Rip It Up Lecture #2: The new ruins of Great Britain

Owen Hatherly's lecture was revealing, enjoyable and provocative. I enjoyed his content and his presentation; both were straightforward. Owen has none of the pretentions that people often pick up from the competitive nature of architecture school, and I enjoyed the way he set his investigations a clear political backdrop. He rigourously deconstructed New Labour's approach to regeneration, and correctly identified that the last government did nothing to correct the mistakes of Thatcherism. He identified numerous failed urban projects and the policies, governance and systems that brought about these failures, such as Pathfinder and PPP. I felt that the most interesting moment, was towards the end when the problem of responsibility was debated. Owen's repetetive and unfavourable mention of BDP during his presentation suggested that in recent times, the Architect has frequently been complicit in the systematic 'mugging' of the working classes, by which I mean the degeneration of post-war counsel estates and the acres of replacement private residential flats that have replaced them, up and down the country. As you might expect, architects in the audience where keen to shrug off any implied responsibility. This attitude highlighted the fact that all too frequently, Architects fail to question the projects they take on, listening instead to the 'any work is good work' doctrine. This was evident during the Diploma market day too, when unit masters presented a variety of briefs that responded to, but did not question the current conditions we find ourselves in, such as the supposed need for nuclear power, and the introduction of free schools, where the validity of these programmes was not up for discussion. So I found it really refreshing to see this debate happen in front of hundreds of people. It's the first time I've seen architect and architecture students alike, publicly consider what their role is in society, to question the system in which they function, think about what political position they are endorsing by designing certain projects and what relationship they have to the governance that initiates much of their work in the first place. Two thumbs up.

Bermondsey Village Action Group Public Meeting with Southwark Council about the draft SPD for Bankside, Borough and London Bridge

Rip It Up Lecture #1: What is the city for?

Last Thursday, Peter Carl gave the first lecture in the 'Rip it Up' series curated by Keiron Long. It was enjoyable and revealing but overall, frustrating.

His content was dense and self-referential that alluded to, but never seemed to get to, the point. The question 'What is the city for?' was briefly dealt with when he showed a slide of Westfield's Stratford City shopping-living complex. I was soon lost in the mix of swirling vortex of vocabulary that I found hard to connect with and I suspected that it meant as little to me as it did the next person. I wondered:

Why did he choose to describe the city in that way?
Is it useful to describe the city in this way?
Does it answer the question?

I began to wonder what this lecture series aims to do and how it's started off. For me, a lecture is as much about the content as it is about the communication of that content. Overall, I felt frustrated that the there was too much discussion between all the usual suspects. This made me wonder why this series is happening. Is it a genuine attempt to generate a conversation within the ASD and beyond about cities, or is it just another self-promoting and self congratualting mechanism by the organisers?

Film: Koyaanisqatsi

Marx wrote:
“In changing nature, we change ourselves.”*

He was talking about the process of production, in which man exploits natural resources and human labour. In capitalist society the aggregate, global exploitation of labour and nature is at the most it's ever been, and the consequence of this is a life out of balance, with nature and with ourselves.

Koyaanisqatsi is an 87-minute visual illustration of this notion. It combines old and delicate nature and industrialised society as if to say, ‘there is a great need to redress this relationship. Look at what we’re doing to ourselves.’

It starts with footage of wilderness and natural cycles, cloud systems and stratified rock formations. These reminded me of a geological perspective of time - that our existence now is less than a speck in the whole of the universe’s existence.

This depiction is then followed by footage about production in a globalized, capitalist world. There’s footage taken in food, garment and vehicle factories, monocultures of flowers and views over the tower blocks in Manhatten. It seamlessly weaves together extremities to create a narrative where the common denominator is always Mankind, and where every shot further illustrates our lives out of balance. The pace is important and is always increasing; only slowing up over the wildernesses.

Made in 1983, the film describes Man’s relationship with Nature during Thatcher-Reagan Conservatism and before climate change became part of Western politics. The film doesn’t show any ice caps melting but focuses on the extremes of the society and cycles we’ve built for ourselves. The film takes the audience on a journey to a destructive, catastrophic end. It is a serious, dialectical film, not a cautionary tale. It is about symbiosis and balance and it has all been brought together to make a perfect object - self-contained, technically brilliant, evocative, compelling and visually dazzling.

I liked it very much.

----------------------------
* "Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature." Chapter 7, Capital Vol.1, Marx, 1867

Manifesto #1

I was born in the Whittington Hospital in Archway in 1987. It's not a glamourous part of the city, despite its proximity to Highgate and its hillside views across the capital. I am twenty-two years old and have lived in London my whole life.

I come to this course after having worked at East Architecture, landscape, urban design ltd. for the best part of two years. At East I was involved with urban projects that aimed to plan parts of the city, such as Farringdon, West Croydon and Tottenham.

This gave me an insight into the various factors and variables that need to be taken into account when designing the city and it gave me a glimpse into the organisations and governance of the city, be they private stakeholders, local residents, businesses, authorities, transport bodies and quangos.

It revealed too some of the limitations of planning and got me asking questions like:

Why do we plan?
Why are we financial bound?
Why do we plan the city when we don't plan the economy?
Who knows what we're doing and to what extent are we accountable?

In the end I became dissillussioned with the masterplan. I see it as a top-down, flawed system that is too dependent on private land, private money, personal relationships and personal agendas. It marginalises the communities it is designed to serve and its fat, red, site boundary, by default, will always exclude someone or something in need. And in the end, the market will dictate and landowners will decide.

So I stopped. And I wondered how I can better grapple with the subject - perhaps as a Planner? Not as an Architect. As an Urban Designer? Where am I best suited? How can I make the change? Where should I put the lever?

I applied for three courses - not wanting to do any of them. I do not want to just be an Architect, or an Urban Designer, or a Planner, or an Educator, or an Artist or an Activist. I would like to be a floater.

I enjoy engaging with the city. It is my primary concern. I hope to use this course to test my critique of the system. I need to assess my understanding so far so that I can experiment with new ways of planning the city and engaging with its inhabitants.

Glossary #1

Planning
Setting our a strategy in order to facilitate something happening or changing.

Spatial Planning
Planning the city.

Design
A discipline that combines problem-solving with material appropriation.

Urban Design
Designing the city.

Consultation
A dialogue with citizens that needs radical reform to make it a two-way process.

Democracy
A thoroughly accountable system of leadership controlled by grass-roots organization.

Need
The requirements of a city that often catalyse planned change, and yet the beneficial, relieving results of that change are often slow or the last to manifest.

Ownership
The condition that reveals the governance of property.

Delivery
It is the last phase of the plan that straddles the planning phase with the actual change. It is when the money is spent and the plan becomes manifest.

Economy
The financial systems that contiribute to and indicate the viability of a plan.

Governance
A system of control that determines the legal, physical and social conditions of space.