Becoming Homebaked

Over four yeas ago Homebaked began life as 2Up2Down, an art commission initiated by the renowned Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and commissioned in by the Liverpool Biennial. Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s work has been widely exhibited, including at PS1 Center for Contemporary Art, the Taipei Biennial, Taiwan, the Busan Biennale, Korea and the Venice Biennale. She has been awarded the Europrix, Chabot and Mama Cash prizes for her work and was the 2011 winner of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. Since 1993 she has been working on socially committed art projects that take place in public spaces.

Liverpool Biennial is among the most successful art commissioning agencies in the UK, best known for presenting the UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art. Established in 1998, since its inception, the International exhibition has commissioned well over 100 new works, many for the streets and public spaces of Liverpool, by established contemporary artists from around the world.

The mission through the Biennial’s activities is: engaging art, people and place. 2Up2Down took its name from the vernacular description of the small terraced house that characterises the North of England, the project offered an imaginative, experimental approach to dealing with empty properties and spaces in Liverpool, UK and beyond. 2Up2Down (now named Homebaked) is located in Anfield, North Liverpool, in the streets leading to and around Liverpool Football Club. The area was designated as a Pathfinder area under the Housing Market Renewal Initiative. The neighbourhood is made up of residential terraced streets, many of which have been earmarked for clearance and emptied. The main street formerly offered varied independent local shops but has in recent years fallen into decline, and now consists mainly of fast food outlets, catering to match-day visitors. Many houses have been demolished, leaving temporary grassed areas that still show the footprint of the terraced streets. Many streets are completely closed – ‘tinned up’ (see figure 1) – leaving residents stranded in otherwise derelict areas and young people growing up in streets with few neighbours and fewer amenities. Other streets in the neighbourhood still house a mix of owner-occupiers, social and private tenants. The best physical qualities of the neighbourhood are its well-built, attractive Victorian terraced property; good transport links to the city centre; and the number of public green open spaces within walking distance. The best social qualities are a strong sense of identity, helped in part by the football club’s presence, and the resilience and creativity of local people.

Figure 1

Van Heeswijk initially worked with groups of young people from the Anfield area to design four new homes, to be all adjacent to the bakery building and amenities for their decimated neighbourhood. Her project found a permanent site when Mitchell’s Bakery, something of a local landmark, closed. The shop was used as a base for the project from summer 2011 onwards (see figure 2), many people dropped in to share stories, but also repeatedly to see if and when the building will re-open as a bakery. The bakery was more than just a shop within the local area, with the Mitchell family taking an active role in the life of the community, it was a symbol of the community history which permeated far and wide through the residential clearances of Anfield and the import of national and international football fans that visited the bakery as part of their match day vigil. For many residents, the closure of the bakery was powerful confirmation of Anfield’s decline and another example of the persistent leeching away of infrastructure that was hastened by housing market renewal.

Figure 2

Therefore, through the influence, input and articulated need of the local community, Van Heeswijk and the Liverpool Biennial supported the grass roots redevelopment of Mitchell’s bakery as a community co-operative bakery and Community Land Trust (CLT). Homebaked development wished to perform a similar role as Mitchell’s Bakery, acting as a community hub, a supportive network, rather than simply a shop and new homes.

The building’s prominent position on a corner within the neighbourhood, within sight of the Liverpool Football ground meant there was a great opportunity to create a highly visible local facility, as well as a successful co-operative trading business. Ownership of these premises transferred to Liverpool city council as a way of ensuring, crucially, that any decisions made by residents actually belonged to them, and couldn't be altered or compromised by outside parties. Homebaked won the 2012 CLT award for excellence in community engagement for just this reason. The local community have had their hopes repeatedly raised and then dashed by promises of regeneration which has been slow to materialise. The project which changed local people’s ability to influence the way their neighbourhood is managed and developed, and help them to take matters into their own hands.

The remainder of this paper will examine how the local volunteers of Homebaked and Jeanne van Heeswijk, through the Liverpool Biennial commission, tackled the inequality and the socio-political problems pervasive within the neighbourhood of Anfield. Unpacking Homebaked through its creation of new economic models of co-operation, community-led long term strategic visioning and strengthening of local and global networks and community resilience.

This project was initiated to tackle what the artist van Heeswijk calls the ‘Battlefield of Our Time’ the right of every individual to choose to live well. Van Heeswijk, the Liverpool Biennial and Anfield’s local community committed to a partnership based on a shared ideology of risk, trust, interaction and learning among the key participants and volunteers of Homebaked. Through the instituting of the CLT, Homebaked went beyond relying on the model of the intervention of an outside art organization and artist who might teach local communities to live within the hegemonic society. The Homebaked CLT committed to methods of organisation, mobilisation, teaching and learning that build on what the Anfield residents themselves know and understand. Also, working with partners in government, housing and business, this pragmatic approach, grounded in a complex political vision about means, ends and cultural activism, results in a creative re-imagining of Anfield and the role of its residents within the precarious regeneration framework that has surrounded them for over 14 years. Homebaked is based on a series of ideas about the transformation and control of their economic and physical environment, to what van Heeswijk describes as the ‘right to live well’.

It is within this context that I argue that Homebaked points to a logic of resilience and what Arjun Appadurai (2001) describes as ‘deep democracy’ through a ‘politics of patience’. The hard won cumulative victories and long-term asset-building that is framed in every aspect of the activities of Homebaked is a slow and risk-laden process. Homebaked has itself learned the importance of slow learning and cumulative change through this longitudinal model against the modality of the ‘project’. Likewise, other strategies and tactics have also been geared to long-term capacity building, the gradual gaining of knowledge and trust, the sifting of more from less reliable partners. This open and long-term modality has been a difficult commitment to retain in the face of the urgency, and even desperation, that characterises the needs of the local residents of Anfield as regeneration strategies shift and change and continue to threaten not only Homebaked but also their own homes.

But it has been crucial and evident that Homebaked and its board and volunteers have accepted this as a historic and ever present normative reality in which to exist so as to guarantee resilience against the ongoing risk, in all forms of grassroots collectivism, that the needs of large corporations may seek to obliterate the needs of the collective themselves.

Figure 3

Patience as a long-term political strategy may be hard to maintain in view of two major forces. One is the constant barrage of real threats to livelihood, home and community that frequently assails the Anfield residents. In this sense, the strategies of Homebaked, which favour long-term asset-building, run up against the same “tyranny of emergency”, in the words of Jérôme Bindé (2000), that characterizes the everyday lives of the residents in Anfield. It is through politics of patience, constructed against the tyranny of emergency that enables Homebaked to tackle the urgency within the area of Anfield.

Homebaked, in constituting itself as a organisation with a democratic structure accountable to members, is not intending to establish a rational consensus but to defuse the potential for hostility that exists between resident and individuals, government bodies and private organisations. It is instrumental in the regeneration of Anfield by providing the possibility for antagonism to be transformed into ‘agonism’. As Chantal Mouffe argues: “according to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (2007: 4). I would propose that this agonism is both critical to the integrity and development of Homebaked as a vital precedence as a healthy infrastructure for the development of the area.

Presented is a quote form my notes from what this researcher called the meeting that could change everything… – Notebook 12

Conflictual consensus or ‘dissensus’ (Mouffe 2007) may be a way of understanding this conflation of the concepts of individual and communal structures within Homebaked. Mouffe identifies an agonistic struggle as one where principles are agreed but interpretations of them differ and coexist. Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere is the site of tension between the self-interested and collective motivation where participants can express themselves, but who “must adhere to certain performative rules that insulate this discursive space from the coercion and inequality that constrain human communication in normal daily life” (Kester 2004: 109). Participating in this sphere, according to Habermas, can lead to ‘self-transformation’: “This self-critical awareness can lead, in turn, to a capacity to see our views, and our identities, as contingent and subject to creative transformation” (Kester 2004: 110).

The Homebaked format of co-operative discourse and decision-making that is in the very manifesto of the organization, plus the space for reflection and self awareness supported in part by this embedded researcher and van Heeswijk, has collectively created new tools for dissensus; a space for ‘agonistic’ voices to be heard beyond the hegemonic political narrative employed to control the Anfield, Liverpool and UK urban regeneration process. Here expressed by Fred Brown an original member of the CLT board:

The artist van Heeswijks’ role throughout this has been to develop, sometimes initiate, then support and prop up the networks that emerged around Homebaked. The range of actions included: initial discussions with local ‘key players’, forming teams of young people to design alternative housing, fostering teams of local experts to input and lead on the development on Homebaked CLT and bakery, building the confidence of local voices to speak online through social networks and at the Liverpool Biennial 2010, undertaking interviews in national and international press, leading to the development of local residents as national television ‘personalities’. In this process, van Heeswijks’ role as initiator and mediator has diminished progressively until its eventual disappearance (although she has been called by local residents as ‘the artist that stays’ and is still a board member of the Homebaked). While at the same time the Homebaked network has found its own voice to offer a new narrative for the area on Anfield and its local residents that sits counter to the destructive narrative and silenced voice that has hindered the growth of the local community for over 14 years of the regeneration process.

Homebaked was presented at the Liverpool Biennial Festival 2012 during the ‘Anfield Home Tour’ (see figure 4). The Guardian described it as a “magical – and thought-provoking – mystery tour”, thus boosting the promotion of the project and helping to demonstrate how art could be used to address social and economic problems. This is captured quite neatly in the Guardian’s review:

Figure 4

The tour was an opportunity for the volunteers to share their plans with the world in a way that was deeply rooted in the history of the area and their own lives and connect with others going through similar situations. But there were concerns from the local volunteers about the local reach of Homebaked and being seen just as an art project. This is reflected in a in a discussion held with Jess Doyle, a founder member of Homebaked:

Following the success of the ‘Anfield Home Tour’ the local volunteers actively sought out populist methods, tapping into the current vogue for all things baking, to connect with the residents of the area, as this was always its aim. Yet they were also aware that raising their profile within the local press brought political leverage. The confidence from the tour and media coverage raised a collective will to find alternative funding to show that there are alternative models of community living and planning. That is, to take steps beyond the support of the biennial and raise finance themselves.

This lead to the Kickstarter campaign

‘Oven at the Heart of Anfield’ - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1627172835/an-oven-at-the-heart-of-anfield

Figure 5

Kickstarter not only had financially implications, it mediated a story to be spread worldwide in which individuals could show their support.

It could be argued that Homebaked, with its soft political influence through its local and global reach, has become the mediator for its local community. The Kickstarter and wider social media campaigns, employing the history and re-imagining of the bakery, has created multiple unexpected off-shoots and connections within the local area as well as alliances with national power players and international supporters, culminating in a network for generating employment and training.

A co-operative practice, such as the one Homebaked fosters, has a different modality, temporality and a different aim to those of a neo-liberal practice. Rather than looking for a material value of profit, it creates the conditions for a liberating experience that changes both the space and the subjects. The opening up of the bakery as a workshop, as social places, and its returning to the function as a bakery, has attracted the most diverse cross-section of interest within the local, national and international. It has connected the bakery with other spaces in the neighbourhood and imagined spaces and, these networks are forms of resilience within Homebaked.

Terms such as ‘urban regeneration’ actually hides the potential violence of this process, to regenerate implies that what is there already is in some way unacceptable and must be renewed. These terms are often applied to places on the urban periphery, seen as areas of social and economic decay. In regenerating, these areas implies that the neighbourhood and the people who live there, have nothing to offer in themselves and so it is necessary to start again, literally form the foundations, rather than work with its and potential.

Ivan Ilich (1973) talks of conviviality as an alternative to capitalist production: “Conviviality is opposed to productivity […] productivity is conjugated with ‘to have’; conviviality with ‘to be’” (1973: 43). More productive for the examination of Homebaked is Ivan Illich’s comparison of the tools of industrial society with what he calls ‘tools of conviviality’. Jeremy Till discusses in his article “Urban Weaving’ (2010) how Illich’s convivial tools could allow for the individual to have greater autonomy over the urban regeneration of their environment rather than the industrial tools architects and designers align themselves with. To dismiss the contribution of professional intelligence is potentially to throw the baby out with the institutional bathwater. Homebaked however employed professional intelligence strategically and co-operatively in a new form of co-produced urban regeneration. Working with their architects URBED in co-produced designs (see figure 6), this intelligence was deployed appropriately, and in tune with Illich’s general aspirations for conviviality, manifesting a shift in values and ways of working that had not before been in place within the regeneration of Anfield.

Figure 6

Currently Homebaked is in negotiations with the local council to keep the building form being demolished. Britt Jurgensen a Homebaked board member explains:

We have got a heads of terms with the council in which they set out a plan of going through buying the building from the Mitchell's and taking over the lease. The lease with the council will be 18 months. They will demolish the block next to us, but not the bakery. Then within those 18 months we have to come up with a scheme of 'sufficient merit' and they would gift us both the bakery and the land adjacent (Britt Jurgensen)

This researcher proposes that these convivial agents, the diverse partners, the local interface of the Homebaked bakery and CLT, the Anfield residents could be seen as carriers of a soft and resilient revolution; they are ‘those who make rhizome’ and reconquer the neighbourhoods territories by alliances and not by war, by transforming them into new forms of the commons, into shared spaces, modalities and temporalities.

This paper set out to examine how Homebaked, the Jeanne van Heeswijk and Liverpool Biennial commission tackled the inequality and the socio-political problems pervasive within the neighbourhood of Anfield. It did this by unpacking how Homebaked created new economic models of co-operation, community led long term strategic visioning and strengthening of local and global networks and community resilience. With a democratic structure accountable to members, Homebaked is not aiming to establish a rational consensus but to defuse the potential for hostility that exists between resident and individuals, government bodies and organizations. Also, with its employment of professional intelligence strategically and co-operatively it is making Homebaked instrumental in the regeneration of Anfield by providing the possibility for antagonism to be transformed into "agonism". Married with Homebaked’s soft political influence through its local and global reach that has made it the mediator for its local community, this paper concludes that Homebaked has employed culture as a new form of co-produced urban regeneration.