Through our discussions I am reminded of this documentary called “Let’s Make Money” and particularly the part below that explores the real estate boom on the Costa del Sol – we see examples of exclusivity and enclosures, deserted resorts and unfinished plans. Also interesting to grasp the global and local impact of these projects, and how different levels of interest and agency intertwine and produce these ‘places’ …
Sorry the English sub-titled version is no longer available on YouTube
The Heygate Estate is located in the South London borough of Southwark. It stretches from Walworth Road to New Kent Road and at one time was home to 1,200 families, having been completed in 1974 as part a major regeneration project that was started in the 1960s.
In the 1930s, the site was occupied by suburban streets lined with Victorian tenement houses, but after substantial damaged sustained as a result of German bombing during the Second World War, the area was littered with bombsites and many of the families who had been living there found themselves without suitable housing. Some years later, the council commissioned a review of residences on the site and came to the conclusion that rather than attempt housing-repairs, the best solution would be to demolish and rebuild.
The report into housing conditions recommended that the demolition take place with the following remark:
“demolish these antiquated tenements, and put in their place homes where the people of Southwark can be both healthy and happy”
Many of the residents contested the compulsory purchase of their homes, despite what had been identified in the report as ‘ever-worsening conditions’. Many of the residents of the streets earmarked for demolition saw their homes a large capital investment and were therefore reluctant to accept the offer that had been made by the council. Despite reservations by many local people, and huge cost to the council, the planned build of the Heygate estate went ahead.
Upon completion in 1974, the Heygate, along with neighbouring estates such as the Aylesbury, was seen to represent a new era, a hope for the future. It aimed to provide clean and safe housing and the chance to rebuild a sense of community between the residents. For many, it was the first time they had had access to indoor washing facilities as well as mod cons such as central heating.
The Heygate did not just make promises of in terms of physical living conditions, the aim was to provide for all areas of the new residents lives. The estate laid claim to play areas for children as well as outdoor garden space and an NHS doctor had a surgery on site. It was this holistic vision for the lives of those living on the Heygate that seemed to indicate its inclusive, utopian aspirations.
Come the 1990s, the estate had begun to run into problems. High levels of crime and anti-social activity were being reported, with the press labeling the nearby Aylesbury as a ‘Mugger’s paradise’. It has been cynically suggested that the label of problem estate only came about after the site had been identified as a lucrative site for redevelopment and that through the council allowing crime dramas and films about youth culture and violence to use it as a filming location, it gained an unfair reputation as a hot spot of illegal activity.
In 1998, the council employed a consultancy firm to carry out a survey of the estate and explore different options for refurbishment and regeneration. The report confirmed that the buildings were structurally sound, and provided estimated costs for several different levels of repair/refurbishment Among these options were ‘Maintenance & Repair’ at an estimated cost of £7.2m and ‘Complete demolition’ at £8.5m.
What the report failed to mention and account for was that the cost of the decanting the estate prior to its demolition. Estimates have put this so far at over £35m. It has cost over £25m alone to buy out the existing leaseholders, despite them being forced to accept what many see as outrageously low valuations for their homes (as low as £32,000 for a 1 Bedroom flat.)
In March 2002 regeneration plans collapse after the council failed to come to an agreement with their ‘preferred development partner’ Southwark Land Regeneration. Since 2007 the council has been in discussion with Lend Lease and a Regeneration agreement was signed off in 2010. There has been discussion with the residents, but many feel that their opinion has not been listened to and any consultations have been a formality. If we look at the disputes currently taking place between Southwark Council and the last remaining residents of the Heygate estate, and those that went on when the site was cleared to make way for the Heygate, there is an unnerving sense of déjà vu.
It is this pattern, the identification of problems within the space and the attempts to solve them, not by any investment in the social relations that already exist within the space but by trying to artificially install an identity on the area by means of architectural intervention that makes this site of particular interest to us and indicates why it formed the geographical and theoretical starting point of the NEOgate project.
Demolition of estate began earlier this year and is earmaked for completion in 2015.
Utopianism is not about being “no-where” it is about desiring to be “elsewhere”. This fact means that utopian desire has both hopeful and pessimistic sides; it yearns for happiness but only because it is so unhappy in the existing world…Utopian desire is the desire to desire differently, which includes the desire to abandon such desire…
Tobin Siebers – ‘What does postmodernism want? Utopia’
Utopia as a concept has had a number of incarnations, but its beginnings as a project are attributed to Thomas More and his book Utopia written in 1516. The title he chose for his imaginary society played on two Greek words: u-topia meaning “no-place” and eu-topia meaning “good-place”. An expression of what humanity might be, it was a place where human reason and rationality produced dignity, democracy, uniformity and equality for all. More’s project however was only ever philosophical, it was a way for him and his followers to critique the real world they lived in, but not to necessarily change it.
Arriving in the twentieth century the project of utopia becomes modernist and concrete and a central vein of ideology in the aftermath of WWII. Utopianism promised hope for a better future, it was feverishly optimistic in which equality and opportunity for all were central values. However these values were unsustainable in the increasingly competitive market driven economy, and the fear of totalitarianism and a realisation that one size does not fit all contributed to its demise.
Lambeth Towers
It is commonly articulated that the post-war socialist utopian project failed and that it was dangerous and degenerating. Clearly the fantasy of utopia must hang on a double edge between optimism and ruin. Like in so many utopian novels, instability is always omnipresent. What is sacrificed or hidden? What is excluded from the plans?
I wonder if utopia as ‘a place’ conceived and represented can ever really exist? For does it not then risk becoming a heterotopia (a different place) or an isotopia (the same place)? – just another council estate inscribed with all the failing of the others? – a homogenous place, or an enclosure that is reserved for particular practices? Can, then, utopia really exist in the present?
In chapter two of The Urban Revolution Henri Lefebvre briefly turns his attention to the matter and presents utopia within a dialectical framework. (see pages 37-40)
Now, there is also an elsewhere, the non-place that has no place and seeks a place of its own. Vertically, a height erected anywhere on the horizontal plane, can become the dimension of elsewhereness, a place characterized by the presence-absence: of the divine, of power, of the half-functional, half-real, of sublime thought… Obviously the u-topic in this sense has nothing in common with an abstract imaginary. It is real. It is at the very heart of the real, the urban reality that can’t exist without this ferment. Within urban space, elsewhere is everywhere and nowhere.
For Lefebvre utopia is found in the dialectical urban form, in the possibility of contradiction and its own negation (possible-impossible and presence-absence). Above and below, near and far, there are spaces in the urban form that are unattainable yet ever present, that attract our attention and desires, they symbolise power structures but escape our full comprehension. He goes on to say,
The urban is defined as a place where people walk around, find themselves standing before and inside piles of objects, experience the intertwining of the threads of their activities until they become unrecognizable, entangle situations in such a way that they engender unexpected situations. The definition of this space contains a null vector (virtually); the cancellation of distance haunts the occupants of urban space. It is their dream, their symbolized imaginary, represented in a multiplicity of ways – on maps, in the frenzy of encounters and meetings, in the enjoyment of speed “even in the city”. This is utopia (real, concrete). The result is the transcendence of the closed and the open, the immediate and the mediate, near and far orders, within a differential reality in which these terms are no longer separated but become imminent differences.
Within a differential reality separations are transcended, and flows and assemblages are in free form. Optimism is exchanged for possibility and anything is possible as long as you desire it enough… Utopia becomes a set of relations, it is pieced together rather than given, and it is lived.
Urban utopia is characterised by its everywhere and elsewhereness. This is interesting when considering our places of interest, particularly Neo-Bankside, not only for those who look on excluded from the plans, but also for those global inhabitants, who are neither here nor there (present-absent), who are always on the move and in a state of un-belonging (but long a place of their own). Not satisfied with owning the property they are also promised the ‘ownership’ of the view, of status, of luxury amenities, of speed – the folding in of time and space. The giddiness in this conception of utopia promises heterogeneity, freedom and agency, it is awash with networks, opportunity and diversity – no less, a marketing dream. But the drive towards completeness and happiness cannot be satisfied; this desire always seeks something else, even if we’re not sure what that is yet (hence more luxury apartments and shopping malls and leisure facilities).
Utopia as a desire to be elsewhere seems quite different from the modernist utopia that projected human values and reason into another time and space. Siebers suggests that ‘[postmodernists] are utopian not because they do not know what they want. They are utopian because they know they want something else. They want to desire differently’ so (ignoring any arguments as to whether we are postmodern or not), it appears then that we are stuck in this utopia even if we don’t like it very much, as a desire to change is thus a utopian desire: this, it seems is the utopianism of present. But this is not satisfactory at all! Perhaps we should go back to classical utopia and not wish it to be a reality, but maintain it as philosophical and critical project and keep it away from desires?
Of course what all this talk of desire misses is the presence of hope that drove earlier utopian projects. Hope in transformations… Perhaps it is hope that needs regenerating and not utopia?
Can utopia really exist in the present? It existence relies on an inherent contradiction: it is possible and it is impossible. As soon as it is realised it dissolves into another desire, or it becomes yet another place just like any other, or it reveals itself as a quasi-utopia – a marketing ploy. It shows itself best in moments of transformation, in sets of unstable relations, and in unfinished plans.
JB
References:
Henri Lefebvre The Urban Revolution
Tobin Siebers (ed) Heterotopia
Alice Coleman Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing
