London’s ears are burning

I’m browsing an old Rough Guide to London left on our bookshelves by someone I can’t remember who passed through London and our flat. There is something pleasurable about reading guidebooks when not travelling, and reading one about your home is like surreptitiously listening in on a conversation about yourself. There is also something neat about the way cities are packaged in these books, and I think that a city’s denizens are influenced by the picture they portray as well as visitors – not only do they describe our notable ‘sights’ but they also inform us on how to make our city attractive to visitors – and, since ‘we are all tourists’* now, attractive to ourselves.

So, when the Rough Guide repeats the ‘city of villages’ theme about London, it not only does so because it is a way to explain the infrastructure of the city (which is does, though not very well) and to provide a useful narrative in which to place a disparate set of sights (which I suppose it does), but it also feeds back into what London perceives about itself and does with itself (takes care of the Tube and markets different areas, like Camden, distinctly – which you might think is obvious but which was a strategy which alluded London’s planners for a long time). I’m not suggesting that Rough Guide, Lonely Planet and so on dictate city planning, but with their huge market of tourists they are certainly participants in a dialogue about how cities work and are developed.

Cities these days are developed and planned by ‘partnerships’ of developers, local authorities, residents and business groups, architects, and other interest groups. There are no longer, if there ever really were, city fathers who commission municipal works on a grand scale. Instead there is a Byzantine network of – brace yourself for this term – stakeholders who seek consensus about how an area should work. Since none of these stakeholders has an overriding veto on decisions (well local authorities and the Government actually do, but it is practised within the constraints of the partnership model), consensus tends to come together around concepts which have been seen to work before: a technocratic approach prevails. Consequently urban planning fashions can be seen across many cities across the globe. A newly regenerated urban centre these days is likely to require a modern art gallery (not necessarily filled with art, but more importantly a building which can be described as ‘iconic’), outdoor cafes (from Athens to Oslo) and a pedestrian-friendly layout. Nothing wrong with any of these things particularly, but a lot of European historic city centres are beginning to look very similar (even down to tolerated graffiti), and that’s before we mention international retail branding. I think that the guidebook depictions of these cities are the end-product of these partnership decisions in some ways.

Looking at the end of the Rough Guide to London which is form 1997 there is a rather interesting expression of hope for the city, laid out in terms of planning, development and building:

…the Royal Opera House is undergoing a major refurbishment, as is the British Museum, and there’s to be a new Tate Gallery on the South Bank, which is itself due to be radically redesigned. And to top it all, a god-forsaken slice of Greenwich has been chosen as the centre of the country’s Millennium Celebrations. The other good news is that if, as looks likely, the Tories fall from power, London seems at least set to regain a properly elected governing body. It has to be hoped that it is given the power to reverse the last two decades’ decline.

That dates it quite neatly and is a piece of text to contemplate in the light of the very different backdrop to the current General Election.

* A quote from Sidney Mintz

Tags: guidebooks, london, urbanism

This entry was posted on April 12th, 2010 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.