LUCY HOOD
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol

Despite long running interests in planning and the built environment, urban geographers have had relatively little to say about the architecture of “…the scale ‘in between’, where buildings become understandable as distinct forms of social production, organization, and aesthetic experience” (Crysler, 2003:179). Taking this contention as a starting point, this paper considers how urban architecture might be approached outside of prevailing political economy-orientated geographical narratives through an event-based conceptual framework using the work of Gilles Deleuze (1990 & 1993). Looking at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in the recently regenerated ‘Ropewalks Quarter’ of Liverpool, rather than interpreting FACT’s creation, presence and purpose in the urban landscape in terms of the cyclical decline of Liverpool’s industrial economy and the city’s more recent reinvention as a European Capital of Culture, I cite an alternative story of architectural intervention in terms of the density of affect emerging out of the event of the building. FACT is then not just as a product of regeneration but rather a productive and event-ful materiality that channels, sparks and heightens the immaterial (yet real) milieu of events, associations, people, things and practices constituting the urban. Focusing the potentially nebulous debates that can emanate from such a perspective the paper examples through a particular event taking place at FACT called tenantspin, which involves a small group of local, retired high rise tenants organizing, chairing and broadcasting online a series of weekly discussions about art, culture and regeneration in Liverpool.  Through this story, FACT is read as a “density of affect’’; an assemblage that folds together the material and immaterial and in doing so opens up the potential for new moments of interaction and sociability to emerge.