The Right to This City

[to be rescheduled]

Based in the Southwest of the UK, Tim Beale MA ARPS is a creative photographer whose practice can be described as saddling the worlds of fine art and environmental photography. With a keen interest in the human psyche and our tangible bonds with the environment around us. Tim will be talking about his project “The Right to This City” a photography research project that documents the inequalities in housing in Bath. He will be discussing how research has helped to inform his photographic practice, and the photographers that have influenced him.  

The Right to This City is a body of work documenting my photographic research into housing inequality in Bath, one of the UK’s most expensive places to live. It also serves as a response to the Henri Lefebvre manifesto “Le Droit a la vile: The right to the city” which sets out the fundamentally basic rights to adequate, affordable housing, good schools, good public transport and a place to grow and thrive. 

“These rights I feel are undervalued or simply set aside in favour of exploiting the city for capitalist gain. Political policy making over the past one hundred years has left a physical mark upon the built landscape across the UK and is particularly evident in Bath. We can see from property size and density how regulatory standards have been systematically stripped away.”

Archive materials from Bath Records Office, from the earliest social housing to the last built by the city council, comprising of contracts, tenders, landscape, and building plans were used to anchor the research text to the photographs, building a social narrative. Newspaper cuttings have been selected to link back to the timeline, reinforcing and clarifying the impact of housing policies throughout the past and today.