Minton - Ground control : fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city

Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City

ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Anna Minton is a writer and journalist. She spent a decade in journalism, including a stint as corporate reporter on the Financial Times, and is the winner of five national journalism awards. Finding daily journalism frustrating she began to focus on longer projects for think tanks and policy organizations and is the author of the Joseph Rowntree Foundations Viewpoint on fear and distrust.

Ground Control emerged from a series of three agenda-setting reports, two of which were published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the other by the think tank Demos. The first focused on gated communities and ghettoes in the US, questioning to what extent these trends are emerging in the UK. The second looked at polarization and culture in one British city, Newcastle, and the third investigated the growing privatization of public space.

She appears regularly on television and radio and is a frequent conference speaker, invited to speak to a wide range of audiences, from art biennials to policemen. Ground Control is her first book. She lives in South London with her partner, who is a film maker, and her son.

More details available at: www.annaminton.com

Ground Control came out in 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis. Nearly three years later, the UK and the global economy continue to reel from that crisis, yet few column inches are devoted to the possibility of alternative models. I wanted to write this new chapter of the book, focusing on the development accompanying the London Olympics, because in spite of the economic outlook, the Olympics represents the high point of the debt-based model of property-fuelled development which played such a large part in bringing the crisis about.

The book ended on a positive note, suggesting that that the era of TINA There is No Alternative was passing, paving the way for a more civic minded and democratic approach to the city. Sadly, there is little sign of that so far. Even so, and despite the excesses catalogued in this account of the Olympic project, I hope that we will begin to talk seriously about alternatives and I hope that this new chapter will play some part in starting that debate.

Although there have been a number of policy changes in the areas investigated by Ground Control, in particular the end of the Pathfinder policy explained in , they have not affected the overall thrust of the case the book puts forward, and I have left the body of the text untouched. The book stands on its own, but the new chapter complements and in many ways completes it, with the Olympic development neighbouring Londons Docklands, where the story detailed in Ground Control began.

Anna Minton, October 2011,
London

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