Thammasat University students interested in urban studies, architecture, sociology, history, business, media and communications, folklore, cultural studies, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 20 June Zoom webinar on Graphic heritage: Politics, power & placemaking.
The event, on Thursday, 20 June 2024 at 6pm Bangkok time, is presented by the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, Leicestershire, the United Kingdom.
According to the event website,
Retail streets are full of graphic communication such as signage, imagery, pattern, and colour. This can be defined as a form of everyday urban graphic heritage that not only enables people to experience or be informed about heritage, but also informs our understanding of, and relationship with, place. This seminar will primarily focus on two very different shopping areas within Walthamstow in London, one of which has, in part, been the recipient of a planned National Lottery funded Townscape Heritage Regeneration scheme. By applying a combination of detailed attention to the visual outcomes of design decisions while situating these in relevant broader theoretical, social, cultural, and political contexts the seminar will discuss how the power and politics inherent in these seemingly mundane design choices can impact on one’s experience of place.
The TU Library collection includes research about different aspects of retail streets.
The speaker will be Dr. Alison Barnes, a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication and a member of the Institute of Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia.
Students are invited to register for this free event at the following link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gTU4CpEMRaaHPbYY3q0unw#/registration
Two years ago, Dr. Barnes coauthored an article on Food’s urban graphic heritage in Walthamstow for a research seminar presentation.
The study abstract:
Food’s material and symbolic values are central to cultural heritage. Urban foodscapes are dense in graphic communication, with memories and meanings that connect us with place often triggered by food’s ‘graphic heritage’, for example, through fascia signs, packaging, branding, patterns, and lettering. This paper’s focus is on everyday grass roots manifestations of food’s graphic heritage within urban settings. It introduces and argues that food’s urban graphic heritage ‘speaks’ differently to diverse individuals and communities, inviting different interpretations that play a part in the development of place attachment and social interaction. The paper also proposes methods for the recording and analysis of these relatively understudied urban features. Questions about what ‘design literacy’ might mean in a multicultural context are discussed as well as notions of power and politics inherent within design choices made in urban environments.
From the article’s introduction:
The relationship between food and cities has become a multifaceted preoccupation in the early part of the twenty-first century, though food has been available on the street since the beginning of human settlement.
Food is increasingly one of the ways in which cities are positioning and promoting themselves, both at an international level through initiatives such as the UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy and through more local experiences like Manchester’s ‘curry mile’.
The comprehensive way food has shaped both the urban fabric and our urban lives provides insight into how ‘cities, like people, are what they eat’.
In this sense, urban foodscapes are diverse and shifting social constructions that connect food, people, place and meaning. Food not only provides us with essential nourishment but also plays a central role in the construction of our identity and relationship with place.
Thus, foodscapes are sites of connection and conflict and food’s material and symbolic values are central to cultural heritage. In the twenty-first century what cities ‘eat’ has also come to define how they look, and what is consumed visually as well as gastronomically.
Consequently, in urban foodscapes across the world, graphic images play a pivotal role in mediating our experience of, and relationship to, place and the subsequent association this has with cultural heritage.
This is introduced here as the concept of food’s urban graphic heritage, and this paper focuses on this as encountered in Walthamstow in East London.
It proposes a methodological approach to its study and discusses some of the issues it reveals about design’s impact on place.
- Context
This paper interrogates the nexus between food, heritage and place.
It is the result of a developing research collaboration between the authors that, in bringing together individual interests, sheds new light on the role graphic heritage plays in food related place-making strategies within multicultural urban contexts.
This section introduces the development of a research scoping study in Walthamstow, London, and an overview of the core concepts that form its basis.
We first provide some background to the origin of the research, and a working definition of graphic heritage.
The concept of food is then explored through the notion of the foodscape and associated designscape, before a brief introduction to Walthamstow.
As our perspective is that of graphic designers, we also emphasise the design context by showing how design literacy emerges from graphic design to be valued as a central idea in the development and improvement of urban places.
These diverse, but closely related concepts form the basis of an exploratory hypothesis that seeks to define graphic heritage as a useful tool for synthesising the diverse academic interests associated with cities, food, heritage, and graphic representation.
2.1 Background to the research study
We had been independently investigating the role of ‘graphic heritage’ in the urban environment and the relationship between food and migrant placemaking activities.
At the Graphic Design Educators’ Network ‘Beyond the Margins: Tools, Strategies and Urgencies Transforming Graphic Design Research’ symposium held at the Royal College of Art in May 2019, we engaged in the first of a series of conversations that began to recognise and define the rich potential inherent in the relationship between these areas of research focus.
This led to a site visit to Kingsland Road, Hackney, London, in September 2019, providing the opportunity to evaluate how cafés and restaurants use various graphic treatments to convey a sense of identity most often associated with their place of origin.
It crystalised the recognition of a clear link between food and graphic heritage and provided the impetus to develop further research. Initially, the planned focus was the role graphic heritage might play in migrant’s place-making activities in an urban context.
For example, lengthy discussion took place about the symbolism associated with an Ethiopian café that featured the colours of the national flag on its exterior. Such decisions about graphic communication were positioned as graphic design decisions with clear heritage connotations, regardless of who made them. In this case the distinctive use of colour.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)