Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Castles Made of Sand

2018; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07402775-7085544

1936-0924

Douglas E. Murphy,

Urbanization and City Planning

Before the 2012 Olympics, most Londoners would not have even known about the area, a forgotten wilderness of industrial detritus and overgrown canals, apart from those few who still worked there, and a community of artists who had installed themselves in warehouses around the periphery. But now, a visitor emerging from the vast warren of the Westfield Stratford shopping center, after walking past some new office blocks and rather dubious student housing, will find the park is well used and friendly. Subtle in character, the design has surrounded the cleaned-up waterways with a wild-grass landscape that dates it as a product of the early 2010s, but which is also a genuinely pleasant environment.The landmarks of the park are mostly fun as well: The stadium, now finally in post-Olympic use as the home of the West Ham United football club, isn’t spectacular but has a certain large-scale elegance, while the dramatic swooping roof of the late Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre, one of her most successful projects, is now a municipal swimming pool. Overall, it’s a far cry from the infamous white elephants of Olympics past, such as those of Athens 2004, whose moldering remains are a popular subject for internet rubbernecking.But there is something that definitely spoils the mood, that lets the whole team down. Unmissable, rising up 376 feet above the park, there is a gigantic steel, um, thing, a twisted, convoluted tower, painted blood red, that has been compared to everything from Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to a prolapsed bowel. It’s ugly, and not in an “I don’t like modern art” way, but in a more profound sense. It’s professionally ugly—as though someone took some scribbles made trying to get a pen working, fed them through the world’s most advanced engineering software, and somehow got someone to pay for it.But what actually is it? Well, it’s called the ArcelorMittal Orbit, named after the global steel company owned by one of Britain’s richest men, Lakshmi Mittal, who stumped up some of the money to make it happen. So it’s a branding opportunity. But it’s also supposed to be a public artwork, having been “designed” by the world-famous artist Anish Kapoor and engineer Cecil Balmond. It is additionally a viewing platform, with a lift taking paying guests to an elevated room designed to give panoramic views of East London, despite the fact it is shorter than many of the residential towers nearby. And in fact, since June 2016, it has been a fairground attraction as well, after a giant slide by the artist Carsten Höller was clipped on.The Orbit cost a lot of money to build—$27 million, of which $4.2 million came from the public budget—and it costs a lot of money to run, apparently losing $700,000 in 2015 alone, despite its expensive ticketed entry. The London taxpayer essentially pays for its upkeep for no municipal benefit, making it the only real failed legacy of the Olympics. And despite the many cooks spoiling the broth of its production, it owes its existence to only one man, for no other reason than that he thought the park needed a bit of zhushing up.That man was Boris Johnson. He may be a politician, but Johnson is a professional celebrity in true 21st-century fashion, famous for being famous, a character whose main job is to keep himself on the front pages. Born in 1964 into the bohemian wing of the English upper classes, he went to Eton and then read classics at Oxford. There is no more elite route to adulthood. Failing upward through a checkered career in journalism, which included getting fired for lying, he used appearances on television panel shows to cultivate a public persona based upon a recognizable caricature of the confused, fun-loving toff, his shock of naturally white hair and bumbling manner making him a popular figure and leading him to become a member of parliament.Johnson is widely reported to have a long-held ambition to lead the country, so when his arch-rival, school friend David Cameron (yes, this is how the U.K. operates), became leader of the Conservative Party and later prime minister (set to go down in history as the instigator of the botched “Brexit” referendum), Johnson diverted his ambitions and won the election to become mayor of London in 2008, a job he held for two terms until 2016. It was at this point that his architectural ambitions became apparent. Through these pursuits, Johnson unwittingly revealed some troubling truths about how power manifests in cities today.Leading up to the election, Johnson’s strategy was firmly directed toward suburban voters, who needed to be persuaded to come out and counteract left-leaning, inner-city citizens. His funding, however, largely came from business and finance, his natural constituency. During the campaign, Johnson made a nostalgic appeal to the former group by proposing his first design project: to “bring back the Routemaster,” referring to the classic red London buses that had been phased out by his predecessor and rival Ken Livingstone. The old stock, an icon of 1960s “Swinging London,” had been replaced with modern articulated buses that were unpopular with drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike. The problem was, those old buses, built with World War II aluminum technology and featuring an open platform at the back for getting on and off, didn’t meet contemporary accessibility standards. To fulfill his promise, Johnson hired Thomas Heatherwick (of whom we will hear more) to style a new bus as an updated version of the classic.The resulting New Routemaster was aesthetically pleasing but functionally troubled—it was heavier, longer, and more expensive than an ordinary bus so as to accommodate an extra entrance for the iconic hop-on-hop-off experience. (These additional doors were quickly sealed to save money on conductors.) Prone to overheating and breaking down, the “Boris buses” were only in production for six years before their gimmicky run came to an end. Out of a promised 2,000 buses, only 1,000 were ordered. With a total cost in the hundreds of millions, the buses made for a rather expensive toy, paid for by the public.Johnson’s frivolous endeavor was an early indication of what was to come. His transport tinkering also led to the Thames cable car, an $83.5-million public project built for the Olympics and billed as a vital addition to the transport network. The cars were intended to take passengers from the financial district of Canary Wharf across the river to the Royal Victoria Dock, but this five-minute journey, named “Emirates Air Line” after sponsorship from the UAE, swiftly became a laughingstock when it was found that only four people were regular riders in 2013. Often closed in high winds, the superfluous nature of the cable car is made even more clear by the pop-ups, sponsorships, and “experience” events that now regularly attempt to drum up interest in the attraction.Some of the development projects Johnson instigated were potentially more deleterious than the odd silly endeavor. As one of the world’s major cities, London has an economy that is international in scale, and seeks constant global investment, especially given its focus on finance and property. In the years after the 2008 crash, no money was quite as appealing as Chinese, which Johnson sought assiduously to attract. In 2013, he introduced a new initiative to “rebuild” the Crystal Palace, the gigantic Victorian iron and glass entertainment building that was originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. When it burned down in 1936, Winston Churchill described the moment as “the end of an age.” This time around the palace was to be reconstructed by a Chinese developer, who would, in the process, revitalize a large public park that the Brits couldn’t afford to look after any more. The developer, ZhongRong, spoke admiringly of Britain’s Victorian ingenuity, and organized a design competition to entice some of the U.K.’s leading architects.Within two years, the Crystal Palace project had fallen apart. It turned out that ZhongRong had demanded to be given half of Crystal Palace Park (impossible), insisted on being exempt from planning rules (illegal), and refused to accept input on a business plan or contribute money to ease the local impact of the proposal (insulting). Leaked documents also suggested that the company expected to build a six-star hotel and shopping mall for a luxury jewelry trade, utterly absurd in that quiet, poorly connected corner of suburban South London. ZhongRong walked away when the initial agreement expired in 2015, and it came out soon after that in order to show off his dealmaking prowess, Johnson had made promises that simply couldn’t be kept. Later investigations showed that the project had been running for nearly two years before it was publicly announced, and that the mayor’s office had enthusiastically seen it as a chance to attract investment, both locally and for the sake of London’s World City status. They knew that they were acting against the advice of planning officials in pursuing the deal, but clearly hadn’t expected ZhongRong to be so intransigent.A more successful bid to entice Chinese development into London was the Asian Business Port, a strip of East London dockland that remained derelict more than three decades after port traffic had ceased in the mid-1980s. Work has since begun on building more than 5 million square feet of offices in the space, intended to allow Chinese businesses to locate operations in the U.K. But the success of this particular investment was marred by controversial claims about the procurement—the company finally chosen to invest in the site shared an office in Beijing with representatives from the mayor’s office tasked with evaluating the bids. Moreover, one particular Chinese developer, a major Conservative Party donor married to a British noble, appeared to be part of the bidding process for both the Crystal Palace and the Asian Business Port projects.The impression one gets from these stories is that behind Johnson’s floppy exterior there is a ruthlessly ambitious man, using developments as self-promotion. As long as nothing fell apart on his watch, he could, by hunting opportunities and courting any and all investment, make himself look effective and keep the city of London happy as well. Many of his schemes were, of course, vanity projects, but they also were meant to help him achieve his long-term goal of leading the country. The problem was that in his addiction to getting something visibly done, many of the rules and procedures for public investment were pushed to their limits. Johnson’s hubris was in expecting his off-the-record promises to take precedence over the complex bidding and tendering processes designed to ensure value-for-money in public procurement.The final straw may have been the Garden Bridge project. Launched in 2013, this was to be a brand new pedestrian bridge in Central London, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, with landscaping by Dan Pearson. Visualizations showed it covered by a small forest. According to early projections, the bridge would be financed with $95 million of private donations. Enthusiastically promoted by actor Joanna Lumley, an old friend of Johnson’s, the project received a warm reception. It was regarded in an especially positive light by Johnson’s other powerful friends in London media—the staff of the Evening Standard newspaper, owned by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev.Many others were less impressed. The bridge was not responding to a need for improved connection, so questions were raised about why it was being tendered as a public transport project, which made it eligible for public funding. There were also concerns about access, as the bridge’s design would allow it to host large numbers of private events, though there would be stringent restrictions on cyclists, groups, and the number of individual visitors at any given time. Finally, people objected that it would obstruct cherished views along the river, and that it was just a frivolity being imposed from above with no outside input.Then things started to get more difficult. Millions in public money had been spent to get planning permission for the bridge, but it still lacked sufficient private backing to proceed. And as time passed, voices of dissent got louder. The “A Folly For London” campaign and an investigation by Will Hurst of The Architects’ Journal put additional pressure on the project. By the time Johnson left office in 2016, nothing had been built. Soon after taking over, his successor, Sadiq Khan, removed the mayor’s pledge of maintenance support, effectively cancelling the project.This hasn’t been the end of the matter, however. Heatherwick, the bridge’s designer, was revealed to have been part of the project long before his firm won the bid to be the designer, despite what was ostensibly a robust tendering process. Senior members of the City Hall team who ran the initiative left to join the engineering firm Arup, which had pocketed substantial fees in the early stages of the process after it was selected to work on the bridge. And finally, Johnson’s friends at the Evening Standard had fought a high-intensity publicity campaign against overwhelming public indifference during the whole affair. Johnson is still in the hot seat for this mess, and in March 2018 he was questioned by the London Assembly, an elected body that oversees the mayor’s office. He’s expected to be interrogated again, and more dodginess may still be uncovered.In the end, London didn’t get its new $275 million bridge, although nearly $71 million in public money had already been spent. This may not be the biggest waste of funds, but the intentions and processes were profoundly undemocratic. Johnson was always proud to boast of the personal connections that allowed him to push forward with his plans, but at the same time this back dealing made a mockery of the procedures and regulations that are supposed to ensure fairness and value in public expenditure. When challenged on these matters, Johnson’s usual response was some variation of “I’m not going to apologize for trying to get things done,” mixed with his usual bumbling fool act. Filling out legal paperwork is tiresome, but it exists for good reason—to prevent exactly this kind of cronyism.Johnson not only treated the public purse as some kind of family fortune that was his to plunder, he also ignored far more pressing aspects of his job. After assuming the role of mayor in 2008, Johnson was in charge when the Great Recession added fuel to an already raging housing crisis in London. He could have intervened to protect social housing, or to force developers to include higher levels of affordable housing, but he mostly did precisely the opposite. Rather than assume the role of planning authority and take over development applications, again and again he stepped in to green light controversial redevelopments, seeing his role more as guarantor of construction than as advocate of his constituents. In many cases—including during a redevelopment scheme for the Mount Pleasant Royal Mail sorting office in Islington—Johnson overruled local authorities that had previously rejected plans because they didn’t include enough affordable housing.The strategy, such as it was, made a certain kind of sense at the time. During the eight years Johnson was in office, London was sucking in huge amounts of foreign investment, especially in property. To make sure that the city was considered “open for business,” Johnson wasn’t going to go up against transnational capital flow. Furthermore, in his original manifesto he’d promised to build 50,000 homes by 2011. Instead, his mayorship saw many highly controversial redevelopments—to take just one example, the Heygate Estate redevelopment in South London’s Elephant and Castle area saw 1,200 cheap, well-built (if not exactly pretty) 1970s apartments destroyed to make way for 3,000 brand new and expensive ones, scattering an existing community all over the country. This resulted in a scandal that Johnson dismissed, saying that the area had “languished in a no-man’s land for too many years.” His unwillingness to protect or support the construction of affordable housing was particularly chilling in the context of London’s diminishing land supply. With a limited amount of space on which to build, developers openly campaigned for public-housing estates to be legally reclassified as “brownfield,” i.e., contaminated, and thus vulnerable to being cleared.As all this was happening, the rich were building vast “megabasements” under their West London properties to multiply their value, while in East London precarious workers paid obscene rents to live in “beds in sheds”—tiny studio apartments in someone’s back garden. New apartment towers sprang up across the city, often bought and sold specifically to foreign investors numerous times before anyone even moved in, and often nobody did, as an empty apartment appreciated so much in value that owners sometimes didn’t even need the hassle of tenants. Op-eds lamented the dark streets in prime real estate areas such as Knightsbridge and Belgravia. And all this in a city where an average home costs almost 15 times the average annual wage.In all, Johnson spent more than $1.3 billion on vanity projects and did very little to improve the quality of Londoners’ lives, even though he had the tools and levers to do so. But since his departure, interesting initiatives are beginning to take place. With the support of Mayor Khan, a new generation of planning and design professionals is reinvigorating the process of making places for everyone in the city, and quietly undoing some of Johnson’s damage. Urban planning has suffered from years of political neglect and de-skilling, but there are hopeful signs in organizations such as Public Practice, which temporarily sends skilled professionals to work on challenging planning problems, and in the borough of Croydon, which once again has its own in-house architects department. Unfortunately, Johnson has moved onto breaking bigger things: After leaving the mayor’s office he became one of the main engineers of the “Brexit” vote, and only missed out on his shot at the prime minister’s job thanks to some choice backstabbing from another rival, Michael Gove. The London Johnson left behind hasn’t fallen apart—indeed, in addition to his novelty projects, it now has many slick new apartment towers and more ultra-expensive restaurants to service them—but for everyone who isn’t well-paid or already wealthy, it is a harder place to live.