Wrecking London’s Skyline? A political critique of how the city is viewed (original) (raw)
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Book Review: Ruined Skylines: Aesthetics, Politics, and London's Towering Cityscape
LSE Review of Books, 2020
The debate over the tall-building boom in London is often torn between those supporting market-led spectacular urban development and those advocating for historic conservation of the traditional cityscape. In Ruined Skylines, Günter Gassner critically intervenes in these discussions, utilising the notion of ruination to show how the city skyline can be a site for radical urban politics. If we are after fundamental change for our cities and a transformation in the way urbanisation is understood and practised, this book offers a fresh and unorthodox framing that is provocative and creative, writes Elahe Karimnia.
How can we critically engage with capitalism in the 'urban age,' at a time when more and more people live in cities? How can we do so with regard to the built environment of a global city? I distinguish between two different approaches. The first starts from contradictions of capitalism such as the juxtaposition of overabundance and poverty and examines the ways in which these are represented in the cityscape. The second starts from a detailed exploration of practices of city making in order to explore the multiple different and often unexpected ways in which capitalist economies are justified and embedded in texts and images that are deemed to be socially meaningful. In other words, the first develops a critique of the capitalist city; the second allows a critique of capitalism through the city. These two approaches interrelate and overlap. However, their claims and scopes are not the same. Both have unique starting points and different directions of critique. In this essay I discuss these two approaches with regard to London's current tall building boom. At the time of writing, approximately 400 skyscrapers are in the planning stage or under construction in the city. Between fifty and eighty of them are towers that will be built by private developers not exclusively but to a large extent for industries that are pivotal for financial capitalism: banks, insurance and real estate companies as well as globally operating business service firms. These buildings are amongst the most visible manifestations of finance capital. Several of them are located in the City of London, which is London's historical core as well as a commercial center of Greater London. This essay, then, explores the relationship between history and financial capitalism or, better, the ways in which historiographical approaches are related to a critical engagement with urban processes under financialized capitalism. Put differently, I examine the ways in which urban historians criticize the visual impact of office towers on the historic built environment.
London’s skyline is changing significantly with a new generation of iconic buildings, of which the Swiss-Re Tower is the most well known. Despite the fact that many of these buildings are located in the City (London’s financial heart), little attention has been paid to the relationship between the transformation of London’s skyline and the recent institutional reconfiguration of the Corporation of London, the authority that runs the City. Focusing empirically on the City’s iconic architecture, and foregrounding a period of institutional crisis for the Corporation (1970–1990), the paper: first, departs from the standard analysis of iconic buildings as signifiers of economic success, and sketches a framework for examining the role of iconic architecture during moments of crisis and, second, offers a new approach to understanding the City’s iconic commissions: not as signifiers of London’s international economic power, but as symptoms of changes in the institutions and élites that promote the City’s new urbanity. The article details how the internationalisation of London’s economy after the 1970s challenged the Corporation’s insular character. The Corporation’s resistance to the ‘invasion’ of foreign companies, people and architectural styles in the City in the midst of a rapid expansion of London’s economy and growing inter-urban competition, led to open threats from the government for the abolition of the Corporation. Responding to these threats, the Corporation reinvented itself with an institutional reform and re-branded its identity in the early 2000s as an outward-looking institution, open to London’s new transnational élites. The 2002 Unitary Development Plan that introduced a new architectural language in the City corresponds to the same need to construct a new imaginary identity for a re-branded Corporation. Towering over the City’s traditional signifiers, the City’s new buildings constitute an ode to the Corporation’s new identity and a visual coup d’état against its time-old heritage-oriented planning.
The politics of design: architecture, tall buildings and the skyline of central London
Area, 2007
After 2000 a handful of very tall buildings were approved in central London, a circumstance that challenged well-established planning practices in that part of the city. Their promotion by Ken Livingstone, the mayor, but opposition to them by conservation groups, seemed to signal a fierce campaign ahead; in fact, it was all over in an instant. This article examines how this debate was framed to dismiss the arguments and concerns of those who oppose tall buildings. To make tall buildings acceptable, London's mayor drew on the merits associated with iconic architecture and high-profile architects. Under Livingstone's incumbency tall buildings were affirmed by the expertise and clout of global architects who provided legitimacy for mayoral ambitions to reach for the sky. Stressing the significance of high-quality design and iconic architecture helped to wear down deep-rooted antagonism and to channel the debate to improving the aesthetic qualities of London, a goal that enjoys wide consensus.
2021
This chapter draws on two of David Frisby's major contributions to our understanding of cities-Fragments of Modernity (1988) and Cityscapes of Modernity (2001) and positions itself in-between these texts by exploring a fragmentation of cityscapes. Frisby once observed that there is a lack of a critical theory of skylines. He made this observation in the context of my research on London's towering cityscape and it was this lack that attracted him to my topic. Yet, what does a fragmentation of contemporary cityscapes involve? The fragmentation of cityscapes that I develop in this chapter focuses on Benjamin's approach. Here, Benjamin's and Deleuze's approach are related through Leibniz and through the built space of the city. I suggest that a fragmentation of cityscapes as we find it in Frisby's analysis of Benjamin's work opens up a space for political action. This space is crucial for a critical theory of skylines because it opens up the possibility of different cities to come.
Visual Consequences of the Plan: Managing London's changing skyline
The skyline of London is composed of historic monuments of national and international importance, punctuated tall buildings built during postwar building booms, particularly since the 1960s. Currently, some of the tallest commercial and residential buildings are under construction and the emerging skyline is intended to reflect London's premier world city status, as a stable global capital that balances finance and culture within an integrated society. Its skyline image has been managed since 2000 by the Mayor of London through the London Plan. This paper will consider the historical, intellectual and policy basis that has permitted – indeed encouraged – the introduction of tall buildings into central London since 2000 by focussing on the design of the Heron Tower, located at the northern edge of the Eastern Cluster of tall buildings in the City of London, and discussions regarding its visual impact on St Paul's Cathedral. Drawings explore the visual impact of the City's tall buildings on a famous view of St Paul's from Waterloo Bridge, and highlight the subjectivity of visual interrelationships experienced locally in the context of the persuasiveness of global finance.
Beneath the Arches: Re-appropriating the Spaces of Infrastructure in Manchester (Ph.D. Thesis, 2014)
2014
This thesis sets out to explore the implications that transport infrastructures have on the production and perception of the urban built environment. Particularly, it focuses on the Victorian brick viaducts constructed to support the elevated railway in Manchester, England. It concentrates on Manchester’s post-‐industrial restructuring and re-‐imaging since the late 1960s, exploring how the presence of brick railway viaducts, as well as the uses beneath their arches, have impacted strategies for revalorisation in the wake of gradual deindustrialisation. In exploring the changing symbolic economy of landscapes dominated by railway infrastructure, as well as the shifting uses and images of railway arches, this thesis explores the interplay between political economy and the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of urban regeneration. Upon establishing the mutually constituted history of Manchester’s elevated railways and its city centre and demonstrating how this 19th century process has shaped the form and character of the city, it excavates a cultural history of the infrastructural landscapes of the city. Special emphasis is placed on the uses and perceptions of railway arches, which have long served as symbols of dereliction and social disorder. These spatial and cultural histories act as a foundation for analysing how the city’s railway viaducts have been implicated in the re-‐ imagining of Manchester as a post-‐industrial city. These histories and representations are explored in relation to property-‐led strategies of environmental improvement, industrial displacement, and heritage tourism along the southern fringe of Manchester city centre, focusing on three thematic and spatially bound case studies. These case studies rely on documentary data of planning and design strategies, interviews with elite actors involved in the re-‐imaging of Manchester city centre, and ethnographic observation. Using critical discourse analysis, the thesis unpacks the narrative relationship between dominant representations of these spaces and professional justifications for their material and symbolic reconfiguration.
The Cinematic Revival of ‘Low London’ in the Age of Speculative Urbanism
2017
Since 2013, a plethora of articles have appeared in the British popular press that display a preoccupation with the expanding London skyline. For example, an article published in The Guardian, evocatively titled ‘A Tortured Heap of Towers: The London Skyline of Tomorrow’, offers 3D images of the London skyline of the future, concentrating on a series of new skyscrapers deemed ‘the cluster’. For Gwyn Richards, head of design of the City of London’s planning team, the completion of the cluster will render the skyline legible in contrast to its current status as ‘an incoherent riot’. Richards inadvertently raises the question of control in his comments, where the desire for ‘clarity on the skyline’ is suggestive of broader anxieties concerning the future of cities the world over, as enhanced methods of technologically based surveillance and security are met with ever more brazen acts of mass terrorism that often evade all measure of control. And yet, in a series of contemporary, London...
Thinking against Heritage: Speculative development and emancipatory politics in the City of London
Journal of Urbanism, 2019
What does a political conceptualisation of the relationship between urban development and heritage involve? Against the widespread idea that there is a conflict between densification and the protection of historic buildings and sites in the City of London, I show that a conservative heritage discourse promotes the construction of speculative towers. Arguing against a City that is privately owned, selfcompeting and socially homogeneous, I develop a democratic understanding of history that contests an essentialist reading of the city and challenges the idea that speculative developments direct attention to and visually enhance historic landmarks. Aligning historical analysis with political critique, I draw on the work of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault and discuss notions of “historical events” and “cultural treasures” in order to think against the prevailing speculative logic in the city.
This short article explores the 'double role' of aesthetic arguments with regard to tall building debates in London: one the one hand, they create a space for a conservationist and historicist reading of the cityscape that wishes to hold onto the current visual order; on the other, they open up a space for a visually transformative reading of the city structured around capitalist imperatives, always on the lookout for new investment opportunities.