ABSTRACT
My initial involvement with the project was to prime the students with ideas drawn from urban cultural theory, and particularly the work of Walter Benjamin. It must have been a bizarre spectacle on that first Sunday morning in 2001: the
essay ‘Thesis on the philosophy of history’1 while my son sat on my shoulders eating a jam doughnut and sprinkling sugar in my hair. The photographers set off down the busy thoroughfare holding light meters up to the sky as if tuning into extra-terrestrial messages.
