Redefining Space
A look at how the Covid-19 pandemic has redefined the way that we view the city
Spending most of lockdown inside, I began having vivid dreams, usually, or almost in all cases, featuring public spaces of a city. Never a defined city and never a familiar one too. While the urban landscapes haunting my night visions were never the same (a symptom, I suppose, of the mind coping with a deficit of supplied diversity), the cities were indistinguishable from each other, its surfaces always poured over with dark grey concrete, radiating cold and estrangement. I have been having these dreams almost every night and they mostly shared a common theme of getting lost in the nightmarish, inhospitable cities. Like in Borges’ ‘The Immortal,’ (2006) the structures permeating these landscapes never seemed designated for human use, or rather, where a grotesque play on the function of modern infrastructure: monumental concrete buildings with no windows, streets intentionally filled with water - but lacking aquatic transport, and many other of which my memory has slowly begun fading. Like in the story, the urban infrastructure seemed to be constructed for humans who have long abandoned the city as a space of lively use.
I don’t think it would be far-fetched to say that these vivid images are but a nightmarish reflection of the universal experience of living in a modern metropolitan city. While for some the estrangement created by the urban space is daily swept under the cosy carpet of cute charity shops and hip cafés, the closure centres of culture and consumption during lockdown deprived us of an external influx of daily activities usually providing us with the feeling of illusory fulfilment. As Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities, ‘you believe you are enjoying [the city of] Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.’ (1997) Not being able to participate in what the city has to offer, we were thus left stranded with a void, slowly, but steadily, being filled by estrangement.
The pandemic has forced us to question seemingly established categories, one of them being that of time. Being left only with the interior of our dwellings and the city in its “bare” state, the temporal experience of our days has mutated into a formless void, feeding on the persistent monotony of our mundane endeavours. Looking closely, however, those whose everyday responsibilities moved online were not completely free from an external structure, still having to perform their work remotely or attend classes through zoom. The seeming collapse of usual temporal experience was, therefore, not so much a consequence of a lack of schedule, but rather of spatial homogeneity accompanying us through daily activities. In this sense, we can see how the experience of time is largely dependent on space, and, how a lack of diversity within this space fosters an undeniable feeling of confusion.
While to a large extent this is can be attributed to the expanse of hours we were bound to our dwellings, the problem is further magnified by the nature of public space in the city, its increasing lack of diversity and loss of local identity. With restrictions in place, we are usually free to move around only in the areas we inhabit, decreasing the repertoire of daily escapades. This becomes a problem especially for most of those who live in the city centre, in which the urban landscape is dominated by generic apartment blocks and skyscrapers, with insufficient access to green spaces.
While the debate on the right to the city and the harm inflicted on large segments of its population by regeneration projects is not new, the conditions imposed on our everyday existence by the unavoidable restrictions certainly more acutely emphasised the problem of how we design our urban landscape. Having spent the first lockdown in Elephant and Castle, the issue progressively became more tangible in my everyday experience. As for myself, I would say I belong to a group of people who are fascinated by the rapid transformations of the city. However, as is mostly the case, my fascination is not grounded in admiration, but in the magnetism of the unfamiliar. ‘The normal is now changing so rapidly, and daily life has become so unstable, we even feel nostalgia for the present,’ writes Jack Self about the accelerating changes of our everyday landscapes, which, I believe, are predominantly present in its urban dimension. Elephant and Castle serves as a prime example.
Designated an Opportunity Area in the early 2000s, recognising its high potential for improving housing, commercial use, and transport, Elephant and Castle was placed under an intense process of regeneration, which, as is stated by the Southwark Council, ‘will deliver enormous benefits for the whole community.’ The council promises at least 1650 affordable homes, 6000 construction jobs, and more public spaces, including the largest new park in central London in 70 years. Moreover, the redevelopment project was included in the Clinton Climate Positive Development programme, framed as an example to be followed to engender prosperous, environmentally-safe urban development.
Despite the promises of local authorities and the international acclaim of the project, the reality looks bleaker. Green areas and public spaces are squeezed between the apartment blocks and, while they remain open, their use is designated for people who can afford moving into the new surrounding apartment buildings. These are built at the cost of destroying the local infrastructure and aimed at attracting new investors and wealthier segments of the society. Contrary to what Southwark Council claims, this is not beneficial to the whole community, but primarily to the accumulation of capital, to which urban real estate has become of central focus (Stein 2019). Rather than bringing the local community together, which is what public spaces in the city should be designed to perform, their “regeneration” further segregates the urban population.
While all of us, to some extent, might have struggled through the experience of lockdown, such changes in the urban environment are one of the critical factors generating inequality within the universal experience. Dismantling the local infrastructure and thus depriving the local community of the spaces they have made their familiar habitat, constituting a part of their identity, fosters a feeling of displacement, further proliferated in cases when the economic situation forces the people to change their place of living, which results in mounting anxiety over what the future will bring. Moreover, in a macro-historic perspective, demolishing buildings causes severe environmental drawbacks, having further deteriorating effects on the places we inhabit: in the UK, the construction industry itself is responsible for generating 45% of all CO2 emissions (Wainwright 2020).
What’s more, examined at from a micro-historic perspective, apart from the obvious damage arising as the effect of these development project, the event of deconstruction and construction itself likewise yields alienating consequences for the local community. As Francesco Sebregondi argues in his essay on the Elephant and Castle Heygate estate, housing over 3000 people before it has been demolished in 2014, such massive enterprises foster voids in the fabric of the city, extending throughout the development process: beginning with decanting the buildings and ending with its the construction of new complexes (2011). In case of the Heygate Estate, the process began in 2007 and is still ongoing, with the construction work on the new Elephant Park still taking place.
These voids are a necessary by-product of urban production. As such, they form a ‘temporal exteriority’ (Sebregondi 2011) to the urban landscape, simultaneously being embedded in the process of its creation. This inherent contradiction laying at the heart of the urban production process yields two equally contradictory results. First of all, urban space meant to serve the community, deprives it of useable space, making the experience of the city alienating and claustrophobic, this feeling further intensified by the restrictions imposed during lockdown. The decanted buildings and construction sites become voids, exterior to the city and simultaneously internal to its development, depriving the public space of its function, just like in the landscapes of my dreams. Second of all, urban production progressively makes the city more homogeneous, while simultaneously proliferating the disparity between those who can afford a lifestyle promoted by regeneration projects and those who cannot. Moreover, it also proliferates the disparity between the people and their environment, as the spaces of their everyday life cease to be the embodiment of their identity.
The countless issues experienced both in public and private lives weren't caused by the pandemic, but magnified by its emergence. The problem of alienating public spaces is one of them. The landscapes of our everyday existence are both shaped by us and shape our identities, embodying our everyday life. As such, the local environments should be shaped in a way that both preserves the local identity and allows for it to develop continuously with the incentive of its people, rather than by ruptures fostering urban voids. After all, as David Harvey claims, 'the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be.'(2008) If we want to let our environments help define our identity, rather than marginalize it, we must fight for urban spaces which will develop in a way that helps us feel fulfilled in our daily existence, instead of posing obstacles to its comfort. This won’t be possible without a radical change in the subjectivity which prioritizes capital accumulation over the wellbeing of the society as a whole.
Words by Olga Lojewska
Illustration by Fortunato Depero (1930) - Sky Scrapers and Tunnels
References
Borges, J. (2006). The Immortal. In The Aleph. London: Penguin Books.
Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible cities. London: Penguin Random House.
Self, J. (2018). Critique of Everyday Life. Real Review (7), pp.10-17.
Sebregondi, F. (2011). The Event of Void. Retrieved from http://heygatewashome.org/img/FSebregondi_EventOfTheVoid.pdf.
Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review (53). Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city.
Stein, S. (2019). Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. London: Verso.
Wainwright, O. (2020, January 13). The case for… never demolishing another building. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/13/the-case-for-never-demolishing-another-building.