High-rise landscapes: The afterlives of tower block 'failure' and rethinking urban futures

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This project will examine the ripple effects of high-rise building failure: how it unfolds in the world with far-reaching consequences, and how its afterlives might be harnessed for rethinking urban futures. Taking the Grenfell Tower fire in London and a series of building collapses in Nairobi as its starting points, it will critically engage with 'failure' as both a socio-political category and as an event to explore how failure acts in the world, and what its afterlives might generate. Qualitative, interdisciplinary urban methods and an ambitious impact and public engagement programme will investigate how fire and building collapse can transform wider urban landscapes across multiple scales, from demolition to urban renewal, material innovation to politics and public opinion. It will explore how failures such as fire, material malfunction and building collapse are embedded in longer histories of social, political and infrastructural intervention, and how these accumulate across time to shape high-rise geographies of exclusion, aspiration and transformation. Investigating urban transformation from sites of failure, the project will track the interrelations of legislative, political and social change triggered by fire and building collapse, alongside powerful urban activism and civic empowerment that are reshaping communities in Nairobi and London.Methodologically, the project will adopt a comparativist, global urbanism approach that implements an open-ended mode of working with variation and discrepancy rather than attempting to control for difference. Working across conventional Global North/ South divides in urban studies, this approach is impact-oriented and participatory, working with built environment professionals, artists and community groups - as well as buildings themselves. Fundamentally, it foregrounds the voices of communities affected by housing disasters, recognising their expertise in their own neighbourhoods, and integrating them into methods for rethinking the future of high-rise landscapes.