Topothesia: Planning, Colonialism, and Places in Excess
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Ecologies of Excess: Lastness as Affect and Aesthetic in Iain Sinclair’s The Last London Ecologies of Excess: Lastness as Affect and Aesthetic in Iain Sinclair’s The Last London
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Temporalities of Urban Development: The London 2012 Olympics and Battersea Power Station Temporalities of Urban Development: The London 2012 Olympics and Battersea Power Station
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Place Making and Ecological Gentrification Place Making and Ecological Gentrification
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Creative Reuse, Innovation, and the Ethical Subject of Late Capitalism Creative Reuse, Innovation, and the Ethical Subject of Late Capitalism
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The Dead Ends of Development The Dead Ends of Development
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4 The End of London: Temporalities of the Gentrified City
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Published:02 May 2023
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Abstract
This chapter theorizes the contradictory temporalities of contemporary London: the contingency and temporariness of “pop-up” culture and the post-employment labor market, the rhetoric of sustainability and legacy put forth by developers, and the experience of the city in a perpetual end state. As intent as the rhetoric of planning is in opening possibility in the city of the near future, it also produces as sense of “lastness,” which I analyze through halted ramblings of a gentrified London by psychogeographer Iain Sinclair. Gentrification functions not as simple economic displacement but only through the creation of an aesthetic framework, one centered, paradoxically, on locality and community. I explore this dynamic through two large “regeneration” projects in London: the planning for the 2012 Olympic games and the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station in south London. Discourse around Olympic planning tries to reconcile its “pop-up” temporariness with the supposed legacy it is leaving behind. Meanwhile, Battersea Power Station’s developers cast the project as a remediation of a polluted, brownfield past into a more verdant, vibrant, and creative future. Both projects, I argue, evince the aesthetic character of contemporary mass-scale gentrification.
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