Lea Valley Drift: transgressing cartological norms as a means to stimulating new
Froome-Lewis, Oliver and Street, Chloe (2013) Lea Valley Drift: transgressing cartological norms as a means to stimulating new. In: AHRA Transgressions Conference, 21-23 November 2013, Bristol, UK.
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'Lea Valley Drift' was formed by Oliver Froome-Lewis and Chloe Street in the spring of 2012, extending research undertaken by Oliver into underused public spaces in the city as part of his ongoing research project entitled Touching the City. These earlier research projects used small temporary performance based installations to reveal the potential of forgotten and neglected places in Southwark, while later projects invited the expression of personal readings and memories in collective space.
Lea Valley Drift set out to continue these themes by testing and extending behaviours in underused public spaces the beyond codified and 'suggested' expectations, through the provision of mapped walking routes. It is contended that 'the map' is overdue for reappraisal as an agency for change, and for this project its conservative identity appealed - offering the potential to confound recipient expectations. A 'Drift Map' set in the southern Lea Valley – an area in flux - was initiated as a means to test these transgressions of conventional recreation.
We set out on a series of 'Endurance Walks' over the spring and summer of 2012 from Leamouth up the River Lea, comparing the actual experience of the area now, with that proposed by a wide array of 'visionary' documents. These 'official' documents reveal the area to newcomers in carefully edited and constructed ways, tending to enhance and augment expectations in line with recreational conventions such as 'heritage trail', 'nature parks' or 'riverside walk'. By contrast, Lea Valley Drift considered the inclusive, exclusive and transformational aspirations of the Derivé, and potentials created by using the map as misinformation, with the general objective to release the creative potential of the user.
The design of the 'Drift Map' developed through a series of exploratory stages testing scale, content, hierarchy of content and handling characteristics. It currently sets out to provide a 'connective tissue' allowing disparate existing, new and near future points of interest to be experienced as a collection. It indicates a route through well-traversed and more unlikely terrain, including numbered icons highlighting attractions of more or less obvious 'public' interest.
Lea Valley Drift was recently awarded funding by the 'Emerging East' project run by the LLDC, in anticipation of the North Park opening in July 2013, alongside a range of other culturally inclusive community projects. The approach and 'map' are being developed with the reintegration of the Olympic Park with local communities and the inauguration of the Public Park in mind. When actively curated through the medium of the map, this field of varied sights and experiences reveals new dialogues between the Lea Valley (local) and the Olympic Park (international).
Situated in both experiential immediacy and transience, Lea Valley Drift initially occupied a distant position from the Architecture of the City. Operating between walking, mapping, researching, curating practices and architecture has offered a new tool to stimulate the enjoyment of place, and a reversal from strategy led design approaches. The final map will be distributed at the North Park opening in July and records of the event and feedback from the product in use will be available, and highly topical, for the September submission.
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