{"id":411,"date":"2011-08-11T19:46:45","date_gmt":"2011-08-12T01:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=411"},"modified":"2013-01-04T10:12:15","modified_gmt":"2013-01-04T17:12:15","slug":"why-is-london-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=411","title":{"rendered":"Why is London Burning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Criminologists offer up an array of usual suspects<\/a>, including social exclusion, poverty, racism, and cultures of violence combined with weak policing. \u00a0In an inspired move,\u00a0The Architects Journal<\/em> asked a group of architectural thinkers and urbanists<\/a> whether architecture could have anything to do with it.\u00a0 This produced an interesting variety of responses.\u00a0\u00a0 Some see the rioting as purely sociological in origin, linked to volatile divisions of power and class that, inevitably, have spatial consequences. \u00a0Others see a more direct causal role for architecture by appealing to historical precedent: the many examples from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in which dystopian \u201ctowers in the park\u201d housing\u2014like Broadwater Farm<\/a>, located in the same area of Tottenham<\/a> where the current unrest was ignited\u2014certainly had something to do with inhabitants rebelling against the alienating conditions in which they were forced to live.\u00a0 Today\u00a0many\u00a0urban regeneration schemes in London and elsewhere privilege commercial\u00a0development and conspicuous investment in iconic buildings<\/a> in ways that displace the poor, herd others into \u201chigh rise reservoirs of social aggression\u201d, and impoverish public space generally.<\/p>\n

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Broadwater Farm Riot Wreckage, Tottenham, 1985<\/p><\/div>\n

But even those who appreciate architecture\u2019s capacity to influence human behavior (e.g., here<\/a>) are willing to take Winston Churchill\u2019s observation that \u201cwe shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us<\/a>\u201d only so far. \u00a0This week’s riots also touched more inclusively regenerated areas. Indeed, they cross-cut a vast range of urban conditions (inner city, suburbs, rich areas, poor areas) and a broad demographic of age, race, and class. Those in the especially hard hit borough of Hackney<\/a>\u00a0drew uninvited rioters from all around London as well as some locals who were, according to a story<\/a> in The New York Times<\/em>, particularly well-heeled. \u00a0As Sam Jacob<\/a> wrote for the website Domus the London riots have an “incredible spatiality”, suggesting a very different kind of riot from those that cities have known in the past.<\/p>\n

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Hackney Riot Wreckage, 2011 (Luke MacGregor\/Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

The accounts of rioting coming out of Hackney (see also here<\/a>)\u00a0got my attention because when I taught a study abroad term in London<\/a> in fall 2008 one of my students\u00a0conducted independent, self-directed fieldwork in the borough to\u00a0fulfill a major\u00a0class assignment. The assignment was to write an “urban\u00a0biography” of a London neighborhood with special attention to the built environment, along the lines of the little vignettes that fill Peter Ackroyd\u2019s wonderful London: The Biography<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Kiley Dowling<\/a>, my only African-American student, chose Hackney because of its diverse ethnic\u00a0makeup and because it \"\"<\/a>was undergoing major changes in advance of the 2012 Olympiad, which would hold some events in the borough. Her study detailed many of the tensions associated with urban regeneration that result from officials and citizens holding different viewpoints about what makes a good city. \u00a0 For example, Kiley described the new council housing managed by Hackney Homes as \u201cdull\u201d and \u201credundant\u201d, and suggested that the buildings seemed more intended to create an image of civic order than provide housing that would nurture the human soul.\u00a0 Her person-in-the-street interviews and analysis of citizen reactions to official presentations of regeneration plans disclosed\u2014as one would expect in a neighborhood of great ethnic diversity\u2014a populace either taken with, ambivalent about, or horrified by the proposed changes.\u00a0 \u00a0With many others in Dalston<\/a> (a Hackney district) she lamented the \u201cmunicipal vandalism\u201d that erased the built legacy of 30+ years of Black art, music, and culture in favor of unaffordable private flats<\/a>. In short, she described a context that made me wonder if the urban improvements promised by London’s \u201cRegeneration Games\u201d would be doomed to ephemerality or destined to turn Hackney into a poor man\u2019s version of The City<\/a>.\u00a0 While Kiley Dowling didn\u2019t exactly predict riots in Hackney (as Mike Davis famously did for Los Angeles<\/a> in City Of Quartz<\/a><\/em>), she did establish that the area was a bit of a tinderbox.<\/p>\n

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Hackney Housing Group Banner, July 2010<\/p><\/div>\n

The takeaway lesson here is that testimony from professional experts and inquisitive undergraduates alike persuade me that it would be a mistake to abandon the working assumption that the built environment can be a significant influence in shaping human behavior. \u00a0How much of a role architecture plays (or can play) is an open question given that the experts themselves are deeply divided on what makes for good urbanism<\/a>. \u00a0Still, thinking about the “post-riot city” in Britain has already begun. The most compelling argument<\/a>\u00a0for an alternative British urbanism identifies a critical need for what Ash Amin<\/a> has called “urban plenitude”: a collective domain of public spaces, local facilities, well-functioning infrastructures, and shared experiences. This will take some time to develop, but meanwhile noble first steps toward community recovery are being made by architects involved in efforts such as Riot Rebuild<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s also disturbing to me at the moment–aside from rioting in a city that I’ve walked from top to bottom and that I truly love–is that I’ll likely have to track London\u2019s progress toward a state of urban plenitude in an academic context that doesn’t involve working, on the ground, with exceptional students like Kiley Dowling.\u00a0 In a recent decision of questionable wisdom my university unceremoniously eliminated extended-stay, faculty-led study abroad programs as a way to cut costs within our expensive but still expanding international education enterprise<\/a>.\u00a0 This will deny students a particular kind of academically-robust and civically-engaged fieldwork experience that was the centerpiece of the London course, and deny faculty a unique opportunity to enrich their own professional development as scholar-teachers. I\u2019m sure there will be other opportunities in the months ahead to say more about how faculty-led study abroad can nicely serve the project of a comparative, intercultural urbanism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Criminologists offer up an array of usual suspects, including social exclusion, poverty, racism, and cultures of violence combined with weak policing. \u00a0In an inspired move,\u00a0The Architects Journal asked a group of architectural thinkers and urbanists whether architecture could have anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,19,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-london","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-6D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2392,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/2392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}