even begin to make change real it is yesterdays story. However, some powerful lessons were learnt, not necessarily the stuff of news and personality, with all the flag waving and self-promotion associated through that routeway, but, a real and indeed practical starting point for new forms of social action might be imagined.

It was from such observations that I began to think more about the ways in which we might create new organisational structures through which we can see examples of how to live sustainably. There is clearly an appetite in these stringent financial times for something to stir the popular consciousness and generate a new set of connections within what are seemingly increasingly fragmented communities.

In my case, the result has been the development of a design for sustainable learning which I have fashioned into what we have called Pop Up Foundation. The idea of the Pop-Up in itself intrigues me, it shouts temporary, short term, it is in effect the quintessential example of contemporary consumerism, here today, gone tomorrow, a partial map which is incomplete and sketchy and at first glance utterly at odds with any notion of sustainable thinking. However, if we adopt a central adage from permaculture which suggests that within the problem lies the potential of the solution, we can see that taking the territory that the pop-up phenomena has created, and then embedding into it a set of activities through which connections can be made, it begins to play an interesting function as a means towards a new beginning, new foundations for a sustainable future, the pop-up’s may or may not lead to more substantive solutions, but they are the ingenious spark that begins the journey.

Adaptation and function are two aspects of one problem. Julian Huxley[56]

So developing Pop-Up-Foundation has become my new map, a map which looks more like a pattern book than any predetermined version of what is in front of us. In the work of Pop-Up-Foundation we focus upon a set of core areas: food, energy, water, waste, well-being, buildings plants and trees, the basic stuff of life. But these are not really the territory, the territory lies in the relationships we might establish to make these different things function and connect within a sustainable set of relationships which merge to become a new system. These areas do not exclude the possibility of other elements which might be thought about, far from it, we use them as a template but encourage cross-reference and connection, the point of these themes simply enables the participating people a way to share their maps, generating patterns of activity which in turn can be overplayed and developed further.

In truth the projects that are generated, the ‘pop ups’ arising from many different places, are the real ‘thought’ leader material, breaking the difficult new ground in their Places and creating that conceptual shift which then enables the broader array of resource which naturally Smart Places can bring to bear to support projects to follow on and establish greater substance at a later stage. The heavy ground work of breaking an idea in the public mind having been done, or at least initiated and this opened up the opportunity for Naturally Smart Places to come along and spread into the broader mainstream of popular cultural opinion and action.

In this early stage of the work we will construct our own localised map — a baseline from which we can draw insight and inform each other of intention and ambitions. As we explore a few projects in response to this map we grow in confidence in our connection and understanding of the potential for restorative practice. Our learning is from them the real lessons that are being learnt in real time.

In undertaking the first step of making the shared map we have created a proposition here that these pioneering efforts to explore ways of using land in Places which are both traditionally used — and those places which are not so traditionally used and could be seen as redundant places is an intention of hope. Our interest lies in the art of the possible, seeking new ways to expose benefits that can arise from working in these types of ways to establish a new urbanism of sustainable living, having gained this knowledge we are interested in the manner in which this knowledge can then usefully inform a pattern book for sustainable living.

This is an extract from my latest book: Cultivating Naturally Smart Places — by Paul Clarke available early 2017

go to www.foundation.rocks and for Naturally Smart Places www.naturallysmart.world contact me at paul@foundation.rocks