This is orc country...

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Minimum or Maximum Cities? A conference

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

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

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

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?

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

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

'Epidemic obesity' and the challenge for urban design

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.