“Cities are becoming more and more central in guaranteeing the quality of life of their residents, from their everyday individual experiences, to the society and the environment in which they live. There has been a lot of research lately showing that the bigger the disparities between wealth and opportunity, the more the sickness and the violence that will come up in society. I think we need to seriously look at those income gaps and at the polarization of our cities. Now, there is much we can do about the environment too, not just locally but together with other cities. We can form procurement alliances across nations to reduce the cost of environmentally friendly technologies, we can exchange things, we can work together more economically.”
“The European city model is based on two policies: one is to avoid the formation of social, cultural and functional ghettos and the other is to create public space, and to defend those spaces so that they remain public, so that everybody can use them, and no single activity takes full control of what is public. Of course, these two policies depend on the precondition of density. We dream of a new European city where you can walk instead of taking the car, where the places for work, play and living are at a walking distance in a ‘pedestrianised’ city. If we are dense enough, we can pay for the construction, control and maintenance of public space. We can avoid the conditions that create ghettos, people can talk to each other, and the city then becomes a place for encounters between different cultures, different ideas, different opportunities.”
“London is almost unique in being geographically defined by a 40-mile wide green belt, which is the area surrounding Greater London and where, by and large, you cannot build anything. The major underlying challenge, which is an underlying theme for urban development debates, is that London will have to contain its long-term growth within that boundary of the Green Belt.”
“In terms of social outcomes, what really matters in London, and in any city of its complexity at the macro-level, is the successful economic development of the broader city-region. This functional region is interconnected in ways that go beyond the understanding of most individual actors living in it; we are addressing only a part of it by discussing Greater London, what we need to realise is that this “one big labour market”, is tightly integrated in complex ways.”
“London is like an assemblage of different fragments, different outcomes, different labour market situations. In London, as in other cities today, we can see, besides the inherited urbanities of the past, an urbanity in the making, arising from the fragments that are located in global circuits – these fragments can be immigrant communities whose households are de facto trans-national, they can be the financial centres which are deeply connected to other such fragments in other cities…London’s possibilities are not intrinsic, they will take work and participation, they will require making.”
“This is somewhat exaggerated, but following the bombings, somebody said that London is the first post-national city. If you leave aside the question of language, the lived experience of somebody in London is much closer to those of people living in multi-ethnic cities around the world than with somebody in a rural English area or a small English town. What makes us different from many other mixed cities in Europe, perhaps the Parisian model of “please leave your culture behind,” is that when we receive foreign investors and migrants, we welcome their money and we also welcome their culture, we think those cultures aid the creativity of our city.”
“The British National Party made its biggest electoral gains in May 2005 in Barking, east London; it made those gains because of the huge racial tension, because of the sense of invasion, the sense of being chased out, the sense of losing out. London may well diffuse its problems by actually pushing white people out of the city at a huge rate, which is what's happening at the moment. I think that the Greater London Authority is giving out the most fantastically positive messages and I hope that it wins. Only 3 years ago very intensive additional policing was needed in order to cope with the huge boom in violent crime and youth disorder within Barking, only half a mile from the City of London. Local residents feel that more has to be done for young people but nobody has got the answer. Just five years ago, other UK cities from Birmingham northwards experienced riots, and that was a very healthy warning to London.”
“We need to better understand how to legitimise certain forms of conflict. We can only assume that we have the ability to resolve conflict, to get rid of conflict as a problem. That is when we assume that, ultimately, the interests of the city can be resolved into one solution that is best for the majority, that cities are not structured by irreparable differences. If that was ever realistic, it has very little to do with the kinds of cities that are coming into being. Our problem, therefore, is how to learn to dwell in constant conflict. How to have a political process which continually expresses differences of class and race, of ethnicity and religion, of different ways of life with unresolved conflicts? We have very few ways of thinking about dwelling in permanent conflict as a positive experience, but unless we start thinking about those ways of dwelling in difference, and about politics as a medium for permanent conflict, not as a resolution for it, I think we create essentially a frozen, static, dead city.”
“It has been argued that the dynamics of work have changed and therefore spaces will have to change. I am not so sanguine about the connection between form and content. The intriguing thing about London is its vast repertoire of forms that are currently used in an incredibly virtuoso manner, in ways that they were never intended to be used. That is where I find the absolute brilliance of this city. Maybe more than 90% of the accommodation in borough housing is used for entirely different purposes from those for which it was conceived. That is, of course, a colossal humiliation for the architects that conceived them, or at least a tempering of their ambitions, because it means that there is no correlation between use and purpose. My theory is that the new workplace will probably not need new forms, but the new dynamics of work will simply infiltrate existing forms of the city, exactly because they are new and therefore have a more creative ability to interpret and less need to convert. In a sense they will be both condemned and privileged to use existing substance.”
“It is a well-studied phenomenon, the fact that as private developments have been growing in size, so has their vulnerability, and therefore the demands from developers for forms that could provide them with a specific identity, without commitment to use. Not only are we asked, as designers, to provide forms that have to be amenable to housing, retail, office space, but also to a mixture, and preferably several iterations of this mixture over an extended period of time. So if one formula does not work, another could. All of that has to be done while providing an identity or an immediate character that precedes and survives their use, their occupation. Are we able to constantly rely on the externalities of the city as a form giver? Are they enough to generate the specificity that we need? Much of the “services” sector is made up of the urban industries of today; service providers in the media sector, for example, may require more specific spaces.”
“One of the interesting things across the board, certainly in the United States and also in the cities that the Urban Age has been travelling to, is that planning and bold visions are back again. Planning is emerging from the coma that it has been in since urban renewal. After those failures and the reactions to those failures, planning suffered a crisis of confidence in the profession and planners thought: do we really have something to say about the city? Are we trying to do too much? Can we accomplish all these things? Are we listening enough to what people want? But now, cities are again looking at physical planning as a way of re-imagining their futures, as way of mobilising actions and as way of empowerment.”
“Being a designer in London who is involved in the making of public buildings, I wonder how the current context of ‘partnerships’ in which I am immersed affects my work, does it make it better or worse? For a long time, we designers were just expected to do as we were told, but now I often find myself asked to exercise my judgement. As negotiators, as mediators, architects are requested to exercise huge spans of the imagination to bring about fantastic innovative designs while also talking about transport, security, history, heritage, public space policy…There are lots of opportunities now to be making architecture, and fundamentally, to be involved in the making of democracy.”
“As a developer, I occupy a world where there is no shortage of capital but there is a shortage of projects. When I started at Stratford seven years ago, it never occurred to me that I would not be able to fund the £4 billion construction cost of the scheme. That having been said, Stratford is being subsumed within the Olympics. The support that the GLA has given to the project from the start is fundamental. It was one of the reasons that I was prepared to continue…Over the past 15 years I have learnt that big projects are not exponentially more difficult than small ones.”
“We have heard that incremental change may be more desirable, it may be able to give us flexibility, breadth and depth, nuances…But mega-projects, such as the regeneration of the Lea Valley through the Olympic Park, may also have their advantages. If we think about the complexity of the site, its influence over the entire landscape of East London…these are really expensive issues that cannot be dealt with in a piecemeal way. The Olympics will bring intensity and focus, leadership and commitment, lots of money, and of course a legacy.”
“Because most projects in London are private sector led, first we need to be very aware of what their socio-economic impacts are going to be, we have to be cautious before we proceed. Architects in London are having a great time now, but in a sense they are playing with fire. The architectural metaphor of the “zip” to reconnect the tissue of the city looks very good on a sketch. However, when expanded to the scale that we are talking about, they run the risk of actually backfiring.”
“Have large-scale regeneration projects forgotten about the wider city? That is, for me, the important question. We are talking about very powerful instruments, these bundles of public and private activities…However they also have costs, and some weaknesses: they exclude entire parts of the city and its people. Therefore, I think these projects need to be embedded in a larger socio-economic masterplan that would also bring about benefits to the neighbourhoods and to those people who are not included.”
“How will big boxes, as they are imagined now, transform themselves into viable and vibrant communities whose members bond and also have bridging connections to the wider city? How would their newly assembled populations react in case of a serious problem? Who should they turn to in case of a bomb attack, a riot or any other massive disruption of urban life? How will their residents acquire a sense of safety and of resilience? Time is obviously needed for them to acquire a sense of belonging; there must be a long-term commitment to invisible modest efforts.”
“There has been a change of terms. First we had improvements, then rehabilitation of states and a focus on individual buildings; that did not work…so the government changed it to redevelopment of slightly larger areas and called it urban renewal, when that failed they decided they would call it regeneration. But regeneration is not working either. The OECD has been reviewing regeneration projects around the world and it has not found a single one that has succeeded, some have done so partially but none of them have achieved everything they wanted.”
