propositions architects to do urban projects of messianic proportions? What is “normality” in pockets of Tottenham, Enfield and Hackney? Postcode wars, daily attacks on shopkeepers and no-go areas for all but the hooded youths? Would we even be talking about these conditions without riots? In France surely not, but the French example also shows how quickly the possibility of a real debate and a rethink of urban politics can evaporate and be replaced by something as ridiculous as was the architectural circle jerk of
“Le Grand Paris” After the third night of rioting, the violence metastasised from London to other British cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, thereby following the French “example” even more perfectly. Right now it has become very difficult to think of an urban politics, let alone an urban planning or design approach that would be able to take on the underlying problems of riots like the ones in the UK in a serious way. I do not think that the reason is that politics and planning have realised their limitations to shape society. I think that the reason is that urban politics and hence planning and urban design are too often treating the city with ulterior motives, instead of actually working for the city itself. The city has become a tool to achieve goals, political, cultural, economic or even environmental.
understood as nothing else than “nigger removal” by the black communities whose homes were demolished for highways, parks and modernist housing projects, and fed the rioting in Detroit, Newark and Los Angeles.
Urban politics It is much too soon to say anything about the relationship between the gentrification of Brixton, or the coming of the Olympics to London, and the current explosion of violent alienation. But if we imagine another kind of urban politics, one that does not take into account a marketable image of the city, but the reality of the entire community, it would probably have entirely different priorities. The first would be to work against the ever sharpening inequality of London, making it one of the unfairest cities in Europe, in poverty levels, education, crime and other indicators. But then the reality of urban riots is that they have always turned out to be the opposite of a learning experience for a city. Riots have nearly always resulted in politicians simplifying the problem even more, and citizens looking away even further. After a riot your average city will become more afraid, more authoritarian, more segregated, more exclusive and less tolerant. That is the real tragedy of the post-war western urban riot, first it shocks and terrifies us, then for a moment it makes us see flashes of the kind of city we should be working towards, which then fades away into the darkness. Back to normal.
Treating the city in this way means that we are constantly passing judgment on what the city should be, and who should be there, and what they should be doing, instead of trying to understand what the city actually is, who really lives there and what they are doing. This produces a dangerous process of idealisation, denying whole areas, whole groups their place in the urban community, because they do not fit the picture. Historically there is a correlation between large-scale urban projects and upsurges in urban violence. The attempts to demolish the grands ensembles through the Grand Projet de Ville policy in France, contributed greatly to the alienation and violent paranoia of their inhabitants. A similar relation existed in the US riots in the sixties, where “urban renewal”, despite its idealistic motives, was
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