Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Post-War and Post-Olympics: East London, Architecture and Regeneration, Across the Generations

This post was contributed by Dr Leslie Topp, Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture in Birkbeck’s Department of History of Art and Screen Media.

What is regeneration? What builds community? And who defines and steers these processes? Architects, planners, politicians, the public? The cold post-Olympic winter, with the built and planned legacy of those games forming around us, seemed a good time to bring local people together to discuss these questions. The day workshop, which was held at the historic House Mill in Bromley-by-Bow on 23 February 2013, was a collaboration between Fundamental Architectural Inclusion, an architecture centre based in Newham, and Birkbeck’s Department of History of Art and Screen Media. Funding was generously provided by the Association of Art Historians Initiatives Fund.

The 10 participants were drawn from the first and second years of Birkbeck’s innovative Certificate in HE in Understanding Visual Arts, which is run out of the Rosetta Art Centre in Newham, and the group of young people which Fundamental works with in initiatives like the Architecture Crew and the Legacy Youth Panel, who are regularly consulted on regeneration plans around the Olympics and its legacy. All local to East London (Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Waltham Forest), the workshop participants had experienced the current wave of regeneration first hand, and knew too the experience of living in the neighbourhoods and estates built in the post-war years. They were also (the Birkbeck students) well versed in cultural history, and (the Fundamental participants) in architecture and planning, and the combination of life experience, knowledge and confidence in discussion made for a stimulating and compelling day.

We watched two films, both dealing with ambitious utopian plans for the rebuilding of large sections of Newham. One was made in 2008 by the Architecture Crew, a group of young people 13-19 years old, who Fundamental was working with. The other was made in 1948, by the then West Ham Borough’s Architecture and Planning Office, about the plans for rebuilding West Ham after the extensive destruction caused by the 1940-41 air raids. One of the most striking differences between them, which emerged strongly through the subsequent discussions, was that while the first offered a ‘bottom up’ perspective, and was a critical enquiry by some of the people who’d be most strongly affected by the regeneration, the second was a piece of ‘top down’ propaganda, representing an ‘experts know best’ position. A lively debate broke out about the extent to which things had or had not changed in this respect since the post-war era. Some argued that while lip service is paid to community consultation, the ‘community’ has very little actual impact on the plans that are carried out. Nick Edwards, the director of Fundamental, and the young people who came along to the workshop, gave a nuanced sense of the particular ways in which people could have an impact on plans (though it was clear that to do this involved a considerable sustained effort over a long period of time.)

Another topic that kept cropping up was mobility. On the one hand, as one participant pointed out, East London has always been a place people move on from when they had the means to do so. Others wondered though whether that may now change – with the regeneration around the Olympics, East London had the potential now to be a place where people would want to stay, or come back to. But the new transport infrastructure, and the increased opportunities to move around, (including Birkbeck’s own courses, such as the Cert HE Understanding Visual Arts, that bring students out to East London and into Bloomsbury) mean that East London is now more connected than ever to the world beyond it. The parts of East London that had been very separate from each other, with some people never venturing much beyond their immediate neighbourhoods, had become more interconnected as well. The homogeneity and static, inward looking quality of the post-war estates (seen as the height of modernity in the 1948 film) were being directly challenged by the latest wave of regeneration.

An extra unexpected treat at lunchtime – enthusiastically taken up by all the workshop participants, despite the cold – was a tour around the Grade One listed 18^th century House Mill. History in East London doesn’t begin with the Blitz!

Exploring race, racism and international development

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This post was contributed by Anna Marry, Communications Manager, London International Development Centre (LIDC) .

Race, racism and development book cover

Contesting what is often taken for granted in international development is important, but rare. That’s why I found this book launch for Race, racism and development very refreshing and different.It was also a truly intercollegiate event on a truly interdisciplinary topic.

On 29 January 2013 the London International Development Centre (LIDC), a consortium of the five Bloomsbury Colleges, and Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies organised a book launch for Race, racism and development: Interrogating history, discourse and practice (Zed Books) by Dr Kalpana Wilson, Visiting Lecturer at Birkbeck and LSE Fellow in Gender Theory, Globalisation and Development. The event was hosted by the Institute of Education (IOE) and chaired by Dr Parvathi Rahman from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, with Firoze Manji, CODESRIA(Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), as discussant.

Kalpana Wilson’s motif for writing the book was a silence she observed about race in international development discourse, what she called ‘the whiteness of development’ – white experts talking about what should be done. Rather than simply advocating measures to change the personnel of development institutions, Kalpana set out to examine questions of structural racism in development. She was interested in how ideas of race legitimise certain power relations, looking both at history (e.g. the anti-colonial movement in India) and the present, for instance the war on terror. Kalpana’s focus in writing the book was on how ideas get incorporated and transformed in public narratives of race. Recently we can observe what she refers to as the ‘racialisation of hunger’ – poverty and hunger are essentially associated with Asia and Africa, both with respect to material relations and representation.

Gender is important too. Not so long ago ‘Third World’ women were pictured as helpless and needing to be saved. Now that image has changed, they are finally seen as agents, but to the other extreme, as entrepreneurial, hard-working and altruistic to the point of being superhuman. And yet the idea of political agency is still associated with the global North.

Firoze Manji, in his discussant’s comments, described development as a sophisticated euphemism that Kaplana deconstructs and links to other ‘forbidden’ words like racism and liberalism. There is no such thing as poverty, claimed Manji, only impoverishment, and this is what we call ‘development’ . ‘Development’ is in fact about exploiting the South, with NGOs playing the role of new colonisers. Kalpana also takes apart what Manji referred to as ‘the pornography of development’, portraying the developing world in a pessimistic, exaggerated way that is meant to shock. Manji argued that in a post-colonial, globalised world we are now experiencing a shift in defining who we are and who the ‘other’ is, but it is nevertheless useful to keep the colonial past fresh in our minds.

The lively discussion that followed raised issues about Marxism; the idea of the innocent, unspoilt South that needs to be saved; gender; the deserving and undeserving poor; the racialisation of corruption,; and the need to delegitimise the NGOs.

This event was different in a very refreshing way. It provided an open platform for examining and contesting what is often taken for granted in international development. It allowed radical ideas to be expressed and engaged with. I was talking to a SOAS student of Development Studies over a drink after the presentations, who said: “At SOAS we learn how to be critical of governments and international organisations. But this is new – that NGOs can also be a destructive power in international development.”

Whether that statement is true or not depends on one’s perspective, but one thing is certain – the event revealed a new dimension and a new way of thinking about international development. And that’s always a good thing.

New short fiction from Birkbeck’s writers

The book

Annual short fiction anthology, The Mechanics’ Institute Review (MIR), has truly excelled this year. Now in its ninth edition, the anthology, which is produced and edited by student’s on Birkbeck’s MA programmes, is a compilation of short stories from talented students on Birkbeck’s Creative Writing programmes.

There’s been a real buzz about this year’s issue, with its striking cover and exceptional array of stories. I may be slightly biased as I was one of this year’s editors but I’m definitely not the only one who can see the high quality – the anthology has been reviewed in the Guardian and DIVA magazine, and several of the writers have been approached by literary agents. Last week, the growing interest in MIR was demonstrated when the MIR editorial team hosted a packed out reading event at Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross.

The readings

As well as selecting students’ work from almost a hundred submissions, the team also commissioned several stories from well-known authors and three of them were able to come along to Foyles to share their stories and their wisdom.

The first to captivate the audience was Nick Alexander who, despite having published nine novels, admitted to a great fear of reading his work aloud. But he quickly had the audience chuckling away at his story, One man’s poison, about the trials of phone App dating.

Alison MacLeod, the author of two novels and a lecturer on the Creative Writing MA at University College Chichester, read an extract from her story, The Thaw. Her expressive and slightly hypnotic reading style had me on the edge of my seat and, despite already knowing what happens in the story, I was devastated when she finished at what would be the crucial moment. Phoebe Blatton, currently a Creative Writing MA student, was up next with an extract of her sinister and discomforting story, Paul and Emma and Paul.

Finally, Julia Bell, author of two young adult novels and Senior Lecturer on Birkbeck’s Creative Writing MA, skipped straight to the main action of her story, The Wilds, where two neighbours find themselves at the violent hands of teenage ‘terrorists’ while on an afternoon stroll along the beach.

Writing

After the readings, there was plenty of time for mingling and drinking the free wine. Common themes of my conversations with other writers were unread manuscripts, mounting piles of books to read and, inevitably, ‘getting that book published’.

A few times recently I’ve been asked about my experience of studying on the writing MA and whether it’s made me a better writer. The on-going debate about whether creative writing can be taught will continue but the experience of helping to edit this collection has been invaluable; reading and editing other writers’ work can provide an insight you can’t get from your own writing. Not only that, but I now have a much greater knowledge of the book industry and this will certainly help when deciding what I want to do with my writing.

You can grab a copy a copy of MIR9 on Amazon – but hurry, the first print run in almost sold out!

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE! Spanish media representations of violence against women

From impunity to retribution: a long journey

In her lecture, Professor Comas gave an overview of how violence against women has been perceived by Spanish society over the course of history. For a long time, it was considered just a private issue: isolated domestic incidents between a man and his wife, behind closed doors. The male perpetrators went unpunished, and the female victims were to some extent “blamed” (she must have done something to deserve this?).

As women began to occupy positions of authority and responsibility in Spain’s post-dictatorship Transición, they started raising awareness about what were clearly not just isolated private incidents, but rather a fairly widespread societal phenomenon: the concept of “battered women” was born. Shelters were put in place. Women were identified as the victims of this phenomenon, but the perpetrators remained a nebulous entity.

However, a sea change took place around 1997, with the spine-chilling case of Ana Orantes, an ordinary housewife who appeared on television to talk about her experience of domestic violence, and who was beaten and burned alive by her husband a few days later. The brutality of the case rocked the nation, arguably because Spanish society could relate the phenomenon of violence against women to a real human being, with a name, a face, and an articulate voice – not just to a statistical figure.

In 2004, the statute books finally recognised that this was a form of violence overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against their female partners. Female victims could henceforth seek protective measures (such as restraining orders) and male perpetrators were brought to justice.

The media’s role: an ambivalent position

Having established that violence against women had become “an affair of state”, Professor Comas then went on to examine media representations of the phenomenon. She noted, first of all, an increase in the amount of reporting (all fatal incidents are now reported in the news), as well as a more informed way of representing the problem (looking not only at individual cases, but also investigating the root causes behind this societal phenomenon).

However, Professor Comas also drew the audience’s attention to some decidedly unhelpful media tactics, such as bringing victims and violent perpetrators together “for a reconciliation” on day-time chat shows (one such case in 2007 led to a young woman, Svetlana Orlova, having her throat slit by her jilted boyfriend, whose wedding ring she had refused on live television), or newspaper columnists who on occasion showed “understanding” for the formerly-humiliated-now-turned-violent boyfriend (Salvador Sostres “Un chico normal” article for El Mundo in 2011 had to be pulled, following public outrage).

With her recent experience as a member of the Audiovisual Media Council of Catalonia, Professor Comas concluded that media self-regulation had its pitfalls – an argument her audience could but agree with.