Contesting Public Spaces

Social Lives of Urban Redevelopment in London

Ed Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000596359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured.

The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities.

This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

1 SOCIAL AND SPATIAL RELATIONS

DOI: 10.4324/9781003248187-2

Over the last thirty years London has undergone an era of pronounced redevelopment where commercial speculation and public interests competed and where small-scale concerns have been overlooked. Approaches to transforming public spaces that were tested in North American and European cities in the 1980s have been adopted in varying ways in London—masterplanning processes that brought together government agendas with international investment. In this chapter I explore such reconfigurations of urban space within national and global contexts, processes that inform both practices of public space and notions of the public sphere. I highlight the intersection of spatial and visual approaches with social conceptions of how London’s public spaces are made and remade. I discuss research and practice that inform the architectural configuration of public spaces (from urban policy to architectural theory) with discourses around their everyday remaking (from social sciences). I afford particular focus to conflicting ways that public spaces are made, highlighting unequal relations between global agendas and smaller-scale routines (Gospodini 2002; Low and Smith 2006; Mitchell 2003; Shane 1995, 2005; Sorkin 1992; Zukin 1995). By examining architecture, landscape architecture and urban design research alongside texts by sociologists, geographers and anthropologists, I explore relations between government policies, developer ambitions, spatial forms and daily activities.

In this chapter, I discuss definitions of public space found in the public spaces of Elephant and Castle Market, Paddington Basin and Trafalgar Square, extending from spatial forms (see Carr et al. 1992) to more social relations (see Massey 2005). I focus on the timeframes of development of the three cases of master-planning (between 1998–2018); this is a period in London when renewed policy directions and highly charged economic agendas facilitated large-scale redevelopments. Exploring broader geographical contexts, I examine models of private development and management that have transformed North American public spaces and that reflect both practices of regeneration and economic conditions for development found in London (Sorkin 1992; Mitchell 2003; Low and Smith 2006). I also explore research that describes state-led approaches to designing public spaces across Europe, strategic interventions that enhance the ability of European cities to compete for large-scale private investment (Degan 2008; Fainstein 2010; Gospodini 2002).

The chapter is structured in four sections and reflects, as Neil Smith and Setha Low describe in The Politics of Public Space (2006), ‘[how] the scale of public space and the public sphere is socially produced’ (2006:7). I describe scales of producing public spaces that are identified in the three cases, highlighting relations of power from national policy and international corporations to community initiatives and individual actions. The first section intersects global agendas, national policies and metropolitan strategies for public space. In the second section, I analyse processes of masterplanned redevelopment, demonstrating how spatial forms are defined by urban designers for developers and local authorities and how their neighbourhood scales correspond to public realm management mechanisms. In the third section I focus on the architectural dimension of individual public space projects that are designed as scenic settings, constructed as spatial products and used as social spaces. In the fourth section I discuss scales of face-to-face interactions where people gather in, repurpose and regulate public spaces and how these actions can be understood in terms of both spatialised public spheres and constantly reproduced public spaces.

Policies and strategies for public space

The beginning of the masterplanning processes of Elephant and Castle Regeneration (1999 and 2004), Paddington Waterside (1998) and the World Squares for All (1996) are marked by significant changes in planning and development policy in the UK. At the end of the twentieth century, the recently elected New Labour government (1997) published Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999), a document authored by a newly formed Urban Task Force that set out conditions for the regeneration of British cities. Towards an Urban Renaissance was commissioned by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and was led by the architect Richard Rogers. The report emphasises the need for design-led regeneration of cities across the UK. It features a foreword by Pasqual Maragall, the former Mayor of Barcelona who had presided over his city’s winning and hosting of the Olympic Games in 1992. The authors present international case studies of what they consider successful public spaces. They emphasise the importance of achieving a ‘high-quality urban product by creating compact urban developments’ (1999:11). The report proposes that developments include networks of public spaces composed of streets, squares and parks, forming a public realm managed by the public sector.

Towards an Urban Renaissance reflects many policy and design issues that Rogers had identified, with the politician Mark Fisher, in A New London (1992). Rogers and Fisher anticipate the establishment of the Greater London Authority (GLA) by calling for a ‘strategic planning body’ that could ‘experiment with land taxes, road pricing, tourism taxes and business rates’ (1992:xxxii). Following the publication of Towards an Urban Renaissance, the Urban Task Force and the government’s Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) authored further reports encouraging the regeneration of UK cities. Publications such as The Manifesto for Better Public Spaces (CABE 2004) and Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance (2005) greatly influenced a climate of design-led masterplanning and government- facilitated urban redevelopment for over a decade. The foundation of these organisations and their publications, Ben Campkin explains in Remaking London, ‘marked a feverish new appetite for the regeneration of cities, and one continued by successive governments and local authorities ever since’ (2013:2).

This focus on urban redevelopment emerged from national contexts of previous Thatcher-led Conservative government policies and the influence of international strategies for the development of new public spaces. In the 1980s Thatcher’s government abolished the Greater London Council (GLC), London’s metropolitan government led by Ken Livingstone, and began to facilitate specific commercial developments, such as London’s Docklands. Rob Imrie and Mike Raco explain in Urban Renaissance? (2003:3):

Regeneration, Thatcher-style, was characterised by the use of public subsidies, tax breaks, and the reduction in planning and other regulatory controls as a mechanism to create a context to encourage corporate capital to invest in cities.

Imrie and Raco highlight a government policy that claimed that a ‘trickle-down’ of wealth from capital investments would reach local communities (2003:11). They explain that significant criticism of the government’s approach pointed to widening inequalities and increased poverty in cities. The resultant fragmentation of districts created enclaves of intense development juxtaposed with areas of neglect (see Shane 1995). This reliance on free-market approaches to development in the 1980s and early 1990s also led to new forms of tightly managed, commercially focused public spaces. Developments such as Canary Wharf and Broadgate established a highly securitised public realm around their estates of commercial buildings. In response to such developments, Rogers and Fisher claim that the public realm of London was being privatised. Emphasising the need for local authority control of public spaces, and criticising the increased presence of private interests, they state: ‘there is no revival of public spaces until these issues are tackled’ (1992:111).

During the 1980s two contrasting public space strategies were employed in several cities in North America and across Europe. On the one hand, the involvement of private interests and commercially led development of public spaces was embraced in cities such as New York. In contrast, some European cities, most notably Barcelona, embarked on significant government-led investments into waterfronts, plazas and neighbourhood parks. These two approaches to planning were later combined in varying ways in London’s Urban Renaissance under the New Labour government. In North America, as metropolitan governments witnessed periods of deindustrialisation after the 1950s, decline in urban populations and limited financial means, they attempted to identify alternative development and management mechanisms for their public and private realms. From the 1960s, and intensifying in the 1980s, varying forms of involvement by private interests in the design, construction and management of urban areas were accepted by local governments, including: Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), park conservancies, privately owned public spaces, bonus plazas, suburban shopping malls, festival districts and gated campuses. Architect and writer Michael Sorkin brought together critics of these private strategies (including Crawford, Smith, Davis and Boyer) in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and The End of Public Space (1992). Further critiques of how cities were being redeveloped ranged from the deindustrialisation and the re-colonisation of abandoned cities (Zukin 1991) to their gentrification (Smith 1992, 1996), ‘Disneyfication’ (Zukin 1991; Sorkin 1992) and militarisation (Davis 1990; Mitchell 2003).

In contrast to strategies that had been conceived, tested and employed widely in North American cities, state-led investment into the public realm was prioritised in Barcelona in the 1980s. Emerging from an era of isolation and under-investment during the Franco era, and witnessing decline in its traditional industries, the metropolitan government of Barcelona commissioned new public spaces and infrastructure as catalysts for economic development and as a focus for attracting inward investment (see Poynter 2009; Degan 2008). In Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester (2008), Monica Degan writes:

Creating more public spaces for collective use in areas such as El Raval [an historic neighbourhood in Barcelona] has to be understood as coming from the strong civic ideals that informed the first years of democratic planning.

(2008:96)

This approach to regeneration, which prioritised state-initiated design and realisation of new public spaces, was closely observed and followed by other countries and cities who sent delegations to Barcelona to understand their success. Rogers writes in the introduction to Towards an Urban Renaissance:

What we learnt from these visits is that regeneration has to be design-led. But to be sustainable, regeneration also has to be placed within its economic and social context.

(1999:7)

However, without its own metropolitan government from 1986 to 2000, London was unable to coordinate redevelopment as New York or Barcelona had achieved. Although London underwent its own deindustrialisation and the abandonment of its waterfronts due to transformations in global competition, it was less well equipped to respond with coordinated urban strategies for its boroughs, neighbourhoods and public spaces.

But, by the end of the twentieth century London had engineered its own renaissance through bringing together Barcelona’s model of state-initiated public spaceled regeneration with commercially focused funding mechanisms that had been pioneered in North America. In The Just City, Susan Fainstein states: ‘Within the history of redevelopment policy London represents an intermediate case between the New York model and that of the continental European cities’ (2010:113). She explains that while London has had an ‘activist and redistributional public sector’ it also uses ‘privatization, public subsidies, and deregulation to promote property speculation and entrepreneurship’ (2010:113). The establishment of a new metropolitan government (GLA) and an elected Mayor for London facilitated high-profile initiatives, such as the 100 Public Spaces Programme, the World Squares for All masterplan, of which Trafalgar Square was a part, and support for London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Although the GLA ‘drew on lessons learnt from the free-market disregard for social policy and social issues in the regeneration of the London Dockland’s’ during the 1980s as well as the ‘weak trickle-down effects of the Docklands’ regeneration to the adjacent parts of the East End’ (Imrie et al. 2009:14), the GLA still needed to engage with private interests to fund many of their initiatives.

The New Labour government did not reject the previous market-led approaches to development—instead they encouraged a closer association between private capital, commercial interests and the public sector. The Urban Task Force set out that the ‘public sector must act as the custodian of the public realm’ while simultaneously advocating the adoption of new financial instruments and incentives to encourage private investment in public space (1999:56). CABE’s Manifesto for Better Public Spaces reflects the Urban Task Force by emphasising the need for ‘coordinated funding’ for public spaces ‘from both the public and private sectors’ (2004:9). However, as there were limited funds to provide state-led public spaces as achieved at Trafalgar Square, and to fulfil the ambitions of Mayor Livingstone’s 100 Public Spaces Programme, local authorities relied on developer contributions to provide design, construction and ongoing maintenance for new public spaces (see Elephant and Castle Regeneration and Paddington Waterside). The situation in London reflected that of other cities that over the previous decade had become dependent on private investments to facilitate regeneration. Writing in City Builders (1994) before the election of New Labour and the subsequent implementation of new development policies, Fainstein describes:

The quandary for local political officials is that they must depend on the private sector to finance most economic expansion, and they have only very limited tools for attracting expansion to their jurisdictions.

(1994:2)

With the election of the Conservative party and David Cameron as Prime Minister (2010–2016), funding for organisations like CABE and the Design Council (2011) were severely cut and agencies such as British Waterways (that later became the Canal and River Trust) were privatised to become independent trusts (2012). Similarly, public space investment was curtailed as Boris Johnson became Mayor (2008–2016), resulting in the later phases of the World Squares for All masterplan remaining incomplete. In contrast, masterplans that involved commercial developers continued to be facilitated, such as Elephant and Castle Regeneration and Paddington Waterside, which were prioritised as Opportunity Areas (www.london.gov.uk 2016). Despite contrasting policies under successive governments, these approaches to development are all ‘part of a broader socio-political process in London which places urban regeneration at the fulcrum of the capital’s economic competitiveness’ (Imrie et al. 2009:5). Imrie, Lees and Raco argue that:

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)

These policies ‘conceive of regeneration as closely entwined with globalisation’ (2009:6) with new and refashioned public spaces being key to inserting and maintaining London in these global city relations. In European Cities in Competition and the New ‘Uses’ of Urban Design, Aspa Gospodini describes the way that the global system is ‘increasing competition among cities to upgrade their status’ (2002:60). She writes that the ‘development prospects’ for European cities are considered partly due to the ‘high quality of urban environment’ (2002:60). Political ambitions were heightened in 1990s London as architects and politicians witnessed Barcelona prioritising the creation of hundreds of new public spaces, hosting the 1992 Olympics and raising its international status (Urban Task Force 1999). From the late 1990s these ambitions began to be expressed in the remaking of public spaces in London.

The refashioning of urban space in London through the lens of global competition has been employed to spur economic regeneration: the redesign of Trafalgar Square can be seen to empower London’s global standing through its imagery and events, while the regeneration of Elephant and Castle and Paddington Basin drive inward investment through residential sales and commercial lettings. However, these selectively redeveloped areas are claimed to also increase fragmentation across London. In Urban Design Since 1945, David Grahame Shane contends that ‘London emerged as the exemplary fragmented metropolis in the 1980s’ (2011:27). Building on earlier writing describing London’s ‘enclaves of hyper-development’ and contrasting ‘enclaves of disinvestment’ (1995:65) Shane suggests that increasingly market-led approaches, as pioneered in London in the Docklands, led to ‘local areas of architectural and urban design control in urban villages’ (2011:25). Selectively chosen Opportunity Areas have further contributed to this fragmentation, facilitating the economic development of strategic areas that contrast distinctly from locations left lacking investment. Despite the Urban Task Force recognising problems of fragmentation in UK cities (1999:50) the GLA has continued to ‘provide[s] encouragement, support and leadership’ for Opportunity Areas to address concerns that ‘London has limited opportunities for accommodating large scale development’ (www.london.gov.uk 2016).

Masterplanning districts with public space

Masterplans are the mechanisms through which government policies and many commercial objectives for development are focused and the way that Elephant and Castle Regeneration, Paddington Waterside and World Squares for All are architecturally directed. These top-down approaches to planning, commissioned by commercial developers or state agencies, and undertaken by urban designers, give direction and guidance for long-term, large-scale development. The main goals of these masterplans have been to organise and, if necessary, gain planning approval for spatial development. Broader urban design ambitions are to make visible urban change to compete with other developments, districts and cities to attract investment. Gospodini describes how this approach contrasts with historic urban development:

While for centuries the quality of the urban environment has been an outcome of economic growth of cities, nowadays the quality of urban space has become a prerequisite for the economic development of cities; and urban design has undertaken an enhanced new role as a means of economic development.

(2002:60)

Imrie et al. (2009), Shane (2011) and Gospodini (2002) claim that this form of competitive masterplanning in London began with the Docklands. While sub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Contesting public spaces
• 1. Social and spatial relations
• 2. Making and taking
• 3. Place as property
• 4. Ornaments and images
• 5. Approaches to public spaces
• Conclusions
• Epilogue: Three propositions
• Bibliography
• Appendix A
• Index