Embedded Files
We coined the term Live Writing in 2023 to describe forms of writing that might work as active, close acts of care for a place: acts which extend towards a context in order to pay attention to it, make connections to others who inhabit it, and reveal ongoing, relational ways of being there. Live Writing, emerging from practices of walking the urban landscapes of Sheffield, is architecture writing – writing spatially in time – as practice. It makes sense of and gives voice to the myriad ecologies that have been forgotten in the past, buried in multiple presents or voided as valid futures.
What does it mean to care for a city, where discourses of care can be criticised as ‘hollowed out’ through cliched use and marketisation? What does it mean to read a place from within, which can only be partially legible? What does it mean to care when our partial legibilities overlap, bringing some things into focus and making others emerge as subtly strange and out of order?
Live Writing is not merely notation of a site, but – drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s term – a practice of deterritorialising, un/learning the way that it has been previously storied through deindustrialisation and decline, vestiges of Empire or through pioneering radicality. Writing iteratively, actively is a tactic to make sense of human and nonhuman entanglement and the ways we together make, purpose and reinvent infrastructures, whether the tangible, material stuff that sustains life or the different systems and structures that make society.
by Emma Cheatle and Luis Hernan
key references
Haraway, D. (1990). ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. by Linda J. Nicholson. London: Routledge, pp. 190–233;
Rendell, J. (2007). ‘Site-Writing: She Is Walking About In A Town Which She Does Not Know’, Home Cultures, 4: pp. 177-199;
Cheatle, E. (2020). ‘Writing walking: ficto-critical routes through eighteenth-century London’, in Frichot and Stead (eds.), Writing Architectures Ficto-Critical Approaches. Bloomsbury, pp. 112–125;
Agyeman, J. (1990). ‘Black People in a White Landscape: Social and Environmental Justice’, Built Environment, 16.3 , pp. 232–36;
Hernan, L. (2025), ‘Caring for the Future: Brightside’, in Design of Care, ed. by Paul Rodgers. Routledge, Forthcoming.
The economic policies of the Conservative government in the 1980s and 1990s mean a drastic deindustrialisation of the North of England, creating widespread unemployment and the tearing apart of local communities. There are a few ‘success stories’ of industries which have remained in Brightside, such as the Sheffield Forgemasters. Image by Luis Hernan, 2023.
The Ickles Level Crossing, part of the North Midland Railway connecting Manchester to Leeds and serving factories and mines in Brightside. Still in use for passenger trains, the crossing serves as testament of the industrial infrastructure of the site now recommissioned. Image by Luis Hernan, 2023.
Qualimach factory on the River Don, Sheffield. Brightside developed as an industrial hub first in the eighteenth century. Few factories remain active on the site. Image by Luis Hernan, 2023.
RESEARCH PROJECT
RESEARCH PROJECT
Live Writing as Care
Live Writing as Care
project
Writing as minoritarian storytelling
team
Dr Emma Cheatle and Dr Luis Hernan
project summary
The project explores writing – architecture writing – as an alternative spatial and radical performance of care. Putting words onto paper about a place necessitates a slow engagement with its environment, materiality, people and critters; its pasts, presents and futures. Live writing emerged as a tool central to our analysis of the industrial east of Sheffield, while walking through Kelham Island and Brightside. The early writing was a material process of scoping the area yet aimed to reveal the intricacies and political dimension of the intersection of acts and actors of care, bringing to the fore how the site opened and suggested itself to the body and subjectivities of the writer. This engagement
enabled us to notice and document the physical and cultural features as they revealed and suggested themselves. It was performed through a series of field notes, with emerging questions opening up potential histories and everyday materialities, to be taken to archival and desk based research.
methods used to think through care
Live Writing is 'close writing' that pays attention to a place and transcribes the act of 'close reading' its materialities, inhabitants and archive to reveal histories and infrastructures as everyday forms and fragilities that sustain and harm communities. The act of reading a place through this kind of writing goes beyond the notational and personal to become a political act in theorising the complicity of productive architecture and urban design in the processes of colonialism and capitalism.
entanglements of justice in care and design
Our practice understands writing and storytelling as an expanded field; a way of paying attention to, troubling and caring. Our approach has parallels in other fields in which the practices of storytelling are used to spatialise the affective dimensions of sites. For example, novelist Danielle Dutton reflects on the way that freeing writing from the requirement of plot opens up possibilities for a ‘politics of attention’, so that specific criticisms of the world are made possible.
‘Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.’ Ursula Le Guin, 2014.
The power of writing to enact a politics of attention is explained by its role in community-making practices. Mexican historian and novelist Cristina Rivera Garza describes how storytelling, in the form of short stories, produces a ‘cultural and social space in which something hidden becomes visible, and therefore shared, but still a secret’.[1] Rob Nixon suggests that storytelling has a role in bearing witness to ‘slow violence’, a term he uses to refer to ‘situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded’.[2] By narrating stories of slow violence, we run against the rules of contemporary storytelling’s assumptions of violence as spectacular and immediate. A minoritarian act of writing bypasses the gloss of content, deterritorialising divided places to offer crucial acts of resistance.[3]
references
Garza C.R., and Booker, S., (2022). New and Selected Stories. New York Review of Books.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, p. 3
Deleuze, G. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Theory and History of Literature, 30. University of Minnesota Press.
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