Abstract
The task of this paper is twofold: The first is to parse out aspects of continuity and change in the decentralist urbanisation of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), through utilising an experimental methodological combination of two urban epistemologies: planetary urbanisation and assemblage urbanism . The second task, responding to the first, is to reflect on this theoretical approach and thus assess these much-debated epistemologies of the urban. To contextualise decentralism, this chapter includes a brief review of the new towns, an influential type of urbanisation, which preceded the LDDC , and of the lobbying activity of their representative organisation, the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) amidst the ‘crisis of the inner city’ in the 1970s and 1980s, and briefly surveys plans for Docklands from the 1970s. This history of decentralism , as a form of urban transformation, is framed in light of reification and the idea of second nature . The assemblage urbanist side of the methodology utilised by the chapter places particular focus on the retaining wall—an overlooked infrastructure that was key to the rehabilitation of both docks and rivers in East London. The chapter shows how retaining walls were subject to a perpendicular reorientation under the tenure of the LDDC, where a decentralist typology persisted within the post-industrial context. The chapter concludes that despite their political differences, the LDDC in fact came closest to realising plans for the ‘decongested’, low-density inner city advocated for by the TCPA in the 1970s, and ends with a reflection on the approach utilised and its future potential.
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Notes
- 1.
The most pressing example of a disputed historical narrative for the present chapter came during an interview with David Chesterton (2016), who disputed the LDDC’s claim to the originality of the decision to preserve the docks, and instead attributed this to their lack of funding for dockfilling. Whether this is true or not, it does not affect the more interesting point, which is the fact that relatively soon afterwards, the LDDC saw it as having been the ‘right’ decision, and it continues to be an important part of the inherited narrative of this organisation’s view of its contributions.
- 2.
The Metropolitan green belt has been subsequently expanded to in fact surround many of the new towns which were formerly outside of its area. None of the major 2016 Mayoral election candidates expressed an intention to loosen green belt legislation.
- 3.
It should be noted that urbanisation in France has a very different history to in the UK, and that the decentralisation of its urbanisation did not take place with quite the same generality.
- 4.
Most dramatically, the Jubilee line extension, eventually opened in 1999 with a station at Canary Wharf, was planned to serve the centre of the Isle of Dogs rather than the northern location of Canary Wharf. This aspect of the DJC’s plan bore a strong resemblance to the ‘City New Town’ plan of the LDST (1973).
- 5.
Similar transformations occurred in other infrastructures: for example, freight railways lines which had previously served the docks were rehabilitated and rebranded as car-free paths and as the Docklands Light Railway (DLR)—the UK’s only elevated, automated passenger rail system; a system chosen to foreground contemporaneous imaginations of high-tech urban development (Reid 1987). Similarly, a fast passenger boat service was instated along the river, an ancient infrastructure which had long been subordinated to freight traffic and which had developed a correspondingly functional imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- 6.
It is important to note, however, that a policy of riverside access was at a later point asserted: by 1998, the LDDC’s Water Use Strategy (1998b: 10) stated that ‘the Corporation is committed to securing public access to the majority of the 55 miles of quaysides and to the riverside in Docklands’.
- 7.
See for example LDST (1973) p. 29 (Sect. “Short Account of the Problems”) and p. 55 (Sect. “First Order Problems and Solutions”).
- 8.
LDST (1973: 30): previous Comprehensive Development Areas of 1947 Town and Country Planning ministry specified 336 person/hectare (p/ha) in contrast to densities frequently between 500 and 750 p/ha in adjoining parts of the Boroughs. LDST adopts a maximum net density for public housing of between 200 and 240 p/ha.
- 9.
See, for example, an article in Town & Country Planning (journal of the TCPA) by architect Tom Hancock from 1982, entitled In place of dereliction: innovation! Hancock states that he welcomed the designation of the LDDC.
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Mountain, D. (2018). Continuity and Change in Decentralist Urbanisation: Exploring the Critical Potential of Contemporary Urban Theory Through the London Docklands Development Corporation. In: Horn, P., Alfaro d'Alencon, P., Duarte Cardoso, A. (eds) Emerging Urban Spaces. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57816-3_5
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