In collaboration with the Philosophy Department at the University of Liverpool, the Liverpool Biennial 2012 has invited artists and thinkers to bring a new understanding of hospitality for our times in relation to humanism, economy and the media. Hospitality is the underlying theme of the next Biennial opening in September.

Participants include: Jeanne van Heeswijk, artist, Liverpool Biennial Owen Hatherley, writer, London Jim Brown, social economy expert, Bristol

This workshop discusses the relation of hospitality and economy in the context of terraced housing in North Liverpool and in particular what it means to live well. What is the impact of changing our thinking around ideas of social economy and what are the possibilities for architecture within a user centered approach to designing one’s neighbourhood?

Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who works on socially committed projects where she stimulates and develops cultural collaboration and production to create new public spaces and remodel existing ones. She works closely with artists, designers, architects, governments and, most importantly, citizens. 
In Liverpool, Jeanne is working with a group of people, young and old, not in education, employment or training to develop places and spaces for their neighbourhood in the empty terraced housing and vacant ground around Liverpool Football Club’s stadium in Anfield. ‘Housing is the battlefield of our time and the house is its monument. 2Up 2Down is a monument being built brick by brick, loaf by loaf by the Anfield community.’

Owen Hatherley (b. Southampton, 1981) received his doctorate in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London for a thesis on ‘The Political Aesthetics of Americanism in Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919-34′. He works as a freelance writer on architecture and cultural politics, and is the author of four books – Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon – An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), the forthcoming A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), and a forthcoming e-book on squares in Eastern Europe, Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012). His recent reflection on housing policy can be found here

Jim Brown is the principal consultant at Baker Brown Associates, a policy research and development co-operative, based in Bristol. His main areas of interest are equity investment, community engagement, innovation, business strategy and training. He was the lead consultant for Community Shares, a two year action research programme funded by the Cabinet Office and the Department of Communities and Local Government, which was completed earlier this year, and the author of The Practitioners Guide to Community Shares, published in July 2011. He is also an enterprise support consultant for Making Local Food Work, and has worked with numerous CSAs on community investment and business strategy issues. (www.bakerbrown.co.uk)

Supported by School of the Arts, University of Liverpool.