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Planning Games

by Bill Risebero

‘How will the Games impact on the physical environment of East London — exploring the social and financial implications.’

'Well', said the curmudgeonly grandfather in Prokofiev's musical tale for children, 'and if Peter hadn't caught the wolf: what then, eh?' And if London does not get the Olympics, what then? I shall come back to that. In the meantime let us assume London does catch the Olympic wolf, and that it will both offer an experience to Londoners and, perhaps more importantly, have lasting social, financial and environmental effects.

The physical environment of east London will be changed. The official view, expressed by the government, by the London 2012 campaign, and by many other supporters, is that the environmental and planning benefits will be substantial. I would like to look further at this claim, and at some of the social and financial implications of the process by which this environmental change is likely to come about.

I shall look at what London 2012 proposes, in the light of recent 'regeneration' experience in east London, and at the experience of the former Olympic city of Barcelona.

'A lasting legacy for future generations' is claimed by London 2012. 'The London Games', it is said, 'would make a major difference, bequeathing an immense legacy'. It is proposed among other things to 'transform people's lives through improving the social, physical and economic landscape in the poorest and most deprived areas of London'.

Three of the four anticipated 'legacy benefits' of the Olympic bid relate to the regeneration of east London: 'to leave behind world-class sporting facilities which ...become the heart of existing communities; to drive the regeneration of the east of London, delivering a high-quality environment for business and opportunities for local people; and to create a major new urban park the biggest created in Europe in 150 years' (London 2012). It is to be expected that the large-scale sports lobby and the associated business interests would subscribe to these claims.

However, they also appear to have the enthusiastic support of the government, the Opposition, the GLA and various local authorities.

For me, this raises an number of questions. Firstly, the Olympic movement is highly elitist. It is run by an international oligarchy, heavily influenced by the demands of transnational capital which supplies the sponsorship, and by governments whose political purposes are served by Olympic events. It does not incline naturally to democratic or popular (as opposed to populist) decision-making. Its primary purpose is not the regeneration of east London. So how far will the benefits generated by the Olympics be retained in the hands of the big players, and how much of them will be allowed to trickle down?

Secondly, the Olympics are expensive to stage. The IOC offers part of the finance, possibly to the tune of £1 billion, but the host city or country must find the rest: £5 billion or more.

How much of this would be diverted from other areas of need, how much would find its way into permanent, as opposed to temporary, benefits, and how many of these would be of direct relevance to the needs of east London? Although it might be argued that such sums could not realistically be spent on regeneration were it not for the Olympics, the danger is of course that finance will be diverted from areas of much greater need. If one was identifying a shopping list of need for east London, valuable as sports facilities and parks are, they might not necessarily be the first priority.

And this raises a third question. With or without the Olympics, there is a great need in east London, and the Thames Gateway area in general, for a planning strategy, based on democratic principles, leading towards a coherently planned environment which meets the needs of all the people in the area. What evidence is there that, with or without the Olympics, such a strategy is evolving?

For evidence on these questions, one could do worse than start with what has actually been happening in east London since the beginning of the Eighties, a period which has seen the government, the LDDC, the GLC, the Boroughs, LPAC, the GLA and the Thames Gateway Partnership - not all at once - contributing to policy-formulation in the area.

The scale of the physical change, from the derelict dockyard landscape to the gleaming new developments, has been prodigious. In this sense at least, much has been 'regenerated'. The nature and significance of the changes, however, is much more questionable.

After 20 or more years of activity by these bodies, unemployment in the east London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham, three of the worst areas in the country, remains well over twice the national average. Newham itself has the highest level of unemployment in the country. Jobs continue to be lost from manufacturing industry (National Statistics). Homelessness continues to increase, the stated first cause of which is the 'shortage of appropriate public sector or affordable private sector accommodation' (Tower Hamlets).

During this time some 12 million square feet of private offices (and the Dome) have been built, subsidized both directly through tax concessions and inducements, and indirectly through the public funds that have gone into supportive measures like the Jubilee Line extension.

The resulting physical environment exists on two distinct levels. The old working-class housing areas - Poplar, Limehouse, the Isle of Dogs, Canning Town, Silvertown, North Woolwich - despite some small-scale improvements here and there, remain impoverished and run-down. Between them, enclaves of wealth, accessed from elsewhere by underground or high level (or airborne) transport links, turn their backs on their surroundings. The surrounding environment remains relentlessly vehicle-based, and it is still difficult, for example, to walk around the Isle of Dogs without having to do so along the edge of busy roads, heavy with construction traffic. The proposed riverside walk, once a feature of the Tower Hamlets local plan, still seems unattainable.

After 20 years of such 'regeneration', the architecture of the area is a good indicator of its provenance. The Thatcherite claim that the private sector, imbued with 'Victorian values', would be the best agent for achieving regeneration, has been disproved even by the townscape.

The architectural incoherence, the poorly-designed public spaces and the tokenistic attitude to conserving the area's historic fabric, speak for themselves. In 1990, the architectural critic Peter Buchanan (Architects' Journal) wrote of the previous ten years of changes in London that they 'were unguided by vision and almost completely unplanned', and that they 'contribute nothing to its coherence, and in their affluence highlight the decay of the public realm and infrastructure that they further overstress'. It would perhaps be possible to explain that east London's is now an ironic, ambivalent, postmodern townscape for post-industrial times, but this would be to dignify the results and, one suspects, the intentions.

Barcelona, by contrast, is not badly designed. In 1999, uniquely for a city, it was awarded the RIBA's Royal Gold Medal, usually offered to famous individual practitioners. For some years, 'the Barcelona Model' has been seen as a touchstone of successful urban regeneration. Peter Buchanan (ibid.) writes of Barcelona's transformation as 'the most exemplary...because its guiding vision...fuses contemporary aspirations with local traditions...a vision of civic life for the end of the twentieth century'.

Barcelona's regeneration began with the return of democracy to Spain in 1977, but was given great impetus in the mid-Eighties through the award of the 1992 Olympics. These games, perceived as among the most successful in modern times, together with other international events - the UIA Congress in 1996, the Barcelona Forum in 2004 - have acted as both a justification and an opportunity for continued urban regeneration.

As well as the Olympic buildings on Montjuich and in the Vall d'Hebron, and the Olympic village at Nova Icaria, Barcelona has seen the reclamation of the Littoral, uniting the city once more with the sea, the construction of the Cinturon, a massive motorway belt to take through traffic out of the city centre, improvements to public transport and to the main drainage system, a hundred or more small-scale urban parks and open spaces, many of them with public sculpture, a rebuilt opera house, new arts centres and museums, hotels, a marina and many other new buildings.

The working class housing areas have not been ignored, with their new community centres and libraries, new open spaces, newly built homes, improvement grants for existing ones, job training, and health and education programmes.

Unlike London, Barcelona has attempted to retain a substantial public sector. And although its service sector, in common with many other European cities, continues to grow in proportion, the city region has followed a proactive industrial policy, replacing its declining old industries with new ones. New or regenerated industrial areas in the Zona Franca, Terrassa, Sabadell and elsewhere employ some 22.3% of Barcelona's employed workforce of 2.1 million, a figure proportionately, and even numerically, much higher than that for London, a city of twice the size (Pacte Industrial).

The Olympics came as a significant financial windfall to Barcelona, with funds coming not only from the city and the IOC, but also from Catalunya, from Spain as a whole, and even indirectly from the EU. Through them, Barcelona became more prominent on the world stage, and experienced a growth in tourism and of inward investment. But there can be little doubt that its continued growth and regeneration have also been due to the comparative strength and variety of its local economy, its maintained industrial base, its strong, proactive public sector, and its visionary planning policies.

Yet in spite of all this apparent success, Barcelona's plans have had their vociferous critics. Acutely aware of the contradictions and inequities of Barcelona's market-led recovery, and scornful of this year's Forum, and its claims to be the culmination of a long period of successful development, a number of local activists recently carried out their own debates, demonstrations and anti-Forum events.

Speaking as the Assemblea de Resistències al Forùm, they describe a city where decisions are taken to favour exploitative speculators and sponsors rather than local people, where over-reliance on tourism has commodified city life, where ecological sustainability is undervalued, and where there is a lack of democratic debate about future directions. In an echo of the London Docklands problem, they point to major mismatches between the funding poured into the Forum's speculative regeneration sites, and the dilapidated working class areas nearby (Assemblea).

And all this in a city which in the last twenty years, by any measure, has been more successful than London in achieving a balance between public and private sectors, between industrial and finance capital, between the development process and the creation of a humane environment.

Of the three questions posed above, I would find it difficult to answer any of them positively. The east London regeneration experience over the last 20 years has demonstrated that wealth does not naturally trickle down: housing, employment, the living environment, and much more besides, demonstrate significant inequality. The same is true, or at least is perceived to be so by some, of Barcelona.

Barcelona also stands accused of diverting funds into commercial, prestige projects which could better have been used on projects of greater social value, such as the improvement of housing and the environment in poorer areas. Even so, it has probably done better in this respect than London, where in the mid-Eighties, the value of commercial building work overtook public sector work for the first time since WW2, and where private housing work increased while newbuild council housing was discontinued: a position that has not significantly altered since (Construction Statistics).

Whether or not London gets the Olympics, the east London area and the Thames Gateway region need a system of democratic, strategic planning, a set of clear, socially responsible objectives and a coherent vision for achieving them. Britain's planning system used to be cited (admittedly often by British planners) as the best in the world. If this was true then, it is so no longer.

A vacuum exists at strategic planning level, with the responsible bodies either too powerless or too respectful of the market to be able to balance conflicting priorities, or sufficiently to represent the needs of the less privileged. One current example of this is the readiness with which the GLA planners, in London's new Spatial Development Strategy, have capitulated to the needs of finance capital, and have taken it as axiomatic that London's industry will continue to decline, and that there will be no return to council housing.

Plan-making is a less democratic process than it used to be, and instead of plans which are fully examined in public and amended after public debate, we now have 'masterplans' produced by a top-down process. The very term 'masterplan', common in the USA in the early Sixties, dropped out of use as a result of the increased respect given in the late Sixties and the Seventies to the public participation process. It returned during the Thatcherite Eighties and has remained as a perpetual reminder of where planning power now lies. The consultation process itself has become increasingly perfunctory; genuine public involvement and debate have been replaced by consultation documents which condescendingly invite people to 'have their say'.

In the end, the successful regeneration of east London will not stand or fall with the Olympic bid. It will depend first and foremost on the creation of an adequately good, democratically-based, strategic planning system, one that is at least as good, for all its faults, as that of Barcelona, and is imbued with at least as strong a sense of social equity, economic diversity and imaginative vision.

The fact that this system does not exist at present will make it more difficult to achieve an Olympics which contributes positively to the social fabric of east London and the longer term development of the region.

References:

1. Architects' Journal 11 July 1990, Peter Buchanan, 'Rebuilding a public realm'
2. Assemblea
3. Construction Statistics
4. London 2012
5. National Statistics
6. Pacte Industrial de Barcelona
7. Tower Hamlets 'Homelessness Strategy 2003-2008', L B Tower Hamlets (2003)

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