The projects and quotes mentioned below are from people who have taken different paths and used different approaches to find their own unconscious city.
“The City is a slippery notion. It slides back and forth between an abstract idea and concrete material. While this is a useful reminder of the basic instability of perception, sliding back and forth between subject and object of attention, it also suggests that critical analysis needs to be attentive to this slipperiness and its spatialisation in cognitive (and less conscious) apprehension of 'the city'”
Maria Balshaw, Urban Space and Representation, 2000
Lottie Child - Doing Nothing
“Last Monday i lay on the pavement near to Habitat on Tottenham Court Road from 5.30pm - 6.00 as the commuters became fewer and the evening light changed - you notice different things when you stop and do close to nothing. I ignored people but occasionally when they caught my eye they smiled and i wonder if doing nothing in public space throws all the speed and activity into contrast i wonder if it makes people reflect differently on all the doing we are doing and the ways we behave in london.”
Lottie Child, www.malinky.org
These activities are influenced by the knowledge that the city is more than just it’s built forms. Urban space and the city are a not just made up of physical form but also mental structures generated from our own consciousness. We all create our own interpretation of our environment and this is influenced by the often privatised and homogenised built up environment. The idea behind Lottie’s Doing Nothing and here other activities, Street Training and Urban Climbing, is to enable people to have an effect on their surroundings equalling that which our surroundings have on us.
Alex Villar - Upward Mobility
This project involves a short film of the artist making various attempts to move upwards in urban space. Climbing up walls, bus stops and anything else available. Villar is shunning the everyday horizontal movement which is necessary to travel around the city. He is challenging the means by which city planning forces movement in a particular trajectory.