URBLOG

Architecture at its toughest

From New Statesman

Concrete poetry

Thirty years after the opening of the Barbican Centre in the city of London, Amanda Levete celebrates a much maligned brutalist masterpiece that has become fashionable once more.

'This is architecture at its toughest and it commands respect. The serrated tower profiles are beautifully articulated, the jagged water stains on the curved concrete balconies only enhancing the form. Podium flats look on to a lush landscape and water, some on piloti striding across the lake.'

'The Barbican is a microcosm of the changing political and aesthetic mores of the past 60 years. The flats were designed during the heady years of the postwar social-democratic experiment and a significant number of them were designated for subsidised housing. The corporation would be the landlord and residents would be tenants.'

'Today, the City is synonymous with discredited financial institutions. Perhaps it is time for their denizens to act with a sense of civic responsibility and to imagine a new model for financing and managing social housing. They could start by learning from the Barbican.'

 

 

 

Living off the land

  China becomes an urban nation at breakneck speed. With the government seeking to increase domestic demand, places like Guiyang are at the heart of its urbanisation strategy.

'Beijing may drive urbanisation, but it does not control it. The results are often messy, chaotic and unanticipated.'

China's rural poor left stranded as urbanites race ahead

As workers leave the countryside in the hope of better pay, the communities they leave behind face increasing poverty.

China's incomes are increasingly polarised. This large income gap is definitely a contributor in the background to the more frequent and violent protests and unrest in the last few months.

'For every one yuan of a rural resident's income, a city-dweller enjoys 3.23 yuan in disposable income – and that may significantly understate the gap. Include the extra services and benefits enjoyed by urbanites, such as subsidised housing, and "many observers believe that the ratio would easily be in the range of four to five and is arguably among the highest in the world."'

 

URBANIZED - London screening

Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren’t created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities. 

LONDON SCREENING

October 21
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, London School of Economics
6:30pm. Special Screening and post-film discussion with director Gary Hustwit and cast members Ricky Burdett (LSE Cities/Urban Age), Alejandro Aravena (architect, Elemental) and more TBA.

 

 

Regeneration? What's happening is class cleansing

Owen Hatherley on Sheffield's Park Hill

At Park Hill we have another instance of the extremely limited council housing stock being sold off and privatised; and that in a city with at least 60,000 on the council waiting list. It should be a relic of the boom, the new Park Hill, an embarrassing reminder of a time when it was thought that the best way to repair a listed building that served a much-needed social purpose was the expulsion of its unpicturesque inhabitants.

Green Streets, Strong Communities

This report from IPPR  argues that capable, innovative and determined groups of people in Britain’s many and diverse neighbourhoods can play a leading role in improving the energy efficiency of homes and community buildings.

The report identifies four major barriers to community energy projects, around community capability, availability of finance, the challenges of Britain's many solid walled properties, and the planning process.

High Line - phase 2

The High Line Park in New York has opened a second section using a former elevated railway line to bringing new life and greenery to lower Manhattan.

"Already, the two-year-old southern portion is a riot of vegetation in greens and muted purples. The flourishing of the plant life is like a metaphor for what the High Line has done to the neighbourhood as a whole, which has exploded economically since the park opened."

London planning futures

Just Space - Urban Salon Conference flyer June 2011

Thursday 9th June 2011
10am-5pm
Venue: UCL Department of Geography,
University College London,
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 6BT
This year over 50 community organisations played an unprecedented role in challenging the strategic plans for London, encouraged and supported by the Just Space Network. One aspect of this work has been to enlist support from the academic and research communities in London. This has connected with debates about the role of academics outside the academy.

50 years of Death and Life

Jane Jacobs : seer of the modern city

Jane Jacobs' classic book on urban living is 50 this year. Our current leaders would do well to read it.

"Jacobs was there first, and with a hard-headed, modern understanding of the sort of relationships that are needed in modern life, and the sorts of community that contemporary cities can offer. Her belief that urban planners and architects should not be realising visions, but creating and preserving resilient, inclusive and adaptable neighbourhoods – places which can largely look after themselves – still resonates."

Homes under the Hammer

The death of a housing ideal

Is the demolition of the Heygate estate in south London the welcome end of a misguided experiment? Or is it the push for regeneration that is flawed?

Council housing was seen as a natural mode of living, a much broader spectrum of people lived in it than was later the case, and the community[the orginal architect] says he deliberately set out to create worked. (Worked in every sense – as ever, joblessness and the resulting dependency and personal chaos are the elephant in the room, even when discussing rooms in the Elephant.) Only later, when people were only housed if they scored highly on an index of deprivation or social challenge and the council lacked the resources to deal with the attendant problems, did the "blight" begin. Software, not hardware; people, not buildings; politics, not aesthetics.

"If you think low income is vanishing, then it makes sense to reduce the amount of social housing that you've got. If you think low income isn't vanishing – and all the evidence would suggest it's not – then it makes no sense to get rid of social housing unless you've got an alternative for low-income people." [Anne Power's] question is a stark one. "What are you going to do about low-cost housing in a city that relies entirely on low-paid, low-skilled jobs for almost everything that its rich clientele depends on? Its hotels, its restaurants, its nurseries, its transport system, its street cleaning, everything depends on low-paid workers, and we are going to create one hell of a terrible society if we don't recognise that."

Saving Excalibur

Largest postwar prefab estate to be demolished 

Excalibur's castles built from postwar dreams must not be demolished

The Excalibur prefab estate in south London may be scruffy, but it's a precious chapter in the nation's story worth preserving,  according to Simon jenkins.

'The whole enclave is an anarchic contrast to the anonymity of the system-built deck-access slabs that usually supplanted the prefabs, now being demolished as uninhabitable and impossible to maintain. The tenants of the vast Aylesbury estate across south London scream, "Get us out of here", but their salvation is expensive and endlessly postponed. Yet no ideologues are so dyed-in-the-wool as Britain's public housing officials, who have long regarded the chaotic individualism manifest in the prefab as intolerably antisocial and to be "designed out".'

'The government has meekly listed six of the 187 for preservation, but none is worth preserving on its own. It would be like listing six houses in Belgrave Square. English Heritage has also refused to introduce conservation area control, on the strange grounds that "this would be imposing our view from above". Surely that is its job.'

'Excalibur is scruffy and working class. It probably offends a Niagara of government regulations. It costs someone's money to maintain and can, I am sure, evoke a pundit to say it is a reminder of a bad past. These arguments were used in the 1970s to fill in Southwark's Grand Surrey Canal with rubble, wiping out a slice of its people's history and an invaluable future amenity. The people of north London apparently merited a canal, but that was too dangerous for south Londoners.'