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Our most recent event, in conjunction with Games Monitor was based around the London Olympic redevelopment plans, aiming to work with affected local residents and campaigners.
The event took place on the evening of Thursday the 10th of April and continued through the day on the Friday.
Below is a report on the event from Libby, you can read a piece she later wrote in Scottish Planner here, and you can read our keynote speaker Iain Sinclair's take on the Olympics in the London Review of Books here. Anyone who was there and wants to add their views, or any further information to this can let us know through the mailing list or by mailing Andy.
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PNUK and Games Monitor
Life Outside the Blue Fence
10 and 11 April 2008
Reflections on the event by Libby Porter
In the late afternoon on 10 April 2008, a group of about 40 interested local people, gathered at the grungy but character-filled Limehouse Town Hall to talk about the impact the Olympics is having on life in the East End of London.
We began by hearing Iain Sinclair give a wonderful off-the-cuff perspective on life in the East End, its history and future, and how communities in the East End ‘woke up to the blue fence’ one day, their lives forever changed. Iain has lived in and written about Hackney and East London since 1969, including both fiction and non-fiction works. He has also written films and co-directed four documentaries for Channel 4, one of which ‘Asylum’ won the short film prize at the Montreal festival. His most recent book is ‘London, City of Disappearances’. Iain’s vocal ramble took the audience from the Limehouse library with its symbolically demolished statue of Clement Attlee along to the churchyard of St Anne’s, to Chobham Farm, and onto the Millennium Dome. Iain’s reflections served as a reminder of the importance of memory and place. Regeneration, and the Olympics as a “smokescreen” for regeneration as Iain put it, is resulting in the loss of memory, the boarding up of places once meaningful and alive. Places that live and breathe because people invest in them and draw meaning from them, are being wiped clean by the imposition of computer-generated visions of a new world. This ‘virtual reality’ has become a dominant form of development in London, and mendacity has become an instrument of government. He wondered aloud if it would be better that the traces of life could be recorded in a landscape before new stuff gets built – a kind of ‘reverse archaeology’, and suggested that planners should always go and walk their places, regularly, before making decisions: they need to walk there, see it, taste it. Iain spoke of the importance of local knowledge, of knowing a landscape, feeling it as a book. The change occurring in London, and particularly the East End is so rapid and so based on ‘virtual reality’ it’s effects are devastating because there is no time to absorb the new. A generation of human memory is required to make meaning and give places life, and so the losses of rapid development are incalculable in this context. The Olympics in this context has become a “prime strategic objective”, it will happen no matter what. And its effects are in no way bounded by the blue fence, but spill out way beyond it, encouraging huge 30 storey buildings, the scrapping of height regulations and building setback regulations to support ‘development in the name of the Olympics’. This prime strategic objective also affects other aspects of civic life – funding for small organisations is scrapped to get sucked into the grand Olympic project. The city is increasingly ‘tidied’ in preparation. Whole neighbourhoods of people are displaced against their will, to make way for people to be placed there who don’t want to be there at all. The security operation that underpins the Olympics is the biggest Europe has ever seen. Iain spoke of the case of one man who had dedicated his life to keeping a photographic record of the Lower Lea Valley – he was arrested doing his work around the blue fence. Much opposition has been mounted to all of this, yet it has been small in its effects and too easy to get drawn into tiny ripostes. The work of ‘discovering where we are’ and finding more imagination must continue.
After some discussion and questions, the audience also heard from Bill Parry-Davies, a solicitor who has lived and worked in Dalston since 1984 and founded OPEN, operating in Dalston and also Shoreditch and Aldgate. Bill is particularly concerned about the scale and type of development occurring in Dalston and other parts of the East End, and also reminded the audience of the importance of walking neighbourhoods to get a feel for them, their life and vitality, and for the importance of local knowledge. Bill’s talk exposed a series of practices in local government and particularly within planning processes that have underpinned the progress of large-scale, unwanted and unsustainable redevelopment of local neighbourhoods. For example, he set out how one local council owned many historic Georgian terraces and faced with a £70million budget deficit decided to sell these. Instead of offering them to the market one at a time so that individual householders had the chance to buy them, they were offered in bulk, 20 at a time, such that overseas investors bought up big at very cheap prices, beginning the process of gentrification. Many historic buildings and places of cultural importance such as the legendary black music club the “4 Aces” have been lost or under threat due to development pressures and poor planning. Cases of poor planning have included masterplans for new development failing to show the presence of historic buildings on a site despite council claiming no decision had been made on the demolition or otherwise of those buildings. Historic buildings that could have been preserved and refurbished have simply been demolished against local wishes. Decisions are taken before consultation. Currently a plan exists to develop a fringe of towers on land currently owned by Hackney Borough Council, the proceeds of the sale for this development are already allocated in the Council budget and developers are currently working on a masterplan for this fringe of towers which will put the surrounding neighbourhoods into permanent shade once built. Bill called for some help to develop community-based visions for development in Dalston and Shoreditch – get in touch by email at: info@openshoreditch.net
Following Bill’s talk, a screening of the film The Five Ring Circus was made, a documentary about the displacement and environmental destruction being brought about in and around Vancouver by development for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The following morning, on 11 April, a smaller group of about 20 gathered at St Marks Community Hall in Dalston to discuss these themes and others further, and to figure out some ways by which alternatives to the current forms of development in the East End of London can be generated. The meeting opened with some reflections from Julian Cheyne, a former resident at the Clays Lane estate who was evicted to make way for the Olympics site. Julian and others at the meeting form the Games Monitor group and have been keeping a series of Olympics-related issues in the public eye through their website (www.gamesmonitor.org.uk). But the campaign has been patchy as time and resources are limited. Julian spoke about his own experience of making objections to planning applications and the compulsory purchase order which removed him and others from their homes in Clays Lane. This has been a difficult and largely unrewarding process due to the obstacles placed in the way of local people from participating fully and properly even in the most basic of ways. For example, residents at Clays Lane were delivered a box of documents of evidence from the LDA on the CPO process, amounting to 10,000 pages – they had 4 weeks to respond. Julian and Charlie Charman (from the Manor Gardens allotments) spoke about how difficult it was to access and view planning documents eg websites that took hours to refresh on old computers, huge pdf documents that were impossible to download and so on. He reflected that local people always feel ‘on the back foot’ and that if groups miss something in a new plan, or a revised version, or in the myriad of plans and strategies that get published, much can result that is unwanted but past the point of no return. It requires so much energy, time, expertise and history to be able to respond even in the most basic way, to planning applications and processes. Most importantly, he expressed frustration at how difficult it is to find alternative models to suggest. The change of structure from the Council-based planning process to the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) has made it much harder to comment on applications. The ODA has divided itself in half with one arm making the planning applications (involving the LDA also) and the other half ‘receiving’ those applications and making development decisions. All are of course a fait accompli, as the Olympics must go ahead! Julian also noted how difficult it has been to get media coverage about perspectives that are critical of the Olympics and their impacts, especially on housing and eviction issues.
Steve Dowding then took the group on a ‘virtual tour’ of life as it used to be inside and around the blue fence using arrays of digital photographic displays across three screens. Despite a few technical hitches, Steve was able to give the group a sense of the place we were talking in and about, its life and activity.
Much of the day was about discussion and people were encouraged to think of themselves not as an ‘audience’ but as participants together working on the same problems. A lot of discussion centred around not only the Olympics (though this served as an extreme example of a wider trend) but a sense of what has become a dominant way of thinking about regeneration in London and the processes which give rise to redevelopment. Regeneration was described by one participant as ‘creative destruction’ and there was a feeling that regeneration and regeneration-Olympics style in particular bring few if any benefits to local people and is instead designed for others. Another important aspect of the discussions centred on actively struggling against this dominant form of redevelopment and urban policy. Some considered that the strengths of local initiatives lies in them being locally rooted, and others pointed out that sometimes networks of movements can help give a broader base of support and resources. One participant brought news that there is a new initiative being considered along the lines of OPEN for the whole of London, to link up community actions against unconsulted and unwanted ‘regeneration. For some this was welcome, for others it was doubtful because it lacked the vital ingredient of being locally grounded. Other movements to share information and knowledge such as ‘open data’ and ‘open knowledge’ in the digital world were also mentioned as possible sources.
At the close of the meeting, participants were asked to each give some ideas that they thought might be helpful in terms of action in the future – this could be for Games Monitor and related groups specifically, or more generally. The following list records what was suggested, in no particular order:
- Experience is gained through battles – develop a way to share experience of battles and use this to help others engaged in similar battles
- Stakeholder voices are stronger when you collaborate, so stay together and form a stronger voice
- Get students participating in activist events
- Local councils as an important actor and network with ODA – can be used more imaginatively?
- Produce a map and use this to propose alternatives to development plans. Post it around to businesses and households in local areas
- Read Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- PNUK – remind planners that they’re citizens too. Get planners walking in the neighbourhoods they plan for.
- Meetings are useful to come together to talk, generate ideas and motivation – so keep meeting, find a way to keep in contact with each other. Help simplify complicated information
- Articulate an alternative Olympics Legacy plan
- Structural constraints of how Council’s work eg short-term planners and execs needs to be considered and counteracted
- Community plan – develop one and make it known locally
- Focus globally – China and Tibet for example as an anti-Olympics movement. Disrupt ODA and expose lies
- Read Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’
- PNUK – can we do something with maps/graphics to show what is coming for the East End if all development plans for towers go ahead, eg show (graphically) the 2012 skyline with its fringe of towers? See skyscrapercity.com
- Journalism – write to attack projects
- Don’t attack the symptoms (ie the product of the built environment), need to attack the cause (neoliberalism?)
- PNUK – make available how to go about fighting against bad development plans, ways to object and have a say, language to use within the ‘industry’ of development planning. Also, keep a website (?) up to date on the changing planning system, new threats and opportunities and information that would help local groups
- Revive the Southern Lee Valley Federation to fight a range of local problems
- Run a series of seminars on how to fight against bad development, activist-led seminars on how to get through the planning process – hold them on different sites, estates etc to inform people. PNUK could assist here.
- Talk to neighbours, communicate better with each other
- Go and inspire 10 other people to feel passionate about this
- Make links with environmental justice movements (local-global)
- What are the things that can impact on a situation but aren’t directly related? Find them and act there.
- PNUK– we need to more clearly articulate what we are trying to do. PNUK to create a research project and develop an alternative for planning. Provide analysis that can give weight to local groups who are trying to develop alternatives for development.
- Contribute to the Games Monitor website – link material together.
- Email to the forum for Games Monitor to discuss issues and share information
- Communicate to the public how important their own living space is and to help them balance the ‘hip pocket’ response. Use the media better.
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