Jennifer Oguguo Yr 5

Fort Bec: Cultural backdrops for hybrid publics ‘Fort Bec’ stages a creative park in the centre of the Becontree Estate, a historical housing development forming an island on the edge of London. The ongoing discussion surrounding the Thames Gateway Development understands Dagenham as a growing cultural hotspot, with a rapid increase in cultural bodies materialising across the area. Fort Bec takes advantage of the investments from the newly briefed freeport development along Dagenham Dock. Envisaging a cultural wall, Parsloe Park morphs into numerous manifestations of cultural stewardship, bearing the costume of an industrial estate. Envisioning painting halls with picnic spots and local storage with prop archives. A typology of public park is produced surrounding thesis research discussing democratic models of public space.

Territories between industrial, public and cultural architecture inform space based in radical concepts by Chantal Mouffe and Pierre Bourdieu – who remark cultural publics, contradictions and conflicts of space as embodies of democracy. Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’ imagines Fort Bec as a ‘public fortress’, an asset for a changing community, developing industrial and public stages as backdrops for culture in the everyday. If home is considered one’s castle, Fort Bec is a public fortress carving public territory in the changing public-scapes of the Thames Gateway.

How might we deal with a problem that is wicked, if not to trick it into thinking it is good?

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