NEW PROCESSES
Artists and architects should not be trying to create icons or signature objects, or ‘places with a distinctive identity’, but places that work, and that make better lives – a process that is more about people than objects. In the ‘broader cultural ecology’ of such processes we will find it harder to distinguish the role of the artist or the role of the architect from that of the community organiser or the writer or the geographer or the health worker. A new politics will be needed to provide a framework for this new ecology and define its objectives, and enable solutions to be developed and implemented on a more local, decentralised, basis. Because of this examples of this practice may not even come on the radar of initiatives and conversations taking place at a national level and this will challenge the relationship of the national to the local and the roles of national and local bodies.