On the intersection of geographical thought and artistic practice: DIY urbanism, flow, and imagining urban futures

Abstract

In this commentary, I explore what an artists’ process offers to city-making: how urban experimentation can open up hopeful, surprising, and imaginative urban encounters and futures. By doing so, I imagine a future for geographical thought and praxis lying partly in the interesting places where they overlap with artistic practice. I ground this thinking on the unstable surface found in the years immediately following the 2010–11 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was into a wasteland of post-earthquake demolition that ‘ordinary citizens’ started to insert creative interventions (known in the literature as do-it-yourself, or DIY, urbanism). I explore how an understanding of creative ‘flow’ helped me untangle what was particular and unique about the uprising of DIY urbanism in post-earthquake Christchurch. From the ‘doing’ of creative practitioners in the city during this time emerged a different and new energy: an imaginative, hopeful, open-ended feeling of the possibilities hidden behind the facade of grey rubble. In particular, I examine how existing work in the geohumanities around hope and temporalities resonates with DIY urbanism and consider what artistic practices may have to offer geographical thought and praxis.