Debating High-rise Urbanism

Panel

Dr. Andrew Harris, UCL Department of Geography

Justin McGuirk, Writer and director of Strelka Press

Dr. Richard Baxter, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London

Paul Scott, Make Architects

Professor Peter Wynne Rees, Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, and former City Planning Officer, City of London

London and the UK in general are witnessing an increased interest in popular debates around the recent spurt in high-rise buildings. While much of these have been rooted in the architectural discussion around its appropriateness as a design typology to a city like London (and other British cities), the discourse is not new to urban studies either where concerns around the practice of building skyscrapers have been set against the pressures of capitalist urbanisation, with high-rises seen as a symbolically and economically essential ingredient of the �entrepreneurial city�. While these are crucial dimensions of the debate, recently scholars have begun to diversify the dialogue by exploring aspects of everyday practices that explain how this specific urbanity is globalised and localised, ranging from the design and construction process to the more quotidian reality of high-rise living. It is in this context that this event by bringing together academics and practitioners proposes an inter-disciplinary engagement with the larger challenges and opportunities embedded within the production of high-rise urbanism to bring a more nuanced understanding to the debate.

Contact:

Dr. Pushpa Arabindoo; 

Urban comparativism: some reflections and challenges on how to actually do it

Speaker
Sara Gonzalez (Geography, Leeds University)

Discussant(s)
Loretta Lees (Geography, Leicester University)

There is a now an established literature on urban comparativism sparked by the works of Colin McFarlane and Jennifer Robinson. This work suggests that we need to move beyond traditional urban comparative approaches, often conceived within positivists frameworks and geographically limited to the Global North. The comparativist turn argues, however, that comparison should be broadened not to just to include different cities or moments within cities but also as an approach rather than simply as a method. This involves also learning from urban difference and thinking theoretically through urban comparison.

In this session I will present some reflections and challenges of trying to do comparativist research drawing mainly from two ongoing research projects/networks: one looking at the impact of the global financial crisis in 4 European cities and another a research network between Spanish, British and Latin-American universities looking at contestation in cities. The aim of the session is not to provide answers but to spark a discussion where we can think collectively how to best approach urban comparativism drawing from examples that I will present and that the audience will hopefully bring.

All are welcome. 

Imaging Collapse: the Aesthetics of Economic Downfall 

Speaker
Mireille Roddier, Associate Professor, Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan

Discussant(s)
Louis Moreno

Chair
Pushpa Arabindoo (Co-organiser Urban Salon)

Drawing from my proposed book project, Imaging Collapse is interested in expanding the lens through which extreme instances of urban blight and fiscal ill-being are portrayed, and to borrow from interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks in order to make sense of the ramifications of such accounts on contemporary architectural production outside of the claims generated from within the discipline. In particular, I would like to question four interdependent aspects of this production that seem worth probing: its reliance upon, contribution to, and naturalization of post-industrial ruin imagery understood through aesthetic and affect theories; its relationship to the relational aesthetics discourse coming from the art world; its capitalization by cultural institutions and the logics of curation, cultural power and recuperation; and its alleged role in creative class urban gentrification in light of the financing of architecture in an era of economic decline. While the focus of my work is not limited to Detroit, the city serves as a case study for many of its parts. It analyses and reveals the complications in much of the architectural work currently emerging out of socio-economically deprived urban contexts in the service of further production by asking: how do we negotiate the creation of architectural artifacts that are either intended for, or recuperated by, the cultural establishment, in a context marked by social violence on the general public.

 The relationship between gentrification and public policy in Berlin – a conversation with London.

Speaker

Dr. Matthias Bernt (Department of Sociology, Helmholtz Centre, Leipzig)

Panel
Tim Butler (KCL)

James Fourniere (KCL)

Juliet Kahne (KCL)

Alan Latham (UCL)

Richard Lee (Just Space)

Paul Watt (Birkbeck).

Chair
Professor Loretta Lees (Co-organiser Urban Salon)

Over the last years, an increasing number of scholarly contributions have become interested in the interrelation of gentrification and public policies. Thereby, the idea that public policies today have become a main driver of gentrification has become a somewhat commonly understood fact.

This talk takes issue with this view. It explores the changing interrelation of gentrification and public policy in the neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin) and argues that while demise in the face of market forces is clearly visible here, the scope of relations between public policies and gentrification is much wider and more complex. The reason for this is the double-character of housing as a commodity and a social right which leads to highly unstable and contradictory regeneration policies. 

Against this background I call for more awareness to varying national and local policy contexts in gentrification research.  I argue that what is widely coined as “gentrification” is in fact an umbrella term for fairly disparate socio-spatial formations which are marked by different policies and state structures and result in different dynamics of regeneration and population change. 

Public Housing in a Private Time: NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) and neoliberalism

Speakers
David Madden(Sociology, LSE)

Paul Watt(Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck, University of London)

David Madden (Sociology, LSE) on Public Housing in a Private Time: NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) and neoliberalism

Abstract

New York City has the largest and arguably most successful public housing program in the US, operated by NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority). While other US cities have demolished their public housing, NYCHA has maintained its public housing stock and largely resisted privatization; there has been no widespread redevelopment or “Right to Buy” in New York. But I argue that an examination of housing policies and neighborhood development in New York demonstrates that NYCHA has nonetheless undergone neoliberalization in various ways. New York’s public housing is, I argue, being reregulated, recontextualized and decollectivized, such that it is becoming increasingly enmeshed with the politics of dispossession that is directed towards working class and poor New Yorkers. Drawing on ethnographic and historical data, I discuss the ways in which these processes have impact NYCHA’s tenants and the spaces in which they live, and conclude with an analysis of some of the contradictions of public housing in a privatizing time.

Paul Watt (Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck, University of London) on The Class Transformation of Public Housing in London: From Gentrification Buffer to State-led Gentrification

Abstract

This presentation sets out a developmental and conceptual framework for understanding the shifting inter-connections between public (council) housing and gentrification in London. It argues that council housing played a key role as a buffer against gentrification in London during the 1960s-80s. During this period, certain inner London councils, notably Camden and Islington, used the municipalisation of private rental housing as a deliberate policy strategy to counter first-wave “pioneer” gentrification. However this buffer role has been diminished under neoliberalism. This occurred partly via the 1980 Right-to-Buy policy, but more recently by New Labour’s regeneration policies, including stock transfers to ‘not-for-profit’ housing associations, demolitions and the sale of estates/land to developers. Contemporary shifts in council housing can be considered as a key constituent part of third-wave, state-led gentrification in London. The presentation develops the notion of a ‘state-induced rent gap’ – whereby the physical public housing stock has been inadequately maintained while land values have risen. Finally, the presentation will examine how the transformation of public housing is negatively impacting on London’s low-income population and is thereby exacerbating social inequalities. The paper draws upon a range of data sources, including interviews with estate residents and young people living in temporary accommodation.

Further details TBA.

De-centring global urban studies: learning from small cities in Africa

Speaker
Mathieu Hilgers (Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Free University of Brussels)

Discussant(s)
 Deborah Potts (Geography, King’s College London) and Ryan Centner (Geography and Environment, LSE)

Chair
Hyun Bang Shin, LSE

Over the last decade there has been a major scholarly push in urban studies, led by research in the South, to decentre the field, to contest Western analyses, and to produce studies that discuss and critique dominant theories. This presentation participates in this dynamic by focusing on cities that are home to the invisible urban majority in Africa. Today, half of city-dwellers worldwide live in urban areas with populations of less than500,000.  In Africa, 60% of people live in such small and mid-sized towns.Nonetheless, in academic work, Africa’s lesser cities are relegated to a double periphery which reflects the importance attributed to them: the peripheral status of Africa in the world, and that of smaller cities within Africa. Drawing on long term fieldwork in numerous cities and discussing scholarly research in many disciplines this talk constitutes a first step to theorize these cities as structurally relevant in the global age but also as specific in that ‘the way they “do” city-ness is distinctive, while still recognizably urban’ (Bell and Jayne 2009: 695). 

Bios:

Mathieu Hilgers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Free University of Brussels and visiting fellow at University of London.His current research focuses on the neoliberal expansion in the global South and analyses the relationship between capitalism, urbanization and state building. He is the author of numerous articles (published in Theory, Culture and Society, Social Anthropology, Theory and Psychology, L’homme Revue française d’anthropologie) and has published and coordinated several books, the most recent (together with Eric Mangez) entitled “Social Field Theory. Concept and Applications” will come out in 2014, Routledge.

Please do bring drinks or nibbles to share after the seminar, when there will be an opportunity for informal discussion and networking.

Learning from International Urban Planning Practice

Speaker

Rosanna Law (AECOM Design and Planning, London)

Robin Bloch (ICF GHK, London)

Discussant(s)
Mike Raco (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL) 

Camillo Boano (Development Planning Unit, UCL).

Chair
Jenny Robinson (Geography, UCL)

Rosanna Law will draw on the case study of the Doha Masterplan. Her article with Kevin Underwood, “Msheireb Heart of Doha: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism in the Gulf Region” (International Journal of Islam Architecture, 2012) can be found on the urban salon website (www.theurbansalon.org). 

Abstract

The objective of this article is to highlight some of the challenges faced by emerging Gulf nation states in modernizing their cities. The Msheireb Heart of Doha Masterplan is used as an exemplar project to offer an alternative approach in urban planning and regeneration in the region. The article describes how the challenges of land ownership, privatization, climate, social diversity and cultural relevance are dealt with in the masterplan, which seeks to create a modern Qatari homeland that is rooted in its local traditions and heritage. Towards the end of the article, reflections and evaluations are examined to prompt further thoughts and discussions. 

Robin Bloch will draw the lessons derived from a number of recent projects with DFID, the World Bank, GFDRR and EuropeAid. These include a guidebook on Urban Flooding (https://www.gfdrr.org/urbanfloods); a five city climate change adaptation planning initiative in Latin America and the Caribbean; urban and spatial plan making in Sierra Leone and in Ghana; and a new large-scale urbanisation research programme just starting in Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa. The presentation will argue that a new era of state-driven urban reformism has now emerged with which practitioners and academics need better to understand and engage.

Guidebook on Urban Flooding.  

Bios:

Rosanna Law is a Director/Senior Associate of urban design at AECOM Design + Planning, London. An architect-urbanist by training, Rosanna Law sees the crafting of places and spatial planning as an integral part of social policies. Her design leadership for the Msheireb Heart of Doha Masterplan has set a new benchmark for urban planning in the region. Global urban issues such as climate change, cultural diversity and rapid urbanization are consciously addressed through her masterplanning strategies in the United Kingdom, Russia and the Middle East.

Robin Bloch is a Technical Director: Urban Planning at ICF GHK, London, with responsibility for consultancy in Planning, Land and Economic Development. He is an urban and regional planner and economist, educated first in South Africa, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. His principal areas of expertise include urban and metropolitan spatial and land use planning; urban and regional economic development; and urban environmental management, resilience and sustainability. Robin has over 20 years of international experience of research, policy making and urban planning, at local, regional and national government levels in sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. He is a Visiting Professor in Urban Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and a Co-investigator on the Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada. 

Smart Cities and Speculative Urbanisms

Speaker(s)
Nerea Calvillo, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid

Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London

Nerea Calvillo, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid

Test Bed Urbanism: Data, Machines and Conduits as the Inhabitants of Songdo

The city of Songdo (South Korea) has been promoted as the first smart city built from scratch. By looking at how the implementation of digital technologies has conditioned (or not) its urban design and built environment, this paper tries to identify some properties of this new territory. By defining this city as a test-bed, it is possible to question a broader logic of testing and big data that emerge as new forms of governmentality. What types of knowing and acting are facilitated by way of test-beds, and what makes them specific to our contemporary condition?

Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London

Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City

A new wave of smart cities projects is underway that proposes and deploys sensor-based ubiquitous computing across infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these digital programs of sustainability give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices within cities? And what are the implications of these distributions of governance for urban citizens and ways of life? This presentation will consider the ways in which speculative smart city project proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality, or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. Revisiting and reworking Foucault’s notion of environmentality not as the production of environmental subjects, but as a spatial-material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies and ways of life, this paper further considers which practices of citizenship emerge through computational sensing and monitoring that are a critical part of the operations and imaginings of smart and sustainable cities.

Transnational Soup: Translating Local Integration Policies Across Borders

Speaker(s)

Hannah Jones, Research Associate, Department of Social Policy and Criminology, The Open University

Ben Gidley, Senior Researcher, Centre on Migration Policy and Society, University of Oxford

 Discussant

Prof Allan Cochrane, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University

This paper explores how European cities develop and innovate in policies for migrant integration, and how these policies might be researched transnationally. It is based on empirical research into the role of local and regional authorities in integration, and the importance of communication and public attitudes. Our research suggests that adoption of promising practices might be most effective when more radically adapted to suit local contexts. The paper reflects on the methodological problems of comparison and how municipalities might learn from each other despite these challenges. We relate this to broader theoretical discussions about the possibilities of comparison in urban studies, and the particular problems of methodological and conceptual nationalism. While not arguing for a return to these reductive approaches, we argue that in policy implementation as well as in theoretical work, it is necessary to recognize the complexities of local and national context when translating practice.

Materialities and urban politics

Speakers
Ignacio Farías (Social Science Research Center Berlin)

Michael Guggenheim (Sociology, Goldsmith’s)

Ignacio Farías: “Cosmograms for city reconstruction: Master plans and the composition of a common world”. 

Abstract: In the aftermath of the Chilean 2010 earthquake/tsunami, most destroyed cities engaged in the elaboration of Master Plans for Urban Reconstruction. In this article, I propose studying these plans as cosmograms, this is, as diagrams of the entities and the relationships among entities articulating a common urban cosmos. By following the work of experts involved in their elaboration, I describe and discuss the establishment of “common boundaries” regarding the territories and entities representing common matters of concern, and the transformation of urban projects into “common things”, ie. projects that give form to this world by means of a surplus of connections to other entities. I also look in detail at how master plans are aimed to act upon the world. Thus, by taking their existence as PowerPoints seriously, I show how master plans operate as resources for action in the present rather than for the structuration of the future.

Michael Guggenheim: Sacralizing and De-Sacralizing Buildings. Noteson the Theory of Technology

Abstract: What does a church do? What do mosques do? Constructivist sociology has usually argued that buildings don’t do anything, but are enacted by users. Conversely, actor-network theory has interpreted buildings as actants that are stabilised by architect-controlled networks. In this article, I attempt a theory, which uses these opposing ideas about the agency of buildings in an ethnographic way, by observing how buildings do different theories in different situations. I use two different kinds of change of use to show that buildings do different things. First, I show that in the case of churches that are changed to other uses, the church attempts to associate the buildings to religion primarily with discursive means.  Second, I show that in the case of factories that are turned into mosques, very small material interventions with furniture I close with some observations of the relationship of buildings and power.