Read the extended review of Jessie Brennan's Re: development: Voices, Cyanotypes & Writings from The Green Backyard, by Matthew Thompson (Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool).
“This is a unique book. […] [Brennan’s] pointedly political redeployment of the cyanotype method here turns blueprint planning on its head – an artistic device that brings to light what too often falls through the cracks between the lines drawn by planning professionals. […] Despite its charged political subject matter, there is a deeply sensory aspect to the book, evoking the hands-on quality of life in the Green Backyard, which asks to be touched and handled like a vegetable freshly pulled from the earth. […]
This collection is the most effective articulation I’ve yet come across that captures these tensions; that expresses in outward language the difficulty of balancing the demands of inward and upward in building social and solidarity economies. […] The real value of Re:development, then, is the gift it gives, not just to the casual reader, in expressing a more meaningful reality, but to the movement contesting the absurd state we’re in – by demonstrating the value of combining inward, outward and upward languages, and convincing the gatekeepers of this unsustainable political settlement that real value resides in other things, in people over products, in narratives over numbers.”
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