New Cityscapes: Redesigning urban cartographies through creative practices and critical pedagogies

This chapter provides a brief ethnographic account of a collaborative venture (Sonic Futures) between a higher education institution (London College of Communication, UAL, London) and a London-based community organisation (May Project Gardens) which combines Hip Hop music and performance with gardening. This pilot project explores the connections between social issues (e.g. social cohesion, participatory and sustainable practices and active citizenry, amongst others), politics and identity formation at the intersection of class, ethnicity, race, gender and the environment. Hence, in my contribution to this volume I reflect on the complex socio-cultural, economic and political fabric of the super-diverse context of South London (see Vertovec, 2007; Wessendorf, 2013). I do so by looking at the responses of the students who participated in the Sonic Futures workshops and through an examination of the knowledge(s) generated through multiple collaborations. In describing the preliminary findings of my project, I have looked at the ‘city’ in its potential to articulate particularistic discourses through its various microcosms, where new possibilities for action emerge and transcultural dimensions are envisioned. Thus, the city, with its different realities, provides a template for various forms of resistance, multiple aggregations and unusual encounters.