Climate Camp established in Blackheath, London

The Climate camp was established yesterday (Wednesday 27th August) afternoon on Blackheath Common - “a rallying point for popular resistance since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381″

The initial camp structures are of more architectural interest than might first be thought. The tripods with protesters sitting at the top are not just spectacle. They play an important role in establishing the site as an autonomous enclave of public spacetime!
In order to legally establish the site as a temporary protest space, the laws of public assembly need to be negotiated. There are laws which make it a legal space if there are structures which are occupied, and a barrier defining the site. The first task for the protesters then, was to erect some occupied structures. The tripods fit the brief perfectly. The are easily transportable, and can be instantly erected on site and occupied. Once erected, they form stable minimal structures, which are impossible for the police to collapse without endangering the life of the inhabitant.
These are physical structures, but which are configured to construct a legal space in what David Harvey (see ‘Space as a Key Word’) calls ‘relational spacetime’. This relational structure has real concrete effects (such as providing inhabitation, and infrastructure for media flows. It also has ‘relativistic space-time’ effects, as the ‘capitalism is crisis’ banner is both an object, and a new generator of the media flows which relate and disseminate these structures as images, through international media network ecologies.

NB: Great Image, copyright Mike Russell 2009, mini_mouse@riseup.net from http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/actions/london-2009/photography