Nick Smith
2017
When thinking about the term civic, I can’t help but remember my childhood growing up in Liverpool in the mid 80’s and early 90’s, civic was a container for: libraries, swimming pools, cafes that your nan went to, where your uncle would sign-on and spaces of meeting for old aged pensioners and bored youths. These places with their greys, oranges and browns, were a connection to my parents generation. You could never quite call visiting these civic centres a pleasurable experience, more a public service. When I was old enough to become a bored youth and could too loiter in squares, go swimming with friends unaccompanied and start to interact with the city fairly independently a shift started happening, something the local councils were calling ‘regenerating Liverpool’.
This perhaps started around the completion of the Liverpool Tate as we know it today which was finished in 1998 (although the first stage of the Tate was finished in 1988). Spaces become shiny, pavements were cleaned, a Starbucks even opened, how very Friends it was. This regeneration carried on until 2008 and the city seemed to reopen after decades of being desolate, the once-powerful city, now powerful again, in a different way, under the banner of the European Capital of Culture. The European Capital of Culture Liverpool, is the Liverpool most people now know, in my mind however, leaving my home city in 2003 to study in London, and yet to return (properly), Liverpool is 2 cities, a civic city (1982-1998) and a public city (2008 – ongoing).
My hometown has changed from one that was concerned with it’s own histories and internal and inherited dialogues, to one which is participating in an open and more modern discussion about its identity. This change is something that has been seen right across the UK, the debate around the change is usually centered on the dematerialisation of industry, however I think there is something more unconscious at play, pertaining to how we are classified in society. In this text I am hoping to further investigate this idea through a couple of examples in an attempt to address the question: what does it mean to live in a post-civic society?
| CIVIC: adj relating to a city or town, especially its administration; municipal. From Latin civis meaning citizen | PUBLIC: adj of or concerning the people as a whole. Or, performed or made open. From Latin pulicus meaning of the people |
Public Identity
In Richard Sennett’s book The Fall of Public Man, he discusses how man learned to represent himself through acting his identity within the public realm. The book is written in the framework of the 18th century and concludes that at the time of completion in the 1960’s that the state has controlled man so much through regulations that to be public is not only impossible but illegal. He states:
The city has served as a focus for active social life, for the conflict and play of interests, for the experience of human possibility, during most of the history of civilized man. But just that civilised possibility is today dormant.
The book alludes to the idea that to be public, is to be liberated, and therefore one could not be public in a society that was not liberal. It’s very much in ‘civic’ or perhaps a more American phrase ‘municipal’ times that Sennett makes this observation. We certainly live in a more liberal society today than we did in the late 60’s, but are we allowed to be public? The public that we have become accustomed to suggests that we are free, but we are only free to express ourselves through some pretty conservative activities: shopping, sports, culture, politics (with a small ‘p’) and entertainment, the reason why these activities are so restrained is because they are mostly privately owned, and when they are public, it’s never clear where the public/private boundary is.
Where these ideologies are most visually striking is with architecture that symbolises a city’s intentions. Birmingham Central Library is an interesting case-in-point, built in 1974 by John Madin, the Brutalist building to establish a geographic center of the Inner Ring Road system. The building stood wide, with each level of the building jutting out, looking like a set of inverted stairs, it represented the core of city once strong with industry. Inevitably the project was never completed as proposed, the wider footprint of the master plan which encompassed the majority of the epicenter of Birmingham had to be sold off to private buyers following cut backs. And then again, 10 years after that, the land called ‘Paradise Circus’ that the building itself was on was sold. This moment is an important one as it marked the beginning of the civic project failing. Councils had attempted to centralise public activities quite literally with big clunky gestures that dictated leisure, but this gesture had failed.
Following on from this in 2010 Birmingham opened the Library of Birmingham, in a different location, Centenary Square, slightly left of the center. The building is an inversion of the Central Library, it goes small to big steps, rather than big to small, slightly random so not to be too close to the bold symmetry of the previous building, its glass rather than concrete, it reflects the outside rather than absorbs it. It has a slogan ‘Rewriting the Book’. These two building mark clearly the move from civic architecture to public architecture. But what is the significance of this? The Library of Birmingham rather than its predecessor does not represent society, rather it is an attempt to be part of society. Are these new public buildings more successful? In short yes, for one simple reason, they are no longer for everyone. While the shift that has happened architecturally is quite obvious, there has been a much subtler and more complex change, and that is social class has become more defined by how we become public. While the Central Library and surrounding development was a space everyone to congregate, the Library of Birmingham is largely for the working class.
In Owen Jones’s book Chavs, he highlights how society has become so segregated, that, not only are the working classes becoming an object of scorn in the public imagination, but also are defined by the places they inhabit. I have been thinking about why this is, and I have come to the reasoning that technology has played a big role as-well as political policies. The ravenous mapping and geotagging of our lives through social media platforms has amplified space as a container for classification. Streams of images and text marking individual’s presence from the Virgin Business Lounge at Heathrow, through to the Pizza Express in Birmingham’s Bull Ring. While this information seems trivial it also being bought by insurance companies, credit cards, credit checkers like Experian who are building portraits of us all and popping us in little social categories that define how much we can borrow, how risky we are, and most importantly how much we are worth!
Worth and Visibility
Like most of my peers I seem not to work for money but for something called ‘cultural capital’, and while most months I can pay my bills my fiscal value seems to be increasingly less associated with my bank account and more so by my choices. There is an aesthetic of choice, which create a kudos of who I am, or who I think I am. Your choice shows how culturally refined you are, the value of something seems irrelevant, but the context in which it is displayed and discussed is the important part.
In 2011 Barbara Hepworth’s Two Forms Divided, was stolen from Dulwich Park London, the sculpture was feared to have been taken for its scrap metal value. This was portrayed in the news by the well educated middle classes as a travesty, and a highly ignorant and thoughtless gesture. Something that these bastions of cultural worth forgot to mention was that this work is an edition of 6. Two Forms Divided can be seen at the Tate St Ives, the University of Bolton and the University of Cambridge, and that’s just in the UK! Now this isn’t to say that there is no loss, but the privileged left reaction to the theft was a bit OTT to say the least. It was noted at the time that the scrap value of the sculpture was estimated to be £750, while the objects art value was said to be £500,000, as if this further amplified their ignorance, actually, all it really does is highlight the ludicrous speculation in the art-market.
The sculpture was replaced by a work by Conrad Shawcross, that he has called a ‘public work’, meaning that the ‘public take ownership of the work’. This is opposed to civic sculpture which is made to ‘engage’ people. The two main constraints that dictated the sculpture were that it had to be made from a material that wasn’t worth stealing, and that it could be interacted with. Spheroidal iron is used in place of bronze as scrapping yards do not trade in the material as it is useless for electrical trades and therefore there is no resale value other than to make other large heavy things, like street grids and drain caps. Looking and perceiving has been replaced with children climbing and swinging, surrounded by their parents. Engagement is value now, but the worth of that value is dictated by your social standing.
These moments although I talk about them lightly do I feel speak just as much of class as they do about being public, the shift from civic to public isn’t merely a change in thinking but a re-establishment of class politics. Civic society marked the death of class, and the rise of individualism, places were made so that everyone could be equal, have access to the same services, interact with all walks of life and be social aright across all social groups. The redundancy and destruction of civic architectures in our cities mark quite a worrying shift to ravenous privatisation, inequality and a society that favours segregation. Now these are obviously issues that have been made because of political changes, but it does make the civic relics that we are surrounded by in the UK more symbolic. And it is therefore now more important than ever to try and understand these moments through documentation, discussion and dialogue so that we don’t forget the unclassified, truly democratic and socialist landscape that we onced worked so hard to achieve.