Regeneration and the 'sink estate spectacle'
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Version 0 of 1. Ben Campkin of UCL from his book Remaking London: Increasingly in the 1990s and 2000s sink estate spectacle has become a major trope in mainstream popular culture, having an adverse impact on the understanding and reception of modernist mass housing. Such discourses distract from the specific contexts and histories of particular estates, taking them into a representational realm of abstract generalisation. The famous-notorious Channel 4 ident, shot on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, is a classic illustration of Campkin's point. As Campkin explains, the grubby laundry was hung by the film makers, not the residents. It assisted what he calls the estate's depiction as "a desolate concrete dystopia" which "provides visual confirmation of tabloid journalists' descriptions of a 'ghost town' estate." Campkin continues: Misrepresenting reality, negative imaginaries of decline have also caused paralysis about how to improve these environments, and have contributed to an unhelpful polarisation of debate....In the [1960s-built] Aylesbury's case, many of the problems can be attributed to original cutbacks and compromises, complex costing models, inexperience in the use of system building, over-ambitious scale, poor communication between the architects and housing offices, and a lack of sustained investment and maintenance. One of the things I'm enjoying about Campkin's book, which also explores Elephant and Castle, Somers Town, Kings Cross and the Olympic Park as case studies of "decline and regeneration in urban culture," is that he eschews easy polemics. He challenges crude mischaracterisations of so-called "sink" estates and neighbourhoods and the people who live in them, and takes a hard look at the counterproductive, top-down, plain bad attitudes that often lurk beneath the "regeneration" banner. But at the same time he advises against nostalgia and romanticising urban decay: It would be odd to be anti-regeneration where it is seen as the ambition to distribute the health and wealth benefits associated with living in a city more equitably, improving living conditions, the public realm and quality of life. A further chapter in the long and often unhappy story of efforts to improve the Aylesbury - which go back to the election of Tony Blair in 1997 - will begin later this month, when Southwark announces its proposed new redevelopment partner for the estate. A concise and eloquently measured two-part history of the Aylesbury and the issues its has raised can be read at the excellent Municipal Dreams here and here. Details of Southwark's commitment last July to building 11,000 new council homes over the next 25 years is minuted on pages two and three here. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |