“Avoiding the mistakes of the past”: Tower block failure discourse and economies of risk management in London’s Olympic Park

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. Th is 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 fi gure of the “failed” high-rise housing estate is confi gured 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

Introduction – Tower block ‘failures’?: High-rise anthropology

Th e high-rise tower block is an ambiguous construction: a muchmaligned architectural form yet a persistent symbol of modernity and aspiration. It is also a fulcrum for discourses about urban failure, broken communities, widening urban inequality, and insecurity. Recent tower block disasters, from the Grenfell Tower fi re in London to high-rise collapses in Nairobi, have intensifi ed such debates. In this introduction to the theme section, we explore “tower block failure” as both event and discourse. Engaging with scholarship on global urbanism, verticality, and failure as a generative force, we highlight the particular discursive, social, political, and material constellations of “failure” as it manifests in relation to tower blocks. We propose that exploring what failure sets in motion—following what failure does, rather than what it means—can help inform our understanding of urban transformation

Ethnicity and prosperity in east London: How racial inequalities impact experiences of the good life

This working paper explores the London Prosperity Index survey data through an ethnicity lens and provides some preliminary findings concerning on the relation between racial inequality and prosperity. The quantitative data analysis is framed around three thematic issues, identified in qualitative research as critical to experiences of prosperity in east London: livelihoods, feelings about the local area and feelings about the future

Re-thinking livelihood security: Why addressing the democratic deficit in economic policy-making opens up new pathways to prosperity

Citizen-led research in east London identifies livelihood security as a critical determinant of prosperity for local communities (Moore and Woodcraft, 2019; Woodcraft and Anderson, 2019). Livelihood security depends on more than income and work. Households draw on a range of assets including: secure income and good quality work; affordable, secure and good quality housing; access to key public services (healthcare, education, care, transport, digital communication); and inclusion in the social and economic life of the city. These assets display complex inter-dependencies, intersect with class, race, gender and other identities in multiple ways, and cut across sectors and policy domains that are commonly siloed in economic decision-making. In this paper, we conceptualise these assets as an ‘infrastructure’ for secure livelihoods to draw attention to their over-lapping nature and to demonstrate how knowledge based on lived experience generates fundamentally different ways of understanding the economy. We argue there is a democratic deficit in economic policy-making that must be addressed to better account for context-specific interactions between macro and micro-economic factors and generate more effective policy-making. Taking inclusive growth policies as a case in point, we explore how an expanded concept of ‘inclusion’ that incorporates participatory research, problem framing and policy development opens-up new spaces for action on place-based prosperity

Understanding and measuring social sustainability

Social sustainability is a new strand of discourse on sustainable development. It has developed over a number of years in response to the dominance of environmental concerns and technological solutions in urban development and the lack of progress in tackling social issues in cities such as inequality, displacement, liveability and the increasing need for affordable housing. Even though the Sustainable Communities policy agenda was introduced in the UK a decade ago, the social dimensions of sustainability have been largely overlooked in debates, policy and practice around sustainable urbanism. However, this is beginning to change. A combination of financial austerity, public sector budget cuts, rising housing need, and public and political concern about the social outcomes of regeneration, are focusing attention on the relationship between urban development, quality of life and opportunities. There is a growing interest in understanding and measuring the social outcomes of regeneration and urban development in the UK and internationally. A small, but growing, movement of architects, planners, developers, housing associations and local authorities advocating a more ‘social’ approach to planning, constructing and managing cities. This is part of an international interest in social sustainability, a concept that is increasingly being used by governments, public agencies, policy makers, NGOs and corporations to frame decisions about urban development, regeneration and housing, as part of a burgeoning policy discourse on the sustainability and resilience of cities. This paper describes how social sustainability is emerging as a practice in urban regeneration in the UK and draws on Social Life’s work in improving the social outcomes of development for communities. It includes a detailed assessment of experimental work carried out in 2011 for the Berkeley Group, in partnership with the University of Reading, to develop a social sustainability measurement framework, which will enable Berkeley to evaluate community strength and quality of life in regard to new housing developments

Stories of Change from the Connected Communities Inclusive Broadband Project: Research Evaluation of a Universal Basic Services Experiment

This report provides a qualitative research evaluation of the first phase of the Connected Communities Inclusive Broadband project launched in June 2020 by Poplar Housing and Regeneration Community Association (HARCA) in partnership with LETTA Trust Schools, Tower Hamlets Council, East End Community Foundation, and Internet provider Community Fibre. The project which will run for two years, is currently targeting 100-200 low-income households in Poplar, Tower Hamlets London borough. Each household family participating in the project is being provided with free broadband Internet connection, a Google Chromebook digital device, and basic information and communications technology (ICT) training and support. The Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL was invited to support Poplar HARCA to research and evaluate the impacts of the first phase of the project. The objective of the research is to collect ‘stories of change’ through personal accounts exploring the expectations and short-term impacts of the project. The findings of this research are intended for both policy, academic and wider public audiences, and will serve to build evidence for a system of Universal Basic Services (UBS) a radical, yet feasible and sustainable policy framework proposal developed by IGP’s Social Prosperity Network (SPN) to re-design a welfare system fit for the 21st century. This study, and the SPN, are part of IGP’s Prosperity Co-Lab (ProCol) UK initiative whose work is focused on rethinking prosperity and the future of the welfare state through citizen-led research and cross-sectoral collaborations

Pathways to the 'Good Life': Co-Producing Prosperity Research in Informal Settlements in Tanzania

Residents of informal settlements in urban centres in Africa are known to suffer disproportionate burdens of environmental and socio-economic inequalities and are often excluded from macro-level visions and policies that seek to make cities safer and prosperous (Birkmann, 2007; da Silva & Braulio, 2014; Dodman et al., 2013). This tension undermines the validity of orthodox, ‘expert-led’ visions, policies and measures of prosperity that are distant from the lived-experience of marginalised urban residents. Based on new empirical work with communities in three informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this article argues that novel methodological and theoretical approaches to co-producing context-specific policy-relevant knowledge about pathways to prosperity (translated by the communities as maisha bora, ‘the good life’) creates inclusive spaces for both community participation in processes of urban knowledge production and critical social enquiry that can lead to grounded theory building. By co-producing both an agreed and relevant methodological approach for the study, and its subsequent documentation and analysis, this work contributes valuable empirical insights about the capacities and capabilities of local communities to shape and influence urban policy-making and in this way speaks to calls for a global urbanism (Ong, 2011; Robinson, 2016) that brings diverse voices and geographies to urban theory to better account for the diversity of urban experiences and processes found in twenty-first century cities

Pathways to the 'Good Life': Co-Producing Prosperity Research in Informal Settlements in Tanzania

Residents of informal settlements in urban centres in Africa are known to suffer disproportionate burdens of environmental and socio-economic inequalities and are often excluded from macro-level visions and policies that seek to make cities safer and prosperous (Birkmann, 2007; da Silva & Braulio, 2014; Dodman et al., 2013). This tension undermines the validity of orthodox, ‘expert-led’ visions, policies and measures of prosperity that are distant from the lived-experience of marginalised urban residents. Based on new empirical work with communities in three informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this article argues that novel methodological and theoretical approaches to co-producing context-specific policy-relevant knowledge about pathways to prosperity (translated by the communities as maisha bora, ‘the good life’) creates inclusive spaces for both community participation in processes of urban knowledge production and critical social enquiry that can lead to grounded theory building. By co-producing both an agreed and relevant methodological approach for the study, and its subsequent documentation and analysis, this work contributes valuable empirical insights about the capacities and capabilities of local communities to shape and influence urban policy-making and in this way speaks to calls for a global urbanism (Ong, 2011; Robinson, 2016) that brings diverse voices and geographies to urban theory to better account for the diversity of urban experiences and processes found in twenty-first century cities

Rethinking Prosperity for London: When Citizens Lead Transformation

This report describes a process of re-thinking prosperity with, and for, citizens in east London. It articulates what prosperity means to people in east London: the opportunity to live ‘a good life’ that has a secure livelihood, secure and affordable housing, and inclusion in the social and economic life of the city as its foundation. Prosperity encompasses healthy and safe neighbourhoods, opportunities for work, learning and participation in civic life, and confidence for the future. This multi-dimensional vision challenges the conventional notion of prosperity as material wealth. The report describes how this model has been translated into the UK’s first citizen-led Prosperity Index: a new framework that measures at the local level what communities say matters to their prosperity