Hiphop & Mushrooms; The Art of Reclaiming Space

Silence has settled over our public spaces in recent years. You can feel it when you walk by a once busy and overflowing community centre that now only hosts occasional Pilates classes and corporate team away days. Or when you pass a gated park with no people in it. Or a fancy building that is completely empty but has security guards ‘protecting’ it. It seems that somewhere along the way we forgot that public space is supposed to be lived in.

What happens to a culture that only exists behind closed doors? What happens to a community that never sees itself reflected in the streets it walks every day? What is Hiphop without community?

Hiphop was born in public space, in the cracks of cities that did not care for the people living in them. And it turned those cracks into culture. It fed off the energy of the streets, the noise, the chaos, the people and in return it fed the city right back, giving it rhythm and language and life. The city shaped Hiphop, and Hiphop shaped the city. A relationship that was symbiotic and messy like a living ecosystem, like a mycelium.

What is mycelium you ask? Mycelium is the underground web of fungi, the part you never see. The mushroom is just the fruit; the good stuff is beneath the soil, growing in the dark, in the cracks, in the spaces where no one thinks anything valuable could survive, let alone thrive. And though I despise mushrooms as a food (It’s a texture thing, let it go), I love them in every other way. Mushrooms don’t ask for permission, they don’t wait for perfect conditions. They spread quietly and persistently, adapting to whatever environment they find, breaking down what’s dead and feeding on what’s alive. They create networks that allow entire forests to communicate. It’s incredible! But if you take mycelium out of its environment, if you try to grow it in a lab, sure it might survive, but it won’t behave the same way. It won’t connect or transform. It won’t feed the world around it.

And just like mushrooms, Hiphop grows and thrives in the wreckage of capitalism. Public space is the soil Hiphop grew from. But slowly and surely the city has become a place we navigate instead of live in, we just move through it with our headphones on and our eyes to the ground. And as our city shrinks, so do the spaces where Hiphop can breathe. Public space, the soil Hiphop depended on, started disappearing. They became regulated, surveilled, privatised and sanitised. The corners where cyphers once formed became no loitering zones. The parks where music blasted now have locks on them. The community halls where we learned from each other now have price tags that shut out the very communities they were built for. The city has become filled with ‘hostile’ or ‘defensive architecture’ aimed at fighting perceived social disorder and keeping people in check. It actively targets unhoused people, young people and poor people by restricting the physical behaviours they can engage in. It's dictating where we can be, when we can be and how we can be. And eventually the space, or more accurately, the lack of public space, has changed how we move and how we connect all together. It’s made us forget what community feels like. It's made us forget how to rebel, how to resist.

Every so often though, something disrupts that stillness. A group practising routines under a bridge. Someone rollerskating through the street wearing a cape. Someone on a bike singing loudly. These moments remind me, Oh yeahh, right. This is ours. We made up rules that say those things are weird or out of place, but public space is meant to be messy. It’s meant to be unpredictable and shared.

And so Hiphop got pushed indoors, into studios with polished floors and mirrors that reflect you back at yourself but don’t reflect the world that made you. Don’t get me wrong, studios are great, they’re clean and comfy, but they’re also sterile in a way that public space shouldn’t be. They are the lab grown version of a wild organism. When Hiphop is removed from public space, it loses its mycelial network. It loses the chance encounters that spark new ideas like the kid who wanders into the cypher or the stranger who stops to watch and becomes part of the story. It loses the sense of connection that comes from claiming a piece of the city and the wildness that keeps it evolving. When people stop taking up space, they stop belonging. And when you don’t belong you don’t take ownership or responsibility for your environment. And so the city becomes just something that happens to us, not something we help build and maintain and care for together. And with the loss of space, we lose the chance to contaminate each other with ideas, we lose the joys of misunderstanding. By being shut off from each other, we have forgotten how to navigate conflict.

Reclaiming public space isn’t just about dancing in a park or hosting a popup performance on a street corner or doing a flash mob (Please, let’s all stop doing flash mobs), but those things do matter more than we admit. We need to re-learn how to be visible and present. How to be part of a shared, unpredictable and messy ecosystem of human beings who are all trying to figure out how to live together. Creativity doesn’t thrive in designated zones. Some of the most transformative moments happen when you’re not looking for them, when you stumble across a group of strangers doing something beautiful and you realise you’ve been invited into a moment you didn’t even know you needed.

Another amazing thing about mycelium is that it never really dies. Even when the surface looks barren, the network is still there. Waiting for the right conditions to bloom again. The same is true for Hiphop. The roots are still under our feet. The culture is still alive in the bodies of dancers who remember (and this includes the young people who’ve never done it themselves) what it felt like to take up space without asking. The city is still full of cracks where something wild could grow again.

Reclaiming space requires us to be a bit more mushroom, refusing to wait for permission. It requires us saying I belong here. We belong here. This pavement, this car park, this hall, it’s not neutral, It’s not empty. It’s a canvas, a stage, a gathering place. Those are the roots of Hiphop. The simple act of people choosing to be together in a world that constantly encourages us to be apart, what’s more hopeful than that? So take up space, and the best part is, that Hiphop don't even need muchroom...