The 'nature' of legacy under localism: fragmentation along the greenway

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The ‘nature’ of legacy under localism: fragmentation along the Greenway

Andrew Hoolachan

Architectural Research Quarterly / Volume 18 / Issue 04 / December 2014, pp 342 - 352DOI: 10.1017/S135913551500007X, Published online: 19 February 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S135913551500007X

How to cite this article:Andrew Hoolachan (2014). The ‘nature’ of legacy under localism: fragmentation along the Greenway. Architectural ResearchQuarterly, 18, pp 342-352 doi:10.1017/S135913551500007X

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arq . vol 18 . no 4 . 2014 criticism342

Andrew Hoolachan The ‘nature’ of legacy under localism

1 The Greenway during the 2012 Olympic Games

2 ‘Nature’ at the Counter Café, Hackney Wick

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‘Where the pastoral meets the post-industrial’.1 London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) Chief of Design, Kathryn Firth’s words to describe the area that the Corporation inherited as part of its remit following the Summer Olympic Games in 2012.2 Seeming to exemplify this, the former industrial warehouses of Hackney Wick, such as the Counter Café [2], allow shrubbery growth and sprawling ivy; their brick exerior walls emblazoned with art work reminiscent of William Morris. What we have here is recognition of the area’s pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial episodes; a narrative that serves to provide some temporal coherence to what is a complex and fragmented landscape.

Since the medieval period, London’s East End, where the Olympic Park is located, has been the area to which unsightly, immoral or polluting services required by the City were always relegated, from manufacturing to prostitution.3 But even at the time when arguably the most industrial damage was done to the landscape, there was always in the background a sense of moral panic about a loss of nature. In keeping with the broad intellectual trends of the time, late nineteenth-century reformers sought to allay the social, environmental and political problems of the day which resulted from mass urbanisation on an unprecedented scale. Many of the responses were both technological and architectural.

Faced with challenges of a similar magnitude over 150 years later, we now seek architectural responses to managing our changing climate. Today, as then, architecture and urban planning are part of a constellation of players, including governments, developers and landowners, who may make or break attempts to solve urban environmental problems. This paper presents a situation in the shadow of the Olympic Park, where the fate of a green route through east London was beset by political changes at Westminster, highlighting the inherent tensions in multi-scalar sustainability planning.

Localism and sustainabilityIn the 1850s Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to construct a new legacy for London: its first modern sewer system. Like many other grand projects of this period, this was another symbol of the interconnectedness of people, labour, space and time that would come to re-define cities in the wake of modernity.4 The East End would become the site of this new infrastructure that would take sewage from the metropolis – at the time the world’s largest – and deposit it in the tidal area of the Thames, freeing the city from cholera, its ‘Great Stink’, and slowly bringing natural life back to the Thames. Today, as we have awakened to global environmental problems, it is cities that are key drivers of policy and design initiatives to deal with the uncertain future of our changing climate. Any large urban area that is built suddenly on such a grand scale and by a single authority will clearly reveal the zeitgeist of contemporary urban policy and design and, as such, the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park reflects today’s articulation of ‘best practice’ in designing a sustainable neighbourhood in the 2010s and beyond.

However, as our cities attempt to deal with global environmental challenges, a parallel strain of thought is resurfacing which claims in some aspects to be about climate change, but may also be about resisting perceived globalisation. As the UK Independence Party claims political legitimacy at the grassroots and as Scotland questions its future in the United Kingdom, localism has returned to government as a central theme in planning legislation, enshrined in the Localism Act of 2010.5 Although localism in various articulations is certainly not new,6 this is the first time in the UK that it has been so clearly defined and so powerfully legislated. In simplistic terms, localism is an attempt to imagine into reality a set of social, political, economic or environmental processes that operate over a smaller geographic scale than is currently the case. In most cases, there is also a Heideggerian tendency to reflect ‘nearness’, or to construct an imagined centre and periphery.7

criticism arq . vol 18 . no 4 . 2014 343

criticismThe fate of plans to transform a green route above part of

London’s sewer system highlights contested notions of

sustainability and the changing politics of localism in the UK.

The ‘nature’ of legacy under localism: fragmentation along the GreenwayAndrew Hoolachan

doi: 10.1017/S135913551500007X

arq (2014), 18.4, 342–351. © Cambridge University Press 2015





Greenway allows us to understand the interplay between the promises of a sustainable legacy and the new localism.

Sustaining what?Although sustainability has become a widely used policy term, its various meanings are almost as broad. Many models of sustainability are based on the influential 1989 UN definition of not sacrificing our future resources to meet our current demands.13 Yet there have been numerous attempts to redefine sustainability since.14 One uniting conceptual framework, however, seems to be based on the notion that society interacts with nature in three ways. Such triadic frameworks categorise our human activities into social, economic and environmental realms. Notions of sustainable development have rested on the balance between all three:15 if we could find a situation where we had social justice, economic growth and environmental protection, we would have ideal sustainable development. In recent years, this model has been modified to become less anthropocentric, so that socio-economic relations, including the balance between growth and social justice, take place within the constraints of the environment: both in terms of resource use and conservation.16

One problem of the ways in which policies are formed and implemented is due to the nature of governance. As governance requires an understanding of society to regulate and manage it, it also responds to societal problems with techniques and modes than can never truly reflect a complex reality, so are often simplified. With regards to sustainability in policy, state-actors naturally reduce the complexity of the socio-economic processes of a carbon-based society, to be able to identify problems and to come up with solutions.17

Thus, sustainability as a government policy response has been critiqued from a wide range of sources for various reasons. The common critique is that sustainability is not a neutral concept. What kind of society are we sustaining and is there uniform agreement on what this is?18 Sustainability has become a quest for a conflict-free, neutral and harmonious balance between man and nature in which sustainable development discourse merely masks conflicts over material resources, space and equality.19 Environmental conflicts are an increasing evidence-base which reveal underlying socio-economic conflicts that may have otherwise been rendered invisible. A discourse of sustainable development helps to maintain a conflict-free society in which problems are swept under the carpet. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek goes as far to suggest that contemporary thinking on ecology, whereby we think nature was once a pure and balanced entity which man has imbalanced, is pseudo-scientific and can be read as a secular version of the Fall of Man.20

We can therefore think of the various ways sustainability is conceived as being based on how nature is understood. Although the subject of humanity’s relation to its environment has been

Any act of localism, whether legislated by the state or driven by grassroots action, implicitly intersects with discourses on sustainability. Consider the proliferation of interest in promoting British Food, or locally sourced food, micro-breweries, farmers markets, and local currencies such as the Totnes Pound.8 All of these localisms attempt to promote local economies for various reasons, but often citing sustainability as a core value.9 But what is the ideal scale at which we should plan for sustainability? Is there a natural capacity over which optimum states of human-environmental economies can be acted? What is the scalar articulation of sustainability in urban planning? Should it be local, urban, regional or national?

The quest for an optimal or ideal commune can be traced far back to antiquity, but in recent expressions we see it in the garden cities of Ebenezer Howard, the regionalism of Patrick Geddes, and of course eco-towns. In each case, an ideal scale of urban development was articulated in extent, but also in a nested hierarchy of scales. For example, Howard imaged a network of garden cities with hard boundaries, spatially aligned to Walter Christaller’s Central Place Theory, where a large central city would be surrounded by equally sized towns.10

The late Neil Smith railed against what has been described as a neo-Kantian articulation of scale proposed by Richard Hartshorne in which scalar concepts such as ‘city’ and ‘region’ were mental conveniences, ideal forms with no material substantive physical reality.11 Smith argued strongly that we can indeed measure scalar geographies in the capitalist re-organisation of cities and regions in the wake of the crises of the 1970s.12 Indeed, can we really argue that the local is purely a mental convenience with no material basis? Does a local government boundary, essentially a representational space, reflect the material physicality of the city it governs? If we understand cities as complex, networked, dynamic and porous entities can any form of spatial fixing really serve as a meaningful claim to that city? Thus in a city like London, does governing for sustainability follow the neat lines of local authorities or should we be thinking of the city as an interconnected ecosystem with planning at all scales from the home, to the neighbourhood, region, and nation as more useful? Can the UK’s new Localism Act therefore deliver a sustainable legacy for east London?

In this paper we will consider the fate of the ‘Greenway’, a section of the London-wide green grid, and the long-distance Jubilee Greenway, which runs from Victoria Park to Beckton on the surface of Bazalgette’s earth-covered sewers, to open up and consider some of the implications of promising a sustainable legacy for east London under a new paradigm of localism. First we will question the assumptions of sustainability as a policy, allowing us to consider the question of how we value nature. Then, we will interrogate what we mean by the local before explaining localism as a policy and its impact on the legacy, before showing how the




The ‘nature’ of legacy under localism Andrew Hoolachan

we see, through taking nature as our empirical object, that the question of scale is always in the background. Are there different articulations of nature at different scales when we plan our cities? Does scale determine what we mean by sustainable urbanism? Like nature, scale too can also be thought of as being opened out or closed in, as we see with contemporary understanding of localism, which implies that the scale of the neighbourhood is the most effective level to plan our cities. So how is it that localities have been considered as scalar constructions, which in turn determine ideal forms of sustainability planning?

The scalar politics of placeFew people today would argue that localities are bounded entities, although there has been some disagreement over what physical or metaphorical dimension they take. For example, for the likes of Neil Smith, David Harvey and Manuel Castells, the scale of the local (and for that matter any scale), can be measured empirically in reality. This may be through the material inequality within cities,23 producing areas of acute social exclusion, ethnic and racial disadvantage to environmental resources,24 or through the use of physical streets and squares to champion minority rights and to gain visibility in the city.25 Others have argued that geographic scales are less measureable through the physical and material, but more discursive: the very act of naming something ‘local’, is more powerful in enabling a material sense of that locality.26 For example, the branding of a city as having a cultural quarter or an ethnic quarter by a state-actor may be a very powerful tool in transforming that area. A discursive understanding of scale enables us to question the politics of how places are constructed. Thus in the case of the Localism Act, the idea of the local as a bounded entity of people who are oppressed by a centralising state bureaucracy was a powerful narrative in getting the bill through parliament.27

Whether or not localities are defined more through their material existence or through discourse, none of them are bounded entities situated within a nested set of hierarchies. Metaphors such as the glocal, or ‘think global act local’, thrown-togetherness, trans-local assemblages, and scale-jumping, propose a sense of the local which, like our nature metaphor, is opened-out. Places do exist, but the processes that make them unique are dependent on the relations between them and other places. Castells in his later work argues for ‘spaces of places’ and ‘spaces of flows’, but such binary thinking has evolved to argue that fixedness and fluidity are indeed dependent on one another, mirroring Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the co-evolutionary relationship of the smooth and the striated.28

Thus there can be shared metaphors in the way in which we think about nature and place; as entities that have been thought about as bounded and static, along a spectrum to the totally porous and dynamic. As a site in east London that has

explored since antiquity, it is René Descartes who is often held responsible for a shift in philosophical thinking about nature. Prior to Descartes, the medieval mind may have considered humans as part of nature and its cycles, but the development of Cartesian thinking promoted a distinction of humans as either above, apart from or separate to nature. We see in the gardens of Versailles for example an extreme expression of our ability to control nature, but, by the Romantic period, attempts were made to get lost in nature, to feel and experience its awe and power. But yet still, we are guilty of romanticising it as some kind of internally coherent system that we have disrupted. The legacy of a Cartesian Romanticism, which has haunted urban planning throughout the twentieth century, has been a major influence on the development of garden cities, green belts, zoning and suburban sprawl.

The idealist Fabians of the late nineteenth century who were influential in shaping Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform were part of a broad movement that sought a return to nature. They thought that many of the urban social problems could be solved by getting back to a simpler way of life centred on small-town living. Concurrent with the Arts and Crafts movement, farming and gardening were seen as virtuous activities and one of the purest expressions of ‘third nature’,21 the natural balance between man and nature. In Hampstead Garden Suburb for example, it was decreed that all residents must have immediate access to and a view upon, green space.

At the same time, these idealisations take place over a spatial extent: the garden, the suburb, the city or the region, or have been considered as having potential to be self-contained, self-reproducing entities. Indeed Geddes envisioned a closed regional biosphere where the City was in harmonious balance with its hinterland, while the garden city was a city of an ideal size situated in a green agricultural belt. What this has led to is a thinking about nature in urban planning that is either closed or open. By closed, we mean the idealisation of nature that has an extent and is situated within a larger-scale whole. To contrast this, we might consider nature not as operating over an ideal scale, that is harmonious, balanced and self-reproducing, but as having no essence, that is just a ‘series of unimaginable catastrophes’.22 A planning and/or architectural response to this open notion of nature would therefore not only critically re-examine a blanket green belt policy, in which green space has lost all meaning (after all, agricultural land is hardly natural), critically to challenge SLOAP (Space left over after planning), and to start conceptually opening up different types of so-called ‘green space’. Is a park sustainable just because it has grass? Is the myriad of suburban sprawl sustainable, because everyone has a garden?

We saw above then that how we think about urban nature can be metaphorically expressed as open and closed. But we used various scales to address this idea, from the city to the region. Thus





are. The second, influenced by Edmund Burke, is called communitarianism and argues for a strong civic society where resources are allocated and distributed as a form of welfare. We see influences of this form of localism in planners such as Peter Krotopkin, and the thinkers of the Garden City Movement, who sought to articulate social equity and reform over the ideal scale of the garden city or suburb. The third and fourth discourses of localism, Clarke and Cochrane call spaces of dependency and spaces of engagement. The former describes a situation where local actors are dependent on each other inside the locality, such as a network of local businesses or growth coalitions. The latter describes attempts to regulate the capitalist economy by re-organising welfare provision, decentralising power to micro-agencies, or giving back power to self-regulating or enterprising communities. Thus our first two discourses of localism operate along an axis of political economy: the free-market versus planned society. The last two discourses understand more clearly the ambivalence of place and the interdependency of people, place and the state.

We can detect almost all of these conceptualisations of political localism in contemporary discourse surrounding not just the Localism Act itself but the notion of the ‘Big Society’ put forward by the Conservative Party in their 2010 UK election campaign.30 ‘The people’ are being mobilised in discourse, especially in introductions to policy documents such as the Plain English Guide to the Localism Act (all localities, it seems, speak plain English).31 Chantal Mouffe argues that ‘the people’ are always used in populist rhetoric to promote a common-sense view, where local knowledge is presented as superior to that which is conceived far away, such as state policy.32 The main thrust of the Localism Act is to empower communities, abolish regional planning, allow citizens to challenge their local authority, but also allow local authorities greater autonomy, freeing up their procurement abilities. This represents the greatest shake-up of UK planning legislation in modern history; Olesen argues that it reflects a broad shift towards the deregulation of urban planning structures throughout Europe.

However, there is a streak in the history of British planning whereby attempts at localisation have resulted in more direct control from central government in Westminster, overriding local authority control and regional planning. For example, the enterprise zones of the 1980s sought to override local government control in depressed areas such as Liverpool and Dundee, but in doing so increased the closeness of decision-making to Whitehall, as many of these places came under direct charge of certain government ministers such as Michael Heseltine, who was described as the ‘minister for Liverpool’. Similarly, in the current condition, it is argued that local government is wasteful and inefficient and that local people know what’s best for them. But this argument that local administrations are ‘against’ the people, lacks an understanding of the historical conditions of

simultaneously affected urban nature and place, the Jubilee Greenway becomes an interesting example of how we govern for sustainability in the contemporary metropolis. The effects of the raised section between Victoria Park and Beckton signify the control of not only fluid but excrement to be carried off into some unknown depository, rendering it invisible. At the same time, the structure that contains this long flow of liquid waste, is also a solid barrier on its northern and southern flanks, preventing any easy street-level communication. Its significance as a barrier is comparable to that of a railway and produces quite similar spatial patterns on its edges: houses with gardens back on to it and the irregular spaces it produces are used for miscellaneous activities. Yet on its surface, moving in an east–west direction, we see this inversion in the form of the easy flow of the pedestrian access route, with the potential to connect a vast stretch of these terraced houses and miscellaneous spaces across the two extremely different sides of Newham [3].

The above discussion of nature and place, and of how we can understand their scalar forms and spatial extents, are useful exercises allowing us to visualise these various arrangements. Now we turn to the reality of governance which expresses a very particular idea of the local, one with significant implications for how we govern for a promised sustainable legacy under a localist agenda.

We have seen that notions of the local are ontologically contested; yet the idea that in current policy it is something radically new is untrue. The precedents to localism have been discussed by Nick Clarke and Allan Cochrane, Kristian Olesen, and Phil Allmendinger and Graham Haughton. Firstly Clarke and Cochrane present four discourses of localism that have existed historically.29 The first is the Classical-Liberal tradition of John Stuart Mill, which argues simply that localism is the most efficient form of government, which is less bureaucratic, and responds to local needs. People are engaged because they know in person who their representatives

3 The myriad plans before the LLDC came into being as part of the Localism Act, with the thick east–west line representing the Greenway cutting through various planning boundaries

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such as Regional Development Agencies in the UK were adopted at this time. But now, Olesen asserts, we are in the period of roll-with-it neoliberalism and planning: this is the most neoliberal urban planning has been, and is very much tied to the classical liberal idea of minimal state interference and the populist idea of the supremacy of local knowledge. It has been used to dismantle strategic co-ordination, regional tier governance, and obfuscate problems that need more-than-local expertise such as sustainability. This shift within the neoliberal paradigm is certainly notable in the adoption of localism by the coalition government, and their rejection of strategic spatial planning. Here again, we see scale becoming a central site of contestation under a reconfiguration of capitalism, similar to Smith’s analysis of the 1970s. So under these conditions how can urban planning deliver the sustainability promises of the Olympic Legacy?

The Jubilee Greenway upgrade: a missed opportunityThe shift from aides-faire to roll-with-it planning can be seen in the scrapping of the London Development Agency (LDA). The LDA provided London with strategic co-ordination of planning and architecture across the city’s boroughs. The group within the LDA that produced work on public realm, Design for London, has also been scrapped. This has left the city without an agency or a set of experts to co-ordinate the London Plan, for which all responsibility lies with the Mayor. Once again, the Localism Act has inadvertently placed big government in a greater position of authority. This is more significant when we consider that the creation of the London Legacy Development Corporation was a direct result of the Localism Act. This has effectively created an area of intense, coherent development with a sustainable agenda, which seems to have a hard boundary where its jurisdiction ends, surrounded by four separate local authorities with weakened budgets and divergent sustainability plans. All of this in the sprawling network of people, buildings and infrastructure that makes London a metropolis. How therefore can the Localism Act deliver the initial promises of a sustainable legacy given that it has presented a more fragmentary approach to governance in an already physically fragmented part of London?

With proposals in the Lower Lea Valley assessed on a case-by-case basis, across four different boroughs and numerous statutory authorities, there has often been little thought for the overall picture – for how disparate projects are adding up to make a new piece of city. Unlike other design watchdogs, which all too often wade in with a lack of local understanding, too late to make a useful difference, Design for London has been there from the beginning, initiating discussions and stitching together key parties in a complex choreography of stakeholders and budgets.36

The above statement was taken from the Design for London document Stitching the Fringe, which summarised the projects the team had been working on, between the announcement of the bid and the document’s publication, soon after which

their development. Local government was not imposed upon cities, but actually lagged behind the rapidly changing social conditions that required their powers of organisation (such as the Waste Management Act 1855 which initiated the sewer constructions), and were a product of local conditions, not opposed to them. This argument also runs counter to the politically conservative idea that pragmatism or organic change is best for Britain, which is said to be why the UK does not have a constitution and why it retains the monarchy. Clarke and Cochrane write:

When localism is used in political discourse, its meaning is often purposefully vague and imprecise. It brings geographical understandings about scale and place together with sets of political understandings about decentralisation, participation, and community, and managerialist understandings about efficiency and forms of market delivery – moving easily between each of them, even when their fit is uncertain. It is often intentionally associated, confused, or conflated with local government, local democracy, community, decentralisation, governance, privatisation, civil society etc. for political effect.33

Thus when the local is used in politics, it often draws on a wide set of representations, most of which are positive. Who would argue that local people do not know what is best for their own communities? At the same time, local government is often seen as bureaucratic and inefficient; in both cases – the community and local government – there is a contesting of the local.

Olesen argues that this vagueness around the deployment of ‘the local’ is indeed part of a neoliberal agenda.34 Despite contemporary understandings of place outlined above, such as the glocal, Olesen claims that places are becoming discursively transformed for the benefit of neoliberalism, not just in the UK but across north-west Europe. He argues that this is an attack on the spatial planning of the 1990s which in itself was seen as a positive shift away from the entrepreneurialism and single-project or area-focused planning of the 1980s (such as enterprise zones in the UK). While there are many different forms of neoliberal planning in reality, he summarises that the general trend is characterised by new public management where planning becomes one of a series of services which deliver to a population who are seen as consumers. The logic of neoliberalism is seen as the most rational approach, and genuine discourse and disagreement in planning has been silenced.

[…] certain policy objectives have developed into the status of being beyond discussion and have been depoliticised. […] depoliticisation is understood as a discursive tactic of presenting a logic of no alternatives in order to shape preferences and remove conflicting views and ‘politics’ from spatial strategy-making.35

This depoliticisation, or the post-political, has continued on from the period in planning of the 1990s which Olesen names aides-faire, where the state strategically supported neoliberalism in Third Way politics. Regional spatial planning





In this description of the Greenway we can see the potential for many variants of sustainability discourse. We can emphasise the length of it as it cuts through various housing areas (some classed as being highly deprived), so would encourage sustainable modes of transport, and may stimulate a local economy. We can look to the environmental and ecological aspect of sustainability, noting the area’s ample shrubs, trees, grass and wide banks of open unused space. Perhaps this could be used for horticulture? We can also read it as a form of heritage conservation – protecting and emphasising the nineteenth-century legacy of London’s first assault on the pollution of the Thames, which had caused so much disease, stink and outbreaks of cholera. Even the Byzantine-inspired designs of the Cathedral-like pumping stations are notable listed buildings. Thus, a case for a full upgrade of the entire Greenway can be made – whether or not we consider sustainability cynically as a policy driver of neoliberalism, or if we believe that simply connecting disparate areas by a pedestrian cycle route with access to a form of urban nature is a ‘good thing’.

In 2010 Adams and Sutherland were commissioned to produce a ‘Wider Vision’ for the Greenway, building on the themes described in the 2008 document. The document is extremely rich in analysis and provides a budgeted future strategy for improvement along the entire length of the Greenway from Victoria Park to Beckton. To name a few, the analysis considers the following: ownership and stakeholders, local connectivity, the location of schools, sports facilities, existing social enterprise, ecology sites and points of access. The vision is split into three sections: ‘Creating Coherence’, ‘Making Places’, and ‘Adding Activities’. Example

the team was disbanded. There were numerous projects that sought to integrate the LLDC area into the surrounding urban fabric, literally stitching the urban grain of London. This was in the form of dozens of bridges, pedestrian improvements and landscaping. At Leyton, for example, the team sought to strengthen the area’s local characteristics, and at Hackney Marshes sought to improve access and increase use of the playing fields by diversifying their function.

The Jubilee Greenway project is, however, neither complete nor incomplete but rather has suffered from a collapse of investment that would have seen it improved to the extent that it could have been a direct architectural response to the stated aims of legacy. But more crucially, this upgrade would have linked, both physically and symbolically, the new paradigm of a sustainable legacy from the intensely managed LLDC area deep into the borough of Newham, linking schools, housing estates, jobs, leisure facilities and community projects, with the greatest mode of transport being by bike or on foot.

The Greenway can be divided into two sections based on two separate plans that have been produced in recent years by the architecture practice Adams and Sutherland. The first is a plan covering the LLDC area. This was adopted and upgrades to this section of the Greenway brought to completion for the Games. We can see this upgrade now, in the form of landscaping: carefully managed grass, small stone monuments, seating areas as well as recycling bins. This plan describes the entire Greenway as follows:

The Greenway is a hidden gem in east London: an almost continuous high level 7km traffic-free pedestrian / cycle route and green corridor, located on top of the embankment of the Northern Outfall Sewers […]. As a key element of the East London Green Grid, the Greenway provides a network of strategic connections, linking Tower Hamlets in the west with the River Lea Waterways, the new Olympic Park, and Newham through to the boundary with Barking and Dagenham in the east […]. As it crosses the Lea Valley, the Greenway is marked by a dramatic topography: tidal rivers, large-scale infrastructure, industrial activity and now the Olympics and its associated legacy. Further to the east the scale is more domestic, with the Greenway cutting a swathe through the terraced houses and back gardens of Newham […]. The Northern Outfall Sewer and Abbey Mills Pumping Station are the most significant visible parts of Joseph Bazalgette’s pioneering London sewage system; a triumph of mid-nineteenth century vision and engineering. […] Currently the Greenway, renovated and ‘branded’ in the early 1990s, is in a poor condition, leading to a perceived lack of activity and use and a consequent lack of security […]. The Greenway is unique amongst Olympic projects in that it concerns a refurbishment in close proximity to an existing historic and yet still fully operational structure. The project not only responds to a new public realm but also contains elements of heritage landscape and grade listed building works. The Greenway has also become an important ecological corridor and habitat in its own right.37

4 ‘The Mounding’, Adams & Sutherland architects

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has been lost entirely, but it seems that a plan already at an advanced stage of consideration, with clear and defined costings, impacts, and partnerships in place, has been wasted.

This is reflected in the landscape, too. It is very clear when walking from Stratford High Street, where the section of the Greenway within the LLDC boundary is well maintained and ordered. Beyond this border, the grass turns from a bright green, to darker colours with weeds, shrubs, litter and rusting signs; the surface paving is uneven in places and could do with some more investment. There was also a suggestion in the Wider Strategy, based on community feedback, that the area felt unsafe [5].

Let us remind ourselves of how this has occurred: under the aides-faire neoliberalism of the previous government, a more strategic approach to planning was available in the name of the London Development Agency. The experts on the public realm within the Agency were Design for London. Under the new emerging paradigm of roll-with-it planning, of which the Localism Act is a part, broad strategic and joined-up thinking has in the case of the Jubilee Greenway project been lost due the abolition of the LDA. This is a blow to the idea of a sustainable legacy for east London, and not just to the area covered by the LLDC, as was expressed recently in the House of Lords committee report on the legacy:

Tensions between some of the host boroughs and the LLDC are a cause for concern. In setting out planning policy, making planning decisions and negotiating Section 106 agreements, the LLDC needs to ensure that it is working closely with the relevant local authority for the area concerned. The LLDC should examine its working practices and decision making structures in

improvements are things like the ‘The Mounding’, a grassy version of the Spanish Steps which uses the gradient of the earthworks covering the sewer to create terraces of paths and steps up the south side of the Greenway, looking onto a large existing public playing field [4].38

Not all the upgrades and interventions along the Greenway vision are funded by a single agency or managed by a single stakeholder. However, going through a list of each of the interventions in the section ‘Making Places’, in which The Mounding is just one project, for nearly all we have the LDA listed as a potential source of funding. It is for this reason that since the abolition of the LDA in 2012, this entire vision has been shelved for the time being. It may be, as the manager of the View Tube (a community café and cycling hub on the Greenway) told me that scattered individual projects may continue ad hoc. But in terms of the ‘whole’ vision, there is no central source of funding or management for it to go ahead as proposed.

So, from the 1990s until 2005, the Greenway had changed little. In the run-up to the Games the area inside what would become the LLDC area was landscaped and improved, with a form of nature that was controlled, landscaped and organised. Before the Localism Act, the Wider Greenway Strategy was produced with a thorough and detailed future vision with tangible social, economic and environmental benefits for the wider area – such that it would conform to the broad notions of sustainability introduced above. But, since the Localism Act has abolished the LDA, together with its funding stream, and fragmented the governance landscape, future planning for such an upgrade remains uncertain. This is not to say that the vision

5 The boundary between the LLDC and Newham where we see a different form of ‘nature’ begin

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Authority, which was, along with other agencies, responsible for organising the infrastructure of the Games.

3. Paul Newland, The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008).

4. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1983).

5. The Localism Act seeks to lessen the power of local government planning and increase the power of community planning. It is the most radical change of planning policy in the UK in modern times. It is part of a broader political strategy of shrinking the state following the financial crisis of 2008 and the election in 2010 of a centre-right coalition government led by the Conservative Party, which has a history (esp. 1979 to 1997) of reducing the state and adopting neoliberal policies.

Notes1. Kathryn Firth, Regenerative

Catalysts: From Urban Surgery to the Olympic Park. Talk held at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, 6 November 2012.

2. The Olympic Legacy refers to the post-Games period of development in east London until roughly 2030. The LLDC is responsible only for the Queen Elizabeth II Park, which also includes housing and infrastructure. Responsibilities for legacy plans for the surrounding ‘wider’ legacy area of east London are shared between the London Mayor and local authorities and are not as clearly defined as they are in the LLDC area. The LLDC inherited sole planning and development powers from the Mayor. It has the same power as a local government planning authority, although is not itself elected. It replaced the Olympic Delivery

the global problem of sustainability, which should surely be tackled at all scales and not just through a romanticised ‘local’.

When Olympic Games come to cities, they represent an intense globalist assemblage of capital, infrastructure and power. When any city presents a bid both to the International Olympic Committee and to their citizens (both in the nation and the host city), it must be in a way that shows the benefits of hosting the Games in today’s world, where sustainability has become policy de rigueur to the extent that, when taken uncritically, it means everything and nothing simultaneously. Future host cities should be cautious of what they promise when, as we see in the case of London, local and national politics can disrupt totalising long-term visions put in place to justify another mega-event in a city desperate to prove its openness to the world. In the times of Bazalgette, London dazzled its empire with the Great Exhibition, which demonstrated the new innovations of the industrial age. The ambivalence of progress was obvious; industrial capitalism churning up human lives in the city, while advances in engineering and medicine gradually improved the human condition by the end of the century. One would hope that a contemporary legacy that dealt with our own ambivalent condition of wealth at the expense of the planet’s resources would have a supportive institutional structure in which to realise itself. Yet, it seems that despite the rhetoric of a sustainable legacy we can’t provide a system of governance that is able to deal with the major environmental challenges that face cities like London in this coming century.

this regard, taking on board concerns raised by the host Boroughs. Strong joint working will be essential to developing and delivering a clear vision for the future of East London.39

Although this case is an isolated example, and a snapshot in time, it is nonetheless revealing. It is too early to be able to make assessments of a policy that, by its nature, makes the planning system more fluid and more locally specific. What this example has shown is that planning for sustainability under localism in London has put a significant project that conforms to a certain view of sustainability on hold. Perhaps localism can work in less transient or more homogeneous boroughs, where the population is better able to engage with the language of governance or where there is a more clearly established set of locals. But if localism can work for some areas, what are we to do with areas that find local participation in decisions more difficult? Citizens in certain local authorities may find themselves disadvantaged compared to other boroughs due to this Act. Indeed, preliminary research by Green Alliance has shown that, since the Localism Act came into force, 37% of local authorities have deprioritised any sustainability plans they had, yet 35% said that localism might improve their sustainability plans.40 How can such divergence in sustainability policy between boroughs effectively tackle the problem of climate change, especially when the onus on adaptation and mitigation is being levelled upon local governments in, for example, the National Planning Policy Framework? It seems that there is a scalar discrepancy between wanting to empower people and places on the one hand, and to deal with

6. Phil Allmendinger and Graham Haughton, ‘The Evolution and Trajectories of English Spatial Governance: “Neoliberal” Episodes in Planning’, Planning Research and Practice, 2013, pp. 37–41.

7. Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 144.

8. The Totnes Pound is a local currency for the town of Totnes, Devon, which aims to keep people spending money on local business.

9. John Germov, Lauren Williams and Maria Freij, ‘Portrayal of the Slow Food Movement in the Australian Print Media: Conviviality, Localism and Romanticism’, Journal of Sociology, 47 (2011), 89–106.

10. Peter Geoffrey Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Malden: Blackwell, 2006).

11. Don Mitchell, ‘Neil Smith,





1954–2012: Marxist Geographer’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104 (2014), 215–22.

12. Andrew Herod, Scale (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

13. Yvonne Rydin, Governing for Sustainable Urban Development, 1st edn (London; Washington, DC: Routledge, 2010), p. 172.

14. Ibid.15. Scott Campbell, ‘Green Cities

, Growing Cities’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 62 (1996), 296–312.

16. D. Rachel Lombardi and others, ‘Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: A Discursive Formation’, Urban Studies, 48 (2010), 273–96.

17. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

18. Campbell, ‘Green Cities’.19. E. Swyngedouw, ‘The Trouble with

Nature: Ecology as the New Opium for the Masses’ (2009), <https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:88035> [accessed 11 June 2014].

20. Astra Taylor, Examined Life (2009), <http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU&feature= youtube_gdata_player> [accessed 2 September 2014].

21. Graham Livesey, ‘Assemblage Theory, Gardens and the Legacy of the Early Garden City Movement’, Architectural Research Quarterly, 15 (2011), 271–78.

22. Taylor, Examined Life.23. Neil Smith, Uneven Development:

Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).

24. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 1st edn (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), p. 480.

25. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1983).

26. J. Pløger, ‘Millennium Urbanism – Discursive Planning’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 8 (2001), 63–72.

27. Nick Clarke and Allan Cochrane, ‘Geographies and Politics of Localism: The Localism of the United Kingdom’s Coalition Government’, Political Geography, 34 (2013), 10–23.

28. Tim Bunnell and Peter Marolt, ‘Cities and Their Grassroutes’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (2014), 381–85.

29. Clarke and Cochrane, ‘Geographies and Politics of Localism’.

30. The Big Society was an ideologically driven set of social programmes that sought to increase public participation, volunteering and local engagement. It was promoted strongly in the early period of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government (2010–15) and gave rise to Acts such as the Localism Act.

31. Department for Communities and Local Government, The Plain English Guide to the Localism Act (London, 2011).

32. Francisco Panizza, Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (London: Verso, 2005).

33. Clarke and Cochrane, p. 11.

34. Kristian Olesen, ‘The neoliberalisation of strategic spatial planning’, Planning Theory, 13 (2014), 288–303.

35. Ibid., p. 292.36. Design for London, Stitching the

Fringe: Working around the Olympic Park (2012), 30–31.

37. Adams and Sutherland, The Greenway: Stage D Concept Design Report (2008), p. 5.

38. Adams and Sutherland, Greenway Vision Study February 2010 (2010).

39. House of Lords, Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy, Keeping the Flame Alive: The Olympic and Paralympic Legacy, 2013.

40. Faye Scott, ‘Is Localism Delivering for Climate Change?’, The Guardian, 27 October 2011, section: Local Leaders Network.

Illustration creditsarq gratefully acknowledges:Adams and Sutherland architects, 3, 4Author, 1, 2, 5

Author’s biographyAndrew Hoolachan is a Ph.D. student at the department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. He is currently working on the scalar politics of urban sustainability on the fringe of the Olympic Park. He received his M.A. in Geography from the University of St Andrews and M.Sc. in International Town Planning from The Bartlett, U.C.L. He also worked as an administrator in the Cabinet Office.

Author’s addressAndrew [email protected]



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The 'nature' of legacy under localism: fragmentation along the greenway

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