People’s Bureau were
invited to contribute to Milton Keynes of the Mind: What does it mean to
have a whole new town in mind? For the festival, we planned a screening of Unearthing
Elephant, following a recent showing at the Elephant and Castle shopping centre
and Tate Exchange. We also planned to lead an activity throughout the day; ‘Shopping
for an Imaginarium’ involved mapping out new spaces through stitch, drawing and
conversations. Images illustrated here are of the work produced on the day.
Programme information for
Milton Keynes of the Mind included the following:
This event
explores what goes into making a city that doesn’t exist. Plans for new towns
like Milton Keynes were closely tied to economic and demographic predictions of
who its population would be and what kind of lives they would lead. How will
future folk earn, travel, spend, play and recover from all their labours?
The Milton Keynes Development Corporation responded with an imaginarium
designed with our future selves in mind. The result is a paradoxical mix of
grand designs, practical compromises and significant follies. Drawing on nearly
50 years of Open University teaching and research, participants will explain
what it takes to imagine, orchestrate, govern and make a life in a place like
Milton Keynes.
Meanwhile, talking with Rebecca Davies about how we might
plan the activity brought to mind A Clockwork
Jerusalem, a show at British Pavilion we both saw in Venice, part of the
Architectural Biennial in 2014. The copy below are extracts from the catalogue
entry for the exhibition, which focused our thinking and directed some of the
conversations we had with audiences on the day:
…the industrial city combining traditions
of the romantic, sublime, and pastoral, to create new visions of British
society… looking backward and forwards, combining science fiction and
historicism to form ideological and aesthetic approaches to the contemporary
city… a product of the picturesque, of landscape, of narrative and of
pastoralism (ref. Capability Brown, Ruskin, Turner, Soane)... a product of the
industrial and the technological (ref. Brunel, Paxton, Spitfires)… showing
British Modernism as a unique and sometime surreal phenomenon… an obsession
with these interests written into the visions of this techno pastoralism that
span such diverse examples as the Garden Cities, 'non plan' and Milton
Keynes... exploring the late and last flowering or British radicalism, the
moment it was at its most socially, politically, and architecturally ambitious…
a moment (the 50s,60s & 70s) that also witnessed its collapse… a period
that sees both epic ambition and complete loss of nerve… grand utopian projects
(of that period) were a high point for a vision of society remade through
modern architecture… how these modern vision were absorbed into the popular
imagination, become sites of new imaginative speculation in the form of novels,
film and music (ref. Stone Henge, council estates, Ebenezer Howard, Cliff
Richard (!))… ruins and destructions, back-to-the-land rural fantasies…
