Re:Tooling The City

Designers, design students are often aware that they're complicit in gentrification etc. We also have some degree of affinity to the city, examining it, our industry tends to be in cities, we all like architecture etc.

Stop the Elephant and Castle Redevelopment

Plans have been around for ages to pull down the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, do some sort of estate development. The current proposal is ual selling the plot where LCC currently is and building a new buiding on the site of the shopping centre. The LCC plot would become condos. 3% social housing units, the Southwark requirement is 17%, which they're arguiing is fine because the university is part of the project - saying they're a non-profit etc. The council refused the proposal (which seems reasonable).

Douglas Murphy

Nicom Poopolis

RCA, lectures at CSM Royal Albert Dock, aka Asian Business Dock A Boris Johnson venture. One of the last big open sites in inner London, worth a billion pounds. With teh invention of the standard shipping container in the 1960s ports on the upepr Thames were replaced.

The people's plan for the Royal docks were a local organisation who had different ideas for the unused docks. London city airport was the first of these developments. The developers are a Chinese company called Asian Business Park and Stanhope.

Richard Rogers (cities for a small planet) built the Centre Pompidou, labour favourite Sir Terry Farrel whos a Tory planned the Asian Business Dock

"London that wants to continue to grow" is an economic entity, "London that has to embrace these changes" refers to the population.

They're building a pretty standard boring office park, but they're using this weird historicist language, using brick facades, saying they're using the structure of the former docks.

Planning applications are expensive, so as a developer you have to have a client to go forward. This is where Boris Johnson the Trumpian deal-maker comes in: He did all these projects with private sponsors (Emirates, Barclays etc) that were mostly funded by public money.

Newham's Banana of Opportunity

Dan Hancocks in Vice about how Newham rebranded themselves as Newham, London.

How do you measure benefit to the local community?

  1. Economic benefit: The developer say the development will create 13.000 jobs, but it seems likely that most of those will be for skilled office workers from China or elsewhere in London and not across the street from Newham. They don't commit to anything other than "contacting employment agencies in Newham"
  2. Housing

Moving image archive of gay bars in the UK (2016)

All these gay bars in London started to close since the financial crash of 2008

Murders of gay men

Homo-Nationalism