Helen Visscher



“So let us agree: the idea of the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascinations and fads… it primarily rises up from the streets.” (David Harvey, Rebel Cities, 2019). Cities are “messy places, full of the mingling of many individual imaginations.” (Paul Dobraszczyk., Future Cities Architecture And The Imagination, 2019). “Revolution must be reinvented, but first we must recognize—re-cognize—it!.” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1991) “Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space.” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974) “Politics in urban space must always be thought and performed in relation to architecture.” (Debra Shaw, Posthuman Urbanism, 2018) “Festival like revolution marks both a break in everyday life and a rehabilitation of the everyday.” (Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 1947) “Thought space, and spatial thought”, reproduce “the projection, explosion, image and the orientation of the body”. (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1991) “Perhaps if urban citizens were freed from the rules imposed on them by municipal authorities, they would create a city of bits...in an extraordinary organic assemblage of individual structures.” (Paul Dobraszczyk., Future Cities Architecture And The Imagination, 2019). “The fact that this world is coming out of nothing, … that it is without models, without principle …that is precisely what forms the justice and the meaning of a world.” (Jean-Luc Nancy) “Spatial justice is not the ground or indeed the final destination." (Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Spatial Justice., 2015)

Urban imagination and the performance of Protest:
An analysis of the ways in which Tree Protection Camps use performative modes of activism to challenge socio-spatial norms and incite change.

The photos presented stand for themselves but are also a personal record of my experiences at the sites in North London from winter of 2020 to autumn of 2021. They describe two independent sites as they were visited chronologically. Reading these photos alongside seminal spatial theory allows new light to be shone on both academia and activism and is presented as food for thought. Through this visual essay I hope you can draw parallels with the work, or perhaps even stimulate a little desire for activism.