2007  Interior  City  Demos  project  *   

Until now, action to improve the lives of children and young people has tended to focus on the institutional spheres of home and school. Yet quality of life also depends on the access to and quality of shared resources such as streets, parks, town centres and playgrounds. And here, in the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. In the pursuit of sustainable communities and urban renaissance, children and young people are too often left out of the script.

This is the point thinktank Demos makes in their latest report 'Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the public realm with children and young people'. To launch this report, Demos organised an event with Lord Richard Rogers and the Rt Hon Beverly Hughes MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families.

I was asked to make the content of this report more tangible. Working in collaboration with Revital Cohen, we made a subtle intervention in the street in front of the event. Based on the way the lines drawn on the street tell us how to behave in a public space, we created an abstract pattern of more playful lines. By mixing different game-structures, words and objects, the installation still prompts playful behaviour but doesn't impose a closed set of rules.

2007  City  Demos  project   

During my internship at Demos, a London based thinktank, I helped out on the Bristol Urban Beach project. With the help of 800 tons of sand, some deckchairs and a stage, a ran-down carpark got transformed in a temporary urban beach. The beach was an experiment after the publication "People make places". More than a place, the beach was a platform: access was free and there were a lot of events going on, both organised by Demos and the people of Bristol. To support this, we created a website where people could announce their yoga-classes or exchange pictures.

The beach made all of us think about the value and possibilities of public space, putting pressure on the developer of the site to focus more on the public realm. The Architect’s Journal, a leading independent architecture magazine, wrote an article on the Bristol Urban Beach. It praised the influence of the Urban Beach project on the future development of Redcliffe Wharf, an iconic site steeped in history.