LGW-HAM is an event to launch the findings of research into parallel conditions identified in East London and Hamburg Hafencity by staff and students at Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA, in collaboration with Alexa Lixfeld.
The event did launch a newspaper presenting the approach, screened images from the projects, and invited discussion. Thanks for hosting the event to LUV INTERIOR HAMBURG!
The major infrastructural changes enabled by the Olympics in East London have created a vast new city park with the Olympic Stadia as city landmarks, a huge shopping district, Westfield, and addressed sensitive environmental issues of flooding, land contamination and sewage disposal. At the same time, and as a result, house prices have escalated rapidly and the communities living around the park feel threatened by gentrification.
In Hamburg Hafencity and the Elbphilharmonie similarly address the question of creating a landmark in ex-industrial terrain and using redevelopment as a catalyst and funding source for necessary wasteland redevelopment.
As in London environmental ambitions give a positive philosophical air to Hamburgs development wishes. And communities in St Pauli feel the forces of gentrification gaining the upper hand.
People, especially local people, tend to get lost in these 'galactic' improvement strategies. Our first London project looked at very specific local conditions around the Olympic Park in London and at the ways that individuals might promote these conditions as a set of fifty interventions that could establish their significance. The second London project looked at the, extreme, measure of reducing housing area standards by 50% in order to make housing affordable to ordinary, more ordinary, Londoners. The final Hamburg project examines the Hafentor 7 location, between Hafencity and StPauli, as a potential site upon which local interests could be given prominence, local people could be engaged with macro strategies and find an authoritative voice or macro strategies could be re-framed to invite local engagement. Stickers representing the initial project concepts were distributed and photographed in Hamburg earlier in the spring as a first positive intervention ...
