Project Mimique London

To trim the flight, barkless, but born of play Project Mimique starts from a Nietzschean premise -- an anti-morality and the annihilation of value -- cleaving the project from environmental activist, academic, political and practitioner domains. It is grounded in the Marxist and Weberian urban sociology of the 1970s, a full flurry of post-structuralist and postmodern positions, and with an underlying obsession with state theory, yet our greatest debts are to those who taught political economy. The project is the product of an anti-functionalist moment at the Bartlett School of Planning in the early 1980s, where a policy of strategic underdevelopment combined with a left-libertarian enthusiasm. Few can boast that Richard Sennett's The Uses of Disorder pioneered the constitutive lack of their education. After Kristeva, we toy sometimes with revolution, refusing all roles and actualising the unspoken, calling forth "whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible, disturbing to the status quo"; at other times we undermine dominant narratives with what is given in discourse. Practical advocacy has tested the dangers of co-option, while work on the 2012 Olympics has fulfilled foundational criteria for prospective planners to work with the planned. Project Mimique takes pleasure in this engagement with urban planning through a double motion, one objectifying planning process and the second through identification with it, a sharing of the powers of spectatorship. Yet our joy lies with a playful Nietzschean polemic, in what we hope is a disturbance of more conventional representations of planning policy, and definitions of what constitutes a 'good city'. We welcome any correspondence, criticism and proposals for collaboration. Please do get in touch. Little it matters Project Mimique October 2008 <c.smith4@lycos.com> Gamman, L. & M. Marshment (1988) The Female Gaze (London) The Women's Press Kristeva, J. (1977) About Chinese Women (London) Marion Boyars Mallarmé, S. (1982) Selected Poetry and Prose (New York) New Directions

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