The Architecture of Resistance: from erasure to resilience
Research in progress: “From erasure to social endurance: Rethinking planning through London Markets”
In this short piece Nuria Benítez Gómez uncovers contestations at a north-London market in order to visualise community organisation as a practice of social and spatial transformation. Nuria is a current Master of Research in Architecture student at the Royal College of Art.
i. Who Shapes the City?
In a city the size of London, the history of spatial growth is linked to the emergence of centres and sub-centres spread across large urbanising areas. In a scheme of centre and peripheries, the flows of the cost of land and the agendas of development in urban centres create attraction inequalities. Attraction plays an important role in drawing people to the centre. Urban centres are a constant scenario of shift and reformation. However, the flexibility in which cities –and its polymorphic centres– grow and shrink generates a diversity of uses and allows for different cultural representations and uses to emerge. In such centres the whole hierarchy of relationships of power, political landscapes, development plans, and demographics change rapidly. In an approach to understanding London’s recent transformation, an omnipresent question rises: who shapes urban space?
At the fast-pace market-driven speed in which the drive to regenerate London has intensified, it has become common to find small-scale structures and micro-economies under threat of displacement and erasure. When the persistence of such structures is at stake, the term regeneration easily becomes a dispute for control and preservation. After all, the city is a manifestation of a specific form of politics.
Zooming in to the scale of sub-centres, the role of high streets and markets in everyday life is important to investigate to uncover the intersection between the socio-political, economic, and demographic agendas in negotiation with space. Various studies like Suzi Hall’s ‘Ordinary Streets’ project, have made evident how encounters and informal interactions in such places bring a sense of community and local identity, transforming them into places of social association and inclusion for marginalised or vulnerable groups. Specifically, if cultural differences and ethnicity are considered, these interactions acquire more relevance.
Equally regeneration is a question of value. Because of the access that marginalised groups and major economic drivers have to reshape the city, the notions of what is of value and what counts as heritage becomes uneven. Those who have agency to reshape places under threat are not always the same people who recognise value in them. Or at least not the same value. This raises the question of where and what is of value in processes of urban transformation. Value for whom? What kind of values are at stake of being lost or kept? Or as Stuart Hall put it, whose heritage?
ii. Market Microcosms
Markets, not only those in London, end up giving shape to a symbolic place of identification and belonging through the ordinary. In a market, social capital translates into a form of capital, and into a form of social space. In its composition as a significant encounter point for local populations, the role of markets as sites where everyday sociality promotes association, inclusion and the mediation of differences within a diverse context is self-evident. However, markets are rapidly becoming a target of investment and regeneration, threatening their permanence. Such is the case of the Seven Sisters Indoor Market (SSIM) in the Borough of Haringey, in north London.
The Seven Sisters Indoor Market is a microcosm of the world within the walls of the Wards Corner, a TFL[1] building in Tottenham. What appears to be an off-license store and a café from the sidewalk, becomes a unique ecosystem as soon as you cross the doors inside.
Vibrant colours and hanging lights, Spanish-speaking chatter and Colombian salsa music in the background give a hint of how this market is regulated by a particular community. Inside the market walls, one is absolutely removed from the mediatised London of films, and brought into another London, the multi-ethnic vibrant environs. Imagery, language, aesthetics, and music all combine to share the Latin American cultures which form the core of the market tenants. The SSIM has become a crucial community centre, a solid economic structure and platform, an enclave of nostalgia of another home, or in Ghassan Hage terms, a place of multi-sitedness.
iii. The Value of Self-Organised Spaces
In 2007, Haringey Council chose Grainger plc as a partner to redevelop the area. Apex House, which is in the process of being built across the street, is almost complete. If the compulsory purchase order (CPO) is carried through, the traders in the market have negotiated to be located in the Apex House building temporarily. But many argue that this relocation is not enough to mitigate the risks to the market: it is only a band-aid solution.
The forms in which displacement and regeneration occur in urban contexts today, asks us to revisit the term Ruth Glass referred to as gentrification in London of 1964. Forms of displacement and regeneration happen more often and in a wider spectrum of scales. The discrepancy between the gradient of mega-projects at the city-scale of planning and the smaller-scale clusterings of cultural and quotidian life often results in antagonistic narratives. These antagonisms are not just ones of scale, but equally about power, stressing concepts of the right to the city[2]. One can visually register this antagonism aesthetically between the towering Apex House, and the small, shabby SSIM.
Is democracy in planning not possible? Is shaping the city simply unfair? When it comes to the production of space and its preservation, injustice and inclusivity in decision-making are ambivalent. It can be argued that gentrification, development, or regeneration all entail the existence of benefits and disadvantages. The question becomes who enjoys these benefits? How is the process of spatial transformation and its outcome democratic and fair? And what of its geography of distribution? In a case like the SSIM, in which the construction of spatial structures (property and profit led) and the removal of socio-cultural structures are at stake, the production of space involves harmful development, as Michael Leary-Owhin would call it.
The SSIM is crafted with freedom and uniqueness; it is maintained not through institutional mechanisms, but through small interventions from the market traders themselves. Shaping it has consolidated the market as a place of consistent social and economic platforms for its traders, making evident its function as a vessel of identity/identification for the community who gives life to it. Partly because the SSIM sits on private land, its regulations allow for certain flexibilities in the space-making and operations of the site.
This is not the case with other markets. For example, with Ridley Road Market in Hackney, or the Brixton Markets (Market Row and Brixton Village), both are on public thoroughfares and managed by the local councils. However, the characteristics of each of these markets should not only be understood within the debate around public or private land, or around a dichotomy of freedom vs. control, but rather as networks of representations of identity, of sociability systems, and of micro-scalar infrastructures. Also, as smaller gestures in which becoming resilient is feasible within the large-scale governance and economic systems.
iv. Financial vs Cultural Value
Market traders and the community have been pushing back the CPO (granted in 2008) and negotiating the development plans in order to keep their market. Considering there is what Gonzales and Dawson would term a systemic underinvestment in the maintenance of markets, one might assume it a good thing that the Tottenham development plan aims to regenerate the SSIM.
However, it is s easy to overlook its critical aspects. So why are the traders and the communities who use the market so unhappy with the plans to regenerate? One reason might be that the how and why of this regeneration plan does not take into account varied notions of value.
Does a case like the SSIM help local authorities rethink policies and planning making? As the lawyer Mónica Feria-Tinta said in support of the case of the SSIM,
“planning is not anymore a self contained regime that has nothing to do with human rights.”
Why are local planners in Haringey, themselves public servants, jeopardising human rights in order to push ahead with this redevelopment? Answers to that question are long overdue. What is at stake here is financial value at the cost of cultural value.
v. The Architecture of Resistance?
The Wards Corner Community Coalition (WCCC) and Save Latin Village are currently developing a community plan and managing a new planning permit to develop the site under other terms. As the WCCC say, “top-down development-led regeneration is not the only way.” Activism and self-determination are a bespoke tool for a political justice contestation, to become a platform for further adjustments or reformations –i.e. Black Panther breakfast programs. Nonetheless, political confrontations like this one end up promoting community cohesion and negotiation with decision makers.
The SSIM is an example of spatial practices of the everyday. These practices have built an architecture of resistance out of contestations between national planning policies and the creativity of those who use them. The SSIM might be understood through Luhmann’s notion of an open system; that the appropriation of space and cultural spatial practices are forms of auto-poiesis. Parallel efforts begin to consolidate a network of solidarity, i.e. StART –a community-led and transparent process for a housing development in Haringey, or Latin Elephant regarding the regeneration and displacement in the Elephant & Castle shopping centre and market.
Where is the value of cultural and socio-cultural infrastructures in the equation of to build or not to build? And how can the socio-political environment be translated and incorporated into the new architectures and regenerated structures within ordinary cities, in all their complexity, diversity and peculiarity?
Within the current political and urban development agendas of London, and with the objective of identifying tactics of resistance and guidelines to safeguarding cultural diversity in the everyday, this research will look at how places of identification and solidarity are consolidated collectively throughout everyday agency in the use of space. Specifically it looks at spaces in which similarity can be cultivated through sharing culture, food, social life, language.
This research is an attempt to visualise community organisation as a practice of social and spatial transformation, to understand how participatory dynamics in specific contexts allow punctual actions to take place and reinforce the communities in which they take place, and to understand architecture as a political tool for resistance.
Through understanding and engaging with community-based built environments, we can better perform as insurgent architects/designers.
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Endnotes
[1] Transport for London/ London Underground bought the land in 1973.
[2] The french anthropologist Henri Lefebvre wrote “The Right to the City” in 1967. Other authors like David Harvey and Saskia Sassen have continued the debate on who has right to the city and how.
Works Cited
González, S. (Ed.) (2018) Contested Cities, Contested Markets: Gentrification and Urban Justice in Retail Spaces
Gonzalez, Sara and Dawson, Gloria(2015) Traditional Markets Under Threat
Hage, Ghassan (2005) A not so multi-sited ethnography of a not so imagined community
Hall, Stuart (2000) Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, re-imagining the Post-nation
Hall, Stuart (2006) Cosmopolitan promises, multicultural realities
Hall, Suzanne (2012) City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary
Hilllier, Ben (1999) Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids
Robinson, Jennifer (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development
Piraguata, Angela(2015) Sociability and ethnic identity
