Despite the 700 Orange Halls that currently exist across the historic province of Ulster, a search for ‘Orange Hall’ on the Northern Ireland Department for Communities ‘Heritage at Risk’ website yields a mere 4 results. These traditional meeting places for the fraternal religious organisation known as the Orange Order dot the landscape, and while some are proudly proclaimed, the majority are alternatively hidden in plain sight, fortified to the point of impenetrability, or falling into disuse and disrepair. The gradual decline of the Orange Order is symbolic of irreversible advances towards a more inclusive society. Its buildings, to those who maintain and protect them against the flow of secularisation and demographic shifts, are a material expression of the importance of resisting change and preserving heritage. To others, they are symbolic of historic oppression and inequality, and their demise is perhaps welcome. This paper uses images from my current research, I Am Where I Am Not, to explore the buildings photographically and autoethnographically and examine these contested spaces in post-conflict (Northern) Ireland that challenge any definition of heritage as necessarily benign and something to be unquestioningly preserved. Drawing on a visual methodology that incorporates Charlotte Cotton’s concept of the deadpan aesthetic and using the unique example of Newfoundland’s Orange Halls as a counterpoint, this paper examines how these heritage sites are not only emblematic of the past and present, but also of possible futures – should they be deemed a heritage even worthy of preservation.
The article examines the phenomenon of border fortification in the twenty-first century. It proposes that borderwalls are not just physical barriers but symbolic forms that embody and enact a state's political visions and phantasms about national belonging and exclusion. It analyses how the visual apparatus of borders is tied to state power and to the use of electronic surveillance technologies to create a seemingly totalising panoptic regime. Central to the investigation are the tactics of state territorial control that unfold in the 'dark spaces' or 'hidden topographies of power' beyond the visible corporeality of the borderwall, where state violence and migrant deaths often occur unnoticed. When so expunged from public discourse, visual fields, maps and memory, how can these hidden border zones be reimagined? In contrast to the official optics, the article presents the making of counter-visualities through an analysis of border art installations. Such artistic endeavours are analysed as examples of how art can challenge hegemonic narratives and humanise border experiences. The article probes instances of artistic experimentation and visual radicalism (performances, installations, public works) along the US-Mexico border as counter-visual platforms for digital knowledge production, witnessing, political agency and cross-border community collaboration.
This article aims to investigate accounts of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City (1898-1994) through a Marxist retrospective, approaching the phenomenon of statelessness as represented in its posthumous digitised life through films, video games and other forms of immersive or interactive media, tracing a lineage of postcoloniality through a critique of hauntology and affect. Tracing the question of Walled City's history within debates of statelessness, the article intends to prescribe a dialectical and spatial reading of capitalist neglect, juridic-political abandonment within the aesthetics of gaming, genre film and contemporary exhibitions on site and in greater Hong Kong. It provides a critical retrospective on Derrida's anti-Marxist approach to hauntology and the condition of postmodern capitalist malaise as per Spectres of Marx. Furthermore, it asserts that digitised reconstructions of the historic Walled City remain in the popular 'dystopian' oeuvre through its repeated intimate re-exploration, re-screenings of popular periodic genre films, and the persisting nature of interrogating, macabre curiosity on the part of the consumer class. Derrida's hauntology, while an evocative means for literary, textual or visual analysis, ultimately risks crucial detachment from material and historical contradictions, spiritualising class antagonisms as something of a stand-in for more concrete, structurally-informed Marxist critique, which asserts that the driving force of history is not the ghostly or spectral but, rather, a fetish.
When urban areas are developed or renewed, they are typically examined through systematic surveying strategies that focus on the interrelationships between physical structures. Technological apparatus, such as high-resolution aerial photography, light detection and ranging scanning and artificial intelligence-assisted virtual landscape modelling, now inform such processes, offering precise and expansive views of urban landscapes in exacting detail. In contrast, the late nineteenth-century topographic photographers viewed cities as cryptic topographies, best understood through fragmented, street-level perspectives. Similarly playful approaches to urban photographic exploration were developed in the 1960s by the townscape scholar Gordon Cullen, and more recently by the photographer of cities Michael Wolf. Drawing upon the work of these pioneering urban investigators, this research establishes a new approach for recognising, analysing and applying the personal and ethereal aspects of the built environment that are often overlooked in photographic surveys today. The study is synthesised through a photographic investigation of three contemporary redevelopment sites in Portugal. The resulting body of imagery exemplifies the ways in which strategic photographic walking methodologies can be used to gather, discuss and validate the characteristics of urban areas undergoing renewal.
Victor H. Green's Negro Motorist Green Book (1936-66) is an essential primary source to dispute this. However, the Negro Motorist Green Book was only optionally accompanied by maps (often provided by 'benevolent' corporate partners, like the ESSO petrol company) and these failed to visualise the safe travel routes and racialised infrastructure gaps that the business listings in the Green Book itself exposed. Representational cartography is one of the most potent tools for fomenting a common understanding of cultural and economic histories. Unlike the visual archive of housing discrimination provided by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's 'redlining' maps, historians and geographers lack similar cartographic proof that transportation infrastructure equally circumscribed African Americans' social and physical mobility. This article illustrates how a lack of representational maps have allowed the USA to cement these stratified networks into its landscapes for nearly a century thus far.
Historically, death was an intrinsic part of daily life, but the growth and modernisation of cities prompted the relocation of most cemeteries to urban outskirts owing to population expansion, rising mortality rates and fear of disease. Today, only a few cemeteries remain inside, yet they exist as often ignored 'negative spaces', invisible to most people's eyes. Starting with the argument that these places provide us (individuals or collective) with an unexpected possibility-of preparing for a transition from the mundane to the sacred-we raise timely questions about their sustained presence in the contemporary city. We examine eight burial sites (of various scales, typologies and histories) found in Istanbul and New York City. These sites range from well-preserved to semi-obliterated; some are active and others closed, often physically bounded with understated gates or walls, sometimes disguised as neighbourhood parks or largely overlooked, wild remnants. We map the anatomy of each cemetery visit, gathered cumulatively via several journeys from the street, and then into, around and through, to expose the most fundamental spatial elements, characteristics, qualities and conditions of these 'rites of passage'. Our framework is composed of four observational themes that we call markers (linguistic, temporal, experiential and contextual) to pinpoint the complexities we encountered during our study. We align our approach and findings with the growing field of urban interiority, not currently part of 'deathscape' studies. Thus, we expand both of these domains with our methodology that combines sensibilities drawn from gathering, walking, sensing, visualising and heuristics. Purposefully dialogic, we alternate between the perspectives of two authors/professors and two global cities, prioritising an interplay between text and image. Ultimately, presented in the form of an archetypal journey structured around nine zones of experience, our insights frame the urban cemetery not only as a liminal site constituting an urban interior but also as a site fostering the establishment of a complex relationship between a visitor's physical being and layers of interiority.
The Battle of Gettysburg, fought between 1 and 3 July 1863, occupies a significant place in United States history and memory. Beginning within six weeks after the battle’s conclusion, much of the former battlefield landscape has been, and continues to be, preserved through careful deliberation. This article argues that those preservation efforts have simultaneously frozen the landscape in time while changing it as part of an industry of memory. However, the intentionality of those efforts has, until very recently, removed the presence and stories of African Americans from the landscape, despite the historical reality that African Americans are central to why there was an American Civil War and a battle at Gettysburg. This article concludes by describing incipient efforts, and some challenges to those efforts, to include those stories on the landscape.
In the decades that followed the Second World War, as suburban residential developments expanded and city centres became less desirable areas, these spaces entered periods of decline. While for many in the emerging middle class a single-family home was seen as desirable, the city centre remained a destination for artists and then societally repressed LGBTQ communities, populations unable or willing to take part in the twentieth-century exodus to the suburbs. This article explores an example of a red-light district that emerged during this time in the city of Toronto. Campaigns to clean up vice districts began as early as the late 1970s. Toronto is a noteworthy example, both for the swift eradication of adult entertainment businesses (massage parlours and adult film theatres) in 1977 and for the upstanding reputation the city cultivated in the twentieth century. LGBTQ communities became an adjacent target as part of this campaign in Toronto. Beyond the city’s swift urban sanitisation efforts in 1977, larger-scale urban gentrification processes have continued since that time. Assimilation into dominant North American societal norms is arguably impossible – and perhaps undesirable – for many artists and nightlife participants. With the gentrification and subsequent continued eradication processes of urban non-mainstream cultural spaces underway, artists and marginalised communities are inevitably less able to gather or intermingle, coexist and co-create in nocturnal venues when there is less physical space to do so. Furthermore, I argue that cultural creative potential was lost for marginalised artistic and LGBTQ communities with the eradication of Toronto’s red-light district and rampant gentrification of the city.
Under 45 years of neoliberal housing policy, the populations of the world have experienced an appreciably increased housing crisis. This is, first and foremost, a crisis of affordability but it is also a crisis of access, of supply and of quality. The fact these housing crises are occurring in Hong Kong as much as in London, in Vancouver as well as in Beijing-cities that have radically different urban topographies, economies and housing policies-strongly suggests that the usual excuses of insufficient housing densities, lack of access to land, an excess of regulation or an influx of immigrants cannot explain what is a global phenomenon, in both cause and effect. Comparing the regeneration of the UK's council housing estates with that of a uniquely Chinese type of public housing called the danwei dayuan (work-unit compound), this article outlines some of the key similarities and differences, both economic and social, between policies and practices of public housing and renewal in the UK and China over the last 45 years. Informed by the research and design proposals of Architects for Social Housing CIC, which has pursued research into housing practices and policies for over a decade, this article will propose opportunities for alternative regeneration strategies derived from the respective conditions in the UK and China. To do so, it explores what lessons can be learned from this comparison with a view to increasing the provision, improvement and maintenance of public housing estates and their communities, and-by default-the liveability of our cities.
This article discusses the impact of building and planning codes on the improvement of affordable housing settlements. It is part of a larger research project that proposes a framework for the planning of affordable housing, based on the model of a type of informal Brazilian settlement, the favela. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the literature that reveals how planning and building codes relate to opportunities for the improvement of affordable housing settlements. The article also demonstrates how alternative assessment tools can provide a more holistic evaluation for a housing settlement, offering suggestions for the general improvement of the neighbourhood. This article considers affordable housing that is produced specifically for low-income families. Its production is subsidised by the Brazilian government and the monthly payment of the loan (or rent, in some rarer cases) cannot be more than 30 per cent of the family's income. Despite the government's efforts, the estimated housing shortage in Brazil in 2024 totals 6 million residences. Throughout the twentieth century in Brazil there were numerous efforts by the federal and local governments to address the problem of housing shortage. There were also many attempts to eradicate favelas, which were always seen by the public as places of poverty, misery and criminality. This article analyses how a case study, the Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro, complies with local and building codes. It also uses a qualitative tool for assessing housing quality to evaluate the same case.
Cohousing and shared living environments have been gaining increasing attention worldwide, as they offer significant social, ecological and economic benefits. Many Indigenous communities across the world had historically lived in collective housing with deep connections to nature, multigenerational relationships and the sharing of resources. However, many of these populations have been displaced from land and currently live in homes that are not aligned with their values and traditions. In recent decades, there have been growing efforts to recover these original values and translate them into contemporary housing through participatory design processes. This article presents findings from interviews with designers working on collective housing projects in two countries across the Pacific where Indigenous values have been integrated into architecture through co-design. This study, conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand and Chile, discusses differences and similarities in approaches, and provides insights into the future of housing. The findings reveal the residents' unique contributions to the design of these housing projects to create a sense of community. The methods and participatory practices shared can be valuable in helping to design socially connected and regenerative collective housing in other contexts and countries.
The estate became the model for public housing development in England and Wales from the late nineteenth century as a response to poor living conditions and housing shortages. To match the scale of the problem, solutions generally involved comprehensive construction or reconstruction (in the case of slum clearance) in the form of physically distinct developments with social and community provision. While estates were often built within or on the periphery of urban areas, they were typically laid out as discrete, somewhat self-contained entities, separated from their surrounding context. Council housing estates still form a significant body of the UK housing stock and are typically managed as distinct concerns by local government or social housing providers. This research examines the history of the estate as a genealogy, drawing connections between the publicly owned municipal housing estate that emerged in the late nineteenth century and earlier models of estate ownership developed by the landed gentry. Landed estates were conceived as territorialised landscapes, and the estate map became the means to display its wealth. The study investigates how established surveying and cartographic practices involved in estate layout and management shaped the genesis of municipal housing as a new form of estate. The work also explores how this new conception of estate drew on visions of village life to embody ideas of self-contained community. The research is informed by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on practice theory, as well as concepts of emptiness and the geo-body from the field of cartography.
This article investigates the construction of cinematic space and the collective cultural consciousness of nostalgia in Stephen Chow’s 2004 Hong Kong film Kung Fu Hustle. Set in 1930s Shanghai, the narrative follows Sing, a vagrant who inadvertently ignites a conflict between the Axe Gang and the residents of Pig Sty Alley, a space emblematic of Hong Kong’s lower classes. By integrating the local experiences of Hong Kong, the film connects the lower-class residential enclave of Pig Sty Alley – where kung fu underpins the narrative logic – with the demolished Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong. This cinematic space as a heterotopia makes Shanghai a signifier through which Hong Kong’s historical and cultural identity is reconstructed. Through its intertextuality, Kung Fu Hustle navigates the complexities of urban experience, depicting Pig Sty Alley as a microcosm of community resilience against external threats. The film’s portrayal of kung fu transcends mere action, embodying a universal humanistic ideal that challenges the violence of the Axe Gang and provides a framework of intertextual otherness between the two cities, which allows the other to become its own cultural mode of expression. Ultimately, this article argues that Kung Fu Hustle effectively intertwines nostalgia with spatial dynamics, offering a poignant reflection on the cultural memory of Hong Kong while simultaneously engaging with the broader historical narrative of Shanghai.
As the speed of urbanisation, which is driven by power and capital, has slowed down on the Chinese mainland, the connection between human emotion and urban space has gradually been gaining attention. Moreover, traditional Chinese culture is attracting more and more interest because of people’s nostalgia for rural life. This study examines how the traditional Chinese understanding of space is integrated into contemporary architecture, and people’s perception of it, to bring meaningful urban space. The methodology in this study collects the characteristics of the Chinese concept of space and investigates how to translate these characteristics into contemporary concrete spatial forms. Furthermore, a felt-phenomenology study of cases located in contemporary urban space is used to examine whether this transformation is feasible. Traditional Chinese thinking is correlative, focusing on the relationships between things rather than rational or logical thinking of things themselves. In traditional Chinese courtyard buildings, for example, this correlative thinking is expressed in the contrast between void and solid. Moreover, the subjective spatial experience arising from the rhythm and ambiguity, which is brought by the interplay between the void and the solid in traditional courtyard architecture, may suggest an absence of connection between the urban space and human emotions. Meanwhile, in contemporary urban space, rhythm and ambiguity can be informed by the research of specific case studies, such as SHUM YIP UpperHills LOFT, the West Village and Raffles City Chengdu.
This article examines the urban modernisation of Xiamen, a city located in the south-east of China, from the 1830s to the 1930s, highlighting the interplay between local initiatives and imperial powers. The Beach Ground was a core area of the Xiamen Bund, located south-west of Xiamen, and played a vital role in the maritime trade. Its planning and governance were closely linked to the establishment of the British concession (1852–1930). Taking the reclamation and embankment construction of the Beach Ground as a starting point, this article analyses how the Beach Ground transformed as an in-between place through unofficial land reclamation (before 1842), British concession planning (1842–1911), sovereignty disputes (1878–1922) and the construction of the Xiamen Bund embankment (1920s–1930s). These four vignettes provide a multi-perspective narrative of Xiamen’s regional development through the political and economic conflicts and resolutions of different stakeholders, as well as its consequences for local society. This reveals the impacts of global exchange on China’s modernisation and affirms the contribution of Indigenous knowledge and local adaptation.
This article selects as a case study the Suzhou Canal, one of the most important sections of the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal. It investigates how the Suzhou Canal is used as a driving factor to achieve canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration based on the concept of everyday heritage. The article is presented in four sections. The first identifies the key characteristics of the global transformation of the canal-orientated urban waterfront. The second reviews the Suzhou Canal District’s historical morphological evolution from the Song dynasty (960–1279) to the 1950s. It then investigates the transition of Suzhou’s canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration from a conservational approach to adaptive reuse of heritage policy from the 1960s to the present. The third section introduces the concept of ‘everyday heritage’ and explores how during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912) the Suzhou Canal shaped everyday life in terms of the formal public courtyards and informal marketplaces along it. This canal-related architectural heritage reveals its crucial role in shaping human behaviours and everyday patterns in the time–space dimension. These findings help us better understand how to adaptively reuse canal-related urban heritage through the concept of everyday heritage and how to integrate it into contemporary canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration strategies. In the fourth section, the article concludes by proposing corresponding recommendations for reusing canal heritage resources to reveal a new potential for economic, social and ecological recovery based on the concept of everyday heritage.
This article explores a participatory process organised to deal with the highly contested former Nazi project Prora on the Baltic island of Rügen. It was carried out on behalf of the German government in 1996. The participatory process was an exceptional way of dealing with a heritage that remains difficult for Germany to this day. Key aspects shifted in Prora as a result of the procedure: away from the ideal of conscientious and careful conservation of the building as a memorial to past dictatorships and towards an active process of highlighting, rejecting and changing qualities of Prora for the construction of a new and alternative future. The main focus shifted from memory work to different present-day demands of the local population and the associated future scenarios for their island. The article argues that during the participatory process Prora was a real-life laboratory in which many things were tried out that were to become important pioneering approaches in heritage management over the next two decades. However, the participatory process in Prora is not only an impressive example of the potential that lies in such approaches; as an experiment it also points to new problems that are associated with them.
