Paige Livingstone
Milton Keynes (MK) was built in 1967, making it 52 years old. It’s the proud owner of more than 300 roundabouts (BBC4, 2017). Due to the roads being built in a grid system you literally cannot drive more than a kilometer without reaching a roundabout. MK is also famous for its concrete cows – such an ‘oasis of tarmac’ (BBC4, 2017:6min 39) is MK that we even had to construct our own wildlife. It’s exactly the kind of place that the Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s would have hated.
The Situationists were a group based in Paris who criticised the gentrification of urban spaces in capitalist societies (Bridger, 2013). They called for the recognition of cities as places for imagination, exploration and co-operation . They recognised the need for cities that welcome lively culture rather than rigidly designed spaces (Pyyry, 2018). The manufactured, industrial, cookie cutter impression that I have of my hometown is something I believe the Situatonists felt of their own urban areas. MK is exactly the kind of place the Situationists rebelled against – a meticulously planned and constructed city, everything in its place and nothing without a purpose. The Milton Keynes Development Corporation set out to build a utopia (BBC4, 2017), but my experience was far from one of someone living in utopia. There is nothing unique or different in MK. There are no independent cafes, clothing shops, restaurants or other shops. I didn’t realise how much of this I missed as I was growing up, but moving to Manchester, where the culture and history of the city feels ever present and clearly has influenced every corner of this place has cast the soullessness of MK into harsh daylight. MK was rigidly designed, intended for practicality and ease of use.
Partly because it was built so recently and partly because of the layout of the place, being in Milton Keynes makes you feel is if you’re standing in a place devoid of culture. The Milton Keynes Development Corporation oversaw the planning and development of MK up until 1992 (BBC4, 2017). They did consider culture creation when designing the city, stating ‘you can’t build a city just of houses and factories and shops’ (BBC4, 2017:20min 36). They were self aware at least, but slapping artistic sculptures around the city does not a culture make.
My experience of growing up in MK has led me to associate these negative feelings with the city and develop harsh and critical opinions towards it. It has become a “place” to me rather than a “space” – the difference between the two being that a “space” is a generic description of a physical area, whereas a “place” is something that holds personal meaning for a person (Cresswell, 2004). Of course MK is a place to me, I would defy anyone to view their hometown, the space in which they were born, developed and grew up, as anything but a place. And although I do have many negative opinions about MK, I am also very defensive of it – as if I am allowed to critique it, but no one else is. There are also parts of MK that I appreciate. For the first nineteen years of my life I lived in Bletchley, more specifically a ten minute walk away from Bletchley Park, a place of huge historical significance. It makes me proud to be able to say that I lived there, despite having only properly visited Bletchley Park a small handful of times. There is definitely only one Bletchley Park in the world, so perhaps it’s not fair to say that there is nothing in MK that is unique.
I’ve also come to appreciate what MK represented to its residents when it was first built, reminding me of how subjective and personal the placemaking experience is. Pink (2008) suggested that sharing an ethnographic psychogeographical experience and attuning yourself to another can help to see the world the way that they do. I have managed to do this without having to leave my own home in Manchester. What I didn’t know before preparing for this essay was that back in the 70s and 80s the residents of the housing estates created collaborative pieces of artwork in order to forge a sense of community (BBC4, 2017). I used to pass these housing estates in my mum’s car, and later explored them more when I started learning to drive myself. They are so familiar to me and so are my opinions of them, and yet imagining the first settlers coming together and creating together makes me feel something new and different about these places. People moved to MK from London in search of green spaces, fresh air and a better quality of life (BBC4, 2017). The Open University was established in MK, which offers advanced learning to everyone, opened at a time when higher education was a privilege of the middle class (BBC4, 2017). This is an opportunity that I feel proud came from my hometown and an opportunity that many people in my life have taken advantage of where traditional university courses wouldn’t have been an option.
There are more than 22 million trees in MK (far outnumbering the roundabouts), and every new family was given one to plant when they moved (BBC4, 2017). Green space has been associated with many mental health benefits including reduced stress [Beyer, 2014] and decreased anxiety (Nutsford et al., 2013). MK is also home to the first Buddhist Peace Pagoda in the Western World (BBC4, 2017), and I run past it every time I go home and do a parkrun. I’ve experienced through this research and these revelations a feeling of placemaking from a distance – a phenomenon that, when conducting research, I found no reference to in the literature. I’ve tempered my own less than ideal experience and opinion of MK with an appreciation of what it represented for those who moved there in its formative years, and the spaces I so often ignored like the Peace Pagoda or the Open University have become places to me almost retroactively and from afar.
When I first planned this essay and started my research, the direction I imagined and planned I would take ended up being very different to the end result. Originally my title for this essay was going to be “The Situationists Would Have Hated Milton Keynes”, but halfway through I realised that that was no longer an accurate reflection of my placemaking experience. I was ready to tear my hometown apart, criticise its lack of soul and manufactured nature. To an extent I do still believe this, but in researching MK I’ve come to appreciate it from a perspective outside of my own. I’ve come to realise what it represented for the people who first moved there in the early seventies. My views on MK are a lot more nuanced than before I started writing and researching for this essay, which I believe is the whole point of reflexive writing.
References
*BBC4. (2017) Milton Keynes and Me [Online Video] [Accessed 25 Feb 2019]
https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0F7FD6A6?bcast=124829996
Beyer, K.M.M. et al. (2014) ‘Exposure to neighborhood green space and mental health: evidence from the survey of the health of Wisconsin.’ International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , 11(3), pp.3453–3472.
Bridger, A.J. (2013) ‘Psychogeography and feminist methodology.’ Feminism & Psychology, 23(3), pp.285–298.
Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: a short introduction . Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
Nutsford, D., Pearson, A.L. & Kingham, S. (2013) ‘An ecological study investigating the association between access to urban green space and mental health.’ Public Health, 127(11), pp.1005–1011.
Pink, S. (2008) ‘An urban tour: The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making.’ Ethnography , 9(2), pp.175-196.
The Reflexive Relay 