Leeds, UK
Mission Title: Social Landscapes – University of Leeds “Timescapes”
Mission By: Stefano Miazzo, Nicole Busetto
Mission Finished on Date: 10-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Go to the University of Leeds and speak with a researcher about the project. Emphasize the spatial aspect of the project in your conversation. How does space and the city come into play through the project? How does the project attempt to capture the social landscape?
- Examine with the researcher some of the kinds of material they’ll be looking at from quantitative data to photographs.
- If available, speak with one of the future subjects of the study, how do they feel to be taking part in the study, how does it work for them?
- After you lave your conversation, and you feel you feel like you fully understand the project, take a look at the city of Leeds, how does your view of the city change after thinking about it over the ong view. Capture people, streets, moments of poetic import in your interaction with the city. Or, if you like talk about how you would feel about your life being examined so closely over such a long time.
- Whatever you do after the interview, with your camera, with creativity or sheer documentary, capture your response to the project.
TRAVEL BAG
What are the experiences of people in space over time?
In building a city, before there are bricks and mortar, before there are streets and sidewalks, doorknobs and sewer pipes, are people, the soft, fleshy center of the microverse we call the city. Understanding how and what people do, what their needs are, and how they evolve over time is fundamental to understanding what they hell cities and architecture are made of and more importantly who they are made for.
Despite it’s rather hokey title, the Timescapes project initiated by the University of Leeds attempts to capture the quality of human relationships over time, using both hard and soft data to figure how people change. Of particular interest to us is the spatial aspect of the project, how does it reveal and or study how human beings interct over time through space: in the city, in neighborhoods, in the street, and in their houses. The £4.5 million project will follow 400 people from diverse backgrounds, ages, professions, and neighborhoods over the period of five years. Similar projects have been done in the past for both artistis (like the 7-up movies) and for multiple academic studies, but none so large and so inclusive of the human experience in modern cities.
