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- Convenors:
-
Constance Smith
(University of Manchester)
Saffron Woodcraft (UCL)
- Discussant:
-
Gillian Evans
(University of Manchester)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Environment
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 15
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Whether as political category, site of collapse or shattered home, tower block failure exposes precarity but can also act as a catalyst for urban transformation. How are urban success and failure imagined and materialised in relation to the tower block? What would a high-rise anthropology look like?
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore how notions of urban success and failure are imagined and materialised in relation to the architecture of the tower block.
In the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster in London and recent devastating tower block collapses in cities such as Nairobi, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro, failed buildings have exposed the injustices of austerity politics, the volatility of construction materials, and disregard for regulations and planning. These catastrophic failures have also reanimated debates about 'proper' forms of urban living, the political economy of the city and the widening inequalities and insecurities that seem to characterise contemporary urban life.
Yet, tower blocks have also been symbols of modernity, status and aspiration. From UK post-war promises of an inclusive future in the 'cities in the sky' to the edifice complex of skyscraper cities such as New York and Hong Kong, the tower block has been a place of dreams as well as nightmares. Even when they fail, tower blocks continue to shape the sociality, politics and materiality of our cities in important ways, influencing the design of future communities, economies of investment and development, and forms of political activism.
Whether as contested symbol, site of collapse or shattered home, tower block failure exposes the precarity of urban life whilst also acting as a catalyst for its transformation. We invite papers that ethnographically explore this shifting terrain. What would a high-rise anthropology look like? How might it illuminate the sociality, matter and imagination of the city at large?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the distinction between high-rise architecture in different political-economic regimes. What is the difference between state socialist, welfarist and wild capitalist verticality? Is the high-rise form inherently 'inhumane', or does it have progressive value?
Paper long abstract:
It is time, this paper argues, to re-orient our understanding of the architectural legacies of progressive high modernism (whether in its state socialist or welfare-statist incarnations): from a failure-centric lens, to a success-centric one; further, this paper moves towards a definition of socialist verticality, and to consider its fates in the 'wild capitalist' urban condition of today. 'Wild capitalism' is an emic term used throughout the post-socialist world to refer to the supposedly 'immature' years of capitalism's infancy during the 1990s. Far from being a thing of the past, I argue, 'wild capitalism' can be deployed as a heuristic through which to make sense of the global urban condition in the 21st century.
This paper considers the distinction between high-rise architecture in different political-economic regimes. What is the difference between state socialist, welfarist and wild capitalist verticality? Is the high-rise form inherently 'inhumane', or does it have progressive value? What is the connection between architectural verticality, centrality and monumentality? This paper surveys a range of ethnographic material, focusing on: the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, a Stalinist skyscraper today emanating a subversive 'still-socialist' 'public spirit' over its wild capitalist host city; on elite Stalinist high-rise residential architecture in Moscow and its contemporary fates; on the Soviet Constructivist idea of the 'social condenser' and its possible high-rise incarnations, from Moscow to New York; on the tragic fate of high-rise council housing in wild capitalist London, from Grenfell to Aylesbury; and on the contested replacement of low-rise (five-storey) Khrushchev-era housing with developer-built high-rise architecture in wild capitalist Moscow.
Paper short abstract:
The Grenfell Tower fire and estate demolitions in London have refocused attention on the question of tower block form and failure. This paper argues a pre-occupation with failed architecture obscures a deeper concern with proper ways to live and the 'social void' where 'urban community' should be.
Paper long abstract:
The devastating fire in Grenfell Tower in west London that killed 71 people gave new momentum to a long-running debate about the perceived failure of Britain's post-war high-rise housing estates. A persistent dystopian imaginary circulates around the post-war tower block, which implicates its architectural form in community breakdown, social alienation, crime, violence, and anti-social behaviour. A renaissance in high-rise living in British cities since the 1990s (Baxter, Lees, and Raco 2009) has done little to diminish the dominant discourse of architectural determinism; a tension that discloses the non-obvious meanings invested in tower block 'failure' as a political and cultural imaginary.
This paper will explore how a pre-occupation with failed architecture obscures a deeper concern with proper ways to live together in a dynamic and unstable modern world. Tower block 'failure' is better understood as a moral absence - a 'social void' where community' should be in the form of proper social relations to provide stability and meaning to urban life.
Based on fieldwork with planners and architects, the paper will examine how this concern shapes the terms on which success and failure are imagined in relation to urban development in London and intersects in myriad ways with the futures imagined for the new Legacy neighbourhoods in the Olympic Park.
Paper short abstract:
In Nairobi, a recent spate of collapsed tenement housing has drawn attention to 'grey development', ad hoc property speculation neither fully legal nor illegal. This paper explores collapse and its socio-political afterlives, highlighting how urban assemblages are made and remade.
Paper long abstract:
Nairobi, capital city of Kenya, is expanding at an extraordinary rate. The speed of this urban growth has produced a parallel threat of architectural collapse. This is particularly acute in low income neighbourhoods, where 'grey development' - ad hoc property speculation that is neither fully legal nor illegal - produces poor-quality tower blocks seemingly overnight. These are fragile architectures at risk of failure: Nairobi has recently experienced a spate of devastating tenement block collapses in which many have tragically died.
Though mostly overlooked by urban scholars, grey development is now the dominant silhouette of Nairobi's skyline. It forms the core of the construction industry, and houses the majority of the urban poor. This is in stark contrast to the city authorities' claims to be turning Nairobi into a 'world class' city of spectacular infrastructure and gleaming highrises. When grey development collapses, the disparity between these global city dreams and the everyday lives of ordinary Nairobians is materialised, animating new forms of debate and foregrounding the city's housing crisis.
This paper will explore the dynamics of architectural collapse in Nairobi, as well as its socio-political afterlives. Collapse makes visible the assemblages of human and non-human actors which constitute grey development. It does not indicate the end of a site so much as its drastic refiguration. Lives are remade alongside or even within the rubble; new economies of salvage emerge. Sites of collapse roll forward, making visible the politics and problems - but also the possibilities - of urban transformation.
Paper short abstract:
300 towers are planned for construction across London. This paper examines these residential towers within their wider context in East London at night, by questioning the role that light and darkness plays in making residents living in and nearby them feel at home, or not at home at night.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will take scope of recent developments in London's housing market, as residential high-rise buildings (re)animate the vertical city, at an unprecedented scale. Since the large-scale demolition of residential towers in East London during the 1980s and 1990s London has witnessed a strange revival of vertical living: more than 300 high-rise buildings have either been erected, are under construction or have been given planning permission since 2013, with 81% of these buildings residential, 23% located in Tower Hamlets and 34% across wider East London. My research examines these newly designed residential high-rises within their wider context at night, by questioning the role that light and darkness plays to how residents living in and nearby them feel at home, or not at home and how they inform people's sense of place andbelonging in East London. Through collaboration with lighting designers I will investigate to what extent the night time, and the lived experience of the night is taken into account when designing these vertical dwellings and how light and darkness is claimed to make them more liveable. The paper will focus on the conceptual framing of the project, engaging with literature on vertical geographies, architecture and domesticity as a way of unfolding the various practices that are invested in the co-production of luminous vertical city. The research will draw on ethnographic methods over a two-year period, and will involve creative collaboration with a photographer, lighting designers and The Geffrye Museum of the Home.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects upon the construction of high rise housing estates on the edge of Chongqing, South-West China as a space of post-displacement which migrant workers, evicted urban residents and expropriated farmers are displaced to, and the framing of these projects through neo-Maoist rhetorics.
Paper long abstract:
At the height of the rapid urbanisation of the city of Chongqing, South-West China, in 2010, the secretary of the city's Communist Party announced the next stage of the campaign to build a more egalitarian 'Red Chongqing': the construction of 40 million square metres of public housing over the next ten years, to meet the needs of an estimated 8 million extra migrant workers. Subsequent political scandals brough Chongqing's 'neo-Maoist' experiment in local government to an end, but the city's periphery is still dotted with hundreds of high-rise blocks of public housing, a remnant of the city's failed egalitarian promise. This paper is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chongqing, working with the inhabitants of peripheral public housing, and considers the high-rise estates on the edge of Chongqing as a space of post-displacement, to which groups disloded by the region's economic restructuring are displaced to: migrant workers, evicted urban residents and farmers whose land has been expropriated by the state.
This paper considers the history of the tower block in Chinese urban design and how it has become a ubiquitous symbol of urban modernity and progress, and contrasts this to the realities of life in the architectural remnants of Chongqing's egalitarian promise.