Jenia Allen
Holding the 2012 summer Olympic and Paralympic Games amidst what is currently Europe’s largest urban development zone, was bound to prompt widespread discussion of the effects of ‘regeneration’ on communities still reeling from the effects of deindustrialisation. This essay will investigate the strategy of Olympics-driven urban regeneration currently being implemented in East London. The first premise of this essay is that such ‘regeneration’ appears to be feeding into a longstanding process of uneven capitalist development, thereby repeating the pattern in which the West of London has traditionally enjoyed relative affluence; meanwhile the East is known for deprivation and its historic qualities are routinely disregarded. A discursive analysis of some of the features of this project suggests further exacerbation rather than amelioration of economic and social inequalities in the area, despite the centrality of ‘legacy’ in London’s original bid to the International Olympics Committee. The essay concludes by arguing in favour of a community-led approach to the revalorization (regeneration) of urban space in East London – an approach which would redefine ‘regeneration’ by giving pride of place to the past, present and future of working class communities.
Uneven Geographical Development: The City and Economic Restructuring
[The City is] Man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.
Robert Park, 1967
In his book Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, David Harvey states that social inequality has increased in recent decades: ‘the promised outcome of poverty reduction from freer trade, open markets and “neo-liberal” strategies of globalization has not materialized’ (Harvey 2006 p.71). Furthermore, for Harvey unequal geographical development is implicit in the linked logics of accumulation and devaluation-by-dispossession, both of which are required to maintain capitalist stability (2006 p.93). As a result, he claims, ‘the combined effect of freer trade and reduced transport costs is not greater equality of power through the evolving territorial division of labor, but growing geographical inequalities’ (Harvey 2006 p.101).
In the global South, manifestations of uneven geographical development as a result of global economic restructuring, are especially pronounced. Global urbanization is shifting the locus of extreme poverty to the cities in the form of proliferating urban slums, the existence of which confirms the claim that both social and geographic inequalities stem from the differential use of space by capital as it flows only to locations that offer the greatest potential return (Pacione 1997 p.7). Meanwhile, the West faces its own issues of inequality as a result of the globalization of economic and political forces, and for a number of reasons these demand closer scrutiny. Though Western cities do not exhibit the spectacularly visible slum conditions characterizing urban centres of the Third World, it remains nevertheless apparent, as Michael Pacione (1997 p.1) asserts, that ‘the uneven distribution of life chances has remained a dominant feature of capitalist societies, with geographic clustering of disadvantage characterizing most cities of the Western world’.
For Britain, the challenge of globalization is particularly acute due to the process of industrial restructuring which has been accelerating since the 1970s, and which is symptomatic of the transition to advanced capitalism (Pacione 1997 p.10). Pacione (1997 pp.16-17) illustrates the particular effects of this transition on the UK space-economy, which until the early 1970s had been buoyed by the prosperity of the post-war boom, which in turn had the effect of disguising the structural problems of the old industries of ship building, coal, iron and steel and heavy engineering. The ensuing absolute decline in manufacturing led to the loss of more than one million jobs in net terms. In the peripheral regions of Clydeside, Tyneside and Lancashire, the textile industry alone shed over half a million jobs, while the West Midlands’ loss of over 150,000 manufacturing jobs in the space of only three years (1978-81), representing almost a quarter of all manufacturing employment in the region, led to the redefinition of this once-prosperous area as Britain’s ‘rust belt’ (Pacione 1997 pp.17-19), or ‘Ghost Town’, in the words of the eponymous song by Coventry-based band, The Specials.
In Britain in the 1980s, the uneven geographical development of capitalism meant that a whole region and its labour force became (partly as a result of overseas competition) suddenly useless (dispossessed), and unable to provide the socio-institutional environment for the fledgling post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation. But the dislocation between the deindustrialising North of England and Scotland, and, led by financial services, the growth of the service sector in the South East of England, was also reproduced inside the South itself, in the desindustrialisation of the Greater London area – a region in which more than a third of post-war jobs had been located in manufacturing.
North and South, the subsequent growth in service sector employment has not been sufficient to cancel out the loss of employment opportunities in manufacturing; apart from the fact that these, new jobs were not necessarily suited to the existing skills of redundant manufacturing workers. The deindustrialisation of the UK economy as a result of global economic restructuring has led ultimately to the geographic and social exclusion of people and places marginal to the capitalist development process.
Pacione (1997 p.28) further contends that the concomitant reorientation of urban policy by the New Right Conservative government ‘was part of a wider agenda to restructure Britain economically, socially, spatially and ideologically around a new consensus of free market individualism and an unequivocal rejection of the social democratic consensus of the post-war Keynesian Welfare State’. This is to anticipate the marked increase in the gap between those on low incomes and those who benefited from the economic growth of the 1980s in particular sectors and associated geographical areas (Pacione 1997 p.53) The sort of urban geography that this produces, according to Susan J. Smith is:
Steeped in the ideals of economic growth rather than in the principles of social justice, a structuring of space more dependent on mobilizing citizens’ obligations than on extending their rights, and an environment built around inequalities in personal prosperity that has little interest in promoting collective social welfare. (Smith, S. 1994 p.245)
Aram Eisenschitz (in Pacione 1997 p.152) also observes that inequality of income has grown further and faster in Britain than in any other advanced industrial country. Moreover, the city of London, the seat of power for many of these changes, has turned out to be ‘the most unequal place in the country’ (Massey 2007 p.19).
Taking into account the uneven geographical effects of economic restructuring and the addition of state political forces working to uphold this new model, the reciprocity of spatial and social releations is readily apparent. Cities do not, as Eisenschitz (1997 p.154) notes, simply reflect a set of spatial, economic and political features; rather they ‘actively recreate social stratification, constructing deprivation and vulnerability in a diverse number of ways’. David Harvey reinforces this point:
The urban and the City are not simply constituted by social processes, they are constitutive of them. We have to understand that dialectic in order to appreciate how urbanization is constructed and produces all of these thing-like configurations which we call cities- with political organization, social organization and physical structures. We have to appreciate better the centrality of that moment of urban construction, which is fundamental to how the social process operates (Harvey in LeGates 1996 p.234).
Mike Davis’ work City of Quartz sets out to demonstrate this idea by analysing the spatial form of Los Angeles as both a result of social relations within the city and, also, a constitutive factor working to have an effect on these relations. Davis used the term ‘Fortress L.A.’ to describe a process of urbanization ‘where the defence of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response’’.’ Profit-driven inner city urban restructuring led to a new class war at the level of the built environment. A system of ‘spatial apartheid’ reinforced by a comprehensive security mobilization was put into place, carrying with it inevitable social ramifications in the form of endemic poverty and gang warfare which quickly led Southern California into ‘its worst crisis period since the early Depression’ (Davis 1990 p.ix). The practice of what Davis (1990 p.105) describes as the post-war ‘growth coalitions’ not only sparked urban unrest and social difficulties for the people affected by their policies, but additionally polarized Downtown and Westside Los Angeles into a ‘city with two heads’, struggling over economic resources and competing against each other for political status and cultural kudos.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, British cities have been exhibiting similar characteristics as they mimic this type of market-driven, high security approach to urban development. Patterns of what is now commonly referred to as ‘urban decay’ in areas where industry once flourished, serve to furnish this process with its spatial articulation. In this vein, John Rennie Short (1996 p.80) contends that ‘the post-Fordist city, with its deregulated state, exacerbates national, regional and local differences in capital-labor relations, local government involvement, and local community preferences and power structures’.
Against this backdrop of increased poverty and pockets of increased wealth – both of these derived from the same process of economic restructuring, London has been labelled a ‘dual city’ (Fainstein, Harloe 1992 p.8), characterized not only by its celebrated, ‘multicultural’ inclusivity, but equally in its exclusion – a characteristic omitted from everyday representations of ‘one of the world’s greatest and most successful cities’ (Greater London Authority 2010).
The notion of ‘success’ here demands further evaluation: in what ways is London a successful city? Or rather, which London is successful? Who is able to reap the benefits of this success? These questions will be addressed in the following analysis of regeneration projects aimed at tackling the effects of unequal development in the East London region.
The City and Governmentality: Discourses of ‘Regeneration’ in East London
The geography of the world is intimately entwined with the most fundamental of political issues: with inequality, with recognition and the evasion of it, with class and democracy, with – what we inevitably live within and are constantly remaking – maps of power.
Doreen Massey, 2007
William Mann (in Cohen et al. 2008 p.46), noting the significance of historical preoccupations with the perceived deficiencies of the East of London, remarks that: ‘since the establishment of metropolitan government in 1880, 120 years ago, it has been the guiding principle for those governing London that the East End is in need of regeneration’. It should thus come as no surprise that in contemporary Britain the topic of urban ‘renewal’ lends itself particularly well to a discussion rooted in what would appear to be an historically subordinated region.
The relative deprivation of the East of London, in comparison to the more affluent West End of the city, can originally be attributed to London’s physical geography (Cohen, Rustin 2008 p.1). The width of the river – wider and more difficult to cross in the East – remains an obstacle to this day. There is also the flat and marshy land that used to be susceptible to flood; also the prevailing wind and the direction of the river’s flow, which channelled all of the city’s dirt Eastwards; not to mention the prevalence of noxious industries in this locality, partly because of its proximity to the Docks (hence ‘Stinky Stratford’). These were all contributory factors to the initial spatial (and thus social) distribution of the city, which determined the settlement of the more affluent in the West, with the poorer classes relegated to the geographically poorer East. Fast forward through rapid deindustrialisation and as Phil Cohen and Michael Rustin point out, though the original geographical disadvantages are no longer relevant, their effects live on ‘in the quality and texture of the built environment, in the types and locations of enterprises, and in the more intangible but nevertheless influential factors of social and cultural capital, in the capacities of the population to compete with those of other zones of the city for well-paid and satisfying work.’ (Cohen, Rustin 2008 p.1)
An historical misfortune stemming largely from unfortunate geographical circumstances appears to have in the present been somehow transmuted into a common negative perception of manufacturing and its legacy (Cohen 2008 p.115). The result of this turn of events is the creation of an abandoned working class (Edwards in Cohen 2008 p.284), inhabiting what has come to be recognized as an ‘under-utilised’ and ‘underperforming’ zone (Cohen 2008 p.295). The twenty-first century manifestation of this attitude can be seen in the fact that the Lower Lea Valley now houses one of the most deprived communities in the UK, where unemployment is high, skills levels low and which has one of the worst public health records in the country (NEF 2008 p.11). Conversely, it is also an area of strikingly rich ethnic and cultural diversity, with an international character unmatched anywhere else in the UK or perhaps even the world.
In response to these real and perceived issues of detriment, the Thames Gateway plan for sustainable communities was initiated in 1990 by the South East Regional Policy Guidance council in order to rejuvenate an area suffering from the decline of traditional dockyard and manufacturing employment, as well as a shortage of affordable housing for its resident population (Poynter 2009 p.191). The effects of global economic restructuring on the East London economy have been similar to those felt in other areas of the UK, largely in the consensus that it is no longer advantageous to locate manufacturing in centres which have generally high costs of labour, land and congestion. The result has been a rise in the service sector, especially financial services (Butler eds. 1996 pp.5-6) and as such the rise of a London that has assumed a pyramid-like structure with finance as its ‘shining citadel’ (Massey 2007 p.22), charged with making East London ‘the power behind London’s growth and global competitiveness’ (Thames Gateway Development Corporation). The vision of the TGDC is indeed expressed largely in financial terms, as evidenced by their website, the homepage of which is devoted to emphasising projected growth figures set against a backdrop of images made up mostly of the glittering towers of Canary Wharf and its environs. What the website does not address in as much detail is how exactly it plans to deliver objectives such as the much needed affordable housing in the areas with which it is concerned. If we are to use this information as a guideline then what comprises ‘regeneration’ since the initiation of the scheme in 1991 appears to have shifted its focus. Massimo de Angelis (in Cohen eds. 2008 p.78) further confirms this suspicion by noting what he sees as the oxymoronic nature of the rhetoric of ‘competitiveness’ that is now coupled with the goal of achieving ‘sustainable’ urban communities.
Both the concept and practice of ‘regeneration’ have thus come to resemble disputed strategies for addressing issues resulting from uneven geographical development in the city, and in this case particularly those stemming from the consequences of urban ‘decay’. Once implemented however, the practice remains contentious, with competing definitions of the term, and their respective supporters, vying over whether an area has in fact been regenerated for the benefit of local communities and existing residents, or enlisted as an additional location best suited to gentrification. The twin narratives of ‘growth’ and ‘competitiveness’ that accompany ‘regeneration’ in the Thames Gateway represent a marked history in London (Risebero in Butler eds. 1996 p.219) whereby the spatial organisation of urban development has been focused almost entirely upon the challenge of economic growth rather than the more immediate problems of spatial and social deterioration (uneven development) that this approach indirectly feeds into. Harvey (1973 p.97) in this vein contests that the practice of spatial allocation which pursues efficiency and ignores the social cost, is likely to in fact result in long-term inefficiency (in the form of decline and/or anti-social behaviour) stemming from those individuals and groups who have born the brunt of it. As with the (now infamous) Docklands development project, questions thus continue to be asked as to who will this time round be the winners and losers in the latest phase of Europe’s largest urban renewal project, especially now that it has been greatly accelerated by East London’s staging of the 2012 summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Olympic ‘regeneration’
The use of ‘mega events’ such as the Olympics in order to catalyse urban regeneration programs represents an emerging trend for entrepreneurial host cities aiming to revalorise former industrial and/or underdeveloped land in order to form post-Olympic, post-industrial ‘anchors’ of investment (Sherer 2011 p.784). This strategy envisions a subsequent ‘trickle- down effect’, which it is hoped will forge the renewal of the wider area. Proponents of this strategy, usually politicians, business leaders and commercial consultancies, highlight the potential of this method to achieve rapid infrastructural development that without the event would take much longer to complete. Criticisms arising from academic sources and local community-based activists, however, tend to focus upon the mega-event as the mechanism that often achieves the removal or dilution of local democratic controls over development, the displacement of vulnerable or poorer communities, and an increase in social polarization in the host city (Macrury & Poynter 2009 p.311).
A 2008 report by the New Economics Foundation and Community Links aims to assess in the case of London the accuracy of the latter perception. It begins by stressing that ‘the regeneration legacy was not just an enlightened addition to the Game’s plan which would be good to achieve if possible. It was central to London’s original Olympics bid’. London’s candidature was in this case unique in that no previous games had made regeneration so central to its vision (NEF).
The ‘Olympic effect’ on regeneration in East London, however, appears to have been for the most part to exemplify and exaggerate emerging trends in capitalist urban development, such as increased privatization and securitization of public spaces, the depletion of stocks of social housing, and risky practices of financial speculation in the property market, leading to the potential subversion of democratic principles of transparency and community participation in urban planning (Sherer 2011 p.784). According to Anna Minton (2012 pp.xii-xiii) this process has also been successfully obscured from the immediate comprehension of the general public by ‘a multiplicity of competing companies and quangos’, with their associated jargon. There are added pressures that act to devolve power from the sphere of the public derived from the fact that upon winning the bid, the host city additionally enters into a (legally binding, non-negotiable) contractual agreement whereby it is obliged to meet a number of requirements and abide by certain rules set by the International Olympics Committee (IOC).
From this it would appear that the Olympics contributes to entering the host city into further relationships of ‘competition’ and high financial risk, adding greater uncertainty to urban environments already being pushed to ‘compete’ in a globalized economy; as opposed to ‘sustaining’ them by way of prioritising the practical needs of their resident communities. In East London this has had the result of impacting upon host boroughs’ residents in a more palpable (and exclusionary) fashion than perhaps would have been the case in the original plan for Thames Gateway. Emerging from this is an enhanced projection of governmental aspirations for a ‘renewed’ and revalorized urban fabric conducive to the survival of the corporate state (Harvey 2001 p.31).
A number of current developments in East London serve to substantiate what David Harvey claims to be the far reaching effects of ‘the dialectic of the territorial and capitalistic logics of power’ (Harvey 2006 p.107). Perhaps the most striking of these has been the development and redevelopment of Stratford City, originally envisioned as an early phase in the Thames Gateway project, and subsequently as the literal ‘gateway’ to the Olympic Park.
Foucault’s notion of governmentality as ‘the conduct of conducts’ highlights the discursive structures of power/ technologies of government implicit in spatial strategies such as ‘regeneration’ projects, that produce and reproduce these spaces as sites of discipline and/or subjectification. Margo Huxley (2007 pp.191-2) to this end points out that since the mid-1990s governmentality perspectives have been informing spatial reconfigurations of cities and regions in the form of urban regeneration projects, public-private development partnerships and attempts to foster community. Historical studies (in Geography, History and Historical Sociology), she notes, show how spaces of the institution, the city and the territory are implicated in projects of government:
They examine experimental and unsecured assemblages of disparate elements- sanitary technologies, philanthropic practices, architecture, government regulations, aesthetic and moral theory, methods of measurement and calculation (such as the census), mapping, medical knowledge, transport and communications – constituting discursive and material arrangements aimed at the making up and government of particular kinds of individuals, populations, locations and territories (Huxley 2007 p.192)
As such it is possible to investigate the ways in which space and environment are invested with causal powers and programmes (Huxley 2007 p.199), and how ‘regeneration’ represents a ‘spatial technique’ in the effect of power which Foucault (2007 p.383) terms ‘rationalities of government’, i.e. effects which are necessary for the maintenance of ‘natural phenomena’ such as economic systems and processes (themselves a form of ‘meta-power’).
Westfield Stratford City
Stratford emerged as a locus for the governmental discourse of contemporary ‘regeneration’ in East London with the introduction in 1993 of the ‘City Challenge’ scheme aimed at assisting ‘communities with limited ability to help themselves’. Funding for the scheme was on a competitive basis between local authorities, and its achievements once implemented measured in terms of ‘outputs’ to be obtained by specially devised mechanisms designed to ensure their delivery. The scheme is said to have differed from previous initiatives in that it represented a more comprehensive approach to regeneration than the property-led model of its predecessors, such the London Docklands Development Corporation (Fearnley in Butler eds. 1996 pp.327-331). In a similar way to the current Olympic regeneration of the area, the scheme emphasised partnership in the regenerative process between government, community and private sectors. The authors note, however, that the time-limited and output-driven characteristics of City Challenge diverted attention away from the longer term, qualitative and potentially more valuable goals; instead focusing attention on the tangible, measurable outputs (Fearnley in Butler eds. 1996 p.350). It is possible to draw parallels between the output-driven approach garnered by City Challenge and current ‘regeneration’ which was driven in the first instance by a similarly time-specific goal, namely, the timely delivery of the Games in summer 2012.
It is clear that the decision to locate the Olympics in East London has had the effect of attracting substantial infrastructural investment to the area that without the event would have been difficult to secure. However, as Elaine Batty et al. (2011 p.32) in their report on low income neighbourhoods in Britain suggest, these represent a set of largely universal drivers of change (connecting disadvantaged neighbourhoods to growth) in places where the diversity of local contexts and manifestations of change affect the possibilities and potential for change to occur.
The Olympic Legacy document produced by the department for Culture, Media and Sport (2010) states that ‘the Games were cited in Stratford, East London, deliberately, ‘to exploit the opportunities they present to develop and accelerate this regeneration agenda’. Despite evidence of a poor track record in East London (see Sampson 2011 p.9), this agenda has been premised on the effect of ‘trickle down’ economics whereby the promotion of rapid and large amounts of inward investment to an area is said to provide funds that can later be used to address social needs (Pacione 1997 p.31). The ‘capitalistic logic of power’ represented here by the adoption of a post-industrial system of consumption-based economic development is visibly embodied in the material form of developments at Stratford City, not least with the emergence in one of the country’s most deprived boroughs, Newham, of what is now Europe’s largest urban shopping mall (within which is also situated Britain’s biggest casino) (Addley 2011). Here ‘efficiency’ to use Harvey’s (1973 p.97) term, in the form of attracting the affluent shopper/ gambler in order to generate ‘growth’ from the development, is likely to come at a social cost of removing the potential for genuine urbanity which a less monolithic development in the area may have permitted, in addition to the blatant contradiction of promoting gambling in a very poor area (Addley 2011). The presence of ‘Britain’s biggest’ casino in one of the UK’s most deprived locations, which incidentally also forms part of one of the European Union’s wealthiest regions (Butler, Hamnett eds. 2011 p.4), exemplifies the contradictory consequences of the competitive strategies of post-Fordist social organization. In this instance those who have lost out as a result of the inexorable logic of captialism, are confronted with the prospect of becoming overnight winners – as if it’s all down to luck and a bit of skill at the card table!
But this is not to say that the Westfield shopping mall is a uniformly malign influence on the local community. Rather, there appears to be evidence, as one commentator observes, that the centre ‘is taking on an additional function as a surrogate youth centre-owing to its warmth and the abundance of comfy chairs’. This he adds, ‘compensates for the area’s lack of such facilities’ (Lamba 2011). In both economic and social terms, however, the disparity between Westfield as a driver of ‘regeneration’ and the places and people it is supposed to benefit most, is an indicator, as the NEF (2008 p.16) report suggests, that this approach is not likely to result in significantly better livelihoods or higher well-being for current residents; despite arguably providing a degree of local employment opportunities and additional leisure options. By ‘raising the profile’ of the East End of London in this way, a more likely outcome is the inflation of land values in the area, which can only act as a catalyst for long-term displacement-by-gentrification of the area’s most disadvantaged residents, rather than empowerment by way of building on established networks of trust and social capital (NEF 2008 p.18). The report (2008 p.16) further attests that ‘the danger with the Olympics is that regeneration drivers are to do with tourism and “place marketing” rather than local needs. In this case, the regeneration of the area ‘is staged not for those who inhabit these places, but for those who consume them as visitors’.
The Australian multinational company which owns Westfield is now the main developer of Stratford City. Having bought out all other stakeholders it now has sole jurisdiction over much of the physical regeneration of the area, including construction of future residential developments. The strategic location of the mall at the entrance to the Olympic Park and Village means that Westfield served to channel the spatial experience of Stratford and the Olympics themselves, using what can best be described as a spatial ‘technique’ of power (Huxley 2007 p.199). As John Burton, director of Westfield Stratford City himself affirmed: ‘Seventy per cent of all visitors to the Games will pass through the shopping centre on their way to the Park’. Under the heading ‘Community’ on Westfield’s UK webpage the company proclaims that ‘Stratford City opens up a whole new vantage point to the public, a new way to see and experience the city’. Indeed, it becomes the only way given the elimination of genuinely ‘communal’ (unbranded, un-channelled) ways in which this space: ‘It removes the choice of experiencing the event and the place without being sold to.’ (Moore 2011)
The lack of civic ownership of space and spatial experience in Stratford City is representative of uneven geographical development informing a largely developer-led process of ‘raising the profile of the East End’; a process that is taking place, oddly, in an area within which ‘regeneration’ is being paid for predominantly using state funds. The additional planned provision of housing and creation of residential communities in the area is even more disconcerting, given that these new neighbourhoods will not be accountable to local government but will be privately governed by separate companies (Minton 2012 p.xxiv).
Carpenters Estate
Lying within a stone’s throw of Westfield and adjacent to the Olympic Park, the Carpenters housing estate and its current relationship with ‘regeneration’ are indicative of the ways in which structures of power impact upon and specify the process of urban renewal. What is at stake in this space in particular is the positionality of a distinct working class heritage, unique to this area and to the identity of East London as a meaningful and valuable place to live in and to come from, despite its deprivation (both real and perceived).
In a paper entitled ‘Common Ground’, Peter Dunn et al. (2011 p.70) observe that the estate’s location adjacent to the Olympic Park and Stratford City has ‘created immense development pressures on a previously neglected piece of East London’. The estate, made up primarily of social housing has been earmarked for demolition by Newham Council, on the grounds that the costs of renovating the deteriorating buildings are prohibitive (Hill 2011). In light of this, the authors of ‘Common Ground’ note that the situation of Carpenters represents a fantastic opportunity to improve the lives of its current and future residents, whilst at the same time preserving a historic East End neighbourhood that is imbued with character and a sense of place. The reality, however, is that the residents of the estate have not been given the (explicit) right to return to their neighbourhood once ‘regeneration’ is over (which would encourage the preservation of the attributes of the current neighbourhood), but have instead been rehoused, with current plans for the future of the site being a new campus for the University College, London (BBC London 2012).
The Carpenters estate dates back to the late nineteenth century, when the Worshipful Company of Carpenters, an ancient London livery company, built rows of Victorian terraces for the workers of the factories that came to be located on this part of their land. The Second World War devastated many of these original structures, but the area maintained the sense of community derived from its initial close proximity to jobs, the relative immobility of residential families, and the efforts of the Carpenters Company to improve the lives of the area’s employees and residents. A process of regeneration occurred in the 1960s as slum conditions on the estate prompted Newham council to build 700 units of council housing in order to provide ‘cheap, decent homes’, and since that time the estate has been able to maintain a community stable enough to encompass the arrival of a sizeable population of immigrants (Dunn et al.2011 p.72) . The estate has remained relatively self-contained, with local amenities, a Tenant Management Organization (TMO), a school – Carpenters Primary, and even its own TV station, ‘home 2 home’.
The Borough of Newham is in desperate need of housing. However, following the decant and proposed demolition of units on the Carpenters estate, it is estimated that fewer than 80 out of 500 units of social housing will remain, while less than 35 per cent of new developments in the area are earmarked as affordable housing (Dunn et al. 2011 p.77, Kortekaas 2012).
Under the governmental discourse of Olympic ‘regeneration’, the definition of successful and ‘sustainable’ residential communities appears to be measured in terms of outputs of numbers and types of housing (Kortekaas 2012), in addition to a set of ‘sustainability’ criteria that is limited in its scope largely to environmental concerns, omitting the inclusion of civil societies in deliberative or participatory forms of decision-making crucial to truly sustainable development (Hayes, Horne 2011 p.750). The focus within new developments almost entirely on provision of private spaces (Dunn et al. 2011 p.80) fosters behaviours oriented towards market individualism as opposed to the social interaction crucial to real neighbourhood development, i.e. the defining characteristic of life on the Carpenters estate.
Carpenters, located in one of the countries’ most deprived boroughs, is perhaps one of the least deprived places in Newham in terms of social capital. The estate exemplifies the complexity of a truly ‘sustainable’, self-sufficient urban community, specific to its locality and the working class heritage of this part of the city; and which should form the basis not merely an afterthought in projects of ‘regeneration’ aimed at value creation in post-industrial, post-Olympic East London.
‘Success’ in capitalist urban development seems to be geared towards ensuring the survival of the city in an international system of competing destinations for capital investment. If this is indeed the de facto ‘purpose’ as Harvey claims within a ‘globalized geography of power’ (Soja 2000 p.204), then Foucault’s insights clarify further the ways in which projects of ‘regeneration’ in East London such as Stratford City and Carpenters estate assume a distinct form (how best to attract the attention of visitors/investors), towards a known end (to compete for the position of ‘capital of global capital’ [Soja 2000 p.206], or, maintain the ‘national interest’), via a set of discursive arrangements that foster behaviours ‘appropriate for the survival of society as a whole’. Subsumed under this are a set of ideas about what comprises ‘the social good’ (Harvey 2001 p.31).
Understanding ‘Legacy’ in London 2012
London’s Olympics bid was based upon a firm commitment to enhancing an existing regeneration agenda (Poynter 2009 p.184), and therefore the promise of legacy has in many ways assumed a position of greater importance than the execution of the Games themselves. Substantial claims in the bid documents promised a legacy of jobs, homes, a new urban park, and community facilities for this part of London (Newman 2007 p.257). As such the discourse of legacy has as its goal the creation of a blueprint for the ideal yet efficient (in relation to existing economic and social climates) post-Olympic city. Indeed, as Poynter (2007 p.14) illustrates, the nineteenth century modernist perspective of the Olympic movement was in the twentieth replaced by more prosaic goals in line with ‘a sense of limits’ that typifies ‘an international society unconfident about its future direction and trapped in a pragmatic post-modern condition’ (Real 1996 quoted in Poynter 2007 p.14).
Hence the concern with ‘legacy’ around the 2012 Games represents the response to a wider process of restructuring that requires a re-establishment of space and spatial behaviours in order that these new places and the individuals and groups that inhabit them are not, in the modernist sense, the epitome of enlightened reason and progress; but are able to obtain and ‘sustain’ wider objectives required for the survival of the nation within a new and uncertain global order. Soja has used the concept of ‘reterritorialization’ to descibe this adaptive process:
Reterritorialization is the critical response to globalization and postfordist restructuring, generating new efforts by individuals and collectivities, cities and regions, business firms and industrial sectors, cultures and nations, to reconstitute their territorial behaviour, their fundamental spatiality and lived spaces, as a means of resisting and/ or adapting to the contemporary condition. (Soja 2000 p.12)
With this in mind, as Macrury and Poynter (2009 p.315) affirm, ‘legacy’ is used to refer to a way of conceiving the Olympics in order to reflect a concern for the physical and social landscape within which they are taking place, in the hope that this will justify the expense and perceived excesses encompassed in the ‘immediate gratification’ of the Games.
The key legacy objectives/ promises on which the 2012 Games were predicated include:
- Increasing opportunities for Londoners to become involved in sport;
- Ensuring Londoners benefit from new jobs, business and volunteering opportunities;
- Transforming the heart of East London;
- Delivering a sustainable Games and developing sustainable communities;
- Showcasing London as a diverse, inclusive, creative and welcoming city.
Exactly what each of these objectives entails as well as who or what qualifies as being a part of them is unclear and contested. Alice Sampson (2011 p.2) notes that mega sporting events are often typified by the use of powerful and persuasive narratives and images in order to portray their legacy. The promise of ‘transforming the heart of East London’ for example can perhaps be read to signify the existing ‘regeneration’ agenda, but the vagueness of a statement of this sort leaves unspecified what exactly constitutes said ‘transformation’. Macrury and Poynter (2009 p.323) in this vein contest that ‘rhetoric does not transform……into fact unless there is sufficient contact with the significant materiality of local life’.
The discourse of ‘legacy’ not unlike that of ‘regeneration’ can be viewed as both a spatial and social strategy of government whereby the rationalisation of the physical space of the city and the mental space of individuals and groups is intended to secure a number of pre-defined cultural, environmental, socio-economic and governance outcomes. The deployment of ‘legacy’ has effects in terms of directing what are deemed to be the long-term benefits of hosting the Games. As we have already noted , the particular notion of sustainability which dominates legacy discourse, emphasises environmental concerns and associated behaviour to the detriment of alternative ideas of sustanaibility focussed on social networks and civic participation in the planning process. In a place like East London, where poverty has been described as ‘perpetuative in nature’ (Fearnley in Butler eds. 1996 p.345) an omission of this alternative definition of the legacy of sustainable development could simply ‘sustain’ existing issues of decline and deprivation, or displace them elsewhere. Similarly, the phrase ‘transforming the heart of East London’ appears to direct legacy and those implicated in it towards the production of a very new East London, without necessarily harnessing feelings of heritage and continuity such as those which have helped to sustain the Carpenters estate – a truly sustainable sensibility which has managed to maintain a really successful neighbourhood.
Uneven Spaces
The effects of uneven geographical development can be attributed in East London to more than a century of relative deprivation. Unfortunately, however, current trends in urban ‘regeneration’ that largely seek to connect these neighbourhoods with ‘growth’ and provide large scale infrastructure investments, in many ways reproduce this unevenness; especially given their adaptation to existing economic pressures which can only led themselves to a top-down model of regeneration. The ‘regeneration’ of Stratford is thus largely predicated on the hope that wealth created by developments such as Westfield Stratford City will trickle down to the surrounding communities. In practice, however, as Pacione (Pacione 1997 p.31) contests, these funds are ‘generally recycled into further development activity. Nowhere has a substantial trickle down effect been demonstrated’.
The hope of ‘trickle down’ has thus come at a social cost in Stratford, in that the resulting development prioritises an efficient economy of measurable outcomes above the complexity and diversity of its East End surroundings. Furthermore, in this order of priorities, the potential for truly sustainably social change tends to be lost. Hence the governmental discourse of ‘regeneration’, enhanced and expanded as a result of the Olympic focus on East London, is impacting negatively upon successful neighbourhoods such as the Carpenters estate, which represent just the sort of cohesive community which is essential for achieving successful social regeneration in an area such as Newham.
Current structures of power governing contemporary ‘regeneration’ rely upon the relentless pursuit of the ‘new’ and the achievement of the aspirations of developers and central government as opposed to those of local communities. This emphasis threatens to devalue collective memories forming the identity of the East End as a unique place to live in and to come from.
Instead, regeneration should begin at the level of communities, building on established networks of trust and social capital which could achieve a more genuine post-Olympic urbanity in the East End. This is the only way for legacy and regeneration to act ‘for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there.’ (London Olympics Bid)
This essay is a condensed version of Jenia Allen’s dissertation which she undertook as part of her degree in BA (Hons) Cultural Studies.
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