The Lift
Putney, Peckham & Pimlico: An idea whose time has come
Rosemary Bechler
During Autumn 2006, Lift invited individuals, community and youth groups from the boroughs of Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich and Waltham Forest to take an active role in shaping how the Lift New Parliament looks, feels and operates through a series of Creative Workshops. Rosemary Bechler draws from a broad historical perspective to explain how these workshops and our recent Open Space events fit into a process of genuine engagement.
The Lift New Parliament designed by AOC is tapping into some mighty shifts in the tectonic plates of our globalising world. This transportable structure, suspended over the surface of the earth, is able to move at the drop of a hat from East London across the city, and from there - traverse the globe, hot on the trail of a new horizontal movement, both real and imaginary, driven by mass migration and ICT globalisation, which is cutting across the silos of national organisation today and challenging some of our deepest cultural assumptions. One image in particular lingers: the Lift New Parliament 'as it might look in the Gobi desert', promising to take the exchange with 'the Other' at the heart of theatre into the space of an emergent global democracy. Lift's recognition of what has been called a 'brave new horizontal world' is, however, only the start.
Even more strategically important, the new design pays tribute to the arrival on the world stage of what David Sifry, in a 'Survey of the New Media' for The Economist this April, pithily described as a 'conversation among the people formerly known as the audience'. As a physical entity the Parliament plans to open all its windows, door-flaps, skirts, virtual spaces and communication systems to this 'conversation' - this is a structure that will only attach itself to a site or a building if it is invited in by a community who literally have their own designs upon it. Moreover, while it is still only a twinkle in Lift's eye - in its formation, in the planning of its key components, the protocols which govern its use, and its launch programme, it is already, long before it is a structure, many such conversations. (Across generations and cultures, Londoners and their friends have voted for the best design, joined community panels, and flocked to some twenty gatherings including three self-organising Open Space events in Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, in a two-year, accretive process of deliberation that will feed into similar exchanges around the world, initiated by an international team of curators.)
What are these conversations about? There are 'hopeful and fearful' discussions about how to play a creative part in our fast-changing cities; questions about what it means to be insiders or outsiders, and how to share a cultural space, give up cultural sureties, how to connect. There are even more basic questions: what matters to you? In one way it seems only too obvious that this is a good place to start. What, after all, is the difference between this consultation process and commercial scoping of a market niche or focus-group political early-warning systems? The difference is that it is not a top-down management technique, and that the creative energies it seeks to release are of a different order.
Which brings us to the third triumph of this ingenious theatrical invention. Is it a tent, is it a bird, is it a hat? It might be, but it is also... a new parliament. This is good timing. In recent years, the political class in Europe, North America and elsewhere, have reluctantly noticed that we don't have much regard for what our old parliaments have become under their jurisdiction. They bemoan the individualisation, fragmentation and lack of national sharing in our modern liberal democracies. It is not just that many of us no longer vote in elections or join political parties, or organise ourselves into the kinds of constituencies that parliamentarians could more readily represent. Something deeper is afoot which registers itself, uncomfortably enough for them, as an end of deference and of trust. They see only the negatives: but the positive is there too if you know where to find it, just on the other side of individualisation and cultural diversity - in the accelerating activities of personal empowerment and larger-scale collaboration and encounter which make up local and global networking today. These energies are now competing with the mass media-dominated, more traditional structures of an older industrial economy for their relatively passive consumers - and by the same token, competing with political statecraft, spectacle and spin.
This new social activity, furthermore, is becoming increasingly central to the way we live. Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, describes it thus, 'As computation and communications capacity on the one hand and human creativity, experience and wisdom on the other hand' spread themselves through the world's populations, these same motivations 'have moved from the domain of the social and personal to occupy a larger role smack in the middle of the most advanced economies of the world today.' The shift already has many theorists and manifestoes . But in bringing a new type of democratic politics into the non-violent yet potentially transformative space of theatre - Angharad Wynne-Jones talks about her interest in 'looking at where practical action meets an understanding of what theatre is and should be' - Lift is tapping into these energies in a unique way.
User Generated Innovation
Just because something is new and timely doesn't mean that it is without precedent. As we look to the future of the New Parliament, many moments in history might be plundered as well - sources of democratic innovation that in being revisited are not only honoured but reactivated. First up - the Putney Debates of 1647 when Leveller civilians and army Agitators joined together to propose what was essentially a new British constitution, against the writ of the King and a Parliament 'which consists of a company of rotten members'. Authority was to be vested in the House of Commons rather than the King and Lords, but only if its members served the people: 'the power of this, and all future Representatives of this Nation, is inferior only to theirs who choose them'. Their Manifesto, the 'Agreement of the People' didn't win the day in Putney's Church of St.Mary the Virgin, but it paved the way for civil liberties in centuries to come and Colonel Rainsborough's famous appeal has surely lost little of its resonance,
"...for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it's clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under..."
This is the authentic tone of a democratic politics and popular civics which was not wholly expunged by the rise of Machiavellian modern statecraft two hundred years earlier, and which has survived ever since that great eruption to send small, anticipatory puffs of steam up between the fissures and cracks of a more or less well-managed body politic. I like to think that these non-Wordsworthian 'spots of time' are feeding into what AOC describes as Lift's 'spatial constitution'.
Three hundred years later, the idea that ordinary men and women could organise themselves creatively was nevertheless still regarded as comic, foolish, or at best, a little too visionary. Take the Peckham Experiment. Two pioneering doctors in the 1930s chose 950 local families to help them explore the impact of environment on health. They paid them one shilling (5 pence) a week, and gave them access to a range of activities such as physical exercise, swimming, games and workshops in the pioneer Centre, a purpose-built modern building with large window areas for fresh air and natural light. Central to the founders' philosophy was the belief that people left to themselves would 'spontaneously' begin to organise in a creative way. Sure enough, they used the facilities to initiate a wide range of sporting, social and cultural activities. When the Centre fell into disuse in the Second World War, they themselves restored it to a condition fit for re-opening. It didn't last long, but it inspired later experiments. Perhaps it also inspired the much-loved Ealing comedy, Passport to Pimlico (1949) in which a London street decides to break away, declare itself independent and run its own affairs, after the money-spinning local council rejects a local shopkeeper's suggestion to turn a derelict site into a playground and public lido.
Of course, the end of that film also delivers everyone back to the familiar status quo, but not before we have experienced some of the unforgettable joy and intelligence, across difference, of shared human creativity. It is this quality which was present in the Festival of Britain's Dome of Discovery, and so singularly lacking in its successor Millennium Dome. This same quality is written all over one of AOC's chosen models for Lift's 'evolving and playful space': the Fun Palace invented for Joan Littlewood by Cedric Price in the early 1960s. Littlewood had asked some "younger creative nuts" (her words) to design a 'People playground', a new 18th-century Vauxhall Gardens with music, lectures, plays and restaurants under an all-weather roofing, for the Lea Valley in London. Price's proposed 'kit of parts' enabled the interior environment to fit any sort of event imaginable and required. In what we might call this 'playful tradition' it is these serious and subversive underlying qualities which Pat Kane in his Play Ethic distinguishes from 'leisure'. If we understand 'leisure' to be 'a re-creation of our exploited selves in order to return to our duties', by contrast, he argues, play is 'adaptive potentiation - that is the spinning out of possibilities, experiments and imaginings to ensure our continuing development'. It is, he concludes, 'as necessary to our survival as our work... We need to be players in this accelerating world, not... contemplatives.'
As is evident in the exponential growth of Second Life, 'An online society within a 3D world, where users can explore, build, socialize, and participate in their own economy' - this playful New Parliament - theatrical meeting place by day, at night a disseminating web and beacon, 'taking the work and issues of local communities into an international context and making connections worldwide' - is tapping directly into the zeitgeist with its own special appeal to our civic virtues. In its mobility, its horizontality, its potential for subject-object reversal, its compensatory insistence on 'voice', and its playfulness, the physical and virtual spaces of the Lift's New Parliament offer us no less than a 'spatial constitution' for democratic renewal.
For example: Paul Hirst's Associative Democracy, Paul Barry Clarke's Deep Citizenship, Mary Louise Pratt's essays, The Arts of the Contact Zone and Planetarity, Richard Barbrook's The Class of the New, Charles Leadbeater's We-Think, Jude Bloomfield and Franco Bianchini, in Comedia's 'Planning for the Intercultural City' or the New Economics Foundation booklet, Participation Works! 21 techniques of community participation for the 21st century.
Rosemary Bechler is author of Unbounded Freedom: a guide to creative commons thinking for cultural organisations published under a Creative Common license available from www.counterpoint-online.org.