Oi Kuz
Out of context: Reply #41
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Hi Jevad,
I could write you a book on why I hate Canary Wharf, and the whole of the Dockland’s redevelopment. In fact several volumes have been written on such post-modern Cities within Cities – i.e the City of Canary Wharf within the City of London. Not least the author who I linked for Ellie on the day of this thread. In part I guess my antagonism is due to me living on the Docklands periphery in the Isle of Dogs. And in part the anxiety and neuroses I develop when walking under its oppressive shadow.
Have you been to the museum in the Docklands? Housed in one of the warehouses where once there sat produce from the far corners of the world, sit now a museum and des-res for yuppies with balcony views. Views from which they can eye-up the hot city chicks dressed in corporate chic gagging for a one night stand in one of the many hyper-real bars that line the waterfronts.
Yeah so the museum in the Dockland’s far from glamorising the accumulation of public space by private investors, depicts a semi-objective history (of course it is in awe of the free-market capitalism that brought it into being) of the docklands. And you see there the turmoil the 1980s Thatcherite/Reaganite development actually entailed. There was indeed widespread protest from the local residents against the planned redevelopment of that area of London (which F Scott Fitzgerald compared to the ruins of ancient Athens). Not least because redevelopment meant the selling of all council properties, relocation of residents further away from the simulacra of London into the areas of Millwall/Isle of Dogs, Poplar, Hackney, Bow, Shadwell (areas since the “emptying” out of the docks have become by-words for social deprivation in London).
As I used to walk from my work in Westferry to my home in Crossharbour, I passed through the heart of the Wharf, north-to-south. It was (and is) almost like visiting “the Zone” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. An area of shifting realities, that comes to life during the working hour’s and dissapears into uneasy, hybernation during the night. As though the whole place was embarassed to be caught in existence outside office hours. Worst was Friday nights, seeing the yuppies congregating in packs, getting drunk and throwing their filth and garbage into the waters below. Overhearing fleeting conversations about who should have been promoted to the board, and who spent 5 years working for a blue-chip.
It is evident then that Canary Wharf looks, thinks and acts like a city in its own right. But it is not a city. Or rather a simulation of a city. Both the utopia and the dystopia of advanced capitalism. Pure real-estate in its purest and most avaricious form.
I guess it is because I’m an old socialist at heart, and a neo-Marxian in thought, that Canary Wharf to me represents the visceral embodiment of the post-modern nightmare. This is what Reaganism/Thatcherism was about. Free-market capitalism that has no social policy. Or rather its social plolicy is the ghettoisation of the poor into socially excluded, but contained, areas, with the rich and affluent in their gated communities manned by a web of surveillance technology and negro security guards.
Fortress Canary Wharf- the role that money and power play in turning the city into a fortified, exclusive and un-welcoming place in which its layout is aimed at the preservation of riches/power for those that have it. And that is the essence of Canary Wharf’s architecture. Taking it’s cue from that other dystopia in the making – downtown Los Angeles (in fact Margaret Thatcher sought the help of the same Candian firm and businessmen who had helped re-develop downtown LA to work on the docklands redevelopment programme – also to be seen in Manilla, West Berlin, several other mushrooming post-modern cities).
The ubiquitous glare of security cameras renders all public space private in the name of corporate defence. Private security patrols watch every step too. In this city, there is no welcome for those who do not 'fit in', unless you are seen to fuel this system of power you are not welcome. Control is built into the very architecture of this theme-park. It is, no less than the militirisation of the landscape.
Because the principle of neo-liberal free market capitalism refuses to make any further public investment in the remediation of underlying social conditions, we are forced instead to make increasing private investments in physical security. Redevelopment of urban slums simply means padding the bunker. This means the radical privatisation of all that was once public, where security cameras scan you from every angle, and security guards patrol in pairs.
Although such monitoring is immediately intended to safeguard expensive sports cars and other toys of the rich, it will be entirely possible to use the same technology to put the equivalent of an electronic handcuff on the activities of entire urban social strata. Drug offenders and gang members can be 'bar-coded' and paroled to the omniscient scrutiny of a satellite that will track their 24-hour itineraries and automatically sound an alarm if they stray outside the borders of their surveillance district. With such powerful Orwellian technologies for social control, community confinement and the confinement of communities may ultimately mean the same thing.
And the politicians blame rap-music and gun-“culture” for the rising crime and violence in Britain. As though free-market social exclusion and the marginilisation of the poor embodied in Canary Wharf, was innocent in manufacturing alienation. Because we comprehensively lack any sort of social policy that might impinge on the free-market, thugs are projected on the sides of buildings to keep them out. And to keep them in, wherever they crawl from.
And there looms Canry Wharf. In all it’s sterile, communityless glory. It rejects us as citizens, and welcomes us as consumers. A symphony of swarming, consuming monads moving from one cashpoint to another. That is the essence of Canary Wharf. The heartless essence.
And I hate the sky-scrapers too. What is this obsession with them? Why do city planners think they need sky-scrapers before they are taken seriously as a city? The sky-scrapers in Canary Wharf in my opinion are ugly monolithic phalluses – an ode to the monumental. To pure ego. I took my friend with me to the NT drinks in Canary Wharf on Friday, and the minute he arrived he whipped out his phone and started taking pictures of the tall buildings. Ofcourse he’d been there before, but he can’t help himself be awe-inspired. Which is the whole point. Architecture that is designed to bring you to your knees. Like the pyramids of Egypt – testimonies of the god-kings. At the top is Merril Lynch looking down at the empty shell of a city.
I did have an incident with a £500,000 boat, as moth remembers. It involved me walking back home drunkardly one 3am morn’ and noticing a speed boat plonked bang in the middle of that walk-way bit right outside Canary Wharf tube-stop. It was there to advertise the London boatshow, who had paid considerable money to the Canary Wharf corporation, a private investment group, to use what was once public land. So I jumped onboard the boat and pretended to be the captain of a ship. Until a swarm of security guards came and tried to grab me and call the police. I managed to shake them off and I ran towards home – through the foyer of another tower, past revolving doors (less Iron curtains, and more glass curtains), over a bridge with the signs that said “this entire area is private property, no fishing or any other recreational activity is permitted in these waters”, and then home to the dogs.
That’s why I hate Canary Wharf.