Talking Volumes

Leslie Kern is the author of The Feminist City [https://www.versobooks.com/books/3227-feminist-city] — Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, a book which, since publication in 2019, has sparked conversations between those who design the city, and those who study it, and who live in it. In this episode, she speaks with Reuben J. Brown about the inequities and complexities of our dominant urban designs and ways of living, while looking towards more liveable, more just, alternatives. And the new urban world Leslie Kern imagines in the Feminist City isn’t designed in a top-down, universalising way — like the utopian urban dreams of the mid 20th Century. Rather, she seeks existing and historical pockets of feminist cities and asks what it would mean to extrapolate those models more broadly. Leslie’s [https://twitter.com/lellyk?lang=en] academic background is in gender studies: she’s currently an associate professor of geography and environment, and director of women’s and gender studies, at Mount Allison University in Canada. And she brings this viewpoint to discussing the city: acknowledging the complex layers of physical infrastructure and human relationships; private homes, and public squares, that make up the places we live. Throughout this conversation, you’ll hear us reference writers, and design collectives who have imagined feminist alternatives, and often put them into practice. And to learn from the success of these projects, is to acknowledge that if design is to have an impact on the culture of patriarchy, it first has to change its own culture; move away from the notion of the master architect, and do a lot more listening from the bottom-up.

The Barbican Estate is possibly the most ambitious architectural statement made in the U.K. in the 20th Century. The ambition and scale of its form, and the radicalism of its ideas, are shining examples of a British post-war architecture which offered a meaningful critique and alternative to the ways of designing and living in the cities of the Industrial Revolution. In this episode we explore the Barbican: both through its onion-layered network of public and private spaces and passageways; and through its ideological foundations in the Modernist notions of ‘Blank Slate’ planning, and its relationship to the architectural style of Brutalism.

Euan’s skateboarded since he was 11 years old. In this episode, we talk about his experiences of the activity and how it interacts with public space, before going out into Cambridge to skate in the city. We also interview Matt from Cam Skate [http://cam-skate.co.uk], and imagine skateboarding as a vehicle towards unique, non-capitalistic public places, shared by everyone in the city.

In the U.K.’s first covid lockdown, Talking Volumes host Reuben worked as a waste collector in Brighton & Hove. In this episode, Euan asks Reuben about his experiences being out across the city at a time when everyone was locked at home; and how architecture changes the way our streets are cleaned, and the daily lives of the people who do that work.

The Royal Pavilion — a palace commissioned by Prince George in the late 1700s — is the icon of Brighton & Hove. It draws hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world and is front-and-centre in the Council logo. The city itself may be the U.K.’s most forward-thinking and liberal: the Brighton Pavilion constituency has the U.K.’s only Green Party M.P., and the city is often considered the ‘Queer Capital’ of the U.K. Without this building, Brighton may well have ended up just like its neighbouring former fishing towns — Hastings, Eastbourne, Newhaven, Bexhill, Worthing — conservative, sleepy. Instead, the city of today is vibrant, queer, liberal — an oddity. The Prince (Later King) George’s investment in the then village through his Pavilion set the stage for this transformation. But the Pavilion is also an icon of the colonialist ideology of the time — an ideology which the present management of the building doesn't acknowledge. In this episode, we discuss what the Royal Pavilion means for modern-day Brighton.