note on “the kind of architecture that makes people become architects in the first place.” Prevec/MAKE E&C MasterPlan 2005 +dRMM

MAKE and John Prevec’s Elephant and Castle Masterplan 2004-5

Our experience of the architects and designers (in the broad sense) of the Elephant and Castle degen has been and continues to be one of stunning degrees of haplessness, incompetence and massively self-censoring compromise. The latter is the kindest way to think of individuals and those who drew up the dumb banality of a scheme lacking any social, political, architectural, urban, ecological ambition. And those that delivered and continue to deliver it up. We write with only 11-12 years of direct experience (particularly 2010-now), which is not a disingenuous remark, the period before held real significance and lay the foundations of the subsequent scandal.

John Prevec seemed like a nice chap, enthusiastic but without any expectation of being able to achieve anything of significance like so many others involved throughout the process: landscape designers, public realm people now employed by Lend Lease, ‘place-making’-type consultants bought-off by Lend Lease to ‘cleverly’ deceive the people of this central London quarter in blatant and naff as well as lucrative-for-them ways. John and the others unfailingly led off with massively diluted compromises,

on #Volkswagen and #LendLease, when #EcoFraud kills #ElephantPark #NoStreetTrees

Eco Fraud Kills: Lend Lease’s Elephant Park (Photograph: Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images)

Revelations about VW’s deliberate faking of their emissions data are gripping us all, albeit perhaps with some bewilderment. What to do? In the US, where the fraud has been uncovered due to some proper monitoring of existing regulations, they can hit them in the only place that Eco Frauds feel it: wherever they stash their millions and billions of dollars… This is a moving story and more manufacturers and territories will be exposed in coming days… See this piece for today.

Volkswagen’s rigging of emissions tests for 11m cars means they may be responsible for nearly 1m tonnes of air pollution every year, roughly the same as the UK’s combined emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture.

We will return to this because it relates directly to Lend Lease and their fraud at the Elephant and Castle obviously. A fraud in which they have destroyed a forest and associated canopy values, with its wide range of indisputable benefits for the public -including air pollution-busting benefits- and so far refused -and been able to get away with- not RESTORING those “public welfare values” to the people and the place they have stolen them from. All the time posing as green constructors, behind pixellated tree advertising, hoardings: vacuous and mendacious propaganda…

on policeman being sentenced to plant/look after trees for violence during Gezi park demos, triggered by tree protest

Fatih Zengin uses pepper spray against Ceyda Sungur during the 2013 protest against development of Gezi park in Istanbul. Photograph: Osman Orsal/Reuters

Fantastic! Some positivity to share with you, albeit very belatedly and something you perhaps did not miss (June 2015). This is such a beautiful piece of justice dispensed that we can only advocate the same course of action for all those in Southwark Council’s inner sanctums and those at Lend Lease who invested in such spectacular greenwash while destroying trees in matching earnest…

“A Turkish policeman whose pepper-spraying of a woman in a red dress became a symbol of the anti-government protests two years ago has been found guilty of misconduct and ordered by a court to plant 600 trees.”

Gezi was important to all of us, right? But we relished it in particular in the forest because the protests were triggered by an action to defend the existing trees in Taksim Gezi park which were threatened with destruction to make way for a vulgar development centred on retail (sound familiar?!). Something instinctive in relation to the trees or Istanbul’s remaining urban forest hardened resolve spontaneously and lit up much broader and deeper grievances… 

on ‘In future, viability documents will be open to the public in Southwark’. the future starts NOW -Pt2 (delancey)

Delancey, Elephant and Castle “cheap mantras and vacuous rhetoric”

Cont…

The Elephant and Castle regeneration was a casual disaster from the off, mired in cheap mantras and vacuous rhetoric. The estate at its heart was condemned 20 years after being completed in 1976, nothing ever spent on it or done for it. A massive loss of faith and confidence, including the abandonment of parts of the estate to its own fate and an endless PR campaign demonising what they had created and left behind.

Then came some fifteen years of farce and failure, which began with talk of an integrated transport hub and is coming in to land mired in every form of scandal imaginable, no integrated transport anything, 6-700 new cars spaces already permitted in a ‘car-free regeneration’ and the cherry on the inedible cake: 1000+ private rental units on 1-3 year leases, instead of homes for people, homes people want, affordable homes, useful homes, homes that correspond with Council policy…

“We are looking to deliver 1,000 new homes for rent rather than for sale across the two sites, for people living and working in London.

The apartments will be let direct to residents, with no fees, a choice of 1, 2 and 3 year tenancies and transparent rental pricing that suits Londoners.“

And here is the limit of Peter John’s future.

on ‘In future, viability documents will be open to the public in Southwark’. the future starts NOW -Pt1 (a promise)

“This is not about one chap but about community and the commons…”

We sincerely welcome the commitment from Peter John, the Labour Leader of Southwark Council who raced to sign the scandalous top secret Regeneration Agreement with Lend Lease, an Australian corporation, within two months of being installed in office in 2010. It’s notable how quickly casual disasters (with serious socially, politically, and ecologically regressive effects such as that agreement) can be done, and how slowly -geologically slow- the opening up of these agreements has been. Might yet be.

That is: an elected group off-load public assets and block public access to details, in every and any way they can -for five years! Who lost out in the meanwhile? Who gained? Anyone lacking the bigness of character and so the humility to apologise, learn from substantive errors and change in significant degrees?

The Council Leader was pressed from the beginning of his hasty error to open up the agreement and process (as was the Director of the Project for Lend Lease). Pressed similarly and publicly with regard to the Aylesbury Estate. He boasts of being able to adjust-up the regeneration benefits of the Elephant and Castle ‘regeneration’ at each planning stage. Of course he could already have begun that, but he has not at any of the four separate planning applications/stages so far. It’s all stored up for this glorious ‘future’. So, after five years of no attempt to even pretend to any form of transparency on these issues there is this belated world-stopping announcement -about catching up with Labour Local Authorities across London, as well as the Tabloid-Tory Mayor…

“But in an exclusive interview with the News this week, Council Leader Peter John … made a momentous declaration to ensure future viability assessments are open to public scrutiny.“

We are disgusting optimists and have no personal beef with Peter John.

on local authorities and political figures who WILL open up viability cons to scrutiny -will southwark follow?

ENTER ‘YOUR’ REGENERATION SCHEME HERE:

THE ELEPHANT AND CASTLE…

We’re glad that The Guardian has taken to writing critically about the last major central London regeneration -instead of leaving the subject to a pantomime apologist when the issue was still ‘live’. Another good piece emerged this week on the blatant con that closed-book viability is and has been proven to be in Southwark with the scandalous Elephant & Castle ‘regeneration.’

You do not have regeneration if you have closed-book financial viability: massive areas of secrecy at the heart of a deal involving the off-loading of public assets, land and GI, as well as responsibilities to residents/tenants to a global corporation focused primarily on locking-off minimum guarantees of 25% profit…

“Sadiq Khan, the MP for Tooting and a Labour candidate for London mayor, has said he would establish “a London-wide standard, which demands that all viability assessments are transparent, honest, and fair”.

He added: “It’s wrong that complicated and secretive viability assessments are being used to protect landowners’ and developers’ profits, and prevent the building of affordable homes.”

We like Khan’s approach, one of very few tough-minded big Party figures in Labour on this and related issues. Southwark Labour will complain with characteristic shrillness about a dissident in the ranks, exposing their appetite for socially, politically, ecologically regressive secret cons. Well, that was always a very short-term, albeit brutal in so many effects, game, absolutely certain to be exposed, but only when it was too late…  

on the #gardenbridge’s ever more foul folly, as #osborne owns it #eggedon, egg on?

Parsley Global Corp: coming to a regeneration near you.

Oh how fabulously repellant this absurd monstrosity is! The breathtakingly nasty and incompetent Tory Chancellor George ‘Man of No Taste’ Osborne, “egged on” hapless Tory Populist Mayor and wannabe Leadership rival Boris ‘Whatever’ Johnson to misuse public money in committing to concrete proof that we are most definitely not all in it together. Invited to apply the ancient protester’s technique of placing an egg on the bridge or its fatuous, vulgarian pre-revolutionary fools, we say simply: be gone. Be gone (with their heads)!

“In a letter dated February 2014, released to the Architects’ Journal after a Freedom of Information request, Osborne wrote: “I was surprised by your proposal that TfL should offer to loan the Garden Bridge Trust £30m rather than to provide this as a grant. 

“I imagine that providing this support as a loan rather than grant will make the job of fundraising even more difficult, which presents an unnecessary risk to the success of the project. I will therefore be paying the government’s contribution as a grant and believe you should do the same.”

 

The last four words were underlined by hand, the Architects’ Journal reports. Osborne has been a key backer of the £175m project, describing it as iconic.”*

on parliamentary questions on viability, more dissociation from casual disasters/scandal at heygate/elephant park (aka lobby, lobby, lobby)

With thanks to @se1 who ‘broke’ this

So, firstly, good! Bravo! What do we want but change? This may be a recognition that 5 years is a long time in the public eye when you are also accountable as an MP but also a small sign of an appetite to start putting right some of the scandalous errors -secrets and lies- that characterises the entire ‘regeneration’ of the Elephant and Castle, especially every element that applies to the entirety of the old Heygate.

That is, from all elements of the hastily-conceived Regeneration Agreement of 2010 through the hastily-permitted Masterplan application, to the evictions and ongoing exclusion of the public and community from ‘their’ ‘regeneration’ to the concrete example of Phase 1/Trafalgar Place, with its car-infestation and raised gated private “public” realm (so reminiscent of the grotesque spectacle of the Garden Bridge, no?). And on…

The Right Honourable Coyle joins his immediate Southwark Labour colleagues in trying to distance and dissociate himself from this appalling legacy. He has a lot of very belated work to do and could start with other really easy hits like, for example, the corrupt Planning Committees.

on architects and local authorities standing up to ‘viability’ assessments and rampant profiteering -building design

Elephant park, the Elephant and Castle, GrowElephantProfits 

Lend Lease’s redevelopment of the Heygate masterplanned by Make

.

A good piece by Elizabeth Hopkirk in Building Design (29 June) reporting that architects want to redraft the clause in the National Planning Policy Framework introducing ‘financial viability’ assessments in 2012 which “unwittingly unleashed industrial-scale affordable housing avoidance”. It’s a report that is, of course, triggered by the scandal of the Heygate estate/Elephant Park with a focus on all those profiting directly from it.

“The NPPF unwittingly spawned a whole industry devoted to helping developers argue their way out of providing social and “affordable” housing on the grounds it would render their projects unviable.”

on southwark eating itself first and fastest: lessons deduced from heygate/elephant park scandals. never again… (pt1)

Elephant Park: the banality of… banality.

There have been a couple of relatively substantial reports on the deeply scandalous nature of the ‘regeneration’ underway at the Elephant and Castle with particular focus on the 1200 homes that made up the old Heygate estate and community. There is little new in these reports, but for detail/legal confirmations and very welcome -albeit very belated- analysis and critique of a casually disastrous agreement, which would have been so much more effective in 2010 when it emerged!

The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright put together a broad and well researched piece on what is revealed in the extremely delayed release of the financial viability documents: the dark secret at the expansive heart of the 2010 Regeneration Agreement which was always such an obvious disaster.  The secrecy held to from the minute it was signed (by a jejune Labour admin. though nothing of this reflects well on the old LD and LD/Tory admins of the previous decade!), challenged in person and publicly from that moment too, is really and frankly a matter of systemic corruption: