Rising East Online

Editor’s letter

Hello, Stranger

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m Andrew Calcutt, new editor of Rising East Online. I turned 50 in September. I was once a revolutionary and a record producer, though not at the same time, and my children are…

No, not a lot of people need to know that. What’s more pertinent is that in editing Rising East Online, I hope it will be more blog than bog-standard; that the contributions published in it will be threaded together, and positioned against each other, in such a way as to make a range of readers (and writers) think twice about what they are reading (and writing). Oddly enough, if it makes the familiar seem strange, it will be doing a fairly good job – and so will I.

Take the pieces which jointly comprise the current issue. They are grounded in familiar territory – the Thames Gateway; and the central theme, sustainability, is now a regular refrain in corporate and government policy. If it gets the go ahead, even the planned casino on Rainham Marshes – I kid you not – will be an eco-friendly, sustainable building.

With so many layers of assumptions about sustainability and its benefits, it would have been easy to add another layer to the consensus. Instead, a number of contributors – architect and guest editor of AD Ian Abley, and Blueprint editor Vicky Richardson, for example – question sustainability as it is conceived and applied, and find it lacking in merit. Their criticisms suggest that, where there is no there, there, as perhaps in the (policy) wonky construct of the Thames Gateway, ‘sustainability’ may be an attempt to find common ground which does not otherwise exist. Yet other contributors, like Pascale Scheurer RIBA, scrutinise sustainability and are more committed to it on account of their scrutiny; still others have come to promote and disseminate it as a general principle with specific, positive consequences for London, such as Green spokesperson Jenny Jones and Patrick Wilson, keen environmentalist and public relations manager for the University of East London.

The overall effect, I hope, is that all these disparate arguments and positions are equally up for grabs and open to contestation. Dialogue between them is not the end of the affair, however. The most important thing is that they interrogate each other in the mind of the reader, and in doing so give rise to a third party which is bigger than the sum of the parts which, as editor, I have curated. Insofar as Rising East Online is the platform for such interrogation, it becomes a space which belongs to none of its individual contributors. It is indifferent to them personally, but committed to the impersonality of interrogation and the third party space which is thereby created.

It would be nice to be able to refer to this as ‘public space’, but it would also be premature. The ‘public’, if we mean by this the expanded third party comprised of large numbers of individuals and what more they jointly become when then they are not merely individuals, is not here or anywhere to be seen – yet. But in the role that I have described, Rising East Online may at least offer space for the potential realisation of the public, albeit on a fledgling scale.

So please do no think I am being rude by saying I want you to relate to Rising East Online but I also want our relationship to stay strictly impersonal. I do not wish to join your network, and I have not got one for you to join, even if you wanted to. Far better, I think, for us to remain strangers; but strangers who have occasion to make the world strange in order to get closer to it; and strangers who share the view that there is more to life than personality.

Impersonally yours,

Andrew Calcutt
a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk

 

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