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Rethinking the institutions of place

Assemblages. Jan Gehl once suggested that it takes 100 years to create a community. The implication might be that in between times, it is too early to tell.

Recently, the Queen visited Ireland. It is a hundred years since a royal visited the country. At that time, the political geography of the world looked different. Today, the landscape is much changed, as are the institutions that govern these geographies. Indeed, so too are the institutions that form the backbone of ordinary, everyday life.

Assemblage is a word borrowed from the world of media. It builds on the idea and practice of remixing, the blurring of distinctions between original and borrowed work. As the political geography of the world continues to change, new assemblages form in our places, new people, new purposes, new meanings.

I used to go to mass when I was young. The ritual of attendance was a tacit condition of one of the key institutions of the state, the catholic church. Everybody went every Sunday. Everybody dressed up in the best clothes, and crammed into the car to get to the church early or late depending on how your family works. From the moment you arrived, you were surrounded by a theatrical acting out of the local social order.

Women and children marched straight into the church and sat. Men lingered, chatting to others outside. Some stayed outside for the whole mass, smoking, posturing, chatting. They didn’t go home ‘til they meet someone they know coming out who could tell them what the sermon was about. Even the hardmen outside the church gate fear the interrogation of their mothers at home. Inside, the congregation splits into the social hierarchy of the parish. The postman, the headmaster and the local businessmen sit up front. The pretenders sit close by.

Families from one side of the parish sit on the balcony, families from the other in the middle row. Old men gather chatting, giggling and gossiping at the back. In this scene, the gaze of a child is often less cast towards the altar and more towards the other youth. This is a place to see, to be seen, for friends, suitors and foe. In my parish, we celebrated the fast priests who could get the mass finished in under half an hour, liberating us to get outside, meet others, chat and laugh.

For me, the religious element of the ritual of going to mass was secondary to the experience of learning how to be a boy, a youth, a man among communities of others. I learned respect and disrespect, harmony and anger, conformity and challenge in equal measure. Only some of this was about religion directly.

It often struck me that the key elements of the mass were both the ritual and the ceremony. Many people didn’t really ask why they went to mass, they just went. In mass, the drone of partly apathetic responses to the ceremony filled the space of the church. Not irregularly did people comment that, at one level, it was just an act of going through the motions. However, from a social perspective it was much more.

When I grew up, there was hardly anyone that wasn’t Irish, wasn’t white, wasn’t catholic in my parish. The institution of the church, its rituals and ceremonies brought together an assemblage of particular people of varying degrees of faith. Today, the landscape is very different. The church has lost much of its national and local institutional dominance. It no longer represents the view of views. The populations have changed dramatically. On a bus recently, I overheard a beautiful little black girl, maybe 4 or 5 years old, explaining to her mother how to pronounce the colour blue* in Irish. It’s a curious thing about language. It is entirely an assemblage.

Professor Stuart Gulliver speaks about three aspects of place, the hardware, the software and the organo-ware or the frameworks that govern. In simpler times, the organo-ware was a simpler issue. The church, the state and the Gaelic Athletic Association governed most communities in Ireland. Today, they still do but less so. The institutional and organisational framework of the place, at all scales is changing. What is interesting about the issue of the mass is that it was a single purpose event, which brought people together with shared cultural norms and values. It was curated. At the actual event, other things unfolded, other purposes. It was appropriated.

This is no lament to re-create the institutional dominance of the church, nor the separating out of cultures nor the arbitrary protectionism of small differences. Rather, it is an attempt to try and understand how, if it were desireable, the local organo-ware of place might work today. In a 21st century context, where there is greater diversity in population, in expectations, in life experiences, what are the spaces that different assemblages can form to learn about how to be a citizen of the world?

* ‘gorm’ is the Irish for the colour blue

Diarmaid Lawlor
Diarmaid Lawlor is head of urbanism at Architecture and Design Scotland

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