LONDON Landscapes of Change
GENTRICITY
Published by Lorena Sanchez Pereira www.lorenasanchezpereira.com Copyright Š Lorena Sanchez Pereira 2017 All rights reserved Gentricity #2. London Landscapes of Change First edition of 25 copies, 2017.
LONDON Landscapes of Change Lorena Sanchez Pereira
GENTRICITY
Cities have become sites of massive redevelopment where the synergies of culture and capital play an important role. The continued deindustrialization of cities, the rise of the service sector, the changes in labour and economic processes, and the gentrification of large urban regions are now receiving attention in cities all over the world, particularly in relation to the roles of culture and of the “creative class” in the urban process in general. The influence of Richard Florida’s theory about the “creative class” and its importance for the economic development of cities is being used by urban planners throughout the world. As a result, cities are being transformed in a global “Soho” sites of cultural production and consumption, luxurious residencies and tourist destinations. Are these strategies improving living conditions in the cities, or, on the contrary, do they increase existing social inequalities? What is the current state of the “creative city” and how does it relate to trends like gentrification?
LONDON Landscapes of Change The development of the history of London has always been closely related to transformations and interventions in its physical space. However, in recent years, the scale of the changes in the urban landscape has accelerated in, perhaps, unprecedented ways. At the centre of this new wave of urban renewal is regeneration, a word that resonates strongly in any current discussion about the city. Regeneration is nowadays regarded as the most important strategy for urban growth in the capital, as the recently revised ‘Plan for London’ (2016) makes clear, but regeneration in the present context is also a very contested political terrain, as a major factor in processes of gentrification and the widening of social and economic inequalities all around London. London’s urban landscape has experienced significant transformations throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, which have influenced, to a large extent, the characteristics of its present urban renewal. As a centre of manufacturing, industry and commerce and capital of the British Empire, London’s population grew in an unprecedented scale, expanding from 1 million in 1800 to 6.7 million a century later. This population expansion caused a rapid unregulated urban growth - the emergence of urban slums and dereliction. It was also a time of major building and infrastructure projects. Developments such as the construction of the railways, – which caused the displacement of thousands of people – docks, canals and basins to support London’s vertiginous industrial activity. Another major phase of urban change in London occurred in the aftermath of World War II in response to the destruction of thousands of homes, buildings and infrastructures. This context presented an opportunity to address some of the urban problems caused by the rapid growth of the city in the nineteenth century. The Greater London Plan of 1944, developed by Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie, sought to offer solutions to London’s rampant growth, improving housing conditions and creating a more organised city with more public spaces. At the core of this plan London’s congestion was to be reduced by relocating people and industries outside the city centre, in new satellite towns like Stevenage and Crawley. The Plan successfully addressed some of the problems of the inferior housing conditions in the capital, but it was also criticized for displacing thousands of Londoners outside the city. As Imrie et al. argue, “the extent and nature of contemporary London’s physical regeneration is a function of its nineteenth-century industrial development” (2009: 42). The decline of manufacturing industry and allied transportation uses from 1960s onwards – docks, canals, railway Yards, disuse factories, gasworks etc. – has produced redundant sites that have subsequently become available for redevelopment. Today, London is a site of massive redevelopment - its scale and ambition is only comparable to the historic periods previously discussed. On the other hand, the developments of today are related to those of the past, as disused industrial sites and infrastructures, and neglected social housing estates are the main focus of the current regeneration schemes in the capital. The London Plan (2016) is the capital’s current strategic plan - in which regeneration is promoted to secure the economic prosperity and competitiveness of a global city. According to Imrie et al. “regeneration is being ‘put to work’ by politicians as part of a strategy to remove obstacles to economic growth and to create the social and physical infrastructure required to compete for inward investment.” (2009: 5). In the pursuit of this endeavour, the displacement of communities and the disruption of social activities are often sidelined. Today, “it is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that, with the exception of social housing estates, much of inner London has now largely been gentrified.... particularly towards the east. What were once working-class areas in the former East End are now seen as desirable residential areas with close links to the City of London.” (Imrie et al. 2009: 52). Gentrification usually affects areas marked by years of disinvestment that have become attractive to property developers and new urban dwellers, which in London primarily include postindustrial areas in the East and South of the city. These places share common characteristics: an industrial past, vacant factories, warehouses and brownfields often in close proximity to the waterfront. They are also places that had built their own social and spatial relationships over time. Zukin (1995) sees this phenomenon as a type of neo-colonialism, since the social and cultural tastes of the newcomers are imposed over the ones of the previous residents which are in turn displaced or marginalised. A further criticism, posed by Zukin (1995) and other
commentators like Rosler (2013) to this wave of regeneration in post-industrial areas, relates to the commodification of space reproduced in the exploitation of the industrial heritage and the instrumentalization of ‘artistic’ and ‘bohemian’ activities that had been developed in these areas over a period of time. In this process, some of these features and activities are used to add value and personality to the area – ‘place-marketing’ – but they are gradually substituted for a ‘bourgeois’ version, accommodated to the consumer’s tastes of new middle-class residents and visitors. Imrie et al. quotes Jager (1986) and his work on class definition and the aesthetics of gentrification to summarize a process in which “developers and urban policy-makers alike have discovered, as Willmott and Young predicted, the benefits of transforming an industrial heritage into a post-industrial urban landscape which immediately provides visual evidence that marks out the city’s success in developing a residential, consumption and cultural infrastructure expected of a global city. In so doing, they have often ‘imagineered’ the motifs of a previous age and use (dockside cranes, old industrial warehousing etc.) into the new era” (2009: 44). The outcome of this is a city where all manufacturing has long been replaced with an economy based in business and services and where the working class has been swept away from the inner city or replaced by an up-and-coming middle class. A neoliberal city where space has become a commodity and, therefore, any intervention of space is subject to the logics of the market. In this climate, culture has become a crucial factor in the commodification of space in the way London is sold to residents, visitors and investors. As Imrie et al. argue, “cultural production and the role of the cultural industries have become an increasingly important element of the London economy.” (2009: 54). Especially, since the turn of the century, government policies have proliferated to promote London’s Cultural Economy. ‘Creative London’ was a plan devised by former Mayor Ken Livingstone to attract new investment to the capital associated with its conditions as a place of culture and creativity. The essence of the plan consisted in identifying key areas or ‘cultural hubs’ where a creative environment had been formed through the activities of artists and entrepreneurs. These areas were in turn ‘developed’ to maximize the profits of these activities. Although the plan facilitated the access of artists and entrepreneurs to affordable studio spaces during a short period of time, it was really conceived as a campaign of place marketing that exploited the bohemian qualities of places like Shoreditch and Hackney, to increase property values. Authors like Zukin and Rosler have described at length this process of place-marketing in neighbourhoods like Brooklyn, Soho and the East Village in New York, which have also become some of the most expensive areas to live in Manhattan. Zukin (2010) examines the revalorization of these areas in relation to a change in middle-class tastes whom she defines as ‘bourgeois bohemians’. Crucial to Zukin’s analysis is the eventual displacement of those artists and entrepreneurs who make the place attractive “for a new ‘creative class’ which encompasses high earners in industries extending far beyond artists, the vast number of whom do not command big incomes” Rosler (2013: 113). The following photographs analyse the use of photography to examine the debates raised above looking at how photography can be used to expose the politics of regeneration and propose a critical perspective capable of challenging the dominant narratives and representations of regeneration. The photographs address urban change through regeneration projects in three distinctive locations of London: the areas surrounding Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Shoreditch and Nine Elms. Since its inception, photography has been used to create visual representations of cities. The development of photography as a representational medium, and as an art form, is closely linked to the growth of the city which provided the multiplicity of visual experiences by which photographers began to establish their own terms of references for the new medium, (Clarke, 1997). In this way, photography also developed different ‘politics of vision’. As Clarke argues, “photography has always constructed a series of different cities, different perspectives and value systems.” (1997: 77). In the context of regeneration, as Aitken and Brake (2016) show in their study of the gentrification in Pendleton, photography can do as much to sell regeneration, as to question it and mobilise dissent.
The photographs that follow, and the descriptions of the contexts where they were produced, pose the possibility of photography as a critical platform from which to examine the politics of urban change through the context of regeneration. By examining various regeneration projects, rather than focusing on a single one, this work aims to expose common trends and politics in urban renewal, which are deployed in areas that also share a common historical context, primarily associated with an industrial past. The position of London, as a global capital, makes these trends and politics important to examine, as they influence similar developments in other cities all over the world. Everywhere, we’re seeing former industrial sites and bohemian neighbourhoods subject to regeneration schemes like the ones described here. The dismantling of the industrial economy in favour of one based in the provision of services is driving cities into a growing competitiveness to attract investment, businesses and visitors. In this context, cities are becoming increasingly commodified, as their success depends on their ability to market their physical spaces and infrastructures, providing, at the same time, a unique urban experience. As we have seen through the areas examined, this experience is usually constructed by exploiting some of the historical, cultural and social practices that had developed in these places over a period of time. What can photography do to contribute to the debates surrounding this context of intense neoliberal urban renewal? Can photography expose the politics of urban change in the context of regeneration? Can it help us to analyse the transformations shaping cities all over the world, from a critical perspective? The answer to this question depends, as John Tagg has argued, on the context of presentation, as “photographs operate as a ‘politically mobilised rhetoric of truth’: “they can represent any set of social circumstances and frame them in any number of ways. They are given meaning by the frameworks in which they are deployed.” (Knowles and Sweetman, 2004). This work aims to explore the power of photography, in conjunction with sociological research, to construct an understanding of urban regeneration and its politics beyond the scope of the image or the text alone.
References: Aitken, John and Brake, Jane (2016) Picturing Gentrification: Representations of Urban Change, Pendleton Salford. In: From Contested Cities to Global Urban Justice, July 4th to 6th 2016, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Clarke, G. (1997). The photograph. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Imrie, R., Lees, L. and Raco, M. (2010). Regenerating London. 1st ed. London: Routledge. Knowles, C. and Sweetman, P. (2004). Picturing the social landscape. 1st ed. New York, NY: Routledge. Kollewe, J. (2017). Battersea is part of a huge building project – but not for Londoners. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/14/battersea-nine-elms-property-development-housing [Accessed 8 Apr. 2017]. Nine Elms on the South Bank. (2017). Nine Elms on the South Bank. [online] Available at: http://nineelmslondon.com/ [Accessed 8 Apr. 2017]. Rosler, M. 2013. Culture Class. Berlin: Sternberg Press. TheProtoCity.com. (2017). Graffiti: Urban Art as a Gentrifier. [online] Available at: http://theprotocity.com/ graffiti-socio-politically-expressive-gentrification-device/ [Accessed 8 Apr. 2017]. Wainwright, O. (2017). Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery is a grown-up gem that shows he’s sobered with age. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/08/damien-hirst-newport-street-gallery-architecture-review-caruso-st-john [Accessed 8 Apr. 2017]. Zukin, S. (1995). The cultures of cities. 1st ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers. Zukin, S. (2010). Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The areas surrounding Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park constitute London’s single most important regeneration project for the next twenty-five years, as stated in the Mayor’s Plan for London (2016), and includes stretches of land in the boroughs of Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and significant areas of social deprivation and brownfield sites that were once the scene of traditional manufacturing industries, docks and railroad yards.
The old Sugar House is a Victorian warehouse originally used for the storing and packaging of sugar brought up river and unloaded on the adjacent wharf at Three Mills Wall River. The building was used as artists’ studios, managed by ACME. The area is becoming increasingly developed, with plans for nearly 1,200 homes, hotel, shops, restaurants, cafes, artists’ workshops and a riverside park near Bromley-by-Bow.
By 2030, the Olympic Park will be home to more than 10,000 new households, and, although The London Plan (2016) and the London Legacy Development Corporation, LLDC (responsible for the regeneration of the area) insist on the sustainability of the project in social terms, past precedents such as the displacement of communities in Stratford following compulsory purchases of land and the controversies surrounding the redevelopment of ‘the Carpenters’, as well as the inequalities visible in the areas adjacent to the park, make this claim very hard to believe.
New Luxury Apartments near The Carpenters Council Estates. Other new developments include various hotels like: Travelodge, Holiday Inn and Westbridge.
Many of the new homes projected surrounding the park are on the side of Hackney Wick, an area adjacent to the park which is changing in a dramatic way. Hackney Wick was originally a site of Victorian homes for workers in industries on the canal, but it was destroyed during ‘the Blitz’ and turned into light industrial buildings for waste disposal and recycling.
The proximity to the Olympic Park, made Hackney Wick a focus of redevelopment which is starting to fully materialise now at an incredible speed. Last year, The Telegraph named the area ‘the new Shoreditch’. Waterfront residential developments are springing out along the Lea Navigation pathway, repurposing or replacing disused warehouses and abandoned buildings which had been used in the past as artists’ studios and venues.
The use of graffiti as a gentrification device in Hackney Wick is currently the focus of much discussion and media attention. Traditionally, in formerly industrial and derelict areas, graffiti had been used as a form of political protest and as a counter-cultural communication device. However, in recent years, graffiti has become increasingly associated with place branding, gentrification and tourism.
From the nineties onwards, many of the vacant warehouses were rented or occupied by artists. The area known as ‘Fish Island’ had the highest density of artists’ studios in Europe.
Shoreditch has become a paradigm of the inner-city gentrification phenomenon to such a degree that we now use the term ‘Shoreditchification’ to describe the process by which an area evolves from an artistic and bohemian neighbourhood into a commercial ‘simulacra’. Most of the strategies for ‘creative development’ in London have their roots in processes that occurred in Shoreditch some decades before.
As in other industrial areas, widespread deindustrialisation created a surplus of disused Victorian warehouses and other industrial spaces that attracted visual artists and other creative types. In the nineties, Shoreditch became the heart of the The Young British Artists, or YBAs, with neighbours like Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Gilbert and George and Tracy Emin.
By the turn of the century, Shoreditch constituted an ideal ‘case study’ for urban planners and local authorities looking to regenerate similar areas of the city, avoiding social contestation by applying the formula of the ‘cultural or creative regeneration’.
Today, in a context of intense neoliberal urban redevelopment, Shoreditch is subject to a new wave of regeneration, looking to expand the borders of the City, capitalising on the bohemian qualities of its neighbour. In this environment, cultural practices like graffiti, music, fashion etc. have become powerful gentrification devices, used to create a sense of an organic transformation where different social and cultural practices coexist.
One the south bank of the River Thames, Nine Elms, is one of Europe’s biggest regeneration zones. At the heart of this project is Battersea Power Station, a decommissioned coal-fired power station that is being transformed, by a Malaysian company, into a “new residential, cultural & business quarter” (Nine Elms on the South Bank, 2017). “In a triangle bordered by the river, Battersea Park and the main railway line into Waterloo, 20,000 homes are being built – most of them luxury apartments in a cluster of high-rise towers that has been dubbed mini-Manhattan or Dubai-on-Thames.’ (Kollewe, 2017)”.
Not far from this site, the arrival of Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, is part of a wider transformation of the area into something of an arts district. “Newport Street Gallery could be a fantastic facility for the community,” says Sylvia Edward […] But I fear it’s all part of the growing Shoreditchification of the area”. (Wainwright, 2017).
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