A publication capping a two year project with Open School East, looking at the intense, localised, collective action in De Beauvoir Town between 1968 and the mid-1980s. The book incorporates newly uncovered images, archival material, semi-fictional writing and personal accounts gathered over the course of the project.

“A personal journal is purportedly recovered from the home of its author, a man who is of the Area.

The author has recorded many months of work, following his discovery that the Constitution of the Area has been threatened with Extraction. To secure its future, he must reproduce the Constitution – identical but re-formed, as complete and coherent as the one he knows. To do that, he must recover all the Deliberation that went into its Assembly. The most decisive period was 15 years spanning the 1970s, when people of the Area worked to redirect its future from the one promised, of total demolition.

His ambition is forever frustrated. The neighbourhood he lives in is the outcome of the decisive period but under inspection it turns up social capillaries, institutional complexities and fragmentary imaginaries at odds with the familiar future they produced…”