Dunn - Dark Matters

First published by Zero Books, 2016

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Text copyright: Nick Dunn 2015

ISBN: 978 1 78279 748 7

978 1 78279 747 0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939766

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Nick Dunn as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Silvering

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Exit Wounds

Words & Music by The Obsession

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For Sarah

Nick Dunn is the author of numerous books on architecture, art practices, design processes and urbanism. He is Chair of Urban Design at Imagination, an open and exploratory research lab at Lancaster University where he is also Research Director for the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and Associate Director of the Institute for Social Futures. He lives and walks in Manchester.

Many of the ideas in Dark Matters were initially auditioned as talks, walks and conversations. I am grateful to the audiences, wayfarers and raconteurs who listened, shared their thoughts and gave me encouragement and feedback along the way. The original premise for this book was first presented as part of the Sensing Architecture symposium held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 29th March 2014. The enthusiastic reception for it is the root for what follows. Whilst this book is about my experiences of nocturnal urban landscapes, many of its ideas and the thinking around them were further refined through walks in the daytime and for this I am indebted to my walking companion Zola, an astute and instinctive critic. Considerable thanks are also necessary to my family and friends who have supported and been understanding of my nocturnal peregrinations over the years. Difficult circumstances in the last few years have on numerous occasions led to nightwalking being fundamental to restoring balance, living proof that amongst the darkness there is always meaning.

If I were to thank everyone who inspired or buoyed the writing of Dark Matters, the book and our journey into the nocturnal city together would never get started, so I will stick to the trodden path (for once) and focus only on those who provided direct help with copyrighted material or worked closely on the manuscript. Therefore, I would like to thank Julie Campbell aka LoneLady for allowing me to include her lyrics in this book, Jon Ashley and Mike Gray aka the Sov Twins for enabling me to use lyrics from The Obsession and also Rebecca Boulton for her help in gaining permission to use lyrics from Joy Division. I would also like to give my sincerest gratitude to Doug Lain for his patience during this books production, Dominic C. James for his help along the way and Emma Jacobs for her attentive copy-editing and proofreading.

Thinking about the elusive, spectral and sometimes fleeting nature of walking through cities at night is why this book is now in front of you. Therein lies an immediate issue which rather than push into the shadows we should bring into discussion. Capturing the essence of the nocturnal city could well be an oxymoron. Antoine de Saint-Exuprys incantation serves well here: Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again (1986, 10). Yet the apparent redundancy of words to ascribe explanation to and of the nocturnal city is the essential reason to engage them. The nature of the urban night and its shifting qualities is the reason why I have been compelled to write about it. However, it is within attempting to describe this fluid character that the difficulty also becomes obvious. Cities are subject to change; they are constructions and agglomerations of myriad elements. But they are also reconstructions. Cities are created, shaped and remain as much in our imagination as in hard material facts. So how to best convey the flux and fleetingness, the rip and curl of the night across the urban landscape? This book has been a while coming. In fact its very brevity has been instrumental to its delay. Numerous people I spoke to about this book during its gestation period have been fascinated by the idea of it and what it might contain. I hope they and you will not be disappointed. The desire to share some of my experiences and reasons for exploring the urban night are what follows. The sketchy origins of this book are rooted in over twenty-five years of walking around cities at night. From the outer suburbs of Greater Manchester during my teenage years; exploring the coal-mined landscape, abandoned buildings, industrial detritus and decay; to more recent encounters with international cities around the world; investigating drastic differences and nuanced similarities, the nocturnal city has been a constant, if not always coherent, companion. There is so much to enjoy out there, I hope this book inspires you to do so.

Before we encounter more ideas, I would like to briefly divert the readers attention towards the format of this book and its contents. As an entity it serves a dual purpose as it seeks to provide a proposition: a call and response to its own concepts if you will. It is therefore arranged into a series of short essays that explore different dimensions to nightwalking in cities. The first may be thought of as an introduction, which presents the strange familiarity of the nocturnal city. There follow sections on: walking, sensing, connecting and thinking. Clearly, as in life, these are not delaminated layers of being and there is much overlap between them as they shape and converse with each other. Finally, a conclusion on what I have termed a manifesto for nightwalking in cities.

Interspersed between these more analytical and theoretical texts are descriptive accounts from some of my own walks around one city. Initially, I had considered whether each one of these should be from different cities I have walked around at night. In the interests of the overall work, I made a conscious decision to draw on a number of experiences from one city, Manchester. As well as being my home city and the one with which I am most familiar, there are two main reasons for this. Firstly, no two walks at night are ever the same and those described here intersect and trace over each other, which enables me to explain the distinct differences within the composite whole. Secondly, whilst walking in new, unfamiliar cities can be a rewarding and rich experience, I wish to direct attention to the familiar and the everyday in order to extol their virtues (and of course sometimes their downright strangeness) which I believe would not be possible in the same way if multiple locations were chosen. The adjacency, rather than complete integration, of the narratives with the essays in the different sections of the book is intentional, to reinforce the connection between theory and practice whilst retaining their distinctive qualities. I hope the reader will understand and forgive this digression. It is the first of many.