 Welcome to the latest in our Just Society conversations. I'm joined by Dr Liz McFall, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, and Stream Lead on Digital Participation in the Citizenship and Governance Strategic Research Area, and by Darren Omney, author, researcher, curator. Welcome to you both. Liz, what's going on? Why are we celebrating Milton Keynes? Why now? Well, that's a really good question. The first and obvious answer is that Milton Keynes celebrates his 50th birthday this year, and this week they're running a week-long festival called M.K. City Fest, which the Open University is part of. And the reason we're part of that is that although the University and Milton Keynes share a history, the University is looking forward to its 50th birthday in about two years time. So they are both part of a sort of grand post-war social experiment. And although that is true, there are also peculiar tensions between the University and Milton Keynes, and the links between them and the dislocations between them haven't really fully been explored. And this is despite the fact that John Campbell, who was instrumental in bringing the University to Milton Keynes, and was the first chair of Milton Keynes' Development Corporation, described Milton Keynes as the scriptural home of the University. So, both the University and Milton Keynes face a particular kind of challenge at the moment, reflecting back on their last 50 years and forward to the next 50 years. In the case of Milton Keynes, you have a starting point of imagining a town that didn't exist that was designed to meet certain sorts of objectives, was designed to fit in with the way people would live. John Campbell also said that he thought a University should be about, try that again, he thought that a University, he thought that Milton Keynes, sorry, he thought that Milton Keynes was an opportunity to experiment and to do something different. Yes, to enact a vision in which value isn't just about cash, there's about truth, beauty, dignity, different ways of living. Well, you make yourself very attractive, but why does it feel to you particularly, Darren, this project of Milton Keynes and the Open University? Well, Milton Keynes is where I was born 50 years ago, so I'm celebrating my birthday, kind of the same year almost as Milton Keynes, and so I've got kind of a long, deep history of being here, and I've watched it grow up alongside myself. So there's a personal interest, but I've been away, I've done lots of other things. I've come back to do a PhD at the EU, which I've just finished. Congratulations. And I'm also working on an exhibition at the moment, which is using Milton Keynes as a kind of data set to explore some of the issues that Lizard was just talking about really. And this PhD is in design? It is in design, yes, but the PhD isn't about Milton Keynes, but the ideas of design, the concepts of design, how we think about the world and how we try to make changes in the world is really kind of an idea that permeates my PhD. The notion of Milton Keynes and how the EU works as well. Perfect. So design, and you're coming from the social sciences background, Liz, does this make you both experts in this topic of Milton Keynes and the Open University? Oh, I don't think it certainly doesn't. I mean, you live here, you work here. Yeah, that's my key claim to expertise about Milton Keynes. I live here, and I've lived here 21 years. And I've done what I think I keep hearing is a fairly standard thing of arriving and finding the place very difficult and then gradually, grudgingly, learning how to love it. And Milton Keynes is a very paradoxical place. It is full of kind of weird and really peculiar contrasts in the sense that it's an incredibly green city in a forest was the design idea, but also very in other places, very brutalist, very modernist design. It has a grid system, which in one sense is North American, but Milton Keynes' grid system is wonky and described as tartan. Because within the grid system, every neighbourhood that's a grid square within the grid system is different. So it's this patchwork of different elements. It's wonky in part to make room for the communities that already existed. Bletchley, Stone Stratford, Wolverton, we're all here already. So the grid sort of moves around those spaces. So it has horizontals, it has verticals, but they don't follow straight lines and sometimes even me. OK, so what about your disciplines? Let's say sociology and let's say design, but you're interested in a range of disciplines. Are there any concepts there or any gurus who help us understand Milton Keynes? Well, I think probably the expression of culture in society. One of the key intellectual projects I've been involved with is the establishment of an interdisciplinary field called cultural economy. Cultural economy doesn't signal, it's not about art galleries, the film industry, the music industries. Cultural economy is meant to signal the boundaries between things. This is an important disciplinary point. The boundaries between things are only what we make them. They're only the work that we do to establish a clear sense for ourselves that, oh, that's different from that. But if you actually turn things inside out, you discover that the most mundane of occupations and sectors are actually quite cultural. So bankers, accountants, building designers. And yeah, town planners are involved in deeply cultural work in the sense that they're involved in an orchestration of technique and sentiment together to try and build things that fit into people's lives that people can use. So that field is about understanding what culture is in terms of being a meaningful practice rather than culture as the aesthetic realm, culture as music, culture as art. So bringing that to bear on how you design a new city, how you design a new town is also about saying, well, how do you pull people in? How do you lure them? How do you attract them? How do you make people want to live here? It's not just about, well, how do you design, draw, build a building? And in your research, it's not just a doctorate, as you said, it's on design more generally, but now working in local communities and understanding the data around. How does that help understand this town or city? Taking one of the housing estates, Netherfield, it had a fairly poor reputation not long after it was built. It's only just the next grid square from here, so it's just there. And it's an incredible piece of architecture. The design of it is quite underrated. And looking at it, trying to trace the history of it, the drawings that the architects made, talking to the architects about it, talking to the planners and the corporation executives who are responsible for making it happen, allowing it to happen, but also trying to stop it happen as well. The design of the building, the building itself, but also the minutes of the corporation, go back to Lizard's point again about the design process is inflected through everything. And the design of the city, you look at the corporation minute books and they are arguing about whether Netherfield should be allowed to be built, should be built for rental or for sale. And the whole of the ethos of the city at times always 50-50 sale rent. And Netherfield eventually was built purely for rent. So there's loads of tensions in there. There's loads of what the architects wanted the place to be like and what it turned into. It's all tracked through the data that's generated by the city, by the people who live in it, by the people who imagine it. You both seem like evangelist ambassadors for Milton Keynes, which is great. And for your own disciplines and the working between them. So two final questions are, how does the Open University make a difference to Milton Keynes? And what exactly are we doing by way of celebration this coming week? Dan, do you think the Open University does make a difference? I think it makes a difference. So it makes a difference to me. It gives me the platform to make those explorations. And so does that for anybody else who engages with the academic institution and the academic community? Obviously how it changes moving forward for the next 50 years. There's a whole bunch of challenges in there. OK. And what about what's happening this week? How are you involved? Well, the product of my Netherfield research is on display at the Milton Keynes Gallery. Fantastic. So that opens on Thursday and it's on for a month. We've got congratulations. It's going to be great. You've got to come. Yes, I will. There's original architects drawings. There's photographs from John Donat who took the 1972 material. There's a fabulous book that folds out for three metres of the Netherfield terraces. Three metres? And there's an 18 foot long drawing that the architect made. So it's big, it's visual, it's long. It fulfills the design kind of brief of the architecture, isn't it? It's a big, long thing. Looking forward to it. Does the Open University make a difference to Milton Keynes? And what are you doing this week? I think the Open University, Milton Keynes is a challenge to the university. I think it's a reminder that whilst academics are sort of figuring out problems about culture and society and how you design it. Just society. There's an extent to which the planners and those involved in making Milton Keynes were trying to solve those problems in a very material way. So it's a bit of a challenge to academics to look at this place and figure out, well, how did it solve those problems? How do we test our ideas about culture and society in relation to this place? Milton Keynes is going to bid to be European capital of culture. And it's very interested in trying to learn from the theorisation of culture and identity and space that has happened in this university. Where we've had world famous scholars of the likes of Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, who spent careers trying to define, well, what do we mean by culture? What do we mean by place? And try to kind of use that to inform and understand, well, what is it about Milton Keynes' culture? How can you say that Milton Keynes is a capital of culture? So this is the first step towards doing this. And we have an event running on Thursday called Milton Keynes of the Mind. And the reason for that title was to try and draw attention to the fact that a city is never just bricks and mortar. It's about big ideas, big grand designs, grand plans that bring together everything from medieval knowledge to ancient religions to modern neoliberal, thatcherite values. How do you mix those things together in a space? Well, thank you both for giving us an insight into the Milton Keynes of the Mind, but also I think the kind of heart and soul of this place. Thank you very much.