not exactly anything

"l'îlot sans être le terrain d'une pratique spécifique qui s'identifierait à lui, entre dans un ensemble plus vaste, sans rupture, où se devéloppe las vie sociale et dont la propriété principale est d'étre urbain"

…an interest in things which isn't invasive is an ordinary way to carry on: the peephole through the building site hoarding. Making a difference - destruction dressed up as passion - is to be avoided .

unleadable

"…one essential thing (about the nation state) is that there is a direct link between government and the bottom (the citizen at the bottom) which never existed in the past old empires or pre-national states. The state only reached down that far down: down below it was left to all manner of networks and hierarchies…"

It's easy to say that reform is necessary but indifference, rather than opposition, to it, is not often discussed. The industrial city was the precursor of the modern state. The reforms which its discontents engendered have led to an all-inclusive understanding of modern society - everyman under the sun of the state. From this emerges a politics that agitates in different ways for a fully mobilised society. Right now, the commonplaces in aid of full mobilisation are about global competition.

Architecture supports a kind of indifference to whatever the current political campaign of mobilisation might be. It refers to something outside, the part of us which is unleadable and couldn't give a fig for all the talk of the global challenge.

musical

No, not another middle-aged Alvar Aalto proponent. No, this is just a little note to say that one feature of the man's apparently offhand style is musicality. This fragment of a building in West Germany, built as the Federal Republic was reaching the zenith of its comfortable post-war certainties, does something musical with the elevation. It's a composition in which objects with an evident internal rythym of their own are combined together.

so ?

The plan is more euphoric (for the designer at any rate) than the elevation possibly because it is not subject to the figurative discipline of a facade. It may seem to the designer to be a tidy resolution of architectural intention and contingency - a diagram of this achievement. The elevation is much more fraught and reveals lack of intention - all that time spent in various dissipations a fraction of which might have been better spent in architectural investigation. The facade will not go away despite ever larger sheets of glass and various off-the-peg "systems" whether conceptual or constructional.

defrag

The word "consolidation" crops up a lot these days - e.g "consolidation of the retail sector". It's a buzz-word.

What does it mean ? Perhaps, a consolidated economy is like a defragmented computer hard-drive which is faster than a heavily fragmented one. The economists at GLA Economics welcome "consolidation in the grocery sector" for "enabling improved productivity and lower prices to consumers". The word consolidation crops up 8 times in a short report called "Retail in London" issued by GLA Economics. The GLA economists think consolidation is generally a good thing for London's retail sector but acknowledge the decline of small shop business in the face of competition from the larger, more powerful and efficient retailers.

OK: consolidation means fewer players and a core of very sussed traders taking the lions share of business. Does the visual representing a fragmented hard-drive look nicer than the one of a defrag'd drive ?

Town Bridge

Recently, the bridge structure carrying Kilburn High Street over the railway was rebuilt. It was a mammoth task very skillfully managed to allow as much ordinary use of the bridge as possible while the work was going on.

But, so far as public space is concerned, the reinstated bridge offers absolutely nothing new. We're right back where we started. Like giving birth to thin air.

The Kilburn job is done now for at least a generation.

A similarly vital road bridge exists in Kentish Town (see pic). Time will come when major repair and maintenance will have to be done to it as well.

When that moment comes, the opportunity to do something new and special to what is a vital urban piece should be taken with both hands.

To put back exactly what's already there when carrying out essential and thorough-going bridge maintenance would be culpable boneheadedness.

Tripe

Many times I have found myself agreeing with the concern expressed about empowering communities, that doing so will give rise to mob rule and expressions of prejudice and other horrible effects that appear to be largely avoided by national government and the current settlement.

Why does one accede to this anxiety ? The most obvious rebuttal of it is that local politics ought to be the arena of conscientious and educated people capable of taking local affairs seriously, and bring to them an informed awareness and a local understanding.

The capable treat the local arena as a desert. The arena has not disappeared but is not much more than an echo chamber for controversy. There is a lot of titillation of prejudice.

The local scene is handled as if its self-importance must be flattered whilst it is whipped into line by central government's hard line on cash disbursements. Local government does its work by convincing central government rather than convincing us.

Lassos

Convenient territorial demarcations are multiplied by the implementation of bureaucratic and technological solutions to urban problems

These territories or lassos - suggestings insiders and outsiders - become definitive of parts of the city and are always absorbed by commercial culture for marketing purposes.

1. Peripheriques (M25 etc)
   
2. planning "zones" and other demarcations e.g "conservation area"
3. other notable planning "protections" e.g Green Belt or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
   
4. "areas of benefit" associated by State funded "regeneration"
5. nature of building stock
6. travel zones
   
7. congestion charging zones
   
8. parking rights
9. school catchments
10. commuting times
11. car-sharing schemes & bike-sharing (Lyon - description of bike-sharing)

First Post

This is a blog of ideas for improving the city space which I inhabit in London. It's a commentary inevitably on things as they stand, on how they might be. Some of it is really frail, I know. There's always weakness if one's contribution is unsolicited.

Who's this for ? Anyone who'll be moderately lifted by a thought shared about improving this city and the less central parts where I am found, those parts subject to po-faced administration rather than any inspiration.

Our city invites us to think and speak.