Bristol’s never-ending makeover: why we need art to be part of urban change

Photo by William Chang on Unsplash

Bristol is a city which seems to be in a perpetual state of physical reinvention. Cranes dominate the skyline. We are constantly being asked to reassess our relationship to the topography of the city as new buildings spring up.

When I moved to Bristol in 1999 as a student, the population was around 390,000. The population now is around 460,000 and is projected to grow by 70,000 over the next 20 years (Source: Bristol City Council).

But at what cost? Bristol is widely recognised as a progressive, green city that tries to do things differently. For those of us who live here, we also know that there are lots of things that don’t work about it. Artspace Lifespace’s recent eviction from Unit 15 in St Phillips shows that there’s a critical need to consider the place of artists and cultural organisations in the future of our cities as old industrial spaces are redeveloped. We know that there’s a national housing crisis. We know that Bristol needs to build more houses and that more of them need to be affordable. We also know that Bristol’s student population is growing and that there are challenges and opportunities associated with this. We know that there are concerns about gentrification and pseudo-public land. We know that if cities continue to grow there needs to be some big ambitious thinking about food sustainability and how we can use our urban space to reduce the carbon footprint of what and how we eat.

It certainly feels like we are living through a particularly vigorous re-shaping of large parts of the city - St Philip’s Marsh, Temple Quarter, Broadmead, and Western Harbour are all at various stages of being redeveloped. There are some huge opportunities here for us to come up with some bold ideas that create a city that works for everyone.

But what are those bold ideas? And how can culture help us all collectively imagine a brighter future for our city?

What has frustrated me so much about the current discourse around 15-minute cities is that it’s such a massive failure of imagination and creativity. It seems that there is the potential for a wildly misplaced conspiracy theory to be accepted as a legitimate argument against creating cities where people can walk or cycle to shops, schools, universities, places of work, places to be creative. When you actually think about what 15-minute cities could offer us socially, environmentally, and culturally it’s completely bonkers that anyone could possibly argue against it. But here we are.

So if there’s a failure of leadership over creating cities that are pleasant places to live, then what happens if we artists and creative organisations are at the centre of the debate about how we shape the Bristol of the future? What if we used art to reflect back the contemporary city as experienced by its residents?

We’re not bad at doing that here in Bristol. From Knowle West Media Centre’s WeCanMake to Artspace Lifespace’s long history of working with a range of partners to safeguard the future of buildings across the city, to ‘Capacity’, the much-missed meanwhile use programme run by Bristol City Council and Bristol Ideas’ Festival of the Future City, there are brilliant people all over the city encouraging us to think differently about the way we could live. Emma Harvey (Trinity Centre) and LaToyah McAllister-Jones (St Paul’s Carnival) are currently convening a city-wide conversation about how we might use citizen assemblies to create a citizen-led cultural plan for the city.

And here at MAYK, we have a long history of subverting how we understand the city around us. From temporary hotels on the harbourside to 24-day continuous soundscapes in bombed-out churches, to dancing on the roofs of multi-storey car-parks, we’ve always used Bristol as something of a playground. We’ve used our creative programme as a way of encouraging people to reimagine our relationship with the city.

Since we moved to St Anne’s in 2021, as Bristol opened up post-lockdown, we began to investigate more deeply how our work could offer something deeper to the people who live in the city. ‘Place-making’ is a buzzword that we shy away from. It’s become so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless, and also implies a hierarchical/top-down approach where power dynamics dictate who decides what makes a ‘place’. But we have been thinking about how we can build even stronger connections to the city we call home. This work is slow and takes time. And we have to start by listening, talking and understanding.

One of the ways we’re doing that is by strengthening our commitment to artists making work in Bristol and inviting them to develop ideas and artworks about their experience of living here.

This winter, we’re digging into all this with a project called Confluence, commissioned by Ginkgo Projects as part of The Glassworks. At the heart of this project is an invitation for us to reflect on how Bristol is changing, and more specifically how the people who live and work here have shaped its past, are shaping its present and could shape its future.

We chose ‘Confluence’ as the title for this project because it conjures images of things flowing into each other, of meeting points, of transience and movement. And we believe that art can play a vital role in helping shape our collective future. It helps us to see the landscape around us differently. It pulls us out of the everyday.

Bristol has a rich musical heritage and so we came up with the idea of making a concept album. Not your ordinary album of music tracks, but a collection of work in different art forms that come together to offer an insight into how Bristol is changing.

Each ‘track’ is its own snapshot of the city as the artist sees it. Each track asks a different question of its audience or shines a light on a particular aspect of Bristol now.

We’ve invited four artists to create tracks for the project – Travis Alabanza, Ryan Convery-Moroney, Verity Standen and Asmaa Jama. You can find out more about them and their ideas here.

We’re interested in how space and community intersect, how memory shapes our understanding of the past, and how the stories we tell each other conjure up worlds beyond the offices, flats and roads.

This is a new way of working for us – a kind of conceptual residency that invites artists into a process where we learn and share together.

We’ll be sharing the outcomes of this work over the first weekend of December at a location (TBA) in central Bristol. Each of the artists will share the outcomes of their work over the past few months and there’ll be an opportunity for you to contribute your thoughts, reflections and hopes too.

Do come and join us on 1–3 December, and if you’re not already signed up, join our mailing list to find out more about the project as it develops.

And finally, if you live in Bristol and want to contribute to the conversation about the future of the centre of Bristol, there are consultations open here and here. Bristol Cable also has an excellent series of articles and resources that look specifically at the future of the city.

– Matthew Austin, Co-Director, MAYK