THE CITY PROJECT

Holes in buildings: theories & practices

2010-05-31T00:57:00.002+01:00

My urban theory reading group is getting into practice. A fortnight ago we joined the student occupation protesting cuts at Middlesex University and talked about Walter Benjamin, history and memory, 1968 and now. On Tuesday we engaged in a little more occupation of underused space - this time a mid-rise housing block standing empty awaiting demolition. Our reading: Eyal Weizman's Lethal Theory [PDF].

Lethal Theory explores Israeli Defence Force (IDF) tactics in Nablus, Palestine, April 2002. Palestinian resistance had barricaded all entrances to the old city and mined the roads, so the IDF gained access by "walking through walls" - that is, blasting holes in them and moving through the city using complex routes through Palestinians' homes, making the city not merely the site but the medium for urban warfare. This "microtactic" was conceived by the IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute in explicitly deleuzeandguattarian terms, such that the IDF would only defeat their enemy's classical, striated conception of space (ordered around roads, barricades, walls) through making the city 'smooth', borderless for their incursion.

We walked into the block of flats through an open door. Up the stairs. A few flats were still inhabited, more sealed tight with heavy metal doors and window coverings. A handful though were open - completely open, without any doors and windows, inhabited by only fresh air and pigeons, topographically - as we had passed through no boundaries or barriers, just a series of passageways - still outside. (This, when vigilante security and then the police showed up, was our defence.)

The flats were almost empty. An old exercise book dated 2002, a benefits letter from 2003. A coathanger, a piece of string with pegs still attached.

The space felt wrong, uncanny. A bath shouldn't be on top of a bedstead. Wallpaper in the next room flapped in the wind, and pigeons nested in the ceiling cavities. Very literally unheimlich. The gaps where electricity cables and pipes had been ripped out to make the place uninhabitable. Homes are bodies to me. I didn't like that.

That's why the doors and windows had been removed too, we realised - to keep squatters out. The stairs had gone too, but we climbed.

I don't want to draw a parallel with what Weizman wrote; in fact, I'm trying to resist it. This isn't war, it's just housing redevelopment. The meaning isn't the same, the meaning isn't the same at all. I don't think the two situations are commensurable.

And yet... Why is the visual symbolism so similar? How far do these similarities continue through the very structure of these spaces? Points of contact:

1. You've got the last few people living in the block and refusing to leave their homes despite the fact these are being made a wasteland. The effect on the outside of the building is violent, like missing teeth. It's a tactic of making a ruin in order to force people out (residents) and to make it impossible for them to stay securely (squatters).

2. This destruction of the "syntax of the city, ...the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, this destruction that redefines inside and outside and refuses "to submit to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries and logic". (Weizman 2002: 53) This turning inside out seems a radical thing for power to do: "This was your home? That means nothing." Radical to do this topologically - the idea of home (in the Anglo-West) is predicated upon making a distinction between inside/outside in order to define private/public. It is a matter of borders and boundaries. The removal of windows and doors (the housing block) or walls (Nablus) makes these spaces merely a complex folding of outside space.

3. The intention of the building owners apparently "not to capture and hold ground" (2002: 56) but rather make it so permeable that no-one else can hold that space and turn it to their own uses or resist the development. These spaces windowless and breached do not even require IDF sensing technologies to "see through walls" - illicit occupants are visible from the street; these once-homes, formerly metaphorically Englishman castles, are now panoptical.

4. The developers are locking up some flats (thick green submarine doors, grey window sheaths) and opening out others - yet apparently for the same ends. (Why some flats get one treatment and others another, I'm unsure - but curious.) Similarly Weizman notes in an aside that, in their knocking-through, the IDF would still lock up Palestinian families in a single room and leave them there for days.

5. Difference: the IDF tactic is about letting Israeli soldiers pass through; the UK developer's tactic is about preventing squatters from staying. Nonetheless in both cases bulidings are not just the sites of these interventions but the very mediums, and the tactic is one of removal rather than addition - something counter to typical security thinking oriented around the encrustation of gates, locks, checkpoints, added barriers.

6. Power is enacted not just on space but on movement: enabling movement for the IDF; enforcing it for potential squatters to the housing block, for whom it is made impossible to stay.

Thus in two quite separate contexts of power acting on people's homes there is a strangely similar visual lanaguage (holes in walls), and three critical strategic similarities: building as medium; a tactic of removal; and power over not only space but movement.

What does these similarities mean? That is my burning question, and one I still can't quite answer for myself. Still, the quotation below is food for thought:

...address not only the materiality of the wall, but its very essence. Activities whose operational means effect the 'un-walling of the wall' thus destabilise not only the legal and social order, but democracy itself. With the wall no longer physically or conceptually sacred or legally impenetrable, the functional spatial syntax that it created - the separation between inside and outside, private and public, collapses. The very order of the city relies on the fantasy of a wall as stable, solid, and fixed.
(Weizman 2002: 75)

While quite arguably true for Nablus it's clearly too much for North London; nonetheless the point about spatial syntax holds true, and I wonder if these strange empty flats do something to the order of the city too. It brings to mind the 'broken windows' theory of crime writ large - if supposedly supportive council housing has such gaping wounds facing the street, how exactly can we expect some Manor House 13-year-old to believe that the destruction of property is a crime?

1. Credit to Adrian @cunabula for the topology insight.
2. Next reading group Wednesday 9th June, northeast London somewhere. If you're reading this you're welcome - drop me a line.

Save Middlesex Philosophy

2010-05-11T12:00:00.004+01:00

Students have occupied Middlesex University’s Trent Park campus in protest of the closure of the philosophy department. This department and its Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) is:

of international importance for the study of continental philosophy, and one of few such centres in the UK
the best research department at Middlesex, according to the last two RAEs, with 65% of its work of international importance and ranking a healthy 13/41 in the UK
flourishing, particularly at MA and PhD level, with 112 full-time equivalent students and applications up for next year
financially healthy, bringing in grant money and reaching the required 55% contribution to the central administration

It is not, however, a business department. Consequently the university plan to shut the philosophy department as a short-sighted piece of asset-stripping – taking its RAE money for the next 5+ years (around £1 million), and re-allocating its student quotas to business degrees which come with more funding per student. The outcry is international and eminent – from Badiou & Butler to Zizek – and with no clear-cut case for closure

What you can do:

Check out the campaign to Save Middlesex Philosophy at the site below, join the groups and pass on the message
Join 14,000 people in signing the petition against the department's closure
Write to the university management and governors (details here)
Join the occupation at the Trent Park campus: supporters are enormously welcome, and I can attest it’s a friendly environment. I'll be at the reading group tonight

Website: saveMDXphil.com
Twitter: @saveMDXphil
Hashtag: #saveMDXphil

Now the speculative urbanist bit:

I was up at the occupation on Sunday for the teach-in events the students had organised over the weekend – talks on the economic crisis, ‘thinking like a bastard’, and the concepts of time and remembrance in Walter Benjamin’s conception of politics, and the eruption of historical events in the now. (C.f. the Hornsey College of Art protests thirty years ago; the current student occupation at Middlesex is not a singular event.)

Then there was an organisation meeting. A few days into the occupation, activist fatigue was setting in. People had essay deadlines to meet and jobs to go to, and the questions became, “How many people can stay here tonight? How many people do we need to sustain the occupation?”

How about none.

Security are not being aggressive but rather very hands-off – they’re under orders from management not to get in the way. Word is that undercover police turned up last night – I mean, two West London factory workers who mysteriously wrote for a US radical journal who were a bit too neatly dressed and very eager to be given a tour of the occupied building – but police have been to Trent Park before and not taken any action; this is a very peaceful occupation making no damage or aggression, just disruption. Most importantly, people are freely coming and going; security isn’t counting anyone in or out; and there is no sense that individuals leaving the building equates to diminishing support or the protest ending.

Consequently it is not in fact numbers but the impression of numbers that keeps the building occupied – that, the locked doors, and the banners hanging from the windows. A handful of people coming and going could keep up the traffic. It’s easy enough to automate the turning on and off of music, films, lights. Playing the video recorded of previous teach-in sessions gives the aural impression of multiple people present having a conversation. In the middle of the night security expect the building to be quiet anyway.

So people needing a night of proper sleep at home doesn’t mean the occupation has to end. Whether three or thirty people stay over each night, they could not ‘hold the building’ should the police enter in force – this is a student occupation to protest the closure of the philosophy department rather than a more militant squatter attempt to seize the building long-term. So if people need to go elsewhere, why not. Come back in the morning and leave at night – treat protest as a day job. Or better yet, see how long the occupation can be sustained without any protestors present at all – just banners, sound coming from the first floor, and no statement of exit from the occupying group.

Without a philosophy department and without researchers of this calibre, Middlesex becomes a simulacrum of a university, a vocational training school concealing the absence of higher learning. A simulacrum of a protest concealing the absence of studnent protestors would thus seem apt.

Juxtapositions

2010-04-26T01:25:00.001+01:00

or,
How to and how not to counterpose old & new architecture

This stands out as one of the nastiest mixings of old and new buildings I've ever seen. Take one historic facade (17th century?) on Gun Street, E1. Resentfully obey the letter of the listed building regulations, and do your damndest to flout the spirit of them. Knock down everything behind the facade and construct cheap-as-possible student housing in the kind of brick that'll be rotten in 40 years. Don't bother to align the windows, such that residents live in the dark and can only see three feet out on to the facade's concrete backing.

Meanwhile, in the background, a property developer constructs a new skyscraper according to formulae for maximising the floorplan at the lowest possible cost. The architects have no meaningful freedom, their only choice being how to whack on some "artfully asymmetric" cladding that enables the building to marketed as "designed" and "dynamic". In this way capital is over-leveraged, architecture constructed as a commodity, and lots more lovely capital (hopefully) accumulated.

In contrast, take this remarkably sympathetic use of materials for new-ish apartments on the River Lea near Bow. For once a block that was no-doubt marketed as having gritty urban-cool "warehouse" style actually has some dialogue with the dilapidated industrial buildings beside it. Ok, the form's nothing special. But just something in how the wood has weathered; the colour of the glass; the perforated steel balconies. Hemmed in on two sides by motorways (the A11 and A12), I can't promise that this is a genuinely functional, flourishing neighbourhood. When the old warehouses get knocked down for more new development, this fragile architectural sympathy between old and new will be lost. But for a few moments, on a sunny day in April...

The streets speak: urban political broadcasts

2010-04-13T23:18:00.001+01:00

Stoke Newington Road, just north of Shacklewell Lane.

High Road, near Seven Sisters underground station.

Original government poster available here, and below:

The ad agency's brief: "Redefining petty fiddlers as full-on benefit thieves." Or, 'scapegoating people trying to get by on an unlivable income as criminals.' Jobseeker's Allowance is all of £51.85 a week for someone my age. I'm counting the pennies living in this city on a graduate starting salary; damn right I'd be getting cash-in-hand work under the table if I had fifty quid a week for food/bills/my entire life. Wouldn't you?

East London charity Community Links says:

"From our experience giving advice to over 12,000 people each year in Newham, we know that almost all those defrauding the system do so out of need, not greed. They need a few hours work to tide them over – to pay a surprise bill, or replace the microwave. Declaring it to the Jobcentre would mean any earnings are deducted from benefits, leaving them with no extra money. Punishing these people is unfair, but also destructive – they need stepping stones to a job and higher income, not sanctions which push them further into poverty."

2008/09 figures from the DWP show total benefits expenditure of £136bn. Out of this, fraud amounted to 0.8% (£1.1bn) - which we might contextualise by noting that £0.8bn of total spend was made up of overpayments due to official error. In addition, £0.5bn was underpaid due to official error, so the magnitude of government mistakes (£1.3bn of Getting It Wrong) is in fact rather more than dole scroungers scrounged.

Just so we can understand the scapegoating of the bottom 10% of society in proper perspective, you understand. Advertising won't have any impact on serious fraudsters. It'll do a lovely job of deterring those in legitimate need from claiming money they have a right to, though, and a campaign focused on "hunting down" benefits "thieves" uses such lovely aggressive language to exacerbate middle class prejudices and promote social inequality. Mmmm...

Co-create London: showing EnterPride with disused shops

2010-03-26T17:42:00.013Z

I wrote last week about Co-Create London, a project using "co-creation" methods from advertising & market research to explore what people want to see happen in London - What would you do to make London a better place?.

After a discussion forum last week, the initial results are out. Of dozens of ideas initially suggested by users on Co-Create London, the following three were developed into more comprehensive proposals:

BeSpoke Lanes – Cycle Paths running alongside railway lines
Enterpride – Turning disused properties & spaces into accessible cultural & retail hubs
Swap Stories – A Book Swap System for London Underground

I understand these ideas will soon be presented for voting online, and the one receiving the most votes will be presented to Our Dear Leader Mr Johnson. More news as it comes…

Books, cycling and marginal urban spaces – could they have chosen three topics much closer to my heart?** I was talking about the latter last week with reference to existing projects such as Spacemakers’ Brixton Indoor Market, and it looks like Co-Create London has come up with something pretty similar:

London is full of disused and run-down spaces especially post-recession. Why not allow these spaces to be occupied by start-up businesses, artists, creative individuals and educational workshops?
Enterpride will facilitate the transaction between landlords willing to volunteer their property & Londoners wanting to use the space. Those occupying vacant spaces will have access to the property until they can afford to rent it, or an established business is willing to pay for the space. If users of the Enterpride scheme have their current space bought by an established company they will be assigned a new one. The only cost Enterpride occupants will have to pay are the business rates which are minimal.

The diagram from the co-creation session:

As mentioned, Spacemakers and other groups have laid a lot of the groundwork already, and already know how to build the necessary relationships with councils and landlords.

But of course that’s a massive opportunity if the Co-Create London team are willing to contact these other projects and get them involved too. A group response based on both the public voting & cocreation and the real, practical experience of already doing this could be a really strong pitch. Perhaps contributors to CoCreateLondon.com suggested this idea unawares of parallel developments like Spacemakers, but co-creation isn’t about ‘pure’ ideas or ownership or authorship, or anything so 20th century! I think it’s about mashing up every source of ideas and knowledge available, and in this case there’s a wealth of existing work out there.

I really hope the Co-Creation Hub are serious about making things happen, not just testing their methodology. (Fancy sharing who the “London experts” at last week’s seminar were, by the way?) Go on @cocreatelondon, say hello to @spacemkrs… Though I hope you're ahead of me and already fast friends!

** Actually yes: writing stories on the walls of abandoned urban spaces, although I can see how they might prefer to present more practical possibilities to the mayor…

Co-creating London

2010-03-16T19:44:00.002Z

What would you do to make London a better place?

That's the question being asked at Co-Create London, the first project from the Co-Creation Hub. Although various planning/social media/branding agencies are involved, Co-Create London isn't trying to sell anything. Instead the plan looks like:

crowdsourcing suggestions for things that'd improve London
the co-creation bit: a workshop with contributors, "London experts", and Co-Creation Hub team members to develop these suggestions into clear ideas
pitching these ideas to City Hall and the mayor

My suggestion was for A system of rent stabilisation (like in New York). London's crazy house prices have pushed rents too high to cover landlords' mortgages, and I don't think it's a good thing. Young people are either pushed into moving in with their boy/girlfriends too quickly to save on rent, or otherwise have to live like students in shared housing until they're 38 (the average age of a first-time buyer without parental support). Rent controls and stabilisation could peg rents to tenants' incomes, stop landlords for demanding excessive increases each year (mine asked for nearly 10% this year, in this economic climate!), and keep central parts of the city vibrant by giving them a better social mix of people than just council tenants vs. the rich. Go on, give it a vote!

The most popular ideas are:

* free wi-fi hotspots in public spaces across town

* Open library-style book kiosks/ book swap system in Tube stations so Londoners are never without reading material on the underground!

* simply by put air conditioning on the tubes would improve life in London during the Summer 100%

* Oyster Card becomes Oyster London card - pay for anything in London up to the value of 20GBP

* Annual Open Labs Day...Similar to Open House Weekend, but celebrates our city's vast and under-appreciated science culture

Throughout an interesting mix of the practical, the imaginative, the speculative and the already occuring. The demand for practical changes is probably the strongest - free wifi, later tube opening hours, air conditioning on the underground - but I hope some of the more imaginative suggestions get developed & taken forward to the Mayor too.

I'm fascinated, though, by the various demands for vacant or abandoned spaces to be put to social/community uses - be these spaces empty land, or empty shops, or the tunnel walls in the underground. Some of these things are actually already taking place, such as Spacemakers Brixon Indoor Market project taking over empty shops, or the community gardens and allotments Landshare or What If projects are doing. How exciting to find that these projects capture something in the wider social imagination of the city; a suggestion that maybe the wider public good is more important than private property rights...

@cocreatelondon

Back of a napkin drawings

2010-03-16T18:48:00.000Z

A napkin, covered in architectural drawings, purloined from the two young men sitting next to me in the Tinderbox coffee shop, Angel, once they had left. Much as they were complaining about the ridiculous design constraints on their various projects, I couldn't but envy the bubbling enthusiasm they had for their work.

Dead railways: London's underground mail shuttle

2010-03-16T18:29:00.005Z

Mail trolleys have been speeding for 60 years
along a 23 mile long underground tube system.
The increased usage of the internet made the
most successful railway it_ be_n d_i___' _nd__r

On the pavement outside Central St Martin's art school, Theobalds Road, Holborn.

Mailrail.co.uk and Subterranea Britannica provide context for this pavement tickertape: it's referring to London's Post Office Railway, an automated train system that took post from Paddington sorting office to Whitechapel delivery office. The 23 miles the sticker mentions is apparently the total length of track on the six mile route; the 60 years to which it refers is obscure, as the railway operated from 1929 to 2003.

Then again, informative historical facts are not really why I collect urban interventions like these.

Modernism in Cansado, Mauritania - 1966, Architectural Digest

2010-03-05T22:28:00.003Z

In a hotel and "cultural embassy" in the former dockland quarter of Amsterdam, I found old copies of Architectural Digest magazine from 1966, back when modernism was still modern.

I remember being surpised in urbanism school just how 'developing world' modernism really was. Paris may have been Haussmannised, but high modernism only got the chance to realise its urban masterplans in the places where city development was still somehow new - and planning legislation in its infancy. An April 1966 copy of Architectural Digest offered an amazing case study of this: from Mauritanian desert, from nowhere, the construction of a new town, called Cansado.

The magazine described it like this:

"In 1952 Milferma, a mining company, was formed to exploit the rich iron deposits in the Kedia d'Idjil mountains near Fort Gouraud. The considerable yield, in the region of six million ton a year, posed transport and administrative problems. A railway was built from Fort Gouraud to Port Etienne, 636 kilometres away, from where the ore could be shipped to Europe. Port Etienne, a makeshift conglomeration of fishermen's huts and military installations was suitable neither as a port nor as a town for the staff administering the port and railhead. It was decided therefore to plan a new town, Cansado, in the neighbourhood."

"Planning started in 1957. Homes for 5000 were to be provided in the first instance, though an eventual population of 35,000 was envisaged. The peninsula on which the new town was to be built is neatly divided between the north-south frontier between the Rio de Oro (Spanish Sahara) and Mauritania, but the coastline available, overlooking the great Levrier bay, was in any case the most protected and suitable for development. The whole consists of a soft and porous sandstone. There is no arable earth. Winds tear across the sandstone and sand erosion presents a considerable problem. Neither the temperatures nor the humidity are excessive. Rainfall is low. Dry winds are liable to cause discomfort from three to five months of the year (at its worst in August and September)."

"The nature of the site, the varied human and social forces, all have greatly affected the form of the development. Houses are oriented north-south, with few openings on the north. Materials have been chosen for their low thermal transmission. Buildings have been kept low to protect and shelter the site. But it is the different ethnic and social background of the inhabitants that has most marked the character of the town. The inhabitants of a wide and distinct origin have different needs. The Arab workers, for instance, wanted houses that allowed all domestic activity to centre around a courtyard that was altogether private. The administrative staff placed more emphasis on the need for cross-ventilation and a view. The whole was thus divided into various quarters, each with its own centre, which was related to the main one which is to be extended when the town is enlarged at a later stage."

"Seven hundred and fifty houses together with churches, mosques, schools and shops were built between 1961 and 1963. The structural system was the same for all houses - load-bearing outer walls of a lightweight aggregate concrete, identical tie beams and cross-beams, enabling all elements to be prefabricated in a temporary factory."

In the 50 years since it is hard to see how a town of 5,000 - let alone the proposed 35,000 - could prosper simply from a railhead, and a port. In this age of automation, where are the jobs? The trains running from Zouerat may perhaps be the longest in the world, but what that means is all that freight only requires one driver. Nonetheless, lafraque on Flickr shows that Cansardo's buildings are still gleaming white, and still apparently uninhabited:

There is another perspective on these places, you understand. First I found these words on the Wikipedia page for Zouérat, another modernist European oasis constructed at the other end of the rail line, in land. Perhaps they will be edited out by moderators seeking to preserve an objective tone. I want to keep them. Whoever wrote them - Mauritanian or not - I think they say something:

"Zouerat is born at the end of the 1950's from nothing, at the end of the Kedia's glacis. The raw materials is transported from Nouadhibou by trucks, on the same way than the future Mauritania railway. Its plan is clear and well ventilated. Three places are made for europeans workers, commanders and executives. All the europeans houses are air-conditionned and furnished.
...
A shanty town grows around and a wall is made to separate the two cities. It is called "mur de la honte" (wall of shame) by the zouerati. The lack of houses for the mauritanians workers has gone to build new flats between Zouerate and the Kediet.

The climate is dry (no mosquito), and the most displeasing is the sand wind.

In 1976, the polisario attacks. A lot of Europeans leave and do not comme back."

And now the Mauritanian coast is another kind of modern, a nodal point of another global trade not in mineral ores but in people. They are not only West Africans: The NY Times reported in 2008 of an Italian fishing trawler towed into Nouadhibou carrying 369 people trying to reach Europe who had come from a continent away: Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Burma, India and Pakistan.

"A new route has opened up", the UN say. From South East Asia migrants fly to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, and thence to Addis Ababa. Then Ethiopian Airlines to Bamako in Mali, Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, or Dakar in Senegal. Then to the ports: Nouadhibou, Conakry, Dakar, and the hope of the the porous points in the European border: the Canary islands; Ceuta & Melilla, Spanish enclaves in North Africa, now closely walled; the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Consequently the Global Detention Project note that:

"Mauritania operates one dedicated immigration detention centre in Nouadhibou, nicknamed “Guantanamito” by detainees, which has been sharply criticised for its poor conditions (USCRI 2009; Amnesty 2008a; CEAR 2008; WGAD 2008; Reuters 2006).
...
Spain’s involvement in establishing the detention centre has raised questions over which authority controls the facility. While the centre is officially managed by the Mauritanian National Security Service (NSS), it is not governed by any regulations applicable to detention centres in the country (Amnesty 2008a, p. 24). Rather, as stated by Mauritanian officials “clearly and emphatically” to a delegation from CEAR in October 2008, Mauritanian authorities perform their jobs at the express request of the Spanish government (ESW 2009).
...
The high number of migrants taken in on a monthly basis has led to severe overcrowding, as noted by several groups who visited in 2008 (Amnesty 2008a; CEAR 2008; WGAD 2008). According to Amnesty, in March 2008 there were 216 bunk beds spread throughout the former classrooms, although only three rooms were being used during their visit. The organization reported that during its visit “a group of 35 who had been expelled by Morocco were being held in a room measuring 8m by 5m, with bars at the windows, which contained 17 bunk beds” (Amnesty 2008a, p. 21)"

So. From high modernism, to a room of displaced people in disputed state space and 1 sq m per person.

Dalston Junction station, East London line

2010-02-08T17:27:00.000Z

Bleak, isn't it. Modern, antiseptic, safety-first-handrailed to funnel us in and funnel us out more efficiently – quite accidentally a beautifully smooth edge to grind a skateboard on, but no doubt they’re developing facial-recognition CCTV that’ll call security as soon as that thought even crosses your mind.

Not exactly Stirling prize-nominated Westminster station – or the drama of Canary Wharf, or the Paolozzi mosaics at Tottenham Court Road… What happened, what changed? Westminster was barely a decade ago, and no doubt built by the same private finance initiative money. Is decent architecture is only for the elites – MPs in Westminster, bankers at Canary Wharf? I understand we weren’t going to get anything world-changing at dirty old Dalston Junction, but did it have to be quite as soulless as this?

There is a realism to it, perhaps we should commend that? That, as a commuter station, it faithfully reproduces the sucking grind of the daily haul into the office, the fluorescent-lit scan-in scan-out automation that would make you feel very small and anonymous if credit card-recharged Oyster travelcards and CCTV didn’t mean that TfL knows your every last personal detail. The station has no doubt been designed using some terribly clever traffic-flow simulation software that has lots of little blue dots going down to the platforms and little red dots coming back up… And it looks like the kind of space where you’ll feel like a little dot in a big system. That’s design integrity after a sort, right?

I’m sure they’ll add plenty of advertising by the time it’s finished – that’ll brighten the place up a treat.

This is orc country...

2010-01-30T19:25:00.000Z

The white hand of Saruman?

Or just a kid and a visceral statement, I Am Here. This Is My City. The ur-point of the graffiti tag, legible in any culture - fuck your matte black building site hoardings, here is the human element...

Cities lectures at LSE, Spring 2010

2010-01-29T18:20:00.001Z

One of my new year's resolutions: attend more of these! LSE's always good at big public lectures - perhaps not such high-profile urbanists in 2010 as in previous years, but with a clear environmental theme this year they're sure to be worthwhile. See you there?

Delivering a Low Carbon London
Date: Tuesday 2 February 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Speaker: Isabel Dedring

Isabel Dedring will discuss developing and implementing a vision for a low carbon London. She is environment adviser to the Mayor of London, and has also been director of the policy unit at Transport for London.

Sustainable Housing: how can we save 80 per cent of our energy use in existing homes?
Date: Tuesday 9 February 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: New Theatre, East Building
Speaker: Professor Anne Power

This lecture addresses how we can drastically reduce energy consumption and consequent carbon emissions by considering existing buildings. Anne Power, professor of social policy, is head of LSE Housing and Communities, a research group in the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.

Reading London (part of the LSE Literature Festival)
Date: Saturday 13 February 2010
Time: 1-2.30pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speakers: Professor Rosemary Ashton, Dan Cruickshank, Leo Hollis, Hans Ulrich Obrist

How do we attempt to understand the sprawling "modern Babylon" that is London, with its layers of social, political and cultural history? Can art, architecture and literature help us to 'read' this complex city?

Rosemary Ashton - prof. of English lit & Bloomsbury literary culture
Dan Cruickshank - architectural historian and television presenter
Leo Hollis - history of London, inc. The Phoenix: the men who made modern London
Hans Ulrich Obrist - director at the Serpentine Gallery

The City Solution: Climate change and transport design
Date: Monday 8 March 2010
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Janette Sadik-Kahn

Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, has transformed the way New Yorkers think of sustainable transport and realised some dramatic and effective projects and policy changes in a brief period – including the part-pedestrianisation of Times Square. She will explain how creative public transport solutions can address the environmental impact of cities and improve the quality of urban life.
Part of the Urban Age: Cities and the Environment series

Property porn - desire, self-loathing, and real estate

2010-01-27T19:21:00.002Z

My Regent's Canal walk a while back was a beautiful but frustrating experience. For mile upon mile I passed the most desirable apartments: perfect geometry, perfect patina, perfect lifestyles on offer if you only had the key.

The key being, oooh, six hundred thousand or so? A cool million if you want a place in the Wenlock Building with its chinchilla fucking carpets... The waterfront warehouse: industrial chic in a calming canalside environment. The stresses of urban living soothed by that neighbouring touch of nature - drink your morning Gaggia-juice watching ducklings dabble past. Lateral space. Curving panoramic picture windows. High ceilings, light, and neighbours of a class worth networking with. What could possibly be nicer?

Such a lifestyle being even remotely attainable.

I do not even desire the highest end buildings (too luxury, not enough warehouse), but it struck me: this is pornography. Lusting after beauty made object, an object you cannot access in reality and yet long to own and possess. That dirty consumer indulgence of imaging where you'd put the grand piano, the cocktail cabinet, and the Andreas Gursky print, and the repeated daydreaming through particularly favoured scenarios. A fantasy life develops in which these things are yours and their lustre rubs off on to you; you become just that little bit more elegant, more urbane.

With a bacherlor/ette pad in this place, just imagine the sexual calibre of the affairs you would have...

'Property porn' is, appallingly, included in the Collins English Dictionary, which describes it as "a genre of escapist TV programmes, magazine features, etc showing desirable properties for sale, especially those in idyllic locations, or in need of renovation, or both."

It has its a Twitter account, @propertyporn.

There's even a book about it, Marjorie B. Garber's Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, where she argues:

What do college students talk about with their roommates? Sex. Twenty years later, what do they talk about with their friends and associates? Real estate. And with the same gleam in the eyes. Real estate today has become a form of yuppie pornography.

But isn't this rather a softcore kind of porn, using the word only as a cheeky reference to having fantasies? Get us, aren't we liberal and naughty? Or hasn't online pornography also created (or facilitated) the sex addict, the dopamine junkie comprehensively scrambling his ability to find pleasure in real women and real sex through consuming this parade of hyperreal silicone and coffee-creamer cum shots? Porno-driven desire all too easily feeds a well of bitterness and frustration - the porn user's misogyny, a hatred for the gorgeous young things who make like they want him on screen – but in real life really don't.

That's where I want to take this 'property porn' analogy. Fantasy-land is a dangerous place, and I want to ask what it does to us to be surrounded by beautiful architecture and beautiful lifestyles that we'll never, ever be able to afford to have.

I find myself half envious, half bitter towards that older generation (my parents) who benefitted from the Nineties and Noughties housing booms - those people who bought low, saw their equity multiply, made it impossible for my generation to buy - and, while they were at it, have us paying off their buy-to-let investments' mortgages with our rental payments. Lovely for them, of course, but this generational inequity (confined to the middle class, admittedly, but that's most of us these days) is no social good.

Through desiring these homes I cannot afford, it's also easy to start resenting my current work in social research. Ooh, an LSE 1st and I might be able to earn £25k in about ten years' time? Christ, what the hell made me pick anthropology when I could have done maths and been a banker! Each time I desire an apartment I can't imagine ever affording, my earning ability, my choices, my value to the (economic) world are measured - and found wanting. Doing something inexplicable in finance starts to look really very rational, if else so much of the city (its homes, its shops, its restaurants and pleasure) can never, ever be mine.

An article at Counterpunch comes to some similar thoughts:

How much was property porn responsible for the inflation of the bubble? Long before becoming chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, Adam Sampson did academic research on sexual pornography. He sees the two as having a similar impact:
"Pornography can make feelings and behaviours that are otherwise unacceptable seem normal. Property porn didn't invent the pastime of using houses to make money - but it gave it legitimacy."

Which is what is truly objectionable about property porn - it takes away the home, it takes away the love - and makes it a mere financial transaction.

Requiem

2010-01-26T13:49:00.003Z

Leonard Street, EC2A.

This has also caught the eye of the Chaotic Semiotic, who posts the full text. The poem (if it wants to be seen as that?) is certainly worth a read, resonating like something somehow familiar, a "lesser-known Wilfred Owen". Yet after several reads I still can't untangle the mix of sentiment sympathetic to the military (if not to war) with Temple Ov Thee Psychick Youth spelling. Writing about finding a lost book, I called the city opaque. Here it goes further into the occult.

Findings in the city: books, names, questions

2010-01-24T01:07:00.001Z

It's been a good month for the city giving me gifts. My lover always finds playing cards, one a week or so, with which he reads an urban tarot. Me? I've had a knack for street clothes, gathering bedraggled pieces of fabric and taking them home to wash. Last winter this got me a good warm hoody at a time I was too unemployed to turn the heating on much, though the elbow-length black velvet gloves won out for chic alongside warmth. Various hats, a couple of things that went straight to charity shops... And of course this scavenging isn't karma-free, so those scarves I've lost on buses and jackets I've left on trains? Call it tit-for-tat.

But what brought me to blog was a History of the City of Gaza, or, at the time I came across it, an anonymous brown-bound hardcover on a wall in Holloway. A 1966 edition of a 1907 book by Martin A. Meyer, a genuine bona fide time capsule telling of a Gaza city so far from the one we know today - as the frontispiece shows:

"The city of Gaza has not had the glamour thrown around it which has brought so many cities on the coasts of the Mediterranean into great prominence. But ... The importance of the city of Gaza will be more and more emphasized as the eastern shores of the Mediterranean are opened up to the commerce of the world, and as the projected railroads bring the inner parts of hither Asia into direct connection with the sea.

"Hither Asia"! What a term. How different the geography of the world - the knowledge of the world - the world itself in 1907. Though, too, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean have indeed been opened up to the commerce of the world, and Gaza certainly has an importance today - an importance that might be said to have a kind of glamour (in leftist circles at least), an evocative power and meaning beyond the bare facts. So perhaps Meyer is not so irrelevant now as all that, and perhaps that's why the book's been republished in June 2009 and apparently reprinted already.

But the story, the story - I tell you all this for the inscription on the inner leaf: "Abeer Abuwarda, 10/2008, London". Suddenly my street find conceivably had an owner, if they'd lost the book rather than put it out on the street like so much broken furniture. Now I may be an opportunist but I'm no thief, so I googled to see if I could find this person to whom to return the book. Who'd I find? A London Met doctoral student working on Architecture of Resistance During the Gaza Blockade, and the "permanent temporiness" of Palestinian refugee camps (Khan Unis Camp below).

(Following the Gaza line of enquiry into permanent temporary settlements, do read the ever-interesting Eyal Weizman on Ariel Sharon, the architect/general for whom war is politics and politics is space-making. But back to the story:)

Small world, you might think, if I could find the book's former owner so easily, and if s/he's an architectural theory postgrad just down the road. But within this visibility is deeper anonymity - "Abeer Abuwarda" has no google trail other than this one page; is presumably not their 'public' name but a personal one for writing in books & this one piece of work; is not to be contacted for bookish purposes after all.

Thus the found object remains mute, its history (lost or discarded?) unclear, its rightful owner (Abeer or me?) unknowable. Whatever the marvels of internet search technology, the city remains opaque.

J'accuse: what use iPhone cities?

2009-11-19T23:20:00.003Z

As far as the urbanist blogosphere is concerned, the 'networked city' made possible by the iPhone and its applications is the only thing worth talking about. The street as platform... The kind of program a city is... This is where the urban buzz is right now.

And this is a plea for moderation. Look, I know futurology is shiny and exciting, but let's put this in context. Research from Nielsen shows that 10.4 million Britons access mobile internet, which is to say over 80% of the population do not. 6.2 million people use smartphones, but this market is dominated by Nokia (44%) and Blackberry (19%), with the iPhone taking 3rd place with 17%, or about 1.05 million users. As Edward Kershaw, Nielsen's VP of Mobile Media says,

Whilst smartphones get all the media attention it’s important not to overlook what the vast majority of Britons are actually using. It’s easy to be blinded by the hype but this results in a distorted picture of the mobile market.

At a generous estimate, 1 in 10 Londoners use iPhones. This app-tastic networked interactive post-architectural futuropolis? Demographically it's white, it's rich and it's male. Now, that also happens to describe the architectural profession rather well, so it's perhaps not surprising that such a privileged perspective has come to dominate the discourse. But here's a comparison for you: the number of iPhone users in London is broadly similar to the 700,000 Londoners living in housing association properties, and the 750,000 Londoners living in overcrowded conditions.

Political bloggers may be doing a great job analysing affordable housing issues, but urbanists? Architecture bloggers? Hardly a peep. I find this deeply disheartening. Architecture school teaches the most extraordinary imaginative skills yet in such a socio-political vacuum, where the closest anyone gets to political analysis is debating whether Le Corbusier was a fascist. I know y'all want your pretty renderings featured in Wired magazine, but why not use that creativity to "augment reality" in a more progressive way than showing where's the nearest Tube station?

I live in a city of massive inequality, where millions of people are stressed and unhealthy and we struggle to imagine a way to exercise without spending £60/month at Fitness First. I live in a city where house prices are greatly determined by parents' fears of educational inequalities, and where my generation will be at the mercy of landlords for life; I live in a city where too many earn below the London living wage of £7.60 an hour. I live in a city that's fucking political, yet I read the leading blogs in this field and you'd never guess.

Now I too fail to blog about this a fraction as much as I should - do not get me wrong, j'accuse myself; I am the kid who wrote a thesis on the existential nature of dust and I got a bit excited about iPhones too. This is a polemic intended to energise myself as much as anyone else...

Anna Minton writes of the city as political and the urbanist blogo/Tweetosphere listens; plenty of academics are working on these topics although often it's crashingly dull. If technofixes are widely critiqued as a means of addressing climate change, why so much technofetishism in urbanist thinking? If you think an iPhone app can double voter engagement and make big developments more accountable, for god's sake shout about it. But hyperlocal advertising and information about the coolest coffee shop in the neighbourhood is just so much capitalist fluff, so much extra encouragement to consume; so not progressive.

Anthropologically, too, who's actually assessing the extent of the impact of this technocity on people's lives? Where's the empiricism in these blog posts? They all seem to be hypothetical or imaginative rather than ethnographic research of this technology in lived experience. Who's questioning the hype about how revolutionary these technologies are? And, among all this shiny, don't we risk losing sight of the actual, tangible, real spaces people are living in? Shitty bike lanes, muggings, litter and traffic congestion? That's why I liked the Bratton piece I linked to: at least it brought some materiality, some tactility back into this discussion.

In summary: where's the political, the empirical and the embodied in these 'networked cities' essays? One sentence mentioning a need to ensure that the wrong people (who?) don't control (how?) all that data does not incisive analysis make. Architectural theory loves its future cities, its fictional cities, its Ballard and Gibson and CAD and conceptualism. Imagination is great, don't get me wrong.

But imagination alone doesn't make the world a better place.

The Empty Post Office

2009-11-13T16:52:00.001Z

West Central District Office of the Post Office, New Oxford Street / High Holborn, London WC1. Empty 10 to 15 years.

With eight floors each apparently 4,400 sq m, that makes for about 350,000 sq ft of vacant space. It's surely one of the largest abandoned sites in London and you would think it ripe for redevelopment - many other offices in 'Midtown' (commercial property-ese for Holborn) have been rebuilt recently. But no. This former stop on the Post Office Underground Railway line (which ran from Paddington to Whitechapel) is now used for occasional art events, fashion shows and product launches. The rest of the time it sits empty.

I got inside in 2005 when it hosted the exhibition Küba by Kutlug Ataman. 40 old teevees in front of 40 old chairs, each showing video of a resident of the Küba gecekondu in Istanbul. 'Gecekondu' translates as 'arrived in the night'; these are shanty towns built on squatted land, and six million Istanbul residents live in one, a full half of the population. And do Küba residents have stories to tell. It's a neighbourhood of dissenters, of Kurds, of fierce loyalties and crime and community and the longing to be able to escape.

Source: Artangel

Still present, fenced off, were the postal chutes and sorting racks of the old post office.

Source: Michael Bujkowski on Flikr

I'm in two minds about what should be done with this building. In such a crowded, overpriced town as London such an enormous space shouldn't be wasted – and it is a waste for it to be empty or only hosting Smirnoff launch parties; it's not often that it gets an exhibition like Kutlug Ataman's. But redeveloping it into an enormous office complex, no doubt with a privatised 'public' square and chain brand cafes and bars, so big that only faceless finance or bureaucracy occupies it? Can't get excited about that, either. (Quite puzzled why the Post Office hasn't sold it off already though, given that organisation's perilous financial situation and looming pensions deficit... If the building's as big as I think it is, it must be worth £100 million plus.)

Social housing would be better than boxy 'luxury' flats; what about an arts space, a new Barbican for the West End? But I am troubled too by this urge to fill it – what if there is a case to be made for its imaginative value as an empty vessel, a void, pure space? It would make no financial sense, but perhaps that gaping absence of capitalist real estate logic could be the point.

People should be allowed in, though. One or two at a time. Able to run around, and scream, and climb on things and slide down the mail chutes and explore. Space to think, to breathe, to play. No question that that's what the city needs.

Still life with uncollected post & the lights left on

2009-11-12T21:28:00.000Z

Last night's walk provided an apt case study for recent ideas about empty properties (see here and here) - albeit in a commercial rather than residential building. This shop, once Shoe Studio, sits - of all places - on Covent Garden itself, on the corner with James Street heading up to the tube. In terms of raw footfall, this site is surely as busy as Oxford Street. Yet, like much of Oxford Street, its landlord seems to have been struggling to attract quality retailers; the no-brand Shoe Studio went into administration in March 2009, and the shop has sat empty for eight months.

They left but failed to turn off the lights - with such irresponsibility is it any wonder the store failed? But, oh, what an aesthetic abandonment. The surfaces are so white and smooth yet the glass in the windows is dirtying slightly under the carbonate trails of the rain. Stripped of any saleable merchandise there is only the rectilinear calm of the shelving and its backlit glow into the night.

Are there ghosts here? Covent Garden has quite the history but this space is too antiseptic; without occupants you might call the shop disembodied but yet it never had a soul to lose. There's a sign on the windows promising 'new collection' but the doors are chained shut.

Related comment from Retail Week: Covent Garden's landlord has plans for rejuvenation (June 2009):

Many of the problems with the market stem from Covent Garden’s mass of smaller streets surrounding the main piazza and the dozens of landlords that have claimed a stake in the area since 1913 when the main estate was first sold off by the Duke of Bedford. Because there have been so many parties involved the retail offer has grown up relatively untamed, with a wide range of shops now occupying the streets.

Three years ago, Capco bought the Covent Garden Estate from Scottish Widows for £421m. Since then it has expanded its reach in the area to the point that the landlord now controls 750,000 sq ft of land around the market – which is most of Covent Garden. It is this huge dominance of the area, lacking since 1913, that gives Capco the opportunity to finally improve the offer. It has the luxury of being able to take a unified approach to planning the retail.

Minimum or Maximum Cities? A conference

2009-11-12T17:59:00.002Z

Keen to go to the Minimum or Maximum Cities conference, held by the Min-Max-Cities group in the University of Cambridge's Architecture department. It's on Thursday 26th November 2009 in Cambridge and looks to be well worth the £20 registration fee and a day off work. They are asking:

What is the future for cities? Are they expanding at an ever-increasing rate or are they being abandoned and shrinking into oblivion? Are cities polluted, overcrowded and anonymous, or are they dynamic centres of innovation and culture? Are they sociable or anti-social?

...So one year on from the economic crash, how should we seek to reinvigorate our urban centres? Some welcome the current mood of caution as appropriate for hazardous times. Others argue a lack of belief in the benefits of an urbanised future is a cause for concern. So should the priority be to dampen expectations and settle for minimising potential problems? Or should we be more ambitious and experiment with new ideas and technologies that could maximise future gains? Are our creative talents best employed in seeking a 'minimum' city as a means to retrench, rethink and rebuild? Or is a 'maximum' urbanism the answer, based on expansive cities for a dynamic and globalised planet?

And the programme goes like this:

9.00 - Registration and coffee
9.30 - Welcome and Introductions

9.35 – 11.05 The Anxious City: The Dilemmas of Growth
"For the first time in history half the world's population live in cities, yet the celebrations have been distinctly muted. Rather than advancing civilisation, cities are said to be on "the edge of chaos", and bring out our "lurking paranoia". Some have claimed the roots of recession are spatial, and that sprawling cities point to a "whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit". Just-in-time contemporary urban lifestyles are said to threaten the frail systems of a brittle society.
So how should we account the sense of exhaustion and limits that have become central features of western discourse on cities? Are cities today too dynamic and spiralling out of control? Or do they suffer from a surfeit of controls?" Is resilience a dynamic, positive message, or one that implies cities are vulnerable?

11.30 – 13.00 The Agile City: Local Ties versus Global Reach
"The ambition to travel further and faster has often been held up as a virtue. Not so long ago, there was enthusiasm for the idea that Jet Packs and Flying Cars could represent the future of urban transport. These days the outlook on travel is less clear cut. We seem less likely to dream about flying cars, than to express concerns about flying and cars. At a time when local accessibility rather than metropolitan mobility excites policymakers, fast citywide, regional or global connections seem less of a priority than measures to promote cycling and walking.
Expanding one's geographical range has often been associated with the positive ambition to broaden one's horizons. So is the new maxim of living more simply and more locally likely to prove inspirational enough to city dwellers?"

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch & Exhibition
Exihibition Space - Paper City: Urban Utopias

14.00 – 15.30 Powering the City: Innovations in Energy
"From the impact of increasing oil prices to the benefits of investing in renewables and smart grids, energy has become central to the discussion on recovering from recession. And whether through 'passive houses', 'transition towns' or 'low carbon cities', the question of sustainable energy now figures prominently at all scales of architectural and urban thinking.
So how should designers view the elevation of energy efficiency as one of, or perhaps even the defining criterion of design quality? Does the current emphasis on localising supply and 'off grid' solutions mean that universal supply and scale efficiencies have had their day? Does the recent focus on altering individual behaviour represent a welcome broadening out of the concept of innovation? Or does it indicate that controls and regulations are taking precedence over discovery and experimentation?"

16.00 – 17.30 The Future City: Rewriting the Rule Book
"What might represent a way forward? From ‘slow cities’ to ‘creative cities’, and ‘liveable cities’ to ‘hungry cities’; from ‘aerotropolis’ to ‘postopolis’, and the ‘compact city’ to the ‘città diffusa’; there are any number of ideas out there that purport to represent a basis for the future city. But is what is on offer today ambitious, challenging and bold enough? Do the visionaries of today respect current rules and accept contemporary limits? Or are they the ideas of risk takers who are attempting to move beyond?
In this final session we invite three teams of aspiring urban visionaries to present and defend their min/max solutions for the future city. This is your chance to crit their ideas… and through doing so, to flesh out your own."

17.30 – 19.00 Wine Reception

Urban Decline: Empty Homes

2009-11-11T02:04:00.002Z

Following my previous post Urban Abandonment: Not Just Detroit which looked at urban decline in terms of depopulation, I now want to think in terms of abandoned housing. There is a lot more data for this metric, which helps!

Just last month Barbara Follet, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, was asked how many empty dwellings there were in England:

Ownership	2006	2007	2008
Local authority	42,870	40,960	36,940
Registered social landlords	30,170	30,770	29,240
Privately owned	675,120	691,590	717,840

David Ireland of the Empty Homes Agency notes that this overall rise of 3% suggests that 970,000 homes are empty across the UK as of March 2008, suggesting the million mark has probably been crossed by now if this trend has continued. Given total housing stock of about 24 million properties in the England and Wales, and 1 in 12 people this is a substantial problem.

In London an estimated 80,000 homes stand empty, with councils employing a wide range of grants and housing association take-overs to reduce this figure.

But so far these are only abandoned houses, not abandoned cities as we are seeing in the US. Without concentrations of vacancies in specific towns and districts, we cannot call this the same problem at all. The Empty Homes Agency, however, report that 937,000 homes or a city twice the size of Birmingham is located in areas of low demand for housing. They report that:

The Sustainable Communities Plan, published on 5th February 2003, provides the Government framework for a major programme of action that will, over the next 15-20 years, tackle the pressing problems of communities across England. One of the key areas forming the basis for the action programme is the tackling of low housing demand and housing abandonment: sustained action to turn round areas where housing markets have failed. Over the next three years, £500 million is being made available for some of the worst affected areas, known as Pathfinder market renewal areas, with the intention of reversing low demand by 2010.

There are nine Housing Market Renewal (HMR) Pathfinder areas:

Birmingham and Sandwell
East Lancashire
Humberside
Manchester and Salford
Merseyside
Newcastle and Gateshead
North Staffordshire
Oldham and Rochdale
South Yorkshire

Other non-Pathfinder low demand areas include the Tees Valley and West Yorkshire, both of which should be getting additional support from the ODPM.

Questions to follow up include:

- What does Pathfinder involvement mean?
- Is it working?
- Many councils have Empty Homes Strategies that look good on paper. What have they actually done and achieved?
- Demolitions: where? To what extent? Local reactions.
- Socio-economic impact of current vacancies (perhaps a gap in the current discourse, which is fixated by solutions).
- National pattern of low housing demand, especially North vs. South: are some areas unlikely to be able to gain more residents, leading to a need for managed decline?
- Lessons from (or for?) the US

Links to follow up:
- Ipsos MORI surveys (c.2006) on scale and reasons for unoccupied homes
- Self-Help-Housing.Org for community-driven solutions and uses for empty dwellings
- Empty homes statistics by region since 1999
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on housing estates' improvements making them more popular with residents
- LSE CASE research on 'Low demand and abandoned housing in the north', some published in conjunction with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Cities and Ambition: the case of London

2009-11-10T18:30:00.002Z

A friend linked me to Paul Graham's 2008 essay, Cities and Ambition. Its thesis:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.

What about The City of this blog - my city, London? What is the quintessential London ambition, what is this city’s message?

Graham is a little opaque. He calls London a city that cares about “hipness” or ‘knowing what’s what’. “So maybe,” he writes, “it has simply replaced the component of social class that consisted of being ‘au fait’. That could explain why hipness seems particularly admired in London: it’s version 2 of the traditional English delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand.” True enough - though it’s definitely not cool to call it ‘hip’, and ‘cool’ is pretty over too. Fashion? Being on trend? ‘Chic’ and ‘style’ are more Paris; London is about the ineffable it that is all the more it by remaining unspecified.

Graham also detects the ghost of a message that one should be more aristocratic, as too in Paris, New York and Boston. (Class itself is of course ‘version 1’ of the “obscure codes” Graham believes we Britishers love.) It would be easy to write off such a statement as a USian stereotype of this country, but there’s a certain truth to it - how many super-social creative venture-starting party kids are doing so funded by a nice little inheritance and a recognisable surname?

The modern London aristocratic is about being that multi-faceted word, ‘smart’. Smart as in well-presented, knowing the codes of double cuffs and just how much you can bend the rules with your haircut. Smart as in well-educated (always paid for, through fees or catchment area house prices), and appearing informed and intelligent in a manner with some autonomy from the question of whether or not you actually are. And smart in the Tatler sense: the politically acceptable word for posh.

Yet ‘being smart’ or ‘having it’ - these are good things to do in London, but could we say they’re this city’s message? I don’t think so - I don’t think London has one message, not in any soundbiteable sense.

It is of course very white to talk about a city having one message: newsflash, Graham’s (or my) middle class white sensibilities can hardly speak for the many and various dreams and desires of a hamlet in Surrey, let alone those of a metropolis. The process by which a city gains an ‘image’, however - that amalgam of representations of history and population and economy and cultural production - that sociocultural process is pretty white- and middle-class dominated. And we’re certainly talking about image here, rather than a genuine belief that the average person in LA really is more celeb-oriented than one in NY. A city’s ambition is instead the beliefs we don’t think we hold but believe those around us do.

So, problematic as the idea is, perhaps we can talk about New York and Los Angeles and Boston/Cambridge having images. Why? Because the US is big enough, with enough big and distinct cities, for like-minded people to cluster. You want a tech job you go to the tech city; you want a sunny eco lifestyle you go to the sunny right-on city. It is at least conceptually possible. Britain? If you want an interesting job, you probably have to move to London: it’s the only city big enough to offer a substantial choice of employers and industries.

I’m a social researcher. In London I could work for a think tank, or government departments or quangos or NGOs, or I could work in public sector market research or in a strategy-oriented consultancy. In Southampton I’d have to work for the Office of National Statistics, or leave. My friend’s a theatre reviewer. Here she can go to see comedy, or musicals, or big West End actors doing Shakespeare or serious Polish avant garde things they prefer to call ‘bodywork’. There’s a dozen gigs a night needing reviewing, and a hundred newspapers or magazines to review them for. Try starting that career in Manchester...

One probably could, of course. It’s not that the rest of the country is a cultural wasteland, it’s just that London believes it is - and that’s what the London-centric national media tells us all. In this culture London gains a monopoly on imaginative possibility - it’s the place you go if you want to make something happen in your life. Even if you’re not quite sure what that something is yet, you can probably do it there. Paul Graham says that New Yorkers want money, Washingtonites proximity to political power, and Berkleyites to live better. Does London have such a clear ambition? Probably not. Instead, the city is just an urban glamour, a dream, an illusion of possibility.

But that is why London is interesting: it could be anything.

So Human: goodbye to the Waterloo footway poem

2009-11-07T10:15:00.003Z

Posted 7 October 2009:

Update, 7 November 2009:

Apparently this poem - Eurydice by Sue Warren - is now gone, painted over by Network Rail last weekend. Read more at Time Out: they're calling it 'cultural vandalism'. As the artist says,

"This work was commissioned by the BFI and The Arts Council and, therefore, was installed using public money. Railtrack have defaced something they did not pay for without any consultation either with the BFI, the architect Bryan Avery or with me."

"...damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half-remembered moon..."

Urban abandonment - not just Detroit?

2009-11-05T18:48:00.000Z

Inspired by Jo Guldi's post Bulldozing Your Neighbours: Development Plans in the Rust Belt, her longer piece at the Commonweal Institute and a general buzz around this topic in the US, I want to do some thinking about urban depopulation - in the UK.

The urban population is expanding. Cities now contain over 50% of the world's population, and 90% of UK residents live in urban areas. Nationally it's a story of growth, up from 79% in 1950 and forecast to increase another few percentage points by 2030. But is that growth evenly spread? I very much doubt it.

Post-industrial Detroit has seen its population halve (some nice representations of this at the Map Scroll blog). Zero demand leads to near-valueless housing, demolitions, and whole streets being abandoned. So what about Britain's post-industrial cities, the ones that really aren't my City, the ones the national media don't report on? I'm sure I've heard something about terraced streets in Manchester being demolished, of vacant housing in towns I couldn't even locate on a map (Burnley? Wolverhampton?). What's this story? I want to find out.

An ONS 'People and Migration' report on The UK's major urban areas provides the closest thing to hard data: population decreases between 1991 and 2001 in Liverpool and Glasgow (both -2.6%), Greater Manchester (-1.6%), Tyneside (0.7%), and West Midlands (-0.5%). It's based on Census data and has quite a lot of methodological detail, giving a suggsetion of how to dig down to census sub-division level to see trends at a neighbourhood rather than city scale.

The problem is that the ONS website isn't user-friendly, and I haven't so far come across any decent datasets on housing demolition or vacant housing (and I'm going to have to work to get the population change by district). So, to start with, a call for information - are any academics working on this for the UK? Where'd I find the statistics I need? Where should I be looking?

More to follow...

The urban jungle

2009-10-29T02:23:00.000Z

Top of Brick Lane // side street off Kingsland Road.
September 2009

'Epidemic obesity' and the challenge for urban design

2009-10-24T00:01:00.091+01:00

This follows on (belatedly) from a BLDGblog post looking at the potential for urban design to limit the transmission of epidemic disease. In essence, sit people greater-than-sneezing-distance apart and they're less likely to infect each other with flu. Reading this I started to think about what might be seen as the defining 'epidemic' of modern times: obesity. How do the spatial requirements for combating this epidemic differ from other diseases?

The obesity-as-epidemic theory refers in the broadest sense to the social character of being seriously overweight. It's rooted in analysis of the massive longitudinal Framlington Heart Study dataset (15,000 people since 1948), carried out by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. This dataset not only covers people's health outcomes but also their behaviours and friends & family networks, making it a powerful resource to understand the social transmission of ill health.

Christakis & Fowler's finding: people don't get fat in a vacuum; instead, obesity spreads from person to person. People have thought for a while that bodyfat has a substantial social life, rooted in the norms we learn about how to eat and what food means; cultural representations of ideal and non-ideal bodies; comfort eating, exercise and dieting as a means to virtue... But that was a sociological hunch, whereas now the Framlington data offers statistical evidence that this 'epidemic' metaphor might really be valid. Not only do children learn unhealthy eating habits off parents (and their peers) but, says the theory, an increased prevalence of overweight people around you makes it more likely you will be fat / gain weight / not be able to lose weight.

That's the theory. While the pattern it describes is pretty rigorous, it's not unproblematic to medicalise obesity as a disease in this way (something discussed more below). At this point in the discussion, though, public health policy operates upon the population rather than the individual, and under this lens obesity isn't bodily experience or personal narrative but yes, epidemiological. So, using this public health framework, how would we engineer the city to avoid the spread and transmission of obesity?

People tend to approach obesity as a problem of calories in versus calories out. Under this schema we would first need a city that increases exercise and activity levels. This means walking and cycling, and promoting this through such things as the Paris Velib scheme, tolls to discourage cars in the city centre, school 'walking buses', not selling school sports fields for housing development, and so on. Investment in suburban public transport could switch people's commutes from a car journey door to door to a bus or train ride - and walking to/from the station at each end. Buildings get designed with more stairs, fewer lifts, and showers for cyclists and runners. Council-owned gymnasiums get subsidised so they're free to use - and so on.

Calories in? Public health interventions here would act upon school dinners, and ensure poorer areas of housing were properly served with supermarkets and fresh-food grocers, not just fried chicken shops. You tax fatty food, sugar, processed stuff; subsidise British and/or organic farming better than current EU agricultural policy. The urban environment loses its billboards advertising junk food, and gains allotments and public farming co-ops with egg-laying hens clucking free. The public health case seems clear, and (alongside economic stimuli) urban design would seem to play as central a role in tackling this epidemic as it has historically in tackling more familiar infectious diseases such as typhoid or TB.

The problem is that 'calories in less than calories out' doesn't work as a strategy for diminishing obesity. It's counterintuitive and you won't believe me, so I'll direct you towards the fantastic discussions of peer-reviewed scientific research on this front on the NYTimes' science & health blog. It's not the place to go into it all here, but in short the factors driving obesity are A Lot More Complicated than food and exercise. Obesity still shows epidemiological patterns of transmission, but the vectors are much more complex.

So what does this mean for the 'urban hygiene' thesis sketched above that suggests 'epidemic' obesity can be tackled by urban design and spatial organisation in an analogous method to combating other infectious diseases? Basically that it's not going to work. Now, walkable cities and access to affordable fresh food are still social goods and by all means need promoting - but not necessarily because they're going to make fat people thinner. (They should make the population healthier, but that doesn't mean people will lose weight.) Instead the more rigorous solution might be to start thinking about obesity as the symptom rather than the illness.

The symptom of what? Poverty, and more than that, social inequality. At some point in the last century the West passed a tipping-point where food became sufficiently abundant that the poor could afford enough of it to get fat. Poverty being in these societies a largely relative state (even in governmental definitions such as income <60% of average), in more unequal societies the poor feel poorer - and are fatter. Why? Because, as humanity overlays biological nature with social meaning, food is about a hell of a lot more than calories or 'fuel'. It's about sociality, comfort and indulgence. Even those with very little can afford access to 'luxury'-marked foods that are rich with fat and sugar and highly pleasurable. The problem is not the food. It's the social structures that make people feel bored, and demoralised, and of little self-worth, and consequently likely to turn to over-consumption for some relief. Even rhesus monkeys do this: "Essentially, eating high-calorie foods becomes a coping strategy to deal with daily life events for an individual in a difficult social situation."

Under this improved understanding obesity is still 'epidemic' - because low social mobility reproduces the same conditions of inequality for the subsequent generation. And, as the famous Whitehall Studies of civil servants show, it is specifically inequality that is the problem, rather than simply low social status: the lower-ranking civil servants weren't poor, but they still had more heart disease, obesity and mortality than higher-ranking staff. Is urban design still able to act on this issue as it can upon epidemics? Yes... Maybe.

It's a lot harder to design out social inequality than it is to put some bike lanes in, that's for sure. For example, do you mix up housing sizes & tenures so rich live next door to poor - is that leveling and pro-equality? Or does it daily remind some people daily of much less they have, and would they be better off in areas of more homogenous income/class where similarity might facilitate greater community? How'd you spatially plan school catchment areas to enable equality of educational opportunity for all - and yet not bus kids halfway across the city, disrupting both social groupings and pupils' ability to walk/cycle/exercise their way to school?

Urban design is important for tackling social inequality, of that much I am sure. It produces the spaces in which different people interact and meet, it sets up the lived, experienced context for ideas of the public and the social commons and solidarity within the social collective. But the specifics of what you design and build and where, as means by which to tackle social inequality (and its symptom, 'epidemic obesity') - it seems a lot more difficult than the urban hygiene of sewers and clean water that beat epidemics of old.

This Is Not A Gateway, 23 - 25th October 2009

2009-10-23T22:50:00.002+01:00

This Is Not A Gateway is a forum for urban discussion - planning, architecture, art, protest. They have an incredibly useful event listing for city-related talks, exhibitions and so on in the capital, and also an annual festival - which is this weekend, the 23rd - 25th October.

Here is the full festival programme; below a selection of the most interesting events. Most are based at Hanbury Hall, 22 Hanbury St, E1 6QR - or elsewhere in the East End. In chronological order...

Denitza Toteva: Integration Through Gardening: Perspectives From Berlin
Friday 23 / Hanbury Hall 11:00- 12:00
Re. my previous post on What If Projects and their appropriation of vacant land for community gardens and 'plant rooms':
Can intercultural gardens play a role in urban integration? Exploring community gardens in Berlin and London. The discussion also examines the conceptual framework of integration in different political contexts. Speakers include Nina Pope (Artist) and Alexander  Vatchev (Gardener).

Tomorrow's Thoughts Today Productive Dystopias, Or... An Architecture Of Unintended Consequences
Friday 23, 20:00 - 21:30 / Hanbury Hall
Can we conceive of an alternative practice where current power structures of patronage and regulation are channeled, subverted or engaged in new ways? And how might dystopian visions paradoxically offer a productive way of approaching the urban question? Panelists: Tomas Klassnik (Klassnik Corporation), Elena Pascolo (Urban Projects Bureau), Austin Williams (Future Cities Project), Finn Williams (Common Office), Karl Sharro (ManTowNHuman) Alex Warnock-Smith (Urban Projects Bureau, AA) and Amin Taha.

Fugitive Images Should Socially Engaged Artistic Practices Generate Social Cohesion?
Saturday 24 12:30-13:30 / Rehearsal Room
C.f. my recent post on I Am Here, the photographs on a Haggerston council estate - and Mango's comments about whether this was genuine community engagement or just Stuff White People Like...
A discussion about the emergence of socially and politically engaged artistic practices. A close look at their motivations, aims and methodologies as well as potential problems. Panelists include, Marsha Bradfield (Artist, Educator and Curator), Dave Beech (Free Art Collective) and Mark Davy (Director of future\city). Chaired by Bill McAlister (Director of ICA 1970-1990)
Also a tour of I Am Here at 11:00 on Saturday 24, meeting at Suleymaniye Mosque, E2 8AX.

This Is Not A Gateway: DIY Urbanism / Influencing The City: Legalities Of Space
Saturday 24 14:00-15:00 / Rehearsal Room
Do cultural and political movements only produce change when they are translated into law? Is law not an arena urbanists should know significantly more about and participate within? What research are lawyers undertaking within the urban field? The discussion explores a spectrum of examples that highlight how law has been employed to propel urban change and the ways urbanists can take better advantage of the opportunities it provides. Speakers include Bill Parry-Davies (Lawyer) and Elizabeth Fonseca (Environmental Quality Manager)

Olivia Tusinski, Sommer Spiers: Urban Regeneration: Views From Above & Below
Saturday 24 14:00-15:00 / Main Hall
Case studies in urban regeneration, taken from neighbourhoods in Istanbul and London, will be examined against a backdrop of prevailing trends of privatisation of urban land, entrepreneurial governance, and political aspirations to retain/attain ‘global city’ status.

David Knight - Birth Of Autonomous London
Sunday 25 13:30-14:30 / Hanbury Hall
An immersive, fictional presentation covering the Birth of Autonomous London: the taking of the waterways, permitted development traveller cities, sewage line thoroughfares, radicalised ‘development corporations’.

Gavin Grindon, Anna Feigenbaum: Creative Resistance Research Network
Sunday 25 17:00-18:00 / Main Hall
Discussion and screening to launch the CRRN; a collective research project investigating street praxis, dissolving artists, improvisational militancy, politics of invisibility and space reclamation. CRRN facilitates a conversation about the potential of the street as a site for radical politics.

Film: A13 Road Movie by Rayna Nadeem & Stuart Shahid Bamforth (Dekko Productions)
Saturday 24 11:30-12:30, 16:30-17:30 / Library
Sunday 25 11:30-12:30, 16:30-18:30 / Library
A13 Road Movie is a documentary that uncovers some of the complexities along the road that connects the city to the infamous Thames Gateway. Billy Bragg, Tory MP David Amess, Pakistani restaurateurs, vicars, Ford union reps, Tilbury dock-workers, West Indian allotment-holders, and lay-by burger van proprietors, provide testimony to the history, the myths and the folklore of this much-travelled route from the East End to the Essex coast.

Artists exhibiting in Hanbury Hall:

Constantin Demner - WALK Intervention in public space in East London, UK, using the language of street art to bring local history to life in the imagination of passers-by.
Isidora Ilic - Youtopia A video that explores the theme of leaving and searching for a utopian place. Questioning artificially built towns and constructed countries such as Milton Keynes and Yugoslavia.
Ben Elwes - It’s Nice To Know That Some Things In Life Are Certain A reflection upon advertising methods within urban environments, their increasing scale, sophistication of psychological strategies, and technologies employed in urban spaces, to target consumers.

See you there?

iPhones and the (inter)face of the city

2009-10-22T23:57:00.000+01:00

A provocative statement from Benjamin H. Bratton:

An experiment: one half of all architects and urbanists in the entire world should, as of now, stop designing new buildings and new developments altogether. Instead they should invest the historical depth and nuance of their architectural imaginations into the design and programming of new software that provides for the better use of structures and systems we already have. It is a simple matter of good content managment.

This quotation begins Bratton's article iPhone City (v.2008) which addresses the topic of urban 'interfaciality': the ways in which we interact with and influence the urban environment. He reminds us that mobile phones are the new computers - more widely owned, and offering more radical possibilities than 'PC + internet' in terms of bringing information into the real spatial environment, into being a part of where-you-are-now. Architects and planners, as the shapers and organisers of urban space, consequently need to engage as much with technological interfaces as with physical ones.

In more down-to-earth language, they shouldn't just be building more public loos but also designing iPhone apps that tell you where the nearest public loo is (with/out babychanging, wheelchair access or a drinking water fountain), as well as some kind of SMS messaging service that lets people tell the council when the toilets need extra cleaning or graffiti scrubbed off the walls. And how about micropayments to encourage private businesses (shops, cafes etc) to open their loos up to the public, or a localised version of TheyWorkForYou.com that lets you quickly tell the council that where you are right now is a public space inexplicably lacking a loo, and needing one built (or a bike rack or a cashpoint or a pothole mending)?

On this interaction of geography and technology, Bratton writes:

Like children learning a new skill, we learn by gaming how to strategize and modulate bodily gestures with environmental spaces, to control nearness and remoteness at once, both as individual passengers of the city and as social groups in emergence. We learned to point & click, to touch & pinch, and are learning to wave & poke. The richness of this appears in the details. As computation becomes a more pervasive ingredient in the fabric of the habitat, the advent of locative media sugegsts the need for an urban operating system(s) that can weave together the multitudinous computational events into a graceful, programmable pattern.

Bratton's iPhone City (v.2008) reminded me of the Urban Tick blog. Here Fabian Neuhaus (of UCL CASA) talks about mapping the rhythmns of daily life - be that by time-lapse photography, GPS route tracing, or (here is the connection!) using an iPhone.

This post on Layar illustrates really well these ideas of technological 'interfaciality' with the city. Essentially Layar is an application which visualises geo-data provided by a wide range of sources: Twitter, Flikr, Open Street Map, even Wikipedia. Though crude, it's an early attempt at overlaying virtual information over the iPhone's camera image of the space in front of you - here, then, the possibility of substantialising 'the cloud' of digital data; of making the virtual immanent and real.

What I really like about Bratton's article is his focus on the materiality of this interface; it is this that's critical in closing that gap between real and virtual:

"Enclosed in sensate glass, the iPhone interface and hardware blend into what the user perceives as a single dynamic form or field. ...The iPhone GUI is filled with things not metaphors; it's a tactile movie shell to be pushed and pulled as real, rubbery stuff. The iPhone GUI seems illuminated from within, not as a layer but as an organic expression; it has faciality. This tangibility and this anthropomorphology are what makes it work, socially and psychologicaclly, as an interface to the world directly, not to the network indirectly; to the real not to the iconic."

I Am Here (in a Haggerston council estate)

2009-09-28T13:55:00.005+01:00

Back in May I went for a walk round the Regents Canal. The building below stood out: brightly marked as ~~condemned~~ a target for regeneration, yet nothing actually generating there - nothing, in fact, happening since April 2007. It is set for demolition in 2011, so what a strange four years for its remaining residents.

That's what Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and Tristan Fennell thought too. They live there, and have been documenting the Haggerston estate in a programme they are calling FLAT (see http://haggerston-kingsland.blogspot.com/. This is what they did:

Boarded-up and half-empty housing estates have become familiar landmarks in the contemporary urban landscape. Their façades function as projection screens for collective fears and fantasies of troubled and dangerous environments that may lurk behind. This perception is all the more emphasized when rapid redevelopment encircles such estates with new luxury loft apartments and live–work spaces.

I Am Here intervenes in this dynamic of preconception and projection, replacing the 67 bright orange boards – which have covered the windows of empty flats in Samuel House since April 2007 – with large-scale photographs of residents on the estate.

"I am here", echoing the signs around the estate that inform you that "You are here". Perhaps critiquing this representation of 'here' as a geometric diagram, as if that's ever what being-in-place was really about. Claiming subjectivity, "I" - an assertion, an ownership, the right to the city - for all the people who aren't on the map bar a little red dot labelled "You".

Urban-related lectures at LSE, Autumn 2009

2009-09-24T14:53:00.004+01:00

Cities and the Environment
Urban Age with the Ove Arup Foundation Cities and the Environment series
Speaker: Peter Head, chair: Ricky Burdett

Date: Wednesday 14 October 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

By changing patterns of urban behaviour, cities can meet the challenges of climate change. How can advanced technologies help create sustainable cities and self-sufficient urban form?
Peter Head is director of ARUP. Ricky Burdett is Centennial Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Director of Urban Age at the LSE.

Beijing Inside Out: Caochangdi
the James Stirling Memorial Lecture on the City organised by the LSE Cities Programme in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Center for Architecture, New York
Speakers: Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray

Date: Monday 19 October 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

The speakers examine the problems and possibilities of one of many dynamic new urban villages redefining the city of Beijing.
Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray are both Stirling Lecture Prize-winners and principals of StudioWorks Architects in Caochangdi.

The first Legacy Games: the physical and socio-economic transformation of East London
a Cities Programme and London Development Agency Legacy Now Team public debate
Speakers: Andrew Altman, Councillor Paul Brickell, Professor Ricky Burdett, Roger Taylor

Date: Tuesday 10 November 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

This event explores the planning and physical development of the Olympic Park after the 2012 games as well as the wider socio-economic benefits the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are bringing.
Andrew Altman is chief executive of the Olympic Park Legacy Company. Paul Brickell is executive member for Olympics and public affairs at Newham council and chief executive of Leaside Regeneration. Ricky Burdett is director of Urban Age at LSE and principal design advisor to the London 2012 Olympics. Roger Taylor is director of the Host Boroughs Unit.

Cities, Design & Climate Change
Urban Age Understanding Cities series
Speakers: Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett

Date: Tuesday 17 November 2009
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

With cities contributing upwards of 75 per cent of global carbon emissions, urban design is increasingly important when planning for climate change. This discussion examines the creative urban design solutions coming out of the world's cities.
Saskia Sassen is Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at LSE and NYU.

2009-08-26T16:59:00.005+01:00

Following up my recent post on New York's High Line elevated urban park, it turns out that the shiny hotel overlooking it is inhabited by flashers. Exhibitionists cannot resist displaying themselves in the floor-to-ceiling windows to the busy park below - and, the Standard being quite a fashionable hotel, it seems to attract quite an attractive class of naked person, see pictures here in the Daily Mail.

This is exactly what I mean by the sexualised city: these practices of display and the gaze, and the importance of physical bodies in inhabiting urban space. Fuck any western preoccupation with subjectivity being some mental state!

The City in High Heels - New Methods in Urban Studies

2009-08-22T20:50:00.006+01:00

Men cannot understand the urban surface. Sadly they design most of it, but paths trodden in Converse allow no appreciation of the myriad textures and challenges of the different pavements in this City. Sturdy flat shoes stride onwards unimpeded, unthinking - let's trip this shit up.

I propose a high-heeled method for this exploration, this opening up of that which is in plain sight. As high as you can, please - 5" does nicely - as this walk must take on both altitude and danger. One needs to walk in something that makes the very practice of walking rather difficult. Perverse? But that is the point - to complicate walking in the richest social-science sense of 'to complicate': to make multireferential, contradictory, challenging. For this purpose Balenciaga's legendary high-heeled hiking boot would be ideal:

The first lesson of this methodology is fetishistic. We wish to expand the notion of the erotic from mere genital origin into the very fabric of the city itself. On an elementary level, the very concept of hiking boots with a 5" heel is perverse. Good. Then, to walk in such shoes lengthens the leg and forces a certain sashay into the hips. In such a heel the buttock is tightened, the body tautened; there is a physical awareness and an awareness of the eyes of others, especially the admiring glance from those gentlemen who have a kink for these things. One no longer merely walks but struts - the stroll becomes a passegiata, a promenade, and the role of pedestrian spaces for style and display and flirtation is brought to the fore. The possibility of an erotic encounter is trodden into the city with every step.

The second lesson of this methodology is about disability. To be sure in high heels one restricts oneself voluntarily, so it hardly offers meaningful insight into the urban experience of people with mobility problems. Nonetheless the pavement is transformed into a place of hazard - and the pedestrian now aware of the slightest irregularity. Gaps between paving slabs; tree roots; this particularly slipperty type of tarmac. Uneven paving slabs offering just enough of a step to trip you up. Uneven kerbs, sloping streets, metal gratings and un-flat manhole covers - even frequent changes of pavement surface or inexpertly patched tarmac become a problem. Give yourself a balance impediment, restrict your stride length, and suddenly such things as these become real obstacles - furthermore if you trip and fall it is not so easy to recover. Accessible distances become another issue, the long walks at Bank tube station exhausting in a way the Converse-clad cannot see. High heels offer a chance for empathy with those who find it hard to walk, and spotlight all the places where the pavement is exclusionary. High heels tell us what to change to make these public spaces really public for all.

Under this methodology all New York is hell - the city cannot mend a pavement for shit. In one particularly epic pothole a high-heeled friend did in fact fall and break her leg - transforming voluntary impediment into real disability for some months. This, you understand, is why it is important to wear stilettos rather than wedge heels: they'll snap in place of your fibia.

The final lesson of the high-heeled method is in texture: for this we must abandon the platform heel for something with a thinner sole. (But please not the ballet flat: these are not chic when terminating an English cankle.) The heel puts pressure on the ball of the foot and again focuses attention as to what's underneath. This intimate contact between sole and pavement allows hitherto unconsidered differentiation between different surface materials - the cool pleasures of smooth flagstones; the dozen genres of tarmac; dimpled concrete versus cobblestones. With practice one might locate oneself to the exact street within a handful of closed-eye steps - now that would be urban knowledge.

Yes, I would make every urban planning student walk in high heels for a semester - transvestite shops cater for all sizes no excuses. More navigable pavements would be a victory for disabled access, sure - but, shit, shouldn't urban designers pay some attention to the needs of high heel wearers as a fundamental principle? Stiletto-navigable streets inconvenience no-one, help many, and yet women's specific needs for urban space are inadequately sufficient. From another angle, Barbara Penner's work on the politics of public toilets makes a similar point - as she puts it:

" As one of the last openly sex-segregated spaces in Western cities, toilets fit the bill, allowing me to think about the ways in which the male-dominated professions of planning, engineering, and architecture fail to accommodate and even actively suppress female needs.

In the late nineteenth century, George Bernard Shaw, then heavily involved in local government, complained that the barrier of the “unmentionable” meant that women’s bodies were never visible at the political level. This silence about needs and provision, in turn, has historically had a real impact on women’s mobility, comfort, and sense of belonging in the modern city."

Street pianos - performing the public

2009-08-22T19:51:00.007+01:00

Play Me I'm Yours was an audacious public art project masterminded by Luke Jerram. The concept was simple and inspired: place 30 decorated pianos in public spaces around the city and leave them for people to play. Unlike the pre-booked pitches for buskers on the Tube, these were free-range pianos - displaying a rare amount of public trust one might contrast with Gormley's hyper-shielded plinth project. Pianos were left out with simply the trust that people would look after them and play fair; for a month these pianos were ours. The result: some truly extraordinary moments of beautiful musicianshp and/or spontaneous public singalongs.

Liverpool Street station:

Carnaby Street:

Cycling map heterotopia - radical geographies from Transport for London

2009-08-22T14:35:00.012+01:00

Cycling geography is awesome. Yesterday a nice brown paper package dropped through the post: Local Cycling Guides from Transport for London. Maps! Now, maps on their own make me happy - it's geeky, but I love to see how everything connects up, and that passion isn't dimmed by however much critical cartography and Brian Harley I read on the power relations involved. Yet in that context these maps are particularly exciting. What they do is re-write the entire fucking road system.

Roads are what make my mental map of the City more than an atomistic collection of buildings and destinations. From the distinctive shapes of the Imax and the South Bank you glide over the river on Waterloo Bridge, swing round the Aldwych, progress up Kingsway past school and the coffee shops, then the Bloomsbury artery of Southampton Row turning into Woburn Place and the difficulties of crossing Euston Road... Maybe Hampstead Road up to Camden High Street past all the council highrises named after places in the Lake District, or up the strange nothingness of York Way with its empty railway sheds and redevelopment that still doesn't look like the architect's pictures... Roads are how I think of the city, and these main roads provide the arterial framework by which I can understand relative location and compass direction and distance.

What's fantastic about these cycling maps is that they upturn that hierarchy. Cycling on high-traffic main roads being scary and dangerous, they structure an alternative network of routeways on low-traffic back roads, utilising every bit of canal towpath and park and standalone bike lane in the capital. Despite studying my well-worn A to Z and knowing my neighbourhood well, I had thought that most journeys I'd need to take would involve these main roads: that they were the straight lines down to Old Street and Camden and Angel, and that backroad routes to these places would be twisty, torturous, too complex to remember.

No! On these cycling maps the major roads fade into the background of black and white, a network of blue and yellow routes drawn above show the sensible ways to go. Yellow roads have been recommended by cyclists as quiet, safe, good alternatives; blue routes may be on busier roads but are at least specifically signed for cyclists. Caledonian Road? Take Hemingford Road. Use Nevill Road to avoid busy Stoke Newington High Street. Highbury Fields and Drayton Park take you to Finsbury Park the safe way; here's a zigzagging (but signed) back route that gets me to Camden without either Holloway Road, Camden Road, or death.

I love it, and want to try it out - every route, every option. This is a new city opened up before me; let these alternatives harden themselves into my mind as my thighs harden into granite with all this practice. Who knew Transport for London made heterotopias? Because this is a heterotopia, I think - an inverting of the usual order of things; a utopian dream of roads for people not motors; a blend of real and imagined; blue and yellow lines of what should be drawn upon the grey map of what is.

I Love Hoxton

2009-08-17T13:09:00.001+01:00

Hoxton High Street, where else?

What If... void spaces could be greened?

2009-08-17T12:13:00.005+01:00

There's a vacant patch of ground near my office. It's not large, an interstitial point behind some offices and next to a a low-rise council block, the post-war kind balcony walkways to the flats. 8x8 metres, let's say, the kind of space that's too small to develop and not big enough to bother about.

Instead, What If projects, an urban sustainability architecture practice, have got 70 half-tonne bags of soil and turned it into an allotment space for the local community. They say it's made the place "a beautiful oasis of green" - green yes, urban oasis yes, beautiful not so sure the plastic bags of soil are really that aesthetically appealing - even if they were commissioned to install the same thing for the opening of the Louis Vuitton store in Westfield shopping centre, see photo below. The latter being such a strange juxtaposition makes somehow the soil bags more appealing - they may be ugly but curation by Jeremy Deller, Turner Prize Winner 2004, makes them art? No, that's too hierarchical an attitude to take - but there's still a joy to be found in this disruption of pristine designer commercial space, even if the fact that it's there at the invitation of the shop itself makes it hardly radical.

This space is distinguished from a void by its big enigmatic white sign, showing only the OS grid reference, an arrow, and their web address. What If call this space Vacant Lot, and they've got more grow bags on another stretch of Chart Street, plus Plant Room on neighbouring East Road and a dozen more projects.

They then do more theoretical work, such as Modesty Screened, looking at temporary inhabitable environments formed without formal architectural intervention. Again, their examples are super-local to me - e.g. the garden centre on Caledonian Road. They write:

PROPOSAL
In UK cities approx. 70% of urban space is residential and planning authorities positively encourage residential-use over other activities. By taking advantage of the slowness of the planning process, areas of the city (i.e. unused sites, disused infrastructure, empty parking garages) could be used temporarily in this way.

This model can be developed in two directions:

1. On a strategic level to encourage the temporary use of existing `unused‘ sites within cities. Activities within these sites can expand to encourage other uses for example: urban agriculture, educational facilities, office / workshop space, arts and entertainment, residential, etc.

2. At a programmatic scale this model can be developed to see how it could influence the spatial and programmatic design of new mixed-use urban developments.

More about this to follow, I hope - I'm really excited by it both theoretically and because, well, I too am an urban dweller without a garden, and I'd love a chance to get my hands dirty with such a practical activism/intervention.

Learning to cycle / re-learning the City

2009-08-15T22:24:00.008+01:00

I bought a bike this afternoon, the process having to be facilitated by a couple of mgs of valium because something about starting cycling in this City scares me that much. This makes it interesting; makes it something important to face up to and do.

Just the ride home from the bike shop opened up so many ideas - cycling will rewrite my urban experience. A few preliminary thoughts:

1. You go so fast. Three or four times as fast my usual walked 4mph and shit, I'm not used thinking at such speeds. Decision-making, navigating, keeping my eyes on everything I need to notice (cars traffic lights parked cars pedestrians holes in the road where the fuck i am) - this must be the source of my fear: the threat of overload in such a dangerous environment. Galloping on a horse - similar speeds, similar lack of crash protection - was at first frightening too; then it just became exhilarating. But there you've got the horse thinking about how to keep you out of trouble too - so perhaps my problems would be solved by a conscious (furry) bicycle?

2. You go so fast. This is going to make the City really small. I got back from Chalk Farm in what felt like 10 minutes, though it must have been longer - the concentration required puts you into a flow state where time is irrelevant. Yet that journey takes a good 45 minutes by bus, being an across-town orbital that doesn't mesh well with a largely radial system of bus routes. So now, fuck, is Chalk Farm close? Easy visits to my friend in Primrose Hill, Marine Ices, and that lovely vegetarian hippy cafe that kept feeding me free food? I'm going to be able to get to hitherto unknown places like Deptford, and the Lea Valley, and - fuck! - maybe the west. Correction: this is going to make my currently-frequented City really small, and enormously expand my perceptions of what's there and what's possible. Life beyond Zone 2 awaits.

3. This is going to require a phenomenal amount of navigational ability. I can usually look at a map once and memorise the route I need to walk - my recall of scale & direction & road names is good enough to absorb a mile or two's data in one go. But, going faster, a bicycle covers so many more streets. Futhermore, in the interests of not getting squashed I might like to stay off main roads where possible, requiring an even greater demand to remember labyrinthine back routes. Suddenly the Knowledge of this town's taxi drivers becomes something I too need to gain.

4. Cycling is also daunting because I apparently don't believe cars have people in - human-shaped amoral vegetables maybe, but not thinking caring people. Pedestrian life seems to have left me with the impression that it's my job to get out of their way, with no expectations that traffic will reciprocally try to avoid me. (After all, they're not going to be damaged by any close encounter.) So I carry this perception through to cycling, even though I am now a road user who should be a car's equal, someone to slow for and permit to turn and acknowledge right of way. I don't seem to understand that I am an equal, and cars should/will do these things for me; has pedestrianism left me with an inferiority complex? That says something about the hierarchical way in which our cities are currently designed/built - and perhaps makes a strong case in favour of those pavement-lowering, sign-removing, shared space reforms recently introduced along such roads as Kensington High Street.

Ornamented spaces

2009-08-13T00:33:00.004+01:00

Jewellery students had taken over this disused shop on Camden High Street to show some of their degree work, these fascinating fabric-wrapped constructions and organic clustered shapes. We stepped downstairs to find, suddenly, the same forms garlanding the basement as used for the necklaces on dispay above -- oh the striking equivalency this suggests between rooms and bodies: they are both containers we inhabit, the spaces in and through which we live.

URBAN SURVIVAL! With Bear Grylls!!

2009-08-12T23:53:00.003+01:00

The City is full of hazards. To keep you safe, here are some words of wisdom from macho SAS adventure man Bear Grylls (feel the testosterone fumes coming off his mere name) that I ripped out of a freebie paper [pdf version here]:

Bear, we're walking down Oxford Street on our way to buy some new pants when a giant savage poodle tries to maul us to death. What should we do to survive?

"I was always told in my army days just to whip your shirt off, wrap it round your arm to protect it, offer it that, let it go for it and then jam your fingers together straight into both eyes. Then squeeze together into its brain, hold it there, and it will release you and die. You're safe."

We're ice skating on the frozen Serpentine and then - crack! - the ice breaks and we plunge into the freezing water. We don't want to die wearing ice skates, so what should we do?

"The first thiing is don't panic. You can die from the gasp reflex when the shock makes you breathe water into your lungs, so you need to control your panic. Turn around and look at where you fell in - you know the ice is good to get out from. Break the ice, then ease your weight up and wriggle like a seal, kicking hard and spreading your weight. When you get out you need to get warm, so take your clothes off and start doing press-ups."

We're on the London Eye and it's really hot - bloody global warming - but it gets stuck, the sun is baking through the capsule and the air conditioning is screwed. How do we stay cool?

"Have you got a window in there? ['Not sure,' we say.] Well, that's very hard. Dehydration is a real killer. I've been in deserts where it's so hot they say that, if you don't have any water or survival skills, you're dead in three hours. Smash a window, get a bit of airflow through and, if nobody is ever going to get you, you're going to have to climb down. I've often thought about climbing the London Eye. I've examined it - it looks quite straightforward."

Now there's a challenge for the City Project to live up to this weekend!

The High Line park, NYC

2009-08-05T08:09:00.010+01:00

City Project is just back from another great city: New York. The High Line park was opened in June, a much-publicised urban oasis on the site of a former rail line running up the West side from Gansevoort St to 20th. The regeneration had been kickstarted by the 2000 photoseries from Joel Sternfeld, showing the park abandoned, recolonised by nature, a beguiling secret space raised up above the city's awareness. It was beautiful. Now, designed within an inch of its life by James Corner Field operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, could the High Line retain any of this magic? My lover was not sure, and wrote to me about this... Then I went to see for myself.

He wrote:

I've just been up to the old elevated train line that was converted into a park. Near sunset, a rosy evening, lots of people on the streets, drifting out of gallery openings between 20th and 25th.

A park like that could have been a wild place, stolen from the city, but it was as sterile as an architect's drawing. Signs said "Keep it wild, keep to the path" - as if you can call anything wild when it grows in a sprinkler-irrigated patch of gravel that's not so much cultivated as curated.

At one point along the path the viaduct crossed the corner of a low building's roof. Broken chairs, old TV sets, statues with their heads replaced, hand-painted signs, hinted that the roof had once been a gateway to this place - what was now a public park had been someone's secret playground. I'm not sure the city's richer for the change.

Even landscape architects couldn't rob the place of all its character, though. There were views over the glass and steel of Chelsea, but more impressive were the points where the path passed through or under buildings. There was one that I found particularly striking - a high modernist grid of green glass and grey tiles, perched on tapering legs. As you know I'm not a fan of the international style, but there was something about the evening light on that smooth green surface that I found oddly moving. It seemed to call back half-formed memories from my early childhood - the wind on the sea, and something else I couldn't bring to the surface. On the way back to the subway all the greens and turquoises were peculiarly vivid. I bought a notebook to write this down for you before it faded.

You should go there when you're over, one early evening when the galleries are open - maybe write about it for the City Project.

My response:

I liked it. I'm not sure I have a defensible reason for liking the park as a concept, but certainly the planting was excellent. Fashionably loose, dominated by grasses and big drifts of colour without structure - all annuals that will die down in the winter, no shrubs - it reminded me strongly of another Chelsea: the Chelsea Flower Show, highlight of the British garden design calendar. The late summer prairie planting contrasted against the austere running lines of the concrete pathway and slick benches; the ecological design selecting the silver foliage and meadow plants that can handle the exposure and shallow soil and extremes of climate; the repetition of design elements and a limited number of different plant types - this is all very now, very chic. It's innovative to see this style escape the private garden for the public park, a space so long the domain of regemented beds of pansies and busy lizzies.

Its naturalness is to be sure a faux-naturalness, an aesthetic covertly overtly created - but the idea of the secret derelict nature reserve that was there before is surely too fantastical to be true (I never saw it, did you?) so what else can the High Line be now but fictive? The concept of a park on stilts, while a happy (hard-fought-for) accident, seems more like a borrowing from the Far East - Hong Kong, or Tokyo, where you don't walk consistently at ground level anywhere. It is designed for such an international audience (perhaps urban studies-educated visitors such as myself most of all!) rather than the utility of any local residents - park utility as in such civil functions as public gathering, grass and trees for those without gardens, space jogging and team sports and whiling away afternoons. No: instead it is surely a space in which to promenade one's small overpampered lapdog to attract another lapdog/metropolitan owner combo of appropriate sexuality; a purpose-designed space for showing off and dating? How utterly NY!

Of course, it's not exactly a free public space or much of an opening for civil society. Has any park been such since the cruisers were kicked out of Russell Square and Tessa Jowell tried to deny Hyde Park to the war marchers? The normative nature of parkspace (no camping no barbeques no music get your public assembly licenced plz) is just a little more visible on the High Line, its very shape in its elongation forbidding any crowd gathering, its entrances so easily sealed off. Perhaps the private garden style design is telling here. This loose, natural planting is meticulously tended by gardeners wearing chic pastiche Chinese peasant hats as they labour on their knees in the relentless unshaded sunshine. It's very picturesque, even labour becoming an elegant spectacle. Do you think they have health insurance?

The High Line is absolutely a bastardisation of what was there before - but the whole of Chelsea is the self-same thing, a district playing at very high-end faux dilapidation with its warehouse art galleries and stripped-down designer clothes stores; it has got the park it deserves and maybe that is excellent site-appropriate design. We're in the wrong part of town to design a park for the poor, darling.

An ambiguous defence, I know. I instinctually liked it, and yet it is unquestionably a problematic space. But oh, such dilemmas are the meat of urban experience...

Peckham library (Will Alsop, 2000)

2009-08-05T01:42:00.005+01:00

I stumbled across Peckham Library quite unexpectedly the other day. It won the Stirling prize in 2000, and high words are said about its social responsibility - thus an appropriate find when I was in the neighbourhood to explore a charity's work with the socially excluded. But does the building work, does it really change anything? I was unsure.

Undoubtedly it's interesting to look at, and for architecture (a discipline that does not convince me with its political convictions) this might be everything - instead of a mere fragment of the building's impact, a fraction of its function as an assemblage of space-movement-people-meaning in a specific socio-economic context. Some authoritative voice tells us that "Peckham Library is not an irreverent post-modern architectural joke. It is a very serious building with a strong social mission" - and then indicates that said social mission goes as far as some nice but hardly revolutionary sustainable cooling measures. Woo. Critical urban theory has apparently not made enough an impact on designers yet, even though they can buy the latest City journal on this very topic in Borders no fancy academic subscription required.

But despite my scepticism, some of Peckham Library's social misssion seems to be working. It's shown in the increased visits to the library, and Alsop's 'civism'

"where civic space is defined as a place where you can meet someone outside, name the place and know where to go"

would indeed seem to be boosted in Peckham: this is a memorable place, it puts Peckham on the map for the right reasons rather than shootings, and there is indeed outdoor seating for meeting people. Nonetheless, nine years on the public square is a little run down, weeds colonising the paving, repairs needed and not forthcoming. The regeneration the library was supposed to herald does not seem to have arrived - perhaps there have been repairs, but no change of mood, no boost in image - and the locality remains very isolated: even the buses take convoluted routes to get there. The highstreet was covered in litter; so much for reputed Anthony Gormley street art.

This regeneration has entailed £275m in investment; 2500 new homes; a £5m new library (which admittedly Gordon the postman thinks is "beautiful"). But if you want to put an end to the ghetto then stop locking the gates at night - this is what's wrong with many smaller-scale housing projects too: impeding porous movement between neighbouring areas creates a them/us mentality and stops deprived areas integrating into wider society. Peckham needs a tube station and the access to the wider London jobs market that would facilitate; without this the gates are locked and the whole neighbourhood is socially excluded. However lovely the access to knowledge it may promise, a pretty green library is fairly cosmetic.

Cities & Citizenship: a New Urban Agenda debate

2009-08-05T00:35:00.004+01:00

An interesting upcoming event from the London Development Agency's New Urban Agenda on the intersection of urban life, urban design, and citizenship:

* What does it mean to be a citizen in the 21st century?
* What is the relationship between the way we design our city and our perception and experience of citizenship?
* Is it time to redefine Londoners' obligations, responsibilities and rights to improve the liveability of our city?
* Are we equipped to tackle the environmental and economic challenges we face?

These questions and more will be tackled in a debate on Cities and Citizenship which kicks off the LDA’s New Urban Agenda Debates. Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA will be in conversation with leading social entrepreneur Lord Mawson and pioneering writer and journalist Anna Minton, chaired by Ricky Burdett, Director of the Urban Age programme at the LSE.

The event will take place at 18:30 on Monday 21 September in the Great Room at the RSA, as part of the London Design Festival

Two sides of sex in the city

2009-07-10T14:28:00.000+01:00

Two excellent reasons to use my 'sex and the city' tag, and a demonstration of two of its extremes.

Who can say what kind of love is inscribed on this tree - an 'I love you' for someone particular; an injunction to all of us, the public, to love more; an expression of a wider love for the city or indeed for trees? I love how scrawled it is, and that it's not a pristine stencil - whatever kind of love it feels passionate. And then a wingéd phallus, erect and exhibitionist yet just silly enough with its little feathers that I find it cheeky rather than aggressively cocky. A comment perhaps on the wilful independence of sexual desire, lust flying free of any conscious intent.

Behind both, though, the same kind of libidinal urban energy - a statement, "I DESIRE". A Deleuzian desire, not one built out of Lacanian lack but rather a force, a drive.

The places regeneration leaves behind

2009-06-18T02:13:00.003+01:00

Just an ordinary North London road, scruffy and shabby with newsagents and kebab shops. When I moved to the City I didn't like these places, so different to the pristine market town where I grew up. But it's home now.

Even before 2008 many shopfronts were battened down or whitewashed over: longer-term shifts in economic geography than recession drove businesses out. Flats on this road are starting to be visibly gentrified - I live in one such block and there's a decent (clearly architect-driven) refurb just round the corner. But there is little demand for business here any more, only corner shop chicken shop pizza place. The odd laundrette; still internet cafes, a reminder that the internet is not exactly the great leveller; many are still economically or culturally excluded. Little more. These are some of the shops shuttered and left behind:

Blackalls Fruiterers and Greengrocers, established over 100 years. Closed now, closed at least fifteen years if its phone number began not 0207 or 0171 but 071. And the tenant just pulled the shutters down and left - the landlord has not re-let the space, has not converted into a fried chicken emporium or poundstore or fought the council for reclassification as in-demand residential. Just left.

W. Plumb the butcher has a beautiful old-fashioned sign with even a little stained glass. Where did he go? How did he feel about closing the business, about giving up hope of becoming W. Plumb & Sons, or perhaps Daughters? I cannot imagine this road with a proper old-fashioned independent butcher on it - what was it like, did it have community that extended beyond council estate dwellers? (Do they still have community, or do I romanticise? I know we middle classes have lost it.) This has always been a working class area, my block of flats one of the few visible signs of gentrification - but for it now to have a proper family butchers like this would be such a posh thing: how Highgate, how Crouch End.

Perhaps a more recent casualty - or not: Sega's Dreamcast (2001) was a failure, and the Saturn (1995) not much better, so would this branding date back to Megadrive days (1991)? I spoke to the chap in North London Models - not a brothel, a model aircraft & toy car shop, a relic still going on no visible sales at all - who dated the loss of these shops to the early Nineties and, presumably, the recession then. Further down the road there was even a bank, the Natwest form now sitting above somebody's kitchen still visible under layers of paint. Was this area once a highstreet, a community, a functioning economy? A destination? Now it is just a road for transit through to other places.

On yer bike: adventures in new urban space

2009-06-17T23:56:00.012+01:00

So I'm finally getting a bike. Finally listened to my road-bike warrior friends on the poetry of motion; finally accepted that it has to be the best way of getting around this tangled City. (Pretty good, too, to save some cash: life in this town eats money.) And suddenly I find myself moving in a whole new environment, find a whole new City opens up to me - a new city built from the same streets I've walked for years. What a tool the bicycle can be for urban perception! Let me explain:

You go fast on a bicyle. Having not cycled since I was 10, I had forgotten this. The same familiar journey becomes a completely different journey at four times the speed (say 4mph walking, 16mph cycling) - instead of taking an opportunity to think, one must be constantly aware of traffic, road conditions, your balance - and all these thiings change, every second. Architecture no longer matters, the dress sense of pedestrians (such an urban pleasure!) becomes inconsequential; the landscape becomes one of road signs, traffic lights, moving cars and parked cars and tarmac texture. Now you can see the grooves buses wear into the street surface; painted road markings are no longer signs & symbols but objects, raised up and tactile. This road-space is governed by rules I do not know; I read the Highway Code so I would not be a total liability out bike-testing, but this is such little fraction of the behavioural codes of roadusers. Cycling ignorant of this is cycling illiterate, a foreigner in a strange land.

Yet what is so intriguing is that these new processes and foreign meaning is re/inscribed upon streets I've walked and bussed down for years. As a pedestrian I handle traffic so fluently, jaywalking across roads watching traffic flow as a set of (differential?) equations, each lane to be solved one at a time. I weave in and out of cars without concern, guided more by instinct than concrete thought as to what is safe. Yet up on a bike it feels like a completely different problem. Instead of crossing perpendicular to traffic I must now move parallel with it - become part of it, I suppose, though my thinking has not yet quite understood that concept so far. This layering of spaces, of meanings within the same built architecture - it is the city as palimpsest, the overlayering of trace upon trace upon trace.

Cycling produces a new emotional geography too. I don't want to be ashamed to admit that testing bikes yesterday I was afraid - so easy to wobble into traffic, or, not knowing what to look for in this unfamiliar setting, to fail to notice impending danger. Cars are so much bigger, heavier, armour-plated - when cycling they felt like autonomous machines, their trajectories inevitable and unalterable. I'd forget there were people inside, people who were watching and thinking about how I was moving - people who would make an effort to avoid hitting me. Is this why cyclists talk of the road as warfare? It is hard to see it as teamwork, much as it may be that kind of social space of cooperation and allowance too. So cycling was this state of continual awareness of how I might come to harm - can I call this existential? - very liminal, danger a knife-edge away. Like standing on the edge of a tall building - and, what is more, knowing how easy a moment of madness could be.

I beg to know when cycling might become second nature; how long does it take to learn to read the road? I hate to be a beginner like this, a liability to myself and others. Though it'd be a shame to lose this novel frame of perception - must mine it for ideas while I can! - it is so difficult to inhabit this road-space of fear and trial and threat. Yet until I started thinking of buying a bike I did not know this arena of challenges was even there - hidden in plain sight, the materiality of the road users visible but the process and meaning obscure without practical experience. And now these streets become a place for me to test myself, to face my fears, and to develop this new competency and embodiment.

If, that is, I can find the right bike!

Hoxton stencillist wisdom, Jan 2009

2009-06-10T00:26:00.004+01:00

DON'T WRITE ON WALLS, WRITE EVERYWHERE - now there's a message for a cities blogger. The first part of that instruction is to be ignored, of course, if your glyph has the graphic purity of the tag below.

Geographic Information... Postcards?

2009-06-09T23:08:00.008+01:00

The Met Police's latest resident engagement exercise: "tell us your concerns about crime and antisocial behaviour in this area", and mark where it's happening on the map.

Quite touching, really. It's the police reaching out rather than being merely reactive, and in allowing written and spatial feedback it's open to different styles of communication and thinking. The tagline is "Listening to you" - god, you think they're going to give you a hug rather than (a) catch criminals and (b) beat up/imprison/murder lawful protestors.

But it's not going to work very well, is it? First, the map's half-unreadable because the boundaries of the local ward cutting off several key street names. Second, do respondents have the sophistication to put their X in the place they want to be describing? Sounds patronising, but the first rule of survey design is always Keep It Simple, Stupid: if it can be misunderstood it will. Third is the problem of processing all these smudged Freeposted postcards: that's a lot of data entry, and half of it won't be legible.

You can see what they're intending, and it's good: mapping crime, Geographic Information Systems, very closely related to work at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. (Linked, even, c.f. former policeman Paul Richards' PhD on Realtime geodemographics for reassurance policing and crime prevention [ppt]. But if you want a GIS, don't hand out bloody postcards... E-democracy or e-governance has never quite taken off in this country, has it - why not? This should be web-based, it should connect to stuff, not least the Met's overall Crime Mapping site - yet there is nothing, no parallel site, no mention of it on www.met.police.uk/islington at all. Is this so hard? It wouldn't require groundbreaking innovation: internet use is widespread enough for e-governance; Google Maps is robust enough; and people can type more legibly than they handwrite on half-a-dozen narrow lines. And we've got an ex-copper doing a doctorate on this exact topic.

So why'd I get a damn postcard?

Capital markets - the economic realities of office space

2009-06-09T01:51:00.005+01:00

Enough cultural whiff-whaff (as our Dear Leader Mr Johnson might say): the city's made of money. Made of capital, if you will. And I love money: I find it fascinating.

The Rat and Mouse is a key real estate economics blog, but its focus is largely residential property - as indeed is most newspaper coverage. Subprime residential mortgages in the US may have kickstarted the whole credit crunch - this was something I watched kick off from a ringside seat in real estate research; fascinating - but it is in fact commercial real estate that has seen the biggest falls. You thought 22% peak-to-current fall in house prices was bad? Try a 50% crash in office values.

Furthermore, whereas subprime mortgage securities may have been the catalyst of the crunch, it is commercial property that yet remains to kick the banks in the teeth. They lent too much against this sector, and have not yet written down these loans and deleveraged these securities. Savills say almost all property investment loans made between 2004 and 2007 are now in negative equity, yet banks are extending loans rather than crystallise their losses. The last couple of weeks have seen green shoots emerging in the economy much earlier than anyone really expected - Darling may have been mocked for his Budget, but now Q3 growth looks a real likelihood. Yet with these lending problems ahead, do you really want to bet against a W-shaped double dip coming up after Christmas?

What I haven't seen is much discussion of what this implies for the urban fabric. With companies cutting back on staff and the near-cessation of merger & acquisition activity, demand for office rentals is down as companies aren't needing to trade up to larger spaces. (The falling rents drive part of this 50% collapse in values discussed above: commercial property is an investment class so its value is based on its yield.) Increases in availability and affordability combined with the current mood of caution may mean that demand will hold up best in traditional centres: City, West End and a bit of Holborn. Your Victoria, Paddington and Kings Cross developments? Aren't going to get the big tenants they'd counted on, and new developments are visibly being put on hold as they fail to be pre-let before completion. Additionally with prime office space more accessible, demand for shabbier secondary offices will surely decrease. If summer is as hot as forecast, how much tolerance will there be for poor or no air conditioning? There's a lot of 1960s and 70s space that, at least superficially, looks to be beyond refurb. Yet demolition costs money, and there's little pressure for new development sites yet.

City Project says it'll be a prime summer for exploring abandoned buildings...

Holloway, May 2009

2009-06-09T01:35:00.001+01:00

Who knows what the story is here?

Sinclair (1997) 'Lights Out For The Territory': A review, or perhaps a mauling

2009-06-09T00:30:00.005+01:00

So Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory is "Quite simply one of the finest books about London ever written", says the Spectator; "A book about London, in other words, a book about everything" (Peter Ackroyd in The Times).

Bollocks.

There are no people there, not in his writing. The city is empty, inhabited only by poets and booksellers: educated, broke but certainly not poor; white or maybe a bit Jewish, and monolithically middle aged and male. What ghost town is this? I wouldn't want to go there. Sinclair walks, he says, but his words are so terribly disembodied for such a project; there he goes, the anti-phenomenologist mimbling off into history, always the past, as though he hasn't found any there there at all. In seeing a palimpsest beneath the city, he loses sight of what's in front of his eyes; oh, Sinclair obsesses over graffito scrawls as though they are authorless, solipsistically taking them all as signs for him to read, to interpret. Hermetic fucking arcana - what about the unknown? What about the proposition that the city is chaotic, is vast, is unknowable? No, let's be afraid of that and search for Dan Brown hidden traces, let's go chasing castles in the sky, this airy semiotic fantasy and forget that the real links, the real connections - the real goddamn mystery - is in the people, the messy illiterate gorgeous mass of people from whom Mr Sinclair is ~~running~~ walking away.

Walk II: Regent's Canal east

2009-05-30T23:33:00.000+01:00

So I went for a walk.

That map torn and battered, had it since the day I first moved here, guide and gospel to the city I at first struggled to like. Places I go most it gets tears, loses pages, each new friend and each new flat bequeathing rings on their pages, got to find that place again. But this low-tech doesn't work any more, Highbury, Lea Valley all changed but the drawings on the paper haven't - so time to draw back, write my own geographies on top of those already marked.

The estate's boarded up, condemned - but I've lived in worse places than that, those blocks last alright enough so what do they want to go knock it down for? Ah, the canalside got cleaned up no longer a rubbish dump but an amenity too good for social tenants. So knock it down, build it up, sell it to the middle classes at £500 a square foot. That's the capital.

[Skipping over Queen Mary university and all its Serious Architecture (as if in competition with London Met's Libeskind); capoeiristas in Mile End Park; an artic tern fishing in the canal; smell of salt air ahead of me unexpected and drawing me on]

Shiny yuppie stuff's back. Limehouse Basin a weird area committing the same residential-only zoning sins as NY. Nice, but too far from anwhere with there there, and nowhere to eat, so not actually nice at all. Wapping a slog along its cobble-lined uninhabited so-called High Street, luxury warehouse developments hogging the riverbank for theirs alone. We'll watch your BMWs in the basement garages flood when the Thames Barrier fails, just you wait...

Body aching just the sight of the water is refreshing; the sun after the cavernous closed-off streets a relief. The river is wide here, the birds and yachts maritime. I had not known this as my city before, and finding it has exhausted me.

But when she's this beautiful you forgive, don't you.

Paint the City green

2009-05-04T00:24:00.004+01:00

This gives me an idea: why aren't all cars covered in grass? Real grass, green growing stuff. What with poor air quality in the City thought to kill 2,905 people every year we need all the photosynthesisers we can get - and covering the key pollutor problem in its solution would seem to be particularly neat answer.

Front gardens are getting dug up to provide off-street parking and this increases the flood risk, as water streams off tarmac and into the sewers rather than soaking into the grass and soil. Lawns are being lost - so let's transfer them on to the surfaces that sit above the ground instead. The grass/herb/succulent-covered roof is a well-established concept, and living/green walls are not infrequently seen - for example this one below on a children's centre on Liverpool Road, Islington. These plants grow vertically, so why can't vegetation be fitted to the shape of a car? Ok ok, it's not exactly aerodynamic - but then again traffic in town rarely moves fast enough for that to be an issue. Lovely as a rooftop meadow of daffodils would be, low-growing sedums and maybe the odd bonsai tree would be more attainable. Seriously now, does anything stand in the way of covering cars in mosses and liverworts? Mould grows easily enough on aging sports car soft-tops, and we have the rain and pigeon shit to feed and water these things. Imagine the gorgeous colours, the deep greens and ochres and chartreuse, the velvet texture between your fingers, and cool cleaned oxygenated air for us pavement-dwellers.

Plants not paint! The revolution starts now.

Shared space

2009-04-27T23:06:00.005+01:00

I liked this - not beautifully written, but as I sit on my own in my studio flat, it said something to me. Semiotically this place is so under control, so perfect: the rectilinear lines, the street and found art on the walls, the fading tulips exactly matching the yolk yellow hue of the champagne bottle next to them. I have wood floors and orchids and my clothes are precisely rolled in their drawers - I know no other way to live now, and yet is this right? (He is in New York; no, it's not.)

I put so much energy into signs, into performance, such that these things become the meaning of the space and the codes by which I read it. But that language of reading: it presumes an audience and thus a fourth wall, an inside/outside relation. What happens when you share space, what is created, what is this topology of intimacy? Instead of the single dweller writing this controlled autobiography through possessions and pristine order, Garnett's ideas implicitly suggest a reversal of this relation - new spatial circumstances re-writing the self. In turn, this raises an idea that fascinates me: equivalency between the home and the body as both spaces in & through which we live. Through pristine accessorising, Garnett was forming herself - then the accessories change, and so does that self. Thus we find ourselves assemblages not individuals, and something about human-object relations becomes a little more focused.

"That's the thing about moving in with a lover: you can't prepare yourself for it, or lay down rules or decide how it's going to be. You just muddle through. But I was, at best, just muddling through living on my own, only with a better kitchen and more acccessories. And no-one to witness the boring bits. And though I've never been prissy I was, on my own, in my own nice flat, in danger of becoming tight-arsed. [...]

"Most of the time, you just have to be your normal, boring, human, honest self. If I've loved getting to know my boyfriend more intimately than I ever imagined I'd know anyone, then I've enjoyed watching my real self unfurl itself infront of somebody else. I've never had to do it before. But everyone who lives with someone does! Sometimes I'm amazed by this feat. It's so trusting and honest of us. Amazingly, my partner doesn't appear to mind when I am boring or ratty or over-tired or sad or blue. He just puts his arms around me and comforts me. He likes it less when I am unreasonable or determined to punish him for some perceived wrong, but then one of us makes a jump and we manage to get out of whatever heavy weather we've sailed into.

[...] "A more interesting lesson has been learning to live with myself. I don't mean that in a cheesy, self-help, 'You have to learn to love yourself before anyone else loves you' kind of way. I mean that when you live on your own you can wave away the bits you don't like about yourself to an extent, but when you live with your lover you can't. It's all thrown out in front of him and you can't take it back. It's like the tree in the forest: if no-one sees or hears it fall, does it actually topple? I did lots of toppling in that flat by myself and, of course, word seeped out. I went to therapy regularly, I had a good many close friends and they, as well as my family (most of my family), got to see me at my most boring and irritable. But you don't have to win your family over in terms fo love. And I didn't live with my friends. No. In this flat there is, day to day, me, my boyfriend and not that much else. But you don't need props, I've discovered, to live together, because what you're doing isn't a performance."

Daisy Garnett, 'Moving On', in Vogue September 2008

Cities lectures at LSE - Spring 2009

2009-04-18T18:42:00.003+01:00

LSE's consistently excellent public lectures programme (follow on Twitter) has the following cities-related lectures this spring:

Architecture as Investment
Monday 27 April 2009, 6.30pm
Professor Alejandro Aravena, Professor Ricky Burdett, chaired by Tyler Brûlé

The challenge to provide affordable housing is a global issue. At a time when market forces are eclipsing architecture’s social value, Elemental’s pioneering housing is transforming urban communities in Latin America. Prof. Aravena is director of Elemental in Santiago de Chile (and Mr Brûlé, of Monocle magazine, just has the best name ever).

The Tycoon and the Tough: towards a comparative anthropology of urban marginality
Thursday 7 May 2009, 6pm
Dr Joshua Barker, Professor Chris Fuller

Anthropologists often use key figures, such as the street tough, the child witch, and the flâneur, as a means to elucidate, personify, and critique underlying dynamics of social and cultural transformation. It is a method that is widely used, but seldom scrutinised. In this lecture Joshua Barker uses examples from his research in the slums of Bandung, Indonesia, to argue that this method can make a powerful contribution to a comparative anthropology of urban marginality.

Picturing Poverty: London past and present
Wednesday 27 May 2009, 6.30pm
Sue Donnelly, Mishka Henner, Professor Gillian Rose, Dr Mike Seaborne

From Charles Booth’s 19th century maps and early photographs of East End tenements, to rich-poor divides in Hackney, this discussion will consider old and new ways of seeing poverty – understanding the underlying political processes that serve to reproduce and reduce it. Sue Donnelly is head of Archives at LSE. Mishka Henner is a photographic artist. Gillian Rose is professor of cultural geography at the Open University. Mike Seaborne is senior curator of photographs at the Museum of London.

All That Life Can Afford
Tuesday 26 May 2009, 7pm
Mishka Henner

What does poverty in London look like? And can photography expose the often hidden mechanisms that keep the rich divided from the poor? Mishka Henner discusses the making of his photographic essay, All That Life Can Afford, deconstructing its production to reveal the negotiations and obstacles involved in visualising poverty.

The Fog of Games: Legacy, Land Grabs and Liberty
Reporting the London Olympics
Thursday 28 May 2009, 7pm
Mark Saunders, Martin Slavin

The Olympics are brief and transitory television events that disguise and justify mega projects of vast urban restructuring that permanently distort our cities for the benefit of a few business interests. The common features of these mega projects are unprecedented land grabs, the peddling of myths of ‘regeneration’ and ‘legacy’ benefits, the sweeping away of democratic structures and planning restraints, the transfer of public money into private hands, and ‘information management’ to hide truths and silence critics.
Mark Saunders is an award winning independent documentary filmmaker, media activist and writer. Martin Slavin's continuing interest in photographing and writing about urban experiences, development and natural life is encapsulated in his current focus on the 2012 London Olympics in his neighbourhood.

City, 1 April 09

2009-04-02T23:24:00.001+01:00

Builders watching the bankers watching the protestors just out of shot at the Climate Camp on Bishopsgate, or perhaps this was Bank of England.

Financial Fools' Day aftermath

2009-04-02T00:06:00.002+01:00

Aftermath of the anticapitalist (antiwar, Green, anti-Labour) protest march and rally; Hyde Park, 1st April 2009.

Please recycle?

Somers Town, 25 Sept 08

2008-11-19T15:04:00.004Z

The City is not a hospitable place for hippies, mystics, and idealists - they graitate west towards smaller towns like Totnes and Stroud. A few pagan shops still exist round Seven Dials, and there's a fortune teller in Selfridges, but by and large the City is about power more concrete than cosmic. Bless these women's groups in the pictures above, then! It was a two-storey building with this sterile, masculinist steel and granite facade more suited to an accountancy or law firm - but there they were, working on dreams of freedom regardless of the difficulties outside.

Stoke Newington, 28 Sept 08

2008-11-15T02:31:00.002Z

Watch your skin peel indeed - love this haunting intervention in the abandoned church in Stoke Newington's cemetery. The medium is fantastic: moss grown upon felt, we reckoned. Cheers to Caspar for the walk that morning and showing me around his neighbourhood - hope Berlin's treating you well these days!

Design Museum: Richard Rogers exhibition

2008-11-15T01:21:00.009Z

A couple of themes struck me about the Richard Rogers exhibition at the Design Museum a few months back - absence and the nature of the architectural model; and microflats and confined urban living. The latter will be another post, something to discuss in relation to my own 250 sq ft dwelling. So here I will talk about:

ABSENCE

I've mentioned the dissertation I wrote on the philosophy of dust - how, if you think about it far too much, dust is this really weird force in the domestic. Dust holds a mirror up to human dwelling, showing us back to ourselves as alien. Derrida was an influence here, offering ideas of absent presence and spectrality. And it's those sort of questions I want to ask about the architectural models displayed. What isn't there, and how is this a problem for architecture?

The idea came to mind when I was looking at this perspex-built model, and realised that there wasn't a speck of dust on it. Helen Lloyd at the National Trust has done a lot of research on visitor numbers, the dust they produce, and what this means for their conservation work. The Design Museum hae to be cleaning like maniacs to keep these models pristine (wonder if they pay living wage?). So what does this mean symbolically? It is an erasure of the traces left by people and time, when people-over-time equals life. It is a desire to elevate these models into the Ideal, to proclaim their forms as absolute truths like Platonic solids. It's a great big denial and repression of materiality, and when the practical outcome of the architectural design process is building stuff for embodied use, that's a fucking problem.

This is the big objection that, coming from a social sciences perspective, I have with architecture. It's not about fucking form. The arrangement of pretty shapes and lighting in space (whether in the model or the actual construction) is... method, means to an end. What actually matters is the effects of these forms: environmental impacts, the responses and feelings that buildings elicit from people, the social interactions they enable or proscribe. But the architectural model stops half way through that process, reifying what's secondary to built space (i.e. form) to the sole signifier. It's exactly a monumental arrogance on the behalf of the architect, this desire to deny the fact that every single person's use of the building is a form of interpretation and thus authorship, and to claim this creative generation for themselves alone.

To be sure, I know that architecture students are now trained to think seriously about inhabitation and use and radical architecture - and that's great. Sometimes the results aren't so abstract as to be incomprehensible and useless: even better! But these traditional models ignore all of that, and by being shown in this museum they're being called definitive architecture. NO.

This is a model of the Millennium Dome. What does it say? Everything it tells us is in the absences. The failure of the Dome project was that it was planned as a model (and reconstructed at 100x the scale as the same); that its contents went in because they seemed educational and a good idea in theory, and theory only. The model is white and sterile; the Dome was never planned as living breathing processual space, somewhere that could encourage culture rather than just displaying it dead and fixed. Was its handling of multiculturalism and Britain's hybrid and colonial history also pristinely white in the sense of racially normative? Sure there was PC, but that's not real inclusion. Planned as an unpeopled model, the only participation the Dome allowed was consumption, the only way we could express what we thought of the place was by where we chose to queue. And then they put this model in a museum like it is a good thing?

I want to look for people who are modelling and planning architecture in other ways than these perspex and plastic tombs, ways that bring what matters about the discipline (that is, staging social life) in from the beginning. Suggest things to me...

Choked up

2008-11-14T17:32:00.002Z

The weather has been ropey this last week, and bang! look at its effects on the systems of the City. So it's been raining. It's bloody November, of course it's been bloody raining. But can we deal with it raining? No. People stop walking and cycling and take to their cars, they jump on buses for the shortest of journeys. So everything snarls up, King's Cross is essentially stationary, and buses don't go anywhere any more. I find this isn't terribly helpful... This is what I am looking at for 20 minutes at a stretch:

God forbid, I may just listen to certain of my friends and get a fucking fixie, hipsterrific as they are. I do not have the space in my teeny tiny flat for a bicycle, and nor could I possibly be restricted to clothing practical enough to ride in. But the way these guys talk about cycling: the way awareness extends in space and time as you slip through this shifting system of road-cars-pedestrians-destination-enironment-self; the physical challenge (and the phenomenal lean grace of their bodies, more real than anything gym-built); the speed and satisfaction... Their eyes light up, their speech is poetic, enthralled, persuasive. Perhaps there's something in it...

Transmetropolitan

2008-11-14T01:12:00.008Z

I have regressed to age fifteen and started reading legendary comic series Transmetropolitan. Been reading writer Warren Ellis's blog for years, of course, so it's about time I got round to his real stuff. Transmetropolitan tries quite hard to be cool, and of course it's essentially deriative - but this is postmodernity so does that matter? I think I like it. Worth scribbling about it here because Transmetropolitan - as the name suggests - is urban as hell. Urban like ur-city, or at least ur- like originary if your year zero was Bladerunner. There are other urban archetypes in Dickens, Le Corbusier, Ancient Greece - but yes, Transmetropolitan's doing all it can to capture a particular one. So let's take a look at it.

"I hate it here. I hate the way it smells (except when you get into a fully residential quarter where people are predominantly first-gen American: the way people express their culture in their cooking is one of the few good reasons for being alie). I hate the way it looks (except for that weird beauty that hits you in the eye eery other second). I hate the way it thinks (except when it buys this newspaper). I hate the things it does to itself (except when it lets me do them). I hate the way it loes me, and I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate it here... but God help me, I can't imagine liing anywhere else."

(Anti-)hero Spider Jerusalem just refers to it as 'the city', which fits this blog way too perfectly! The series seems to have quite a fixation on prostitution as proiding definitive urban background colour, too, which I need to unpack - that 'Sex and the City' post I promised. Of course it's essentially just romanticised misogyny, but the trope (common enough, think Sin City too) hints at a bigger about urban social relations too, I suspect... But first another trope of Transmetropolitan: drugs.

"You know, when I was a kid, we listened to music that made our parents' eyes bleed and took drugs that made us want to dance and fuck and kill things. That is the way things are supposed to be.
It was, therefore, in the spirit of honest investigation that I internalised a heroic dose of Space, the new social drug enjoyed by the young folk of today as part of the youth culture referred to as Supermodernity.
Supermodernity, apparently, is the experience of being between places; that is, not being in a real place at all, but waiting in transit between one place and the other. This is why SM/Space Culture music appears to us to be utterly silent. You hae to be on Space - slowed down, across places, in the one between ticks of the clock - to be able to hear it.
This is what they do for fun, apparently: suck up appalling volumes of a drug that traps you in an airport waiting lounge of the mind and doesn't let you go for approximately two hundred years while someone plays an antique handheld electronic keyboard in your ear."

First, what the fuck, a reference to the Marc Auge Non-Places: ...Anthropology of Supermodernity that is basically A. getting Terribly Upset about driving on the motorway? Unexpected... But also the suggestion that real cutting-edge spatial theorists ought to be hoovering up ketamine and the other space-time distorters (salvia, perhaps?). The eco actor-network theory of Tim Ingold is essentially based on the acidhead realisations of Gregory Bateson: 'oh shit, man, it's like, all connected! We better be nice to the plants and reindeer now...' So what would the results be for embodiment and architecture if working with disassociatives? Of course architecture students are always already doing these drugs by the bucketload, but is anyone out there integrating it with their practice? I want to know...

New York, New York

2008-11-12T01:46:00.007Z

Twelve days ago I went to New York for the first time. I didn't visit for the sake of the city at all - hell, I wish it didn't exist - oh, let's just say it separates me from someone, someone who's pretending for the moment that the City isn't the one true place to be. Nevertheless, this is enough of a someone that I would consider leaving my beloved City for his - so while I was there (and because I lack the money, and because I'm an anthropologist not a lousy tourist!) I was thinking about how NY operates as a place to live. A few comments on its urban space and architecture, to begin with:

The Bowery was one of the streets I liked the most, even as gentrification starts to go too far. (The less said about the hotel these days the better.) It let me take a satisfyingly evocative (cliched) photo, and still seemed to carry a few ghosts.

The Bowery hosts the New Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the very few bits of proper, committed new architecture I found in the city. (I didn't go even as north as Midtown, though, so I accept I may have missed a bit! Then again, no-one was trying to convince me that the Upper East Side was a happening place to see...) The rainbow 'Hell Yes' on its side didn't exactly 'fit' as such, but the building had a scale and a rhythm that worked well. I liked its texture, I liked its balanced imbalance, and it proided a fitting space for its gallery purpose.

One of the other rare bits of serious new architecture I saw in NY was Tschumi's Blue Building on the Lower East Side - I failed to get a decent picture, but thankfully the New York Times did. Apparently, "its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings." No no no! It's just a bog-standard tower block that happens to be wonky. It's a monolith of glass and steel that doesn't speak to any grittiness or disorder; it seeks to be a singular landmark rather than dispersed or multiple; it's blocky, aggressive, still fucking phallic. This longer review is more astute when it observes that the asymmetric form is all about maximising the square footage, i.e. capital-with-a-capital-C. If I gave a shit about the Lower East Side, perhaps I'd cry.

Oddly enough for America, New York's best buildings were its old ones, with their fragile rusty balconies and sense of speaking in harmony with their neighbours. I was surprised to find that the city had a facility for elegant decay, something I associate strongly with Mediterranean cities and perhaps Latin America. Paint peeled, graffiti layered on top of posters, the sidewalk fallen apart fit to break a leg... Unexpected, but quite beautiful in its anti-statist way. Sea air helps, too, I suppose. I'd thought Coney Island might have this quality but instead it was sadder than that, surrounded by housing estates and derelict land, an illustration of New York's segregation and deelopment rows. Shame. (Fucking enormous seagulls, too.)

Further commentary in another post regarding the 'suburbanisation' of New York and other suggestions as to why I didn't feel it was somewhere that worked very well. But as a teaser, I like this comment by Rocco Landesman, a Broadway producer:

But I think there has been a delibidinization of our city, I really do. ...In terms of public planning there’s been a kind of prudishness, a kind of social and political correctness that’s gone on.

Sex and the City, now there you go - and now that's such a topic for this blog, too!
x

29 Aug 2008, 15:18

2008-10-07T00:23:00.002+01:00

Also, I like this 'fuck you' response to the anti-flyering paint: more than one way to appropriate an urban surface for one's own purposes!

City-related lectures at LSE this autumn

2008-10-06T23:28:00.005+01:00

There are a thousand reasons why the LSE is brilliant, and one is the quality of its evening lectures. The full list is available here, but below are details of the best on urban and spatial topics. I'd like to attend them all, but that'll be easier said than done!

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Running Cities: London in context
Sir Simon Milton, Prof. Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
What is the new administration's vision for London? Speakers discuss how to design and manage the powerhouses of the global economy, assessing London's development compared to the megacities of the world.
Simon Milton was appointed deputy mayor for policy and planning after serving as chairman of London's Local Government Association. Ricky Burdett, chief adviser for the London 2012 Olympics, and Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, are co-editors of The Endless City.

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: social order revisited
Prof. Robert Sampson & Prof. Paul Gilroy
A look at classic urban themes as they are manifested in the contemporary city, focusing on social reproduction of inequality, the meanings of disorder, and the link between the two.
Paul Gilroy is Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory at LSE. Robert Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair of sociology, Harvard University.

Tues 4 Nov, 13:00 - Big Ideas: Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

Weds 12 Nov, 18: 30 - Desiring Walls
Prof. Wendy Brown
In this lecture, Professor Wendy Brown will draw on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine the desire for walls in the context of eroding sovereignty. Why the current proliferation of nation-state walls, especially amidst widespread proclamations of global connectedness and anticipation of a world without borders? And why barricades built of concrete, steel and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed or networked? Why walls now and how are they to be understood? While acknowledging variety in the explicit purposes of the new walls, this project argues for comprehending the recent spate of wall building in terms of eroded nation-state sovereignty. Above all, the new walls consecrate the boundary corruption they overtly contest and signify the ungovernability by law of a range of forces unleashed by globalization.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thurs 13 Nov, 18:30 - Our Urban Future: the death of distance and the rise of cities
Prof. Edward Glaeser
Improvements in transportation and communication technologies have led some to predict the death of distance, and with that, the death of the city. In this lecture Professor Ed Glaeser will argue that these improvements have actually been good for idea-producing cities at the same time as they have been devastating for goods-producing places. What, then, does the future hold for our cities?
Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard.

Tues 18 Nov, 18:30 - The Politics of Mobility
Peter Hendy
Sprawl versus dense? Public transport versus private car? This debate will outline how London's transport strategy shapes - and is shaped by - environmental policy, quality of life and political imperatives.
Peter Hendy is commissioner of Transport for London.

2008-09-28T19:58:00.003+01:00

What I've been working on in these weeks away from this blog - this is the introduction to my Masters dissertation entitled Dust: Disturbing the Domestic:

I first started thinking about dust when lying on the sofa in my flat, procrastinating on putting together a dissertation proposal. Eyes casting around for things to do other than study, I noticed that an enormous amount of dust had gathered under the table. Where trapped by chair legs it was forming dustbunnies, tangles of an oddly purpleish fuzz and hair that were a prodigious size seeing as I had swept only a couple of days previously. It didn't seem fair. I had to be the one to blame – my previous flat had been excessively dusty too, but that was clearly due to sharing it with two engineering-student boys. Now, living alone, this dust had to be my responsibility – yet I was neither balding nor scrofulous, and my flat's soft furnishings were not becoming threadbare. Where was this material coming from? I was disturbed.

The problem of dust was clearly a more interesting question than any possible dissertation. How frequently did I need to clean in order to prevent dust, daily? But that would be silly. The dust was quite a pleasing colour and safely out-of-the-way, so perhaps I should just leave it? After all, dust wasn't really yucky – it just sat there quietly – and cleaning to avoid my dissertation was clearly procrastination to be discouraged. I had thought I lived in every inch of my tiny flat, yet on reflection dust marked all the spaces in which my presence was absent, the out-of-the-way places my feet didn't tread and my body didn't occupy. Dust sat in corners, under the bed, and on top of the cooker hood, while the rest of the flat acquired discarded clothes and coffee stains, traces instead of use. And paradoxically this dust marking all the places I wasn't was nonetheless made of me, made of my skin and made of hair no more dead than that attached to my head. It suggested a sort of hidden embodiment-apart-from-the-body, dispersed over space and time. The accumulation of dust was like the accumulation of the past, which must at some point become suffocating to the present – housework the only thing preventing the transformation of the home into a nightmarish haunted house. What if dust could be sentient, like the animated soot particles in the film I'd watched recently, Spirited Away? This stuff was weird, intriguingly so.

I decided I wanted to do some serious thinking about dust.

I live(d) in Blade Runner

2008-08-12T23:22:00.006+01:00

Nothing special for the photograph today, but it gestures at something so central to my mythology of the City. For six months 06/07 I lived in Clerkenwell (aka sexy warehouse architect land) in a big council highrise full of more yuppies than council tenants. The area was... odd, actually, despite the hype. It was a little lacking in basic necessities such as a decent supermarket, hell, even just a newsagent open when I wanted the Sunday papers. A little too quiet after hours; it had City looks, but not City buzz. It didn't really feel homely, but nor did it feel anything else.

But one thing made up for all that. Up on the sixth floor balcony, walking towards my flat's front door, I had this view - the Barbican towers, their dark jagged concrete forms disjunct on the skyline. Not so close (about a kilometre away) and, on a sunny day, not so foreboding - but still a gift because they let me pretend, just for a few seconds as I walked towards the door, that I was living in Blade Runner. In my heart, that is what the City is about.

The City is Bananas

2008-08-12T01:55:00.005+01:00

Today I finally caught up with my friend Astrid. We found some coffee then went hunting for banana skins - no really. Astrid runs London Bananas, a photoblog dedicated to the urban banana. A new(ish) resident of the City, she writes:

"When I arrived I noticed something straight away: there's a lot of banana skins around.
I see them everywhere. They're languishing on doorsteps, hanging out in the middle of the road, dangling off street signs, peeking out of piles of garbage, reclining in the middle of the sidewalk, riding the bus for free....
Eventually I managed to get a camera and started documenting these bananas in situ, partially because I thought it was funny and partially to assure myself that I wasn't making it up."

Here's one of her photos:

Why's this belong here? Because, like people on BoingBoing, I'm loving the game of 'guess where?' these photos inspire. Taken at banana-height perspective often without much background context, these pictures challenge my micro-knowledge of the City. I know where Astrid lives, works, goes drinking - but have I been concentrating? Can I place that shopfront, those railings, that advertising hoarding? I want to be able to do so: I want to know my City intimately, not (just) as theoretical structures and systems but like the palm of my hand. (Like my own body...)

And simultaneously London Bananas also functions as a guide to someone else's City, her paths and the traces these leave in her mind; a little awareness of the things she sees that I never do, that is, banana skins.

Decorating the City

2008-08-07T13:58:00.005+01:00

I love my shitty motorola camera-phone - sometimes it chooses to focus on things, sometimes it chooses not to. We shall pretend, please, that this random variation makes my photos on this blog more artistic, and that it's nothing to do with being too slothful to find/carry/use a proper camera!

By Old Street tube, 4 Aug 08. The tag -ACK (the first letter was damaged) made out of the genius new medium of plastic cups stuffed into wire net fencing.

20 Apr 08, probably East London. Stencilism by now outweighs spray-can graffiti, or at least the good stuff - wonder who to blame for that?! It still looks great, but yet is something of the soft & easy option, I think...

29 Jan 08 - pure Dada.

Gower Street, 28 Feb 08

2008-08-07T13:55:00.002+01:00

Foucault wept.

Tate Modern 'Global Cities' exhibition

2008-08-07T12:49:00.004+01:00

The Global Cities exhibition at the Tate Modern last summer was not a raving success. Rem Koolhaas talked bollocks about slum dwellers being 'more free' in their architectural choices because they weren't constrained by Evil Conservative Planners - the fact that they're constrained by lack of money and materials, which likewise generates stylistic uniformity, didn't seem to occur to him. Graphs appeared without scales or quantification, statistics without context and sometimes flat out wrong (a 10 km square is not the same as 10 square km, oh innumerate curator). And most of the video works were vague, uncontextualised, and a bit dull.

But I found some pictures on my phone of the cool stuff, so I thought I'd post them:

Nigel Coates (2007) Mixtacity
An artistic reading of urban planning for the Thames Gateway - brilliant because at first the only weirdness seemed to be that the buildings were made of biscuits & rolls of thread; then, as you looked further east, the buildings themselves got stranger and stranger, but so gradually that it all seemed plausible.

A plywood model of the residential density of a city, possibly Mumbia. Pretty but essentially meaningless, given that there's no scale attached. And can the city's borders really be so sharply defined, moing from ultra-dense to barely populated in the space of a kilometre or less? I doubt it. So what's the point of such an impressionistic rendering?

Not sure who this was - Planet of Slums is a Mike Davis phrase, but he wasn't a contributor. But as a signpost of increasing class segregation in the city, it's apt - makes me think of the vitriolic battles over hipster appropriation of Brooklyn, New York.

Ur-points: Sim City

2008-06-06T16:25:00.005+01:00

If it hadn't been for a childhood spent in a darkened room, hunched in front of genius early computer game Sim City, would I have ever got so interested in cities, their patterns, and the forces that shape their operation? The variables one could control in Sim City (taxes, land-use zoning, transport and so on) always functioned linearly-enough that the algorithms behind the game were semi-visible, making it (after enough practice) easy enough to build the optimum-functioning city. So after having built a profitable, thriving city, I had to seek new challenges - to design a city optimised for education, or low pollution, or of lots of separate small communities. This sounds not so far from the challenges of real urban planning, but when I tried to implement the Chicago school models of urban zoning I learnt about in GCSE geography, they never really worked. Sometimes I would get bored, and attack my cities with wave after wave of floods, fires, aliens, volcanoes... Or take profit-making to its logical conclusion and construct an ultra-dense city of arcologies, each holding thousands of Sim-residents - and ridden with crime, and so watched over by a thousand police stations...

These days, of course, I have read de Certeau and I know all about the importance of practice, I know about performed spaces and subaltern geographies and more. But still, those early days spent simulating cities force me to acknowledge the pleasures of the god-view, make it seem so easy to slip into pastel-coloured dreams of total knowledge, and order, and discipline, all for the welfare of the population...

Sensuo-city

2008-06-06T15:04:00.001+01:00

The city stinks today, a cloying retch of decay. I believe it is only a type of tree pollen, but it still hints at the possibility of a dead body rotting in a flat overlooking the street, the dark & disgusting unknowns that might hide behind every wall in this space... It blends into the honk from the fishmongers - real dead bodies this time, blended with a slight hint of unwashed pussy... Jeez, when I dream of an embodied city I do not want my thoughts to go in this direction!

HEFTED, or, Thinking Like A Sheep

2008-03-31T20:51:00.005+01:00

The best upland sheep in Britain are 'hefted', a phenomenon where they are instinctually attached to a certain area of land. They know this land intimately: where's best to go when a storm hits, where the natural salt lick is found, and how heavily to graze the ground. This territorial knowledge is passed on from mother to lamb, and it's strong - Cumbrian farms may have a "landlord's flock" that has to be sold to stay with the farm, as if moved elsewhere the sheep will just walk over the fells back to their 'heaf'.

I find it interesting that this instinct was man-made - by shepherds in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the Acts of Enclosure, lowland grazing ground was divided into fields all owned by one person or another, but the Cumbrian fells were left as unfenced common-land. This provided a communal grazing resource, with rights given to
farmers to graze their sheep on individual sections. But the sheep could easily stray for miles - so the shepherds taught them to stay put. Through breeding their own flocks, and rearing lambs in exactly the same places year-on-year, farmers have maintained this hefted instinct for hundreds of years. These sheep belong.

This isn't a rural affairs blog, I know! But give me time and I'll explain why it's an interesting way of thinking about the spatial.

1. Foot and mouth disease in 2001 was disastrous for this way of farming. It disrupted traditional patterns of moving sheep between high and low ground, and a couple of seasons of lambs were born un-hefted - making them a liability to keep on the rugged fell-land. Consequences: this is really interesting for thinking about the timescales and durability of tradition. On one hand, hefting produced by shepherds 250 years ago has lasted. On the other, it's so easily disrupted...

I can also see a really good PhD proposal here! About the problems of government intervention into rural life not properly understood, and competing spatial knowledges - hefting versus the language of proximity and contamination of foot & mouth management. (When, in fact, there were other strategies for stopping foot & mouth, such as inoculation...)

2. Really good article in the Independent yesterday about declining rural people and ways of life:
Another country: whatever happened to rural England? - Richard Askwith

I then want to cross-reference it with this one in the Times: Are you hefted? If not, that's a pity - Ben Macintyre

The point of intersection: what about people being hefted? What would that entail?

There are clearly some similarities to the Welsh concept of hiraeth, longing or homesickness - the same instinctual desire to be in a particular place, and feeling rooted there. But hiraeth is a word more often used by sentimental Americans tracing their genealogies - I think 'hefted' is more rigorous. The Independent article mentions a farming woman, 83, who has only ever spent one night off her farm, and never been further than Exeter. Now that is being hefted.

I love and adore the City, and City life and streets and space, and refuse to take any future path that leads away... But that's not being hefted, that's not enough. I wasn't born here (few in the City are: it's a destination aspired to & chosen), my parents and grandparents before me weren't born here, and I keep moving between neighbourhoods of the City in search of a better flat! Perhaps the only heft I can claim is at the scale of England itself, not just in terms of inherited roots, but an instinct that's expressed very much in terms of relations to the landscape (the heath, the birch trees, the moor...) And a great-uncle, the last of the family to farm, who does indeed keep sheep on the the uplands of the Dales...

WalkScore: Quantifying urban experience

2008-02-24T11:54:00.007Z

WalkScore is a piece of genius that quantifies a neighbourhood's 'walkability'. Enter your street address or postcode, and it uses shop and amenity data from Google Maps to give your specific address a walkability score out of 100.

So what does this concept of 'walkability' entail? They say:

Walkable communities tend to have the following characteristics:

* A center: Walkable neighborhoods have a discernable center, whether it's a shopping district, a main street, or a public space.
* Density: The neighborhood is dense enough for local businesses to flourish and for public transportation to be cost effective.
* Mixed income, mixed use: Housing is provided for everyone who works in the neighborhood: young and old, singles and families, rich and poor. Businesses and residences are located near each other.
* Parks and public space: There are plenty of public places to gather and play.
* Accessibility: The neighborhood is accessible to everyone and has wheelchair access, plenty of benches with shade, sidewalks on all streets, etc.
* Well connected, speed controlled streets: Streets form a connected grid that improves traffic by providing many routes to any destination. Streets are narrow to control speed, and shaded by trees to protect pedestrians.
* Pedestrian-centric design: Buildings are placed close to the street to cater to foot traffic, with parking lots relegated to the back.
* Close schools and workplaces: Schools and workplaces are close enough that most residents can walk from their homes.

However, their algorithms are not this complex. (That'd be some pretty hardcore GIS!) Instead, they're working off Google Maps to assess the distances from a particular location to its nearest amenities, then combining these figures and finally ranking that location's cumulative walkable accessibility from 0 to 100, bad to good. This means it doesn't actually address most of the criteria of 'walkability' above. So is it any use - does it provide any assessment that makes real-life sense when compared with our own detailed, lived knowledge of places?

I'm impressed. I currently live in the City's northern inner suburbs in a nameless locale not quite part of half a dozen districts. My address gets a walkability score of 60, which I think bang on. 24-hr petrol station & grocery store 500m up the hill; a medium size Tescos 10 minutes walk a way, as is the tube. Bus stop outside the door, tailors and dry-cleaners 100m away, bank and library and coffee shops (aka civilisation) about 15 minutes up the hill and down again. Of course there are innumerable chicken'n'chips and pizza takeaways in walking distance - or should I say fat-arsed waddling distance? re. issues of obesity and food poverty - as easy access to cheap fried grease make up the very fabric of the City's 'burban fringes! But 60% walkable? I think so. Day-to-day maintenance is by-and-large local & walked - but for work, pleasure, socialising it's straight on the bus into Central.

Does me good. First place I've lived in this City that I've remained in for more than six to nine months...

...Though damn, yes, I still miss the yuppie student brat pad I shared in Bloomsbury a while back, affordable courtesy of a friend with a daddy who was 'something in mineral extraction'. Not quite up there with LSE's Russian oligarch-spawn and their penthouses in Covent Garden, but not miles away either... Walkability score 95% + Soho in 12 minutes = bliss.

Grew up on the edge of the City's commuter belt in a supposed market town that was more one big dormitory 'burb. Now, it's clear that Google Maps doesn't provide such good shops/amenities tagging outside the City - the library's not tagged, the sports centre's not tagged - and, more generally, there's a problem that newsagents don't seem to get tagged, when they're the standby saviour shop for residential areas. So perhaps the WalkScore for my childhood home of 5% is a little harsh - but shit, it felt that cut-off from any life, so I do not criticise too far!

My friend Ash: "I say keep hating your hometown: it encourages aspiration."

WalkScore currently works for the UK, the US and Canada - with more countries to be added soon. So give it a shot and tell me - how's its alogrithms compare to your subjective feel for your neighbourhood's walkability?

Starting point I

2008-02-17T11:08:00.005Z

Raban 1974 Soft City

Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mold them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.
(p. 2)

Both the villagers and the media sophisticates watched themselves living; they were all actors, and their performances were subject to a continual critical scrutiny. The studied gesture, the hand cupped around the igniting tip of the cigarette, the flounce of the caftan, the muddy stride across the Green, these were part of a calculated repertoire. To be part of the city, you needed a city style - an economic grammar of identity through which you could project yourself. Clearly this was something to be learned; an expertise, a code with clear conventions. If you could not get the surface right, what hope was there of expressing whatever lay beneath it? ... Some people dealt so finely in its niceties that they lived out a kind of vulgar poetry.
(p. 54)

Most of my acquaintances there had no real precedents for the life they were leading; they wanted to be 'in London' without knowing where London really was. And so they conspired to build a metropolis as glamorous, witty and up-to-date as the place they'd imagined as sixth formers in some small town or suburb.
(p. 55)