“Planning” Visual Dominance in Whitechapel’s Absorption Neighbourhood?

Abstract

The morphological gap between the controllability of the undocumented population and the ability of the authorities to identify them is inherent in the public areas of the neighbourhood in which the unregistered population is concentrated for decades. The data indicate that the control, which expresses the visual ‘linking’ dominance of any location—or in our case the ability of the authorities to have access to multiple restricted visual fields—is limited to the main streets. In contrary, the ability of the undocumented population from a specific location to ‘see’ sites that ‘see’ relatively more space than it reveals as the primary mechanism that attracts newcomer undocumented migrants, to the neighbourhood. These insights are embedded within the residential behaviour of undocumented people from different countries of origin who similarly read the space and concentrate in defined places. In doing so, they comply with the long-standing spatial code of Whitechapel. However, since the neighbourhood has undergone a massive gentrification process and development, we assume that the new construction and the changes of buildings’ height and streets’ proportions may affect the character of Whitechapel as an absorption neighbourhood. During the last decade, the recognition that the government has a responsibility not only to promote people’s material standards of living but also to enhance their subjective experience of well-being leads to several initiatives by the central government departments in the UK to monitor public well-being.