nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

Street Training:experiences of co-creatingpublic space— Lottie ChildStreet Training attempts to demonstrate that as much as our surroundingshave an effect on us, WE can have an equally powerful effect on our surroundingswith our behaviour. Street Training is the name I give to any actions andsuggestions, often minute gestures such as smelling flowers, climbing walls,floating leaves in puddles and smiling at strangers, gestures that people do allthe time in public spaces. I see such acts as a distributed assault on the pervasiveculture of fear and cynicism that we otherwise perpetuate and normaliseas we constitute our urban public spaces.The aim of Street Training is to harness this behaviour and develop awarenessof how urban spaces and behaviours can be actively shaped, safely andjoyfully. Posing as a kind of martial art, Street Training is all and any of thejoyful, funny, poetic, challenging things people do as they move through thestreets. When formalised in Street Training sessions, all this gets combinedwith observation, analysis, intervention and play. It seems that when peopleinhabit the streets for anything other than walking down the street with theirwalking-down-the- street-face, they are perceived, and we perceive ourselves,as suspect. We constantly reproduce the myth that the streets are for goingto and from work and for shopping and spectacle. So teenagers who havenowhere else to go are stigmatised when socialise in public.There are other ways of being in the streets, and to explore this I attachparticular importance to practice, exchange and mutual learning in thetraining of myself and other people in relation to the urban built environment.Traditional learning hierarchies are often challenged or reversed whenI apprentice myself to children and young people in order to discover anddevelop activities, attitudes and behaviours. Together we train adults whohave roles in the shaping of city streets. Those have included police officers,107