Already an established installation and performance artist in Amsterdam and online, Bernhardt first came to Bristol to research the work of the city’s infamous AR street artist 3Cube, but fell in love with what was happening in the Croft, so decided to stay. She’s now been here nearly two years. “It was wonderful, what was happening here—just so exciting. It’s really playful, and I think that’s incredibly important. It’s important that we make cities playful. People think we’re Luddites here—that we’re anti-technology—but in fact it’s quite the opposite. We’re celebrating technology.
“The whole smart-city idea is so top-down, it’s nothing more than a suite of products sold to cities by large companies. It’s a one-size-fits-all model—it works on the idea that all cities are the same, that they have the same problems and situations. That’s just not true. Cities are different, just as the people that live in them are different. What we’re doing here is showing how technology in cities can belong to the people that live there, that they can come along and shape how it works and what it does. What better way to do that than through art?”
As exciting a picture as Bernhardt paints, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft has remained unsurprisingly controversial. While there’s been an attempt by Bristol City Council to maintain its liberal approach to art experiments such as this, it has butted its head against Manaan’s community a number of times, as have the local police. Most of this is over the disruption to surveillance in the neighborhood, and the worry that it’s creating a “crime blackspot.” Local media and some of the more conservative members of the council have focused on this, demanding that the network jammers be shut down. Although he wasn’t available to comment for this article, Chief Constable Chris Walker has previously voiced concerns about the area becoming “a physical manifestation of the dark web: an area that attracts the worst kind of criminals and preys on the most vulnerable. This is not what Bristol needs, and I personally will not let it happen.”
“The stories of drug dealers, child pornographers, and malware manufacturers around here are nonsense,” says Manaan. “It’s nothing more than media hype, lazy journalists and politicians looking for an easy, fear-mongering story. Look around, this is clearly a happy, vibrant, and safe place, that’s incredibly well integrated with the local community.”
In many ways however, it might actually be community integration that poses the biggest threat to the PRSC. Stokes Croft has always been a controversial street anyway—a vein of bohemian gentrification that runs through St Paul’s, an area that has traditionally been dominated by South Asian and West Indian families. It’s been a conflict for years, but the PRSC seems to be making the situation worse. From talking to just a handful of people at random, it was clear there were strong tensions in the neighbourhood.
“It’s a pain in the bloody backside,” I’m told by Jiten Patel, who has run a newsagent’s and off-licence on Stokes Croft for 25 years, right in the middle of the jammed zone. “I’ve had to replace all the bloody wireless gear in my shop, the tills, the stock-checking wands, the security cameras and alarms, everything. Either replace it with wired gear or find stuff that isn’t blocked. Rush and his lot helped me do that, sure, even gave me some bits and pieces, but still it cost me money. I can’t use the internet on my phone while I’m here, I have to use this ancient laptop that’s on a direct wired connection. It’s a pain. I mean they’re nice kids and that, and it brings in new customers because a lot of people come down here to have a look at the art, but it’s a pain largely. We’ve been here, my family and me, for over forty years, and nobody asked us first. They just went ahead and did it.
“I worry about the crime angle too,” Patel adds. “It’s not affected me personally yet, but you hear stories. I worry it’s not safe out there with no CCTV cameras. I can’t hail a cab from here either, I have to walk to the end of the street—both Uber and GoogleCabs pass through here but they can’t stop. Also it’s dirty, the streets. The road-cleaning robots can’t come down here anymore, because of the jamming. Now I have to go out and clean the street in front of my shop myself—I don’t mind as such, but my council tax is meant to be paying for those robots, you know? It’s bloody stupid.”
Another problem is that as tight as Manaan’s digital boundary might be, there’s some obvious seepage into neighbouring streets. “Half the time the wireless in my own house doesn’t work,” I’m told by Chantelle Andrews, who lives nearly half a mile outside the jamming zone. She works as a driver for a local on-demand delivery service, and she says it’s highly disruptive to her job. “I have to get up early in the morning, get in my van, and drive out of the neighbourhood to pick up my jobs for the day. It’s also the only way I can get phone calls and messages. If any work comes up that means picking up or dropping off in the Croft itself, I usually have to just turn it down. It’s affecting my daughter, too—she’s zero hours, working freelance retail, so none of the apps she uses to bid for jobs work at home. She has to walk for half a mile just to get reception. I don’t think it’s fair, to be honest.”
Even some of the Croft’s newest residents, brought here by the freedom promised by the PRSC, have run into problems. Tara-Jane Allbright is a jewellery designer that moved into one of the communal art spaces last year. “I sell most of my work via Facebook and eBay, so I’ve had to do a lot of adapting. In some ways it’s great—I separate out my creative work here in the studio, where I’ve got no internet, from my admin and shipping work, which I do when I go home on my wired connection. But it means I can be slow to deal with customers’ inquiries, which has led to some problems.”
I put all this to Manaan—is there not a danger that the Croft is actually just becoming another form of gentrification, foisting itself upon unwilling surrounding communities? “I don’t think so,” he says. “We try and work very hard with local communities, and we’re always checking and monitoring exactly where the perimeter is, and finding ways to make it tighter and more accurate. This is an experiment, we freely admit that—it’s not perfect. It’s a work in progress. As such there’s always going to be conflicts, problems and issues that need to be smoothed out. But I’ve got faith that we can deal with things sensibly, and through consensus. It’s what this place is about, really—freedom, as well as bringing people together.
“It’s important to try and remember what we’re trying to do here,” he continues. “This is an experiment, a statement. People don’t realise how reliant we are on the internet now. If it disappeared tomorrow there’d be chaos. It’s not just that you wouldn’t be able to Facebook your mates or read the news—everything is connected to it now. The markets would stop trading. The economy would collapse. There’d probably be no electricity, no food in the shops. Vital equipment in hospitals would stop working. It’s not just your phone or your spex—cars, busses, trains—everything would grind to a halt. It’d feel like the end of the world. We’re just trying to show people how dependent we’ve all become on something that we don’t own, that isn’t controlled by us. We’re just trying to show people that there are alternatives, different ways of doing things.”