Rescaling Ruralities through the Art Project Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks

Abstract

Taking Company: Movements, Deals, Drinks (Company) as a case study, this essay discusses implications of carrying out rural practices within urban settings. It asks how the project might rethink relationships between rural and urban settings. It looks at how these practices unpack complexes of situations, and how the project expands possibilities of mapping urban spaces in economic and social terms. To do this, it draws on Maurizio Lazzarato's understanding of enunciation as a way of understanding the project's potential to reshape dynamic relationships that the local communities have with both social and natural spaces that exist within their urban environments.

Keywords:

• urban agriculture
• rural/urban history
• enunciation
• the commons

Notes

1. Dagenham and Barking, officially known as the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, is located in East London. Once part of the county of Essex, it was incorporated as a London borough in 1965. Before urbanization and industrialization, the area was countryside and market gardens for both London and Essex; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagenham (accessed June 9, 2016).

2. See www.c-o-m-p-a-n-y.info (accessed June 9, 2016).

3. See www.createlondon.org (accessed June 9, 2016).

4. See www.myvillages.org (accessed July 1, 2017).

5. See http://r-urban.net (accessed October 15, 2016).

6. See http://www.ueber-lebenskunst.org/index_en.html (accessed December 19, 2016).

7. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Micropolitics and Segmentarity” [1933], in A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 229–57.

8. “Integrated World Capitalism” is a phrase used by Guattari to describe globalized capitalism; Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Continuum, 2000), 46–7.

9. In the nineteenth century, hops were widely grown across Kent, and at its height between the 1920s and the 1950s the annual hop-pickers from London would total around 200,000. Cheaper, imported crops led to its decline, and today hop gardens take up fewer than 3000 acres. All but one hop harvest has been mechanized and the manual harvest is carried out by workers from Eastern Europe.

10. Valence House in Dagenham is the only surviving manor house of five in the area. It has been since been used as a family home, a town hall and, today, is a local history museum. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_House_Museum and http://www.lbbd.gov.uk/MuseumsAndHeritage/ValenceHouseMuseum/Pages/Home.aspx (accessed September 6, 2014).

11. It was mainly women and children who took part in the hop-picking, while working men often stayed at home during the week to continue their jobs, visiting their families at the weekends.

12. Raymond Williams, Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).

13. P. Cloke, T. Marsden, and P. Mooney, (eds.), Handbook of Rural Studies (London: Sage, 2006); K. Halfacree, “Rural Space: Constructing a Three-Fold Architecture,” in Handbook of Rural Studies, ed. P. Cloke, T. Marsden, and P. Mooney (London: Sage, 2006), 44–62.

14. Halfacree, “Rural Space,” 51.

15. Michael Woods, Rural (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 28.

16. K. Halfacree, “Locality and Social Representation: Space, Discourse and Alternative Definitions of the Rural,” Journal of Rural Studies, 9 (1993): 23–37.

17. For more about the hop-picking communities themselves, see Gilda O’Neill, Lost Voices (London: Random House, 2006).

18. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 74.

19. Growing Communities is a community-led enterprise that provides alternative food-growing, trading, and purchasing opportunities for local people and food producers. For more information, see http://www.growingcommunities.org/.

20. Greg Sharzer, No Local: Why Small Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World (London: Zero, 2012).

21. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge – Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordeon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 82.

22. William H. Sewell Jr., “The Temporalities of Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review, 6, no. 3 (2008): 517–37.

23. Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” In Culture and Public Action, ed. V. Rao and M. Walton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59–84 (62).

24. Ibid., 82.

25. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

26. Ibid., 174.

27. Ibid., 179.

28. Ibid.

29. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001).

30. Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 200.

31. Ibid., 243.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 181.

34. Ibid.

35. J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory,” Current Anthropology, 55, no. S9: “Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy” (2014), S147–S153, available online: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/676646 (accessed February 1, 2017).

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., S149.

38. Ibid., S151.

39. Ibid., S149.

40. J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds,’” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008), available online: law.uvic.ca/demcon/victoria_colloquium/documents/gibson_2008_progress_paper.pdf.p.2 (accessed June 18, 2015).

41. Gibson-Graham, “Rethinking the Economy,” S149.

42. Ibid., S152.