Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the benefits and challenges of urban transformation at East Bank, a new cultural and academic district planned to open in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2023.

Paper long abstract:

The London 2012 Olympic Games brought dramatic change to the communities of Stratford and neighbouring boroughs in east London. Rapid urban transformation across this part of the city is not new and has, over the past century, resulted in both positive change, and problematic disruption and displacement. The public corporation established to deliver the promised sustainable legacy of the Games and reinvent Olympic Park infrastructure for long-term public use, conceived of East Bank, a billion-pound investment project adding cultural and academic organisations to an existing framework of housing and business development. In 2014 the V&A accepted the invitation to join the East Bank campus and will build a new museum and a collection research centre across two sites in the Olympic Park. This paper will consider the role the V&A and other East Bank partners play in the development and gentrification of these east London boroughs, where ethnic and socio-economic demographies are some of the most diverse and starkly contrasted in the UK. It will ask how new public cultural infrastructure can, and should, serve fractured and increasingly divided communities to create equitable spaces, experiences and opportunities for everyone; and will discuss the opportunity the V&A has to document, display and engage people in discourses around the challenges and benefits of urban transformation.