Alberto Duman - Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss in East London

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Regeneration Songs

Regeneration Songs:

Sounds of Investment and Loss from East London

Edited by

Alberto Duman

Dan Hancox

Malcolm James

Anna Minton

To the people of Newham

Table of Contents

Alberto Duman, Dan Hancox, Malcolm James & Anna Minton

Interlude:
Londons Regeneration Supernova
Original Text

A Conversation between Alberto Duman, Andrea Phillips, and Anna Minton
Showroom Gallery, 16 January 2018

Setting the Scene: Thirty Years of Regeneration in East London
Anna Minton

Interlude:
The Uses of Poetry
Gillian Swan

The Song Remains the Same: Regeneration Narratives in the Royal Docks
Sue Brownill

Empire State of Mind
Tom Cordell

The Royal Docks as Museum
Matthew Friday

Condensing and Displacing: A Stratford Dream-Work
Jane Rendell

Into the Magenta Haze: Notes on Making Art in the Arc of Opportunity
Alberto Duman

Pirates and Olympians: Deja Vu FM and the Copper Box Arena
Dan Hancox

From the Factory to the Pop Centre and Back
Owen Hatherley

We Need to Talk about Newham: The East London Grime Scene as a Site of Emancipatory Disruption
Joy White

Harmony and Prosperity Unlimited: Real Estate Rhetorics between Shanghai and London
Michela Pace

Jean-Michel Jarman: The Last of Docklands
Will Jennings

Interlude:
Urban Porn (World City Trailers)
Keller Easterling

Authoritarian Populism | Populist Authoritarianism
Malcolm James

Other Peoples Plans for the Royal Docks
Douglas Murphy

Thats Just the Way It Is: Ageing and Mobility in East London
Theodora Bowering

Does This Place Exist? Identity Making in the Royal Docks
Robert Baffour-Awuah

Reclaiming Regeneration
Concrete Action

The Art of the Possible: The ArcelorMittal Orbit, Collective Memory, and Ecological Survival
David Cross

LONDON AFTERSHOCK:
Variation on a Theme by Walter Benjamin
Phil Cohen

Interlude:
Can You See Us Now
Amina Gichinga and Rohan Ayinde (Take Back the City)

The Zone
Dean Kenning

Recurrence of All Things
Kunal Modi

Narrative Arcs
Amy Butt and David Roberts

Fig. 1: Fiery Pool of Asphalt. Image by Alberto Duman 2017

Introduction

Alberto Duman, Dan Hancox, Malcolm James & Anna Minton

This book sets out to explore the relationship between culture and capital in the contemporary production of urban space in London and the co-opting of culture and art, in its various manifestations, by property finance. These spatial and ideological relationships between advertising, visual culture and the ability to displace our perceptions, were captured by Walter Benjamin almost a hundred years ago when he noted: What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.

An object of visual culture in the shape of a promotional film about East London, aimed at global investors, is at the centre of this publication. Londons Regeneration Supernova is a marketing film made by Newham Council, in East London, together with the London Development Agency (LDA), for screening at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. It aimed to highlight land and property market opportunities in a large area branded as the Arc of Opportunity. This stretches from Stratford, the heart of the London 2012 Olympics, through Canning Town, Custom House and the Royal Docks, focusing particularly on the Royal Docks area, which was described in the film as offering regeneration opportunity on a global scale. This part of London and its people like so many other parts of towns and cities around the UK and world was offered as a product for sale to the capital investors gathered in Shanghai.

This particular branded area was conceived as a councilled, government-supported and market-backed commodity, suspended between the material values of land and property and the immaterial values of art and culture. A key theme explored in the book is that space and place do not merely reflect economic and social relations, rather they produce social relations through the creation of the urban imaginaries and patterns for living. Idealised and abstracted versions of those imaginaries and patterns are themselves reflected in the hundreds of strategies, promotional materials and CGI representations of possible futures. These contribute to the placemaking strategies described, which rest on the economics of extracting value from places increasing land and property prices, in other words. As the late geographer Doreen Massey wrote, spatial organization is integral to the production of social relations and power relations and not merely its result. Our concern then is not only for the spectacle of Newham provided to global investors, but also what it means for residents of Newham to live in such fiery imagery.

***

The idea for the book originated in 2015 when Alberto Duman and Anna Minton secured a grant for Alberto to work as artistin-residence at the University of East Londons Master of Research (MRes) Architecture Programme, subtitled Reading the Neoliberal City, where Anna is Programme Leader. But the genesis of the project came earlier, perhaps in 2012, when Alberto was asked to programme an event about the London 2012 Olympics for MUTE Magazine . As part of this he started to track down the appearance and disappearance of a strange promotional movie called Londons Regeneration Supernova .

Albertos first request for a copy of the film, made through Newham Councils Media Services Department, was refused, apparently because the material contained in the movie no longer represented Newhams regeneration priorities and branding. He then made a specific Freedom of Information request to the London Borough of Newham and managed to obtain a copy. The peculiarity of this recovered evidence was that the film provided by Newham was silent. The original on-site music for the event remains unknown, but the absence of sound for such an important piece of promotional place marketing narrative, opened the conceptual space for what became the Music for Masterplanning project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The aim of the project was for Alberto to work with artists and musicians across the Arc of Opportunity area to record an albums worth of music tracks to go with the film.

The film was produced for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, which showcased the dizzying speed of global regeneration and development which was reaching a pinnacle in the host city. In such circumstances, the idea of the sheer speed of change of a Supernova was a fitting image to bring to China. The once in a lifetime investment pitch was a film filled with culturally laden terms such as prosperity, amidst references to red telephone boxes and Big Ben, which sold the Arc of Opportunity to Asian investors who would likely never have heard of Newham on the basis of it being three hours from Paris and six hours from New York.

Fig. 2: Screenshot from the Londons Regeneration Supernova movie, 2010.

For Alberto, the paper trail goes back further to 6 July 2005, when the 2012 Olympic Games were unexpectedly awarded to London, the day before terrorist bombs struck the city.

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