Woodcraft, Saffron;
(2019)
Void potential: absence, imagination and the making of community in London’s Olympic Park.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis examines the meaning and making of community in London’s Olympic Park where five new neighbourhoods - described as model communities for the 21st-century, and known as the Legacy Communities Scheme (LCS) – are currently under construction. ‘Thriving new communities’ have been identified by government as an indicator of the success of the Olympic legacy regeneration programme, which promises to transform the prosperity and life chances of people living in east London. Planned urban development is the vehicle for this transformation, of which the LCS is a significant component. This research interrogates the social and material effects of the Olympic legacy regeneration programme by examining the process of ‘making’ Chobham Manor, the first LCS neighbourhood, from the perspective of the professional planners, architects and regeneration practitioners engaged in the planning and placemaking process. Based on ethnographic data collected over two and a half years, the thesis describes a series of social, spatial and discursive ‘voids’ – territories, gaps, absences and emptinesses - that emerged as prominent and agentive entities in the work of imagining and making Chobham Manor. It examines the investments made by different actors in producing, protecting and sometimes over-coming, the potential of these voids to support, disrupt or sustain the making of ‘community’. The thesis deconstructs how the voids shift through material registers and operate to produce and exert power in coercive and subtle ways, and from this empirical base, develops a typology of voids as an analytical device to interrogate the production of power, space and citizen subjectivities in the neo-liberal city. By engaging with ‘voids’ as vital and contingent entities that produce dynamic social, material and temporal relationalities, this thesis advances the analytical potential of the void beyond current engagements with the immaterial and transcendent.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Void potential: absence, imagination and the making of community in London’s Olympic Park |
| Event: | UCL |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2019. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > UCL Institute for Global Prosperity |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10071841 |
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