The modernism of neoliberalism: amenity and leisure in the London Docklands Development Corporation

伦敦滨海港区开发公司（LDDC）活跃于1981-1998年，旨在建立一种新的市场主导的城市再开发形式。随着22平方公里的内伦敦的地理政治职权范围，它获得了作为一个形成的参考点，并作为一个典型的案例研究在西欧的历史时期，奠定了战后福利国家和“第三条道路”年的新工党在英国。独特的物理环境，其中一个过时的基础设施-码头-被审美化为休闲景观，已成为世界各地许多城市重复的模式。LDDC的主要历史叙述是，定义其特征的基本决定是拒绝先前假设的计划填充封存的码头，而是保留原地的基础设施-利用和美化其历史技术遗产，以及其独特的空间布局。这是为了开发一个令人愉快和有市场的环境，使宁静的水体成为第二天性。巴恩斯等（1996年：15）总结了许多学者对LDDC的历史观：“豪华的滨水公寓和后现代办公楼成为这个新时代的物理符号。在20世纪80年代，滨海港区是世界各地滨水重建的典范。“这种发展形式打破了以前社会民主主义城市再发展机构对城市规划中水的舒适性（1976年滨海港区联合委员会中流行的一个术语）的承认，只在河流中。这种从自然价值的增值到基础设施的纳入的转变意味着舒适的规划逻辑被休闲的规划逻辑所取代。在公司的存在和遗产中，从舒适到休闲的转变的重要性在1997年得到了最尖锐的表达，当时其公共事务总监Sunny Crouch提到了丰富的水上空间供应来总结公司的成就：他说：“康乐设施是区内居民，工人和游客的生活质素的一个持久特色。“（Bentley 1997：69）。在某种程度上是一种自觉的肯定姿态，我建议复活这个合法化的合法化类别，休闲，作为一个视角，通过它来回顾性地分析滨海港区作为更广泛的社会变革的指示。LDDC所确立和使用的休闲概念与战后的社会福利有何不同？它是否在当时和后来更广泛地构成了社会？2. LDDC的城市主义在多大程度上延续了建筑设计和城市规划中的现代主义历史？3. LDDC的案例对全球城市规划史有什么影响？这些核心问题导致了对现代主义和新自由主义之间关系的全面调查，正如城市规划和建筑本身以及当代政治和文化思想所表达的那样。在最高层面上，拟议的研究旨在通过正在进行的辩论，在城市研究和批判性城市理论，关于城市的不同认识论理解城市在当今的适当性经验工作。

The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) active between 1981-1998, set up to instate a new form of market-led urban redevelopment. With a geographical-political remit of 22km2 of inner London, it gained status as a formative reference-point and as an exemplar case study of urban regeneration in Western Europe in the historical period which lay between that of the post-war welfare state and the 'Third Way' years of New Labour in the UK. The distinctive physical environment instated, in which an outmoded infrastructure-the docks-was aestheticised as a landscape of leisure, has become a model repeated in many cities around the world. The dominant historical narrative of the LDDC is that the foundational decision which defined its character was to reject the prior assumption of plans to fill in the mothballed docks, and to instead preserve the infrastructure in situ - capitalising and aestheticising their historical technological heritage, and on their distinctive spatial layout. This was to the end of developing a pleasurable and marketable environment in which tranquil bodies of water become second nature. Barnes et. al. (1996: 15) sum up the historical view of many scholars on the LDDC: "Luxury waterfront apartments and postmodern office buildings became the physical symbols of this new era ... In the 1980s Docklands was a paradigm for waterfront redevelopment all over the world." This form of development broke with previous social democratic urban redevelopment bodies' acknowledgement of the amenity (a term prevalent in the 1976 Docklands Joint Committee) of water in urban planning only in rivers. This shift from the valorisation of nature to the inclusion of infrastructure infers the replacement of a planning logic of amenity with one of leisure.The importance of the transition from amenity to leisure within the corporation's existence and legacy was expressed most acutely in 1997, when its public affairs director, Sunny Crouch, referred to the opulent supply of watery space to sum up the achievements of the corporation: "the enduring feature which brings quality of life to the area for its residents, its workers and its visitors is the provision for leisure." (Bentley 1997: 69). In what is to some extent a self-consciously affirmative gesture, I propose to resurrect this legitimating legitimising category, leisure, as a perspective through which to retrospectively analyse the docklands as indicative of wider societal change.Research Questions1. How was the concept of leisure, as instated and utilised by the LDDC, different to post-war social amenity? Was it constitutive of society more widely at this time and subsequently?2. To what extent was the urbanism of the LDDC continuous with the history of modernism in architectural design and urban planning?3. What implications does that case of the LDDC have on the global history of urban planning?These core questions lead to an overarching investigation into the relationship between modernism and neoliberalism, as expressed in urban planning and architecture itself, and in the contemporaneous political and cultural ideas. On the highest level, the proposed research seeks to empirically work through ongoing debates, within urban studies and critical urban theory, regarding the appropriateness of different epistemologies of the urban to understanding cities in the present day.