imap

Fine Grain Analysis

You will make a finer grain field analysis of the area identified below, to the north of London City Airport, part of which is currently occupied by the University of East London.

Gentrification

You will make an analysis of the process of gentrification by using the cast-study of London’s nowdemolished Heygate Estate at Elephant and Castle.

The area has seen years of protest, particularly from residents of the estate and the largely Latin American shop and stall owners. Such protests are rarely successful. As capital investment floods in and the city changes, original communities are displaced through the increase in property prices. A series of development tactics are often used to minimise commitments to local people, with local government often either complicit in the process or powerless through pressures to accept lucrative inward investment.

HEYGATE ESTATE - 1974 - 3000 PEOPLE

ELEPHANT & CASTLE SHOPPING CENTRE - 1962 - 100 SHOPS

- 450 TREES - PUBLICALLY OWNED - DEMOLISHED

- PUBLIC PLAZA - INTEGRATED TUBE AND RAIL - DEMOLISHED

As long ago as 1979, Neil Smith, then a doctoral student working under the supervision of David Harvey, was writing about the “back to the city movement,” using the early gentrification project of Philadelphia’s Society Hill as a case study. Through analysis of property prices, Smith demonstrated that the return to the city was the return of an affluent class only. He quotes the novelist Nathaniel Burt, who observed that “[r]emodeling old houses is, after all, one of Old Philadelphia’s favorite indoor sports, and to be able to remodel and consciously serve the cause of civic revival all at once has gone to the heads of the upper classes like champagne.” However, despite the gentrification project being underway, the suburb would continue to rise as the dominant typology for nonaffluent classes. In the UK, the owner-occupier suburb followed America’s lead and the UK housing market is still principally suburban. “Not only do 80% of households live in suburbs but also suburban housing is more likely to be owner-occupied.” In the processes behind the “return to the city,” we can see what were once classdivisions re-forming as what the political theorist Brian Elliott has described as “determinate shared identity” – the now so familiar pattern of urbs as a territory for a single, affluent group, the sub-urbs for others. The city core is becomming the domain of the wealthy.

In an attempt to subvert this process - to avoid horizontal spread and to build a dense, compact, pluralistic fieldwe will need to devise appropriate, new spatial forms. Small-scale, low, traditionally configured neighbourhoods will not suffice. As Lefebvre reminds us, “. . . new social relationships call for new space, and vice-versa.” We will address realistically the staggering scalar change in cities, and the changing social behaviours of its populations. David Harvey has criticised current “New Urbanist” preoccupations for presuming “a fixed, nostalgic view of the wants and needs” of urban citizens, and something that “embed[s] its projects in a restrictive set of social processes.” This we will avoid.

The new urbanism connects to a facile contemporary attempt to transform large and teeming cities, so seemingly out of control, into an interlinked series of ‘urban villages’ where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil and urbane fashion to everyone else.

You will make strategic propositions for the dock to the north of London City Airport, currently occupied by University of East London. The proposition will include a compact housing landscape with associated programmes. Crucially, your strategy will use intelligence gleaned from the studies of public architecture of the twentieth-century (the estates) to make suggestions for new social and spatial forms for the twenty-first century - forms resistant to current forces of “development” and prioritising ideas of publicness.

To do this, you must understand what the forces of development are, what they represent, and how new sociospatial forms might subvert them. The strategic ideas will consider architecture and the city as heteronomous - as deeply connected with its social, political and economic contexts, and committed to the community it defines, and which will, in return, define it in the future.

The work will be presented as large scale drawings which explore attitudes developed from your theoretical and analytical work, brought to bear on the site and which form a proposition devised to challenge the statu-quo of housing development.