VIP Urbanism: Opportunity Areas, Regeneration, & Culture in the London Borough of Lewisham

Keywords: regeneration, culture, racism, displacement, eviction
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 43

Abstract

This paper will discuss Lewisham Council’s use of culture in its “regeneration” efforts the past 20 years. In 2008, the Mayor of London designated an 815-hectare Opportunity Area within the Borough, a planning device that creates loopholes for developers (and thus international banks who are majority shareholders) to accelerate construction by circumventing considerations pertaining to density, affordable housing, public consultation, and new buildings’ relationship to their existing surroundings. The Mayor of London designates OAs for intensive job- and house-creation, which sometimes entail public land transfers to private owners. Yet projections are divorced from local contexts: development is planned to incrementally increase land value for extraction. Schemes may divert business rates from re-investment in the local area to instead service loans associated with the new development, such as large transport projects.

Although OAs are planned to maximise density and increase prices, developers and local authorities obscure financial motivations for built forms with “placemaking” strategies predicated on the upcoming “new” location, including its “cultural” offerings and creative industries. The Council’s promotional narratives and schemes center culture as a commodity, yet in previous decades the British media, politicians, and police used the same word with different connotations, such as denigrating housing estate residents’ “culture” to justify displacing them and demolishing their homes. I will conclude with reflections on how “regeneration” impacts Lewisham’s multi-generational existing music culture, drawing on interviews conducted in summer 2021 about music culture’s functions, what places are important to musical development, and how that has changed over time.