Abstract
This chapter draws upon an ongoing longitudinal study which started in 2007 and uses a rich mix of ethnographic research to track the impact of Olympic-led regeneration on the lifestyles, livelihoods and life stories of the people of East London. Cohen looks at how the Olympic Legacy narrative is being enacted through the development plans for the Olympic Park and at how young people attending the local Academy school and residents moving in to the East Village (former Athletes Village) are actually making sense of this new piece of city. A close grained reading of incomers’ narratives and mental maps reveals very different strategies of inhabitation on the part of well-to-do middle-class ‘residents’ and disadvantaged social ‘tenants’ and a striking split perception of the new and old East London. The chapter goes on to look at various attempts to micro manage the resulting tensions and promote a shared sense of belonging to an ‘urban village’ and ‘living the Olympic Dream’. This strategy is analysed in relation to the notion of an ‘estate of exception’, the role of gentrification as a ‘civilising process’ and the tension between moral and market economies of worth in the delivery and evaluation of the 2012 regeneration legacy
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Notes
- 1.
This is an epigraph to a collection of Yeats’ poems published in 1916, but written before the Easter uprising in Dublin. It refers to the poet’s attempt to distance himself from the romantic nationalism associated with the ‘Celtic Twilight’ and engage with contemporary political realities, including the Workers strike of 1913. The epigraph was used by Delmer Schwarz as the title for his most famous short story, published in 1919 in which the protagonist dreams he is watching a film featuring his parents courtship and vocally intervenes in a row between them on screen, resulting in his being expelled from the cinema. In his dream the narrator thus throws a spanner in the works of the dream factory, and is promptly evicted from its mise en scene. The hero acts as if the screen depiction was happening in real time, and as if his intervention possessed a magical power of performativity and could actually stop his parent rowing, and possibly breaking up. His eviction from the cinema – and by implication from the dream – illustrates the issue of hysterical materialism being addressed in this chapter.
- 2.
This primary process of environmental attachment is virtually ignored by psycho-geographers who are more influenced by the French situationists, who in turn draw on Bachelard’s phenomenological ‘topo-analysis’ as advanced in his book The Poetics of Space (1994), in which he completely rejects the Freudian Unconscious. The psycho-social geography advanced here draws on Michael Balint’s Kleinian model of spatial object relations supplemented by an ethno–cartographic approach to understanding how mental maps are formed through cultural processes.
- 3.
It was difficult for modernist architects and planners to recognise this ‘other scene’ of urban regeneration because their professional training predisposed them to emphasise the creation of a rational spacial order. The shift to a post-modern aesthetic encouraged greater experimentation with urban form, and opened up room for the utopian and phantasmagoric, albeit at the service of fictitious capital.
- 4.
Fictitious capital was a term coined by Marx in Capital: Volume 3 to refer to the ideological impact of an economy burdened with property and financial claims in the form of interest and dividends, fees and commissions, exorbitant management salaries, bonuses and stock options, and where ‘instead of explaining the self-expansion of capital out of labour-power, the matter is reversed and the productivity of labour-power becomes itself this mystic thing, interest-bearing capital’ (cited in Hudson, 2010).
- 5.
The projects took place in 2014/15 and were funded by a consortium of local agencies: The London Legacy Development Corporation, Share East, and Triathlon, and delivered by The Building Exploratory in partnership with LivingMaps. Chapter 6 by Debbie Humphry in this book describes one of the projects in detail.
- 6.
Jane Jacobs, the American urbanist, was an apostle of ‘spontaneous un-slumming’, and saw the urban village as a model of piecemeal urban renewal in inner-city areas threatened by ‘slash and burn’ redevelopment – an alternative regeneration strategy led by small businesses rather than large corporations.
- 7.
The projects included an ethnographic field study, youth video and community photography workshops and a Young Persons Guide to the Olympic Park produced with students from Chobham Academy School, one of the Legacy flagships. I would like to thank all the East Village residents who took part in the ethnographic study for their permission to reproduce extracts from interviews. A report on the whole project is available from www.livingmaps.org.uk and www.buildingexploratory.org.uk.
- 8.
The phrase is Alexander Pope’s from his poem Windsor Forest. The full quatrain is:
Not Chaos like together, crushed and bruised
But as the world, harmoniously confused
Where order in variety we see
And where, tho things differ, all agree.
See the discussion in Cohen (2013, Chapter 9) on the implications of this model of an organic body politic for the 2012 version of the Olympic dream.
- 9.
The research was part of a longitudinal ethnographic study which began in 2007 and is scheduled to finish in 2020. The aim is to chart the unfolding narrative of the 2012 legacy outside the evaluative framework imposed by the official legacy narrative and its mode of deferral.
- 10.
The use of principles of periodicity and predicament derived from the life course provides a reassuring naturalising framework for understanding the micro-histories of neighbourhoods and underscores an organic model of urban regeneration.
- 11.
The objective is to train some of our key East Village informants as do-it-yourself ethnographers, so that the research story ends by being told in their own idiom.
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Cohen, P. (2017). A Place Beyond Belief: Hysterical Materialism and the Making of East 20. In: Cohen, P., Watt, P. (eds) London 2012 and the Post-Olympics City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48947-0_5
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