John Bingham-Hall | Choreographing the City: Morning Conversations

Dr. John Bingham-Hall is Director of the charitable research centre Theatrum Mundi (TM), which aims to expand the practices of city-making through projects linking built environment and artistic disciplines, and Honorary Senior Lecturer at UCL STEaPP. With TM he has led programmes on cultural infrastructure, sonic urbanism, urban commons, and choreographing urban mobility. He has held research posts at LSE Cities and UCL STEaPP and an associate lectureship at Central Saint Martins. He has a multi-disciplinary academic background, holding a BMus (Music) from Goldsmiths College, and an MSc (Advanced Architectural Studies). His PhD (Architectural Space & Computation) from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture focused on hyperlocal media, mapping relationships between urban form, communication technologies, and the neighbourhood public sphere. His ongoing research interest is in the ways urban design shapes the public lives of cities, linking technology, performance, media, and infrastructure as topics and methodologies.

In this Morning Conversation we will be looking at infrastructure as art, scores as infrastructure. We will begin from the perspective that thinking about designing, ‘infrastructure’ is about designing underlying conditions on top of which people can build their own spaces and forms of expression, rather than fixing identities through providing ‘end results’ of creative processes (for instance public art works, creative districts) that are targeted at particular sets of imagined users. Urbanists are associated with being about architecture, but it is important that urbanity involves noticing a combination of political environments, overlapping networks of communities and cultures, the multiplicity of simultaneous activities going on, different meanings (such as at different points of the day); exploring how the environment is approached and used. Essences that in our last conversation with Dr Scott L Pratt,  we touch on as noticing agency beyond ourselves in the Logic of Place and also as in terms of the Demonic (McKittrick).