Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article problematizes the relationship between the global super‐rich and processes of property development that have generated large volumes of underused residential space. Evidence is presented to show that much of London's new skyline is underused or lies entirely empty, so that one interpretation of this new landscape of super‐prime residential development is that it is a kind of dead residential space or necrotecture. These relatively lifeless spaces can be interpreted as the particularly wasteful result of continuing rounds of international capital investment in the built environment and the overconsumption of housing and other resources by the super‐rich. Necrotectural forms, seen in new towers and spectacular homes, appear to index a massive misdirection of development capacity, even as the city experiences a massive social crisis that continues to be played out in the wider housing market.

Gated residential developments, neighbourhoods to which public access is restricted, continue to generate academic, policymaker and public curiosity. Why do people want to live in these places and should public interventions be directed towards either their prevention or tacit acceptance? In a recent paper in this journal, Tony Manzi and Bill Smith-Bowers (2006) attempt to provide what they see as a more subtle approach to these developments, arguing, by way of a critique of some of my earlier work (centrally that of Atkinson and Blandy, 2005), that hostility to gated communities is misplaced on several grounds. I argue here, in return, that there are several problems with the positions they adopt, and that these should be considered if we are to effectively discuss how planning practice and housing systems should work with or against these new trends in the built environment. I argue that the key 'problematic' raised by gated communities is less one of empirical evidence on their impacts, since much work already points to a range of problems, and rather what these developments forecast for the character and dynamics of the urban spaces and societies we wish to live in. At the heart of my position lies a concern that either bolstering the case for gated communities or seeing them as neutral objects in the landscapes around us risks amplifying the further construction of impermeable boundaries. Critically then the risk is that ignoring the political and normative aspects of gating, as I believe Manzi and Smith-Bowers do, may lead to further and deeper socio-spatial segregation that itself excludes the voice of social groups least able to challenge or, indeed, reside in gated developments and the additional security that they appear to offer. ; The paper is published by the European Journal of Spatial Development (EJSD). The previous version of the journal was host by Nordregio.

Abstract The counterpart city represents an attempt to conceptualize the hidden spaces inhabited by social problems and 'problem' people who are counter to the mainstream, or included, modes of contemporary urban social life. This 'opposite', or negative, space comprises the spatially withdrawn and socially excluded who are largely outside the purview of the comfortable classes of the same cities. Not only has residential segregation been sustained over recent decades, so too have mobile circuits of mutual exclusion been created, which enable higher‐income groups to avoid the associated negative externalities of poverty (visibility, disorder, aggression and so on). As responsibility for dealing with social risks has become devolved to the level of the household, the desire for social evasion, as politicians, media systems and welfare patterns mark out threatening territories, has become more evident. The counterpart city is shunned in ever more elaborate ways and with the support of public policies. As the 'spatial' social policies, housing and urban, have become increasingly criminalized in the focus of their agendas, such interventions expend energy to facilitate this separation between affluent and poor. Traditional imperatives for public intervention are diminished as poverty has become more concealed from affluence – its costs and impacts evaded by technologies, socio‐spatial circuits and policies that skirt those who are locked into places of poverty and abject marginality, a constellation of social forces and effects I term the great cut.