Holes in buildings: theories & practices

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.

Co-create London: showing EnterPride with disused shops

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:

1. BeSpoke Lanes – Cycle Paths running alongside railway lines
2. Enterpride – Turning disused properties & spaces into accessible cultural & retail hubs
3. 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

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:

1. crowdsourcing suggestions for things that'd improve London
2. the co-creation bit: a workshop with contributors, "London experts", and Co-Creation Hub team members to develop these suggestions into clear ideas
3. 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

The Empty Post Office

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

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.

Urban Decline: Empty Homes

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