The Monthly talks to Amberlea Neely about the “9ft in Common” project – Part 4 – Organising gatherings

You have organised events or activities?

We decided not to call the things we organised events, rather we called them gatherings. We felt if you organise an event it comes with a certain expectation, that you will be coming to be entertained. Whereas by calling something a gathering, people are genuinely a part of it. We could see then, what developed as people came together to share an experience.

What did these gatherings consist of?

The first one we did took place in East Belfast on the 1st of February in the pouring rain. About 40 to 50 people turned up to make Brigid’s Crosses. Lots of interesting things happen when you put something on in what can be quite a confined space.

So we could see people standing shoulder to shoulder, some people teaching others how to make the crosses, you could see little conversations taking place, people getting to know each other.

We have explored place-naming, we have explored food, we had a feast in an alleyway, a gig in an alleyway. All sorts of interesting gatherings. We had artists, musicians and residents, different sorts of people getting together.

Would you say there was a sense of community being developed?

I think we have tried to inspire people to take action. Belfast does have a grass roots culture which often sits alongside a sense of waiting for someone to do something, for the Belfast City Council to come and clean up the space for example whereas, you don’t really need to wait for that to happen. You can make decisions to make some small changes yourself.

There was also a sense of people getting together as neighbours rather than strangers living in the same street. Little shifts like that seemed very important.

Where to now?

One of the things worth thinking about is that there are at least 202 kilometres of alleyways across the city. Can we think about this as an off-road infrastructure, or as a series of green corridors across the city? Could this network be seen as spaces of connection throughout the city?

This year for Belfast 2024 project we were able to look into the growing potential for the alleyways, and we worked with Jo Facer from Laurelbank Farm in three different alleyways,

Jo came up with the idea that if you used 10 per cent of the alleyways as places to grow food, you could grow 1.4 million carrots. Now that is just an example, and it suggests what might be possible if we applied a different logic to the alleyways. If we saw potential value in using these spaces in a different way.

We think we could come up with lots of different uses for these spaces, for example we could create greenways.

Is there anything coming up to publicise this project?

We have created a Manifesto for the Alleys and we are going to launch that on the 6th of December. We will have a limited edition of the manifesto on the day and the manifesto will be available digitally as well.

We have been inspired by an organisation called Situations and they produced a document called New Rules for Public Art. The Manifesto for the Alleys explores 9 points of action that people can take to make their alley, their community and their city better.