Tower block failures: high-rise living and global urbanism

2017年6月14日，伦敦西部格伦费尔大厦发生毁灭性火灾。同一天，肯尼亚内罗毕卡里奥班吉庄园一座塔楼倒塌。这两起悲剧以不同的方式暴露了城市政治的不公正、建筑材料的不稳定以及对法规和规划的漠视。他们还重新引发了关于城市生活的“适当”形式、当代城市生活日益扩大的不平等以及理想城市应该是什么样子的辩论。本项目将研究塔楼故障作为物理事件和更广泛的公众话语。我将研究失败如何在多个尺度上出现，从设计和材料到政治和公众舆论，以及这如何启动拆除，建设和更新的新过程。通过这种方式，失败事件作用于城市更广泛的景观，激活政治，社会和物质影响的网络。未来领袖奖学金将提供灵活性和支持，以应对这些动态，因为它们正在展开，与研究人员，建筑环境专业人员，艺术家，社区和建筑本身接触，以产生新的见解，展览和以影响为导向的战略，这些战略与经历城市变化的过程，材料，场地和人们合作。经常被描述为城市的失败之地。然而，这些评估通常是通过参考欧洲和美国城市建立的城市规范来进行的，好像有一个通用的城市标准，所有城市都应该根据这个标准来衡量。虽然卡里奥班吉的坍塌清楚地揭示了内罗毕的主要问题，但这种普遍主义的方法并不一定是理解城市失败的最有效方法。它不仅掩盖了城市建设的不同模式和特定背景的问题，而且假定欧美城市是一个理想的基线。但正如格伦费尔及其引发的有力批评所表明的那样，对伦敦城市街区、住房设计或地方治理失败的担忧远未得到解决。在伦敦和内罗毕灾难性的高层建筑倒塌之后，一个有弹性和可持续的城市世界可能是什么样子的问题重新出现。在城市发生空前变化的时代，这些关切尤其紧迫：到2050年，世界三分之二的人口将生活在城市地区，城市增长最快的地区将是发展中区域，特别是非洲。这些都是该项目旨在通过两个关键目标来解决的关键挑战：一个城市的城市灾难的特殊性如何帮助了解另一个城市的灾难并做出反应？在城市化日益多样化以及世界城市之间的联系日益紧密的时代，我们需要什么样的新方法和合作方法来把握失败的来世是如何重塑城市空间的？因此，我的研究将对社会和社区福祉具有重要的潜在应用和益处。这是一个关键和及时的机会，以开发新的研究途径，解决城市社区的弹性和城市未来的性质，对英国和肯尼亚的发展至关重要的战略问题。使用塔块作为一个透镜，并结合城市人类学与城市研究，物质文化研究和城市设计的方法，我在一个独特的位置，开发创新的经验和理论方法，以推进什么构成城市的成功或失败的理解，不仅是学术，但城市实践和城市生活。

On 14 June 2017, a devastating fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, west London. On the same day, a tower block collapsed in Kariobangi estate, Nairobi, Kenya. In different ways, both tragedies exposed the injustices of urban politics, the volatility of construction materials, and disregard for regulations and planning. They also reanimated debates about 'proper' forms of urban living, the widening inequalities of contemporary urban life and what a desirable city should look like. This project will examine tower block failure as both physical event and in wider public discourse. I will investigate how failure emerges across multiple scales, from design and materials to politics and public opinion, and how this can set in motion new processes of demolition, construction and renewal. In this way, failure events act on the wider landscape of a city, animating webs of political, social and material effect. A Future Leader Fellowship will provide the flexibility and support to address such dynamics as they unfold, engaging with researchers, built environment professionals, artists, communities and buildings themselves to generate novel insights, exhibitions and impact-oriented strategies that work with the processes, materials, sites and people experiencing urban change.Cities in Africa, with high levels of informality, infrastructural breakdown and poor governance, are frequently depicted as places of urban failure. Yet these assessments are usually made through reference to urban norms established in the cities of Europe and America, as though there is a universal urban standard against which all cities should be measured. Whilst the Kariobangi collapses clearly reveal major concerns in Nairobi, this universalist approach is not necessarily the most productive for understanding urban failure. Not only does it mask diverse modes of city-making and context-specific issues, it assumes that Euro-American cities are a desirable baseline. But as Grenfell and the potent critique it ignited make clear, concerns about the failure of urban neighbourhoods, housing design or local governance in London are far from resolved. In the aftermath of catastrophic high-rise failures in London and in Nairobi, the question of what a resilient and sustainable urban world might look like has emerged with renewed force. These concerns are particularly pressing at a time of unparalleled urban change: by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will be living in urban areas, with highest urban growth occurring in developing regions, particularly Africa. These are crucial challenges that this project aims to address through two critical objectives: how can the specificity of urban disaster in one city help to inform understandings of, and responses to, catastrophe in another? And what new approaches and collaborative methods do we need to grasp how the afterlives of failure are reshaping urban space, at a time of increasingly diverse urbanisation, as well as growing connectivity between cities of the world? As such, my research will have important potential applications and benefits for society and community wellbeing. This is a crucial and timely opportunity to develop new research pathways that address the resilience of urban communities and the nature of urban futures, strategic concerns vital to the development of the UK and Kenya. Using the tower block as a lens and combining urban anthropology with methods from urban studies, material culture studies and urban design, I am in a unique position to develop innovative empirical and theoretical approaches to advance understandings of what constitutes urban success or failure, not just for scholarship but for urban practice and urban life.