Can we tell the story of city crowds through comics? Crowds are central to cities. The commuting crowd, the Saturday night crowd, the protesting crowd, the festival crowd, the sports crowd, even the online crowd. There are crowded markets and overcrowded homes, crowded subways, squares, and parks. The different crowds of the city generate all kinds of experiences. People might find one crowd exciting or fun, or another overwhelming, exhausting, or claustrophobic. What stories might we tell of crowds in the city?
We are assembling a comic on city crowds, made-up of a collection of short pieces. The call is for potential contributors to submit an idea of 1-4 pages in length. It is part of a research project based at Durham University and funded by the European Research Council (DenCity 773209). The research focusses on crowds in cities across the world, from London, Hong Kong, and Manila, to Toyko, Mumbai, and Dar es Salaam. Applicants are asked to connect their idea to one of more of five key themes below, although we are open to proposals on other themes related to crowds and cities. Applicants are invited to submit creative ideas that takes the topic in any direction they like. The contribution must tell a story about crowds and the city, and cannot be an illustration alone. Payment will be between £250-£450 per page.
1: The pandemic crowd. In the spring of 2020, cities underwent a vast programme of de-crowding. Being in a crowd could get you fined, or worse. Within the crowd, an invisible threat lurked. Some experienced intense anxiety around crowds, while others longed for the ‘buzz’ of the city. To some, even a small gathering felt like a busy crowd. But the pandemic crowd was not experienced equally. Residents in ‘slums’ in Manila or who drive buses in Mumbai or who work in construction sites in London, sometimes found it impossible to isolate from crowding, while wealthier groups could usually work from home. There are legacies too. For many the anxieties they held about crowds during the pandemic are forgotten and normality has resumed; for some being in crowds creates feelings of unease or even panic.
2: The commuting crowd. In subways from New York to London and Tokyo, or buses from Mumbai to Paris, the morning rush hour can be a crushed crowd. Bodies thrown into tight proximities, unwanted intimacies and moments of frustration, laughter, or overwhelm. People both experience the crowd as one mass and develop their own relationship to it. Some escape into smartphones and music, others quietly endure, and still others find their tempers occasionally flare. On the regular commute, friendships are sometimes borne within the crowd. Strangers become familiar even as they remain unknown. Encounters might unfold that are mundane and unremarkable, or which can change the course of people’s lives.
3: The protesting crowd. This is a crowd that comes together with a clear purpose. These crowds can take on all kinds of atmospheres. They might be angry or joyful, sombre or whimsical, pained or excited, or all of these at once. They might have complex demands or simple calls for something to stop (or start). They can be volatile. The crowd might splinter as some groups pursue actions that others disagree with. They are policed, sometimes violently so. In some cities, they might be dicing with state intolerance and brutality.
4: The overcrowded home. We tend to think of the crowd ‘out there’ in the city, but what if the home itself becomes a crowd? Hidden from view, but often with difficult and impoverished living conditions, the overcrowded home takes all kinds of forms. The ‘slum’ homes of extended families in tiny shacks in Mumbai or on rooftops in Hong Kong, low-income migrant homes in London, workers dormitories in Singapore, and more. The overcrowded home is a space of shared intimacies, where privacy is perpetually suspended. Multiple daily activities are improvised in often tiny spaces. Social and familial bonds can become frayed or enhanced, tensions might escalate and close support networks might be crucial to survival.
5: The toilet crowd. The global lack of toilet facilities affects people all over the world’s cities. In many poorer neighbourhoods, dependence on public toilets can lead to huge early morning queues to access what can be woeful facilities. A long queue for a toilet in a poor neighbourhood in Delhi might be dominated by men, with women and children shunted out and forced to find unsafe spaces such as under bridges, on in fields, or behind garbage grounds. The sanitation crisis impacts people in starkly different ways and extents, from refugee camps in Sudan or school children in Lagos to food delivery cyclists in London.
Please send your idea or any enquiries to the research lead, Professor Colin McFarlane, at colin.mcfarlane@durham.ac.uk by June 23rd, 2023. The submission should include a description of your idea (max 1 page), two samples of your work, a link to an online portfolio (if available), a budget with a quote for the work, and a CV (max 2 pages). The submission will be an initial pitch that will be developed further in collaboration with the project, and the deadline for final work is October 27th, 2023.
Please note that if the idea is to involve more than one person, it will need to have a complete team (eg we won’t accept ideas for scripts where there is no artist also involved) and the page rate will remain the same. Ideas are welcome on any city and not confined to the cities mentioned in this call. The final product will be free of cost and made available as a downloadable PDF and in paper copy at relevant events, conferences and conventions. More information on the DenCity project is available here: https://dencity.webspace.durham.ac.uk.
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