Keene, Tom. 2022. The housing database made visible: An artist and activist-led investigation into relational machines, aspirations, and urban regeneration. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

Preview

Text (The housing database made visible: An artist and activist-led investigation into relational machines, aspirations, and urban regeneration) DES_thesis_KeeneT_2022.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (70MB) | Preview

Abstract or Description

This research project investigates the role of government database technologies within highly contested urban regeneration schemes that demolish homes and displace communities. Such databases are unacknowledged, poorly understood, and semi-invisible to citizens and residents. As a case study, this project focuses on housing databases employed by Lambeth Borough Council in South West London to manage over 33,000 tenant, leasehold, and freehold homes. These databases inform Lambeth’s proposals to demolish the 306 properties on Cressingham Gardens Estate (Cressingham), including my own home. I argue that Lambeth’s housing databases are intimidatingly complex, inaccessible, distributed across network infrastructure, and ultimately unknowable because they constantly change. To address this complexity, I draw on work from philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Michel Foucault to theorise Lambeth’s databases as evolving collectives of human and technical components that shape government, economic, and individual aspirations for Cressingham. Following John Law, the project employs a method assemblage approach to research that incorporates a critical technical practice, social and cultural theory, action research methods, participatory art and design, computer programming, and activism as intersecting modes of enquiry in Lambeth’s database systems. Through this enquiry I explore how human aspirations to demolish or refurbish Cressingham are mediated by the tables, primary keys, and network infrastructure of Lambeth’s database systems. The outcomes of this work include diagrams, workshops, contraptions, programming code, algorithms, a bike trailer, and contributions to the @SaveCressingham activist campaign. This assemblage of artist and activist practice exposes and critiques the technological, political, ethical, interpersonal, and material implications of Lambeth’s database technologies on residents’ lives.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00031990
Keywords:	databases, urban regeneration, housing, art, design, activism, method assemblage,critical technical practice, Simondon, Foucault, Cressingham
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Design
Date:	30 June 2022
Item ID:	31990
Date Deposited:	12 Jul 2022 10:53
Last Modified:	08 Sep 2022 13:30
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31990

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record (login required)