“Avoiding the mistakes of the past”

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>A powerful dystopian imaginary dominates political and cultural representations of Britain's postwar tower blocks, which continue to be linked to social dysfunction and alienation despite extensive empirical research that challenges such claims. This article asks what contested declarations of failure “do” by examining how “tower block failure” is discursively deployed by placemaking professionals—planners, architects, housing managers, regeneration practitioners—engaged in the construction of a “model” mixed-tenure neighborhood in London's Olympic Park. Examining how the aesthetic figure of the “failed” high-rise housing estate is configured in relation to the normative models of citizenship and community that infuse social and spatial policy, I argue “failure” is entangled with a speculative, future-oriented economy of risk management, which refracts wider questions about the nonobvious forms that power takes in the neoliberal city.</jats:p>

Light violence at the threshold of acceptability

“…While little work has explored the legal geographies of vertical urbanism and high-rise development, a rich body of work in urban studies and associated spatial disciplines has explored how the loosening and in some instances withdrawal of planning regulations and obligations on high-rise developments have diminished the regulatory capacity of local authorities (Appert and Montes, 2015; Graham, 2015; Nethercote, 2019; Smith and Woodcraft, 2020; Woodcraft, 2020). In the United Kingdom, critics suggest that local councils are ‘progressively undermined by central government’s desire to be friendly to developers’ (Moore, 2014: 11) and that their role in harnessing the onslaught of vertical development is increasingly minimised.…”

Sanitation challenges in Dar es Salaam: the potential of Simplified Sewerage Systems

“…With a 4.7 per cent annual population growth rate, the population of 5.5 million is expected to almost double by the mid-2030s, (44) presenting a huge challenge to the capacity of local authorities and utilities to deliver infrastructure for all.…”