Selected Writing
On Dance of the Remediators
For the Lock-Up, Newcastle, December 2023
At our house there’s a corner of our couch we can never use: at least not as a couch. It’s a boat, or a cave, or the highest alpine station of an elaborate cable car network. It morphs from one day to the next, a teetering construction of cushions and blankets, ribbons and baby muslins, studded with Duplo characters and Franken-vehicles hidden just beneath the surface. Sit at your own risk.
This is how a four year old shapes her world: constantly adapting, reimagining, transforming. Where we might see an object with one function, a child sees past the illusion of a static surface through to the dancing electrons, in eternal flux and suggesting infinite possibility. Through the alchemy of imagination we can get a glimpse of how everything that seems solid and permanent is just energy passing from state to state.
Sure it’s a couch for you, mum, for this heartbeat that we’re all together here in this room, but not everywhere and everywhen: it’s also a seed and a sapling and a duck and a sheep and a hand-me-down and a wreck and an anthill and soil again.
While four year olds are the world’s greatest practitioners of this alchemy, artists and activists have retained access to the magic. Through art and story, artists can show us what lies beyond the blinkers we wear to get through the demands of the everyday, to see our moment in time within a continuum stretching forwards and back. Activists use research and conversation, and stimulate hope and community, to cut through the illusion of im/possibility and permanence to expand our civic imagination. They help us see that behind the painted plasterboard of Well That’s Just The Way Things Are there’s a rickety shambles of biases and blind spots, scaffolds that fall away when you discover there are many more ways to organise and share our world than we dreamed possible.
This is the power of the Dance of the Remediators: it uses the playfulness of childhood to spark the visioning we need to see beyond this moment, to suggest the adaptability we need to cultivate and to prefigure the rituals we need to invent, to help us transition to a future we can actually look forward to.
Dance of the Remediators honours the histories embedded in every object we use, gently reminding us that we can collaborate with rather than consume the material world. It’s all too easy to have a short memory: that’s why humans have always had rituals and stories to remind us of where we sit in time and in relation to each other, and to carry knowledges through the dark ages.
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In their practice Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline offer us infrastructures for re-imagining our cities and systems. They’re crafting an experimental toolkit through art, architecture and community, to prod the invisible structures that underpin the Anthropocene and hold up privilege and inequality, and to construct alternatives.
I love the physical way Axelsen and Moline create environments using humble, domestic materials and informal, loose and seemingly haphazard physical forms. It feels intimate and whimsical, a gentle way of approaching complex and urgent topics. The stakes might be high, but the conversation is not highfalutin. Formally, you might call it speculative futuring: in normal life, you’d say it’s play.
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Play is crucial right now, because when we have the courage to question, to ask the but why but why but why questions of childhood, we find assumptions waiting to be dismantled. When we give ourselves the time and space to play together we find we are clever and creative and inventive like four year olds.
It’s only then we can build new systems for buildings and cities and industries and economies that honour the long lifespans of the material world and our own responsibilities to that world. When we listen to more voices we can understand our place in a bigger story. When we feel that we belong to a place and to each other, we gain more connection and beauty and nuance in our daily experience, encountering landscapes with meaning and narrative, alive with fellow travellers and noble beings, rather than seeing resources, transactions and competitors.
This is the future that’s at our fingertips. I know it can feel silly sometimes to talk about out loud, that some people will roll their eyes when you dare to imagine anything that deviates from what seems to be the unchanging endless here and now. As Fredric Jameson wrote, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But I have spent enough time in sandpits in the last few years to know that you don’t build anything beautiful and new without getting some dirt under your nails and earning a few weird looks.
While I’m talking about this stuff like it’s child’s play, this big change we need to make, the imaginative and societal and economic transition that is critical to our survival in this heartbeat moment we’re in, well, we can’t leave it to the kids to deal with it.
Us grown ups have to learn a new two-step dance - staying open and playful and hopeful as we imagine other ways forward - while also doing the hard and serious and often very boring work of bringing that other world into being. Using politics and economics and civic participation and community organising and reading the fine print and going to meetings. Sometimes breaking the rules to make new ones. Few of the systems we have today lend themselves to the new (and very old) ways we need, so we have to be silly enough and brave enough to invent them anew.
All this stuff is child’s play, and that’s harder than it looks.
The City as a Pleasure Garden
Provocation, SxSW Sydney, October 2023
I’m sorry I can’t be with you all today: but I had a baby last week - Iris will be twenty seven years old in 2050 - so when I share my hope for the future city, it’s her future Sydney that I am hoping for.
I love that we’re using this metaphor of the garden in this discussion, because usually when we talk about ecology, we tend to use the idea in relation to nature - likewise when we talk about connection to place or country - but we need to reconceive of our relationship to places everywhere, and think about the ecology of the culture of a place.
What would the future city as a pleasure garden look like, and feel like, for you?
My pleasure garden would be a place that sparks discovery: that encourages you to seek things out, to enjoy the delight of serendipity and the unexpected. But that also feels accesible, open to being explored and understood. You don’t have to be the coolest person in the world to find your way into it.
For me, it’s a place that has struck the balance between stimulation, surprise, daring and challenge, and safety and feeling inclusive and welcoming. Like a place that has room for everyone to express themselves and find their tribe.
My pleasure garden would be a place with wild patches and unkempt plots: where weeds can grow through the cracks, where there’s enough dirt and grit for seeds drifting on the breeze to land and take root and thrive in surprising places.
It would be a place where you can go wild: where you can dance all day and all night, where your mind and heart are opened up to new perspectives, where you can discover new passions and talents and people and feel a deep sense of belonging and connection.
It would be a place where people feel like they can make culture, express themselves and perform and participate, as well as being audiences for new ideas and art forms. My vision would be a place where people can tell new stories in new ways, actively making culture, not just performing the stories of the past.
Sure, that all sounds pretty good, right?! But it also sounds like a fantasy - almost like science fiction from where we’re standing right now. So how do we get from here to there?
I think we need to do three things to get there.
The first is redefining pleasure to expand beyond the superficial and short term: it’s pleasure that’s connected to human flourishing, eudaimonia, Aristotle’s concept that’s about fulfilling our innate and unique human potential and being of purpose in our world.
We can imagine pleasure to be less passive and more active - it’s about the doing - we have to draw our joy from the process of making this garden together. From a deep sense of responsibility to this place - not just rights over it - and in that we have a huge amount to learn from First Nations philosophy which is echoed in cultures around the world. Sure it’s a cliche to say the journey is as important as the destination, but we’ve got to realise that culture and creativity isn’t just about consumption - it’s about participation and creating - and we need to see ourselves on the stage as active players, more than just being in the audience.
Secondly, we have to question the deep code we’re using as the basis for our operating system today - the rules that set the foundations of who gets to make a city, who pays their fair share, what we make space for and what we value - and reset some systems. For example, we can use tools like land value capture to ensure development and rising property prices aren’t extracted out and away, but instead gets channeled into a hyper local allocation of benefits to fund the creative economy.
I wrote a lot about this in my book, Glimpses of Utopia: Real Ideas for a Fairer World. There are tools we can borrow from places like Brazil, Colombia, Spain, in using development to fund affordable housing and city making. There are models in practice right now in so many other parts of the world that we can use to build the creative, fairer, more joyful cities of the the future.
Thirdly, we have to acknowledge that if we don’t change the incentives and systems we’re operating in today, like as soon as possible, our future cities will be desperately boring. They will be walled gardens rather than thriving, wild, abundant hotbeds of diversity and discovery. If we allow our cities to continue to become expensive, exclusive enclaves, they’ll be fragile mono cultures where no one can afford to take risk, make a mess, make noise.
We need to go beyond incremental change and demand more daring solutions now to build in the structures that allow for diversity and creativity now, and that means looking at our planning systems, tax incentives, at how we manage land and housing and creative space, and how we participate in democracy at a fundamental level.
We need to look at the regulation that enables and funds affordable space and creativity - not just rely on the hope of innovation to get us there.
But most of all, to seed and water and nurture our future pleasure gardens, we need to reimagine our role as gardeners who derive our joy and pleasure and connection from our deep responsibility to this place.
See you in the future, fellow gardeners!
Re-wilding the Civic Imagination
Keynote, Byron Writers Festival, August 2023
I begin with the disclaimer that I’m not a botanist or horticulturalist: I’m just a hoe with a metaphor and a vague memory of year ten agriculture class.
But my mission for our time together today is to plant a few seeds in your mind, and to reveal a patch of your mental garden that isn’t being weeded or watered, which is overgrown with lantana, where the soil is degraded. But it’s there, waiting for you to revive it, rewild it.
Heck, this part of your garden may even be unknown to you - like those dreams you sometimes have about extra rooms in your house - I want you to imagine that this overlooked garden at the bottom of your yard spills out beyond the back gate and cascades down the hillside to a creek below. You look down there and see that this metaphorical garden isn’t just yours, but it’s connected to your neighbours. It’s part of something we share and manage between us: it’s a commons, some might say.
I want you to imagine that this garden is our shared civic imagination.
It is the seed bed for all that can be in our society. All that we can campaign for, fight for, protest for, must begin with what we can imagine to be possible. Our civic imagination gives form to hope. It is our capacity to imagine alternatives to the cultural, social, political, or economic conditions we live in right now, and it helps us turn vague aspirations into ideas we can articulate and work towards.
Civic imagination is also about our capacity to see our own selves as empowered agents, as citizens and not consumers or voters. That we are all in this together, in collaboration and not in competition, and that monumental change is possible when we have common purpose.
But over the last two or three or four hundred years of colonial and capitalist monocultures, and particularly over the last forty or fifty years of neoliberalism, we’ve seen our civic imagination shrink. We’ve been told there’s no alternative to business as usual, and every shoot of possibility has been pulled out by the roots. Our civic imagination is depleted, denuded, drained.
2023 has been a triple whammy:: the climate crisis fills us with existential dread, the inequality crisis leaves us too stressed and exhausted and isolated to ask questions, work together, or take action, and we’re experiencing a cultural crisis in which bigotry rises, and disinformation and conspiracy confuse and divide us. The weed hedge seems impenetrable.
Friends, it’s time to pick up your pitchforks and hoes. Not to storm the capitol or the steps of Parliament, though that may come later, but because it’s time to make like Costa and do the groundwork necessary to rewild our civic imaginations.
We need to prep our mental gardens, create a rich loam of ideas to nurture more diverse species, new possibilities to pluck from as they grow and mature. And we need to ease off on the manure we’ve been shovelling in.
Let’s start with the endemic species, because some of the best ideas we’ve got to choose from today are actually very ancient, and come with this place (with credit to Debra Dank).
There are many lessons to learn from First Nations philosophies, but this could be the first seed to replant in our rewilding.
Picture our civic imaginations growing from roots which reframe our role as humans: from domineering masters of all we survey, to responsible participants in an interconnected, multi-species world. To start with, it really takes the pressure off, right?! It suddenly suggests – if we’re collaborators in this world, rather than commanders, who or what else do we have to collaborate with and learn from as we shape the solutions this world needs?
We also need to look to species thriving elsewhere, which could adapt to our changing climate here. Yet for some reason, we keep importing ideas from the US and the UK, and yikes, look at how that is turning out.
There are dozens of flourishing, nourishing and resilient ideas we could clip a cutting from: in my book, I borrowed ideas from Taiwan and Syria, Brazil, Kenya and Iceland, India and Lebanon. There are so many more places to trade seeds with.
And when we look beyond the usual sources of ideas, we might start to see that “common sense” ain’t that common and “just the way things are” doesn’t apply everywhere or everywhen.
We might find that there are options beyond “the market” for allocating resources: that ideas of commoning and stewarding are effective and enduring. And that these ideas that might have been applied to grazing pastures or fish stocks in the past have a new relevance in an age where our digital, genetic and health data are the new commons to be managed communally.
We might discover that there are different ways to manage social decision-making - aka politics - than deferring all our responsibility and agency to elected representatives or political parties. We might find that all of us and our neighbours are capable of making good decisions in our common interest, when supported through processes like deliberative democracy that unlock the wisdom of the crowd. That we are smarter and more capable than we dreamed, and there are more democratic ways of living in democracy than we’ve been taught in school or seen modelled in Canberra.
All this looking further out may help us see more clearly the priorities and values hidden in our policies. When we tend to the garden of our civic imagination, when we graft hybrids and propagate new thinking, we might start to wake up to the graft already happening in our supposedly rational system today. We might interrogate the choices made on our behalf about what we subsidise and what we tax. We’d ask: whose efforts do we penalise and whose hoarding do we incentivise? Whose hobbies do we allocate vast stretches of public land to - with credit to Briony Doyle - and most importantly, and whose costs do we discount, at our planet’s cost, at our future’s cost? And we might know what to demand instead.
So, how do we do this? Just when you thought this poor exhausted metaphor could do no more, I will ask you to grasp the handle one more time.
My last question is this: what tools do we need to rewild our civic imaginations?
Sociologist Tim Eatman has created a beautiful metaphor which I will borrow for our gardening working bee.
Professor Eatman says art, music, literature - culture and creation – they are central to restoring our depleted civic imaginations. He invites us to use our hands to revive our imagination in a multi-sensory way.
Tim starts with the thumb – hope is the opposable thumb, humanity’s humble superpower, which gives us the capability to grab onto something.
Next, we have the pointer finger of history: it facilitates a reckoning with the true facts of social reality. It can point backwards in time to give us context, or forward to give us a direction, and it grounds us in this moment in time. We are here, now, and this moment matters.
This one is my favourite: the middle finger is the sense of passion. We need all that outrage and urgency, it is the energy source that propels our efforts towards change.
But – we need more than passion. The ring finger reminds us that we’re all in relation with each other, it reminds us of the centrality of empathy in shaping civic imagination.
Finally, the pinky gives us traction and balance, and it represents planning and strategy. It shows us every small part of the body politic matters, and that good plans are only good when they include us all.
Prof Eatman says to truly effect change and touch one another we need to use all five senses of critical engagement, which you have at your fingertips.
We have rewilding to do, and a garden to tend to, but we have all the tools we need right here.