Confessions of a wandering mind

Luke Bennett
Department of the Built Environment
Sheffield Hallam University

l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk
http://lukebennett13.wordpress.com
#lukebennett13

Confessions of a wandering mind
Luke Bennett
Department of the Built Environment
Sheffield Hallam University

#lukebennett13

Confessions of a wandering mind
Luke Bennett wondering
About?
What?
Why?
Im not an artist...

...Im an
environmental
lawyer with an
MRes in sociology

...working training
surveyors and
building managers

...but
Its all about reading the city
I study ways of reading
the built environment

Lawyers read the city
Surveyors read the city
Inhabitants read the city

...and they all read
concrete and ghosts

Reading concrete
Materialities are undeniable
in the city: the environment is
built

Metal and concrete carries the
road over the river



Yet much passes unnoticed, by
most

The bridge is only noticed if it
fails



What processes trigger the
valorisation of mundane
elements of the built
environment?

Reading ghosts
Ghosts of the past
Materialities of the past
Conventions of the past

Ghosts of the present
Fear of usage / non-usage
Liabilities / compliance

Ghosts of the future
Forward gazing
(contingencies; planning;
designing)
Laws x-ray specs
Crown owns sea bed
Crown probably owns foreshore
Crown
owns
coal
and
oil
rights

Beach car park: 4 hour
licence to park
Holiday
cottage:
weekly let
Ancient Cockling Rights
Woodland
owned
by Trust
as tax
investment;

Nature
reserve
management
agreement
Common Land (grazing
rights)
99 year lease of
hotel; ground rent;
chancel repair
dues
Restrictive
covenant
prohibiting
launching
of boats
Tree Preservation
Notice

Right of Way
over private road
Public Highway
Development Agreement
(option to purchase)
What brings
me to here?
At one level my work is an investigation into the
legal/user aesthetics of the built environment

Why does the law notice (or ignore) what it does?

How do lay people use (or ignore) the built
environments legal encoding on a day to day level?

How does the law bit reside within a wider material
and symbolic realm of meaning-making and normative
control?
Studies of
owners
anxieties about
visitor safety
- cemeteries
- trees
- quarries
Cultures of risk
perception and
object-reading
Studies of
metal theft
object-reading
and circulating
cultures of
commodification
Studies of deep topography
urban exploration, bunkerology,
psychogeography, ruin porn etc
object reading and
cultures of enthusiasm
Studies of mundane
physical law
object reading and circulating
norms of event and place framing
LUKES RESEARCH THEMES
What am I trying to stitch
together?
The weirdness of laws role in constituting the
mundane physical world

The prevalence of myth, ghosts and embodied
practices within everyday space

Plus something applied. Im studying these
processes because they ARE pragmatic

How?
Models of disciplinary work
Legal scholarship deductive, hermetic: study
the law as a code-system, ignore the non-law
realm.

Social science inductive, empirical: study the
social world and derive valid generalisations.

The arts phenomenological, experiential:
reflective and depictive of affect and subjectivity.
Towards a psychogeography
of the dropped curb
Drawing across domains:
Adding mundane law; adding concrete; adding ghosts

Henri Lefebvre multiply the readings of the city
Walter Benjamin botanizing on asphalt

Valorisation
enchantment
Valorisation / enchantment
Mining the interzone
lukebennett13
Jean-Paul Sartre:

I was carried away: nothing appeared to me
more important that the promotion of street
lamps to the dignity of philosophical object
[for] truth drags through the street, in the
factories

Struggling to
recognize the over-
familiar world of the
everyday
Ben Highmore on Henri Lefebvre
in (2002) Everyday Life and
Cultural Theory


Surrealism as montage;
montage as method
Surrealism is about an effort, an energy, to find the
marvellous in the everyday, to recognize the everyday
as a dynamic montage of elements, to make it
strange so that its strangeness can be recognized.
The classic Surrealist can be seen as Sherlock Holmes-
like: faced with the deadly boredom of the everyday,
the Surrealist takes to the street, working to find and
create the marvellousness of the everyday.

(Ben Highmore 2002: 47)

On method
Take a dog for a walk

Notice everything

Look from all angles

Hold the thought: and
do something with it


Thoughts on the songs that railings could sing

Is this research?

Is it scientific?

Is it poetic?

On straddling
Studying Abandoned Quarries
After Bunkerology...

British Mountaineering
Council project on
owner anxieties about
climbing in abandoned
quarries

But also how are these
non-places valorised
and used by climbers,
poets and other
enthusiasts?



Riding the fence
The perils or
productivity of
straddling.
Riding the fence
The perils or
productivity of
straddling.
Officials are highly educated,
but one-sided; in his own department
an official can grasp whole trains of
thought from a single word, but let
him have something from another
department explained to him by the
hour, he may nod politely, but he
wont understand a word of it.

Franz Kafka, The Castle
Kafka on the fence
Officials are highly educated,
but one-sided; in his own department
an official can grasp whole trains of
thought from a single word, but let
him have something from another
department explained to him by the
hour, he may nod politely, but he
wont understand a word of it.

Franz Kafka, The Castle
Kafka on the fence
Franz Kafka, recipient of the
American Safety Societys gold
medal for inventing the industrial
safety helmet circa 1912 whilst
working as a lawyer at the
Workers Accident Insurance
Institute
Graham Harman (2008) On the Horror
of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and
Husserl
Philosophy must be realist
because its mandate is to
unlock the structure of the
world itself; it must be weird
because reality is weird