Auditing, Revealing and Promoting Industry in the London Borough of Southwark

Renewed enthusiasm surrounds the potential for urban industry and its contribution to the socioeconomic diversity of cities, despite concerns about the loss of industrial uses, land, and buildings in high-value, post-industrial cities. Yet, industry is often hidden and undervalued, and methodologies to change the culture around nurturing industry in cities have not been well explored. As a first step in moving this agenda forward, this article proposes effective ways to reveal industrial uses and to advocate for policy protections of the land they occupy. It examines how London Metropolitan University’s School of Art, Architecture and Design (AAD) Cities action researchers applied their Audit, Reveal and Promote methodology to Southwark, a London borough with a high concentration of urban industry. There are key aspects to revealing industrial economies: collecting accurate data on the ground, showcasing local businesses, building stakeholder networks through mutual trust, and creating a space of possibilities between vertical hierarchical and grassroots power networks to enable stakeholders to participate in urban change. This article presents a methodology for cultural change towards valuing a mix of uses, including industry, to transform land development towards retention and densification of industry

Advocating industry in London: audit, reveal and promote

This portfolio provides information about action research to reveal to policymakers, built-environment designers and local communities the significance of industry to London’s economy. The project aims to persuade local and national governance and local stakeholders to protect existing industry in London, expand industrial areas through policy protection, and promote densification of industrial activities through design

Where is Tottenham's economy?

In a context of major development-driven change in Tottenham, this project offered a complete picture of the High Road’s economy, recorded through a survey of its 700 or so workspaces. It exposed a rich and varied small-scale economy and the range of unique products from Tottenham, as well as the stories of the people and places that produce them, offering a stark and deeply significant contrast to proposed development-driven change. In collecting this information, the research team collaborated in an ongoing art/research project the Tottenham Living Market (supported by LYST, Create and the GLA) which was intended to expose the findings to the public, politicians, planning community and press [this project did not receive funding, so did not go ahead]. The project also added hard information to evidence-base for planning policy-making in Tottenham, developed and tested norms of practice for clear presentation of information to community groups and professionals and was the seed for a much more ambitious project that pictured the whole economy of the Lea Valley far beyond the high street (a research project was carried out for the Lea Valley by Cass Cities students in 2014/15 (see Chapter 2, section 2.1), and another in 2015/16 of the Old Kent Road and beyond, see http://www.casscities.co.uk/Cass-Cities-audit-book). It showed the high value of what is already there in Tottenham, and what can easily be destroyed with the wrong kind of development

The depth structure of a London high street : a study in urban order

This thesis is a study of Tottenham High Road, and how the urban blocks which comprise its depth are composed. Depth has a number of components: architecture, space and time; depth is the armature in which people live their social lives, and the place where local cultures emerge. The conception of depth offers a way of capturing urban life in its richness and its reciprocities. The literature about high streets offers few detailed analyses of their spatial and psycho-social ordering and this thesis seeks to fill that gap. The approach is a hermeneutics of praxis, using ethnographic methods, in-depth interviews, and situating the information spatially using architectural drawing techniques. It offers a novel method of investigating and understanding the structures and processes which make up the high streets and which, in aggregate, make the whole city. Tottenham High Road is used here as a case study, a vehicle through which to interpret evidence about the existence and nature of depth, with its manifold structures. Understanding depth is vital to understanding high streets, so this thesis allows a deeper and richer interpretation of high streets than has previously been possible. There is a problem in planning orthodoxy around high streets, typified in Tottenham: the richness of depth is flattened and codified, in order to frame swathes of city as sites from which to reap economic reward. In fact, depth contains all of human life, and understanding it, therefore, is an ethical responsibility for planning. Depth has a number of characteristics, ordered by different processes and forces. Firstly, physical order, shaped by both economic and social forces. For example, the most public uses are found in the ‘shallowest’ parts of depth, and these are the most valuable sites because they command the greatest passing trade. Secondly, depth has a social order, through playing out of place ballet by people as they live their lives. The social order operates interdependently and reciprocally with the physical order of depth. Commitment between people and places (citizenship) results in special place cultures, which are hosted in depth. Depth has variation in the scope of decorum from the outer edge of the block to the centre: more things are possible inside the block than at its edge. The insights about depth in this thesis are relevant to many areas of life: to planning, to politics and to existing theory, because depth provides an account for the ethical order in which other areas of human life take place. With an understanding of depth it is possible to evaluate planning proposals, efforts at ensuring political participation, to shed light on existing theories such as Cosmopolitanism, and to add a valuable layer of information about the real structures of London to the existing literature

A place for participation on the Old Kent Road

The politics of planning decision-making play out spatially, and space can be deployed strategically to either grant or limit access to decision-making opportunities. To achieve better understanding and more thoughtfulness in terms of the location and place given to participation of local communities in the making of urban futures, planning consultations and other participatory political events need to be accessible in time and space in order to maximize participation, particularly for hard-to-reach groups, such as local businesses

Introduction to Everyday Streets

Everyday streets are both the most used and the most undervalued of cities’ public spaces. They constitute the inclusive backbone of urban life – the chief civic amenity – though they are challenged by optimisation processes. Everyday streets are as profuse, rich and complex as the people who use them; they are places of social aggregation, bringing together those belonging to different classes, genders, ages, ethnicities and nationalities. They comprise not just the familiar outdoor spaces that we use to move and interact and the facades that are commonly viewed as their primary component but also urban blocks, interiors, depths...Urban Desig

The form and use of everyday streets

Everyday streets facilitate various activities and movements, both indoors and outdoors. The second section of this book addresses the following question: What is the relationship between the urban form of everyday streets and the activities that occur on them?Urban Desig