How does the 9ft in Common project come about?
The majority of the work I do is responding to briefs which other people have written. 9ft in Common is the opposite of that, in that it doesn’t come from someone else’s brief.
It came at a time when I had just moved into a new house and when I was viewing the house I went to the bottom of the back garden and I opened a creaky back gate. I was faced with an alleyway which looked more like a country lane than an urban alleyway. I was immediately intrigued by that space, it had a kind of nostalgic feeling. It looked like somewhere it would have great to play as kid because it was all overgrown and mysterious.
And that lead me to me to ask lots of different questions. For example: Who owns the space at the back of our house? Do I own it? Why isn’t it like other urban alleyways? Who is meant to maintain the space? Is it a shared space?
I started delving into those questions by emailing the Department of Infrastructure and Belfast City Council. I was trying to get access to a map of that space and I was finding it really difficult to get information. In fact I didn’t get very much information, and I know how to go about this. I have contacts in these areas, I know who to speak to and I feel quite comfortable contacting the people you need to contact and I know what questions to ask. If I was finding it difficult, I was wondering how other people were going about getting information on their own alleyway.
Around about the same time, a collaborator who I’d worked with previously, Aisling Rusk from Studio idir, contacted me about a call-out for ideas from a UK Trust called SHED. The way they work normally is through word of mouth and relationship building. They would usually approach people they wanted to work with. But this was around the time of Covid and Lockdown and they put out this Open Call which was something they hadn’t done before. They were looking for interesting projects to work on.
What happens then?
I spoke to Aisling about the alleyways and her PHD research is all about contested spaces, leftover spaces, particularly in cities of conflict, and she was really enthusiastic about working on a project that could link our common interests.
So, we pulled together a proposal about uncovering information about Belfast’s alleyways. The whole idea was that we would find out as much as we could about the alleyways and then feed that information back to the City. We wanted to do it in such a way that it would peak people’s curiosity about these spaces.
The first thing we did was create a map of the alleyways, every alleyway in the city, and we published that map. We were able to offer information about the alleyways, were they gated, were they owned by Belfast City Council, or had the spaces been “adopted” by the Department of Infrastructure, “adopted” spaces are maintained by the Council.
We could show how some spaces were maintained and others were “unadopted” and were not maintained by anyone.
After that, we started to think about the potential for these spaces and the name for the project emerged from an original deed map for my house which was created in 1902 and this referred to a shared ‘9 foot passage in common’. That means that everyone in the street shared access to that space. I think that is an important aspect of the project, that these spaces are shared spaces.
To follow up on the work of Amberlea Neely see the links below
