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When the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games open in July, the enormity of the changes to East London will be as dramatic for any visitor from the West End, who has not recently visited Stratford, as for a tourist from Australia. The Games have involved the construction of new sporting venues, most conspicuously the Velodrome by Hopkins Architects, the Olympic Stadium by Populous and the Aquatics Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects. They have also included extensive new permanent housing in the Olympic and Paralympic Village. Perhaps most far-reaching for the area, though, has been the whole-scale decontamination and cleanup of the Lea Valley which was undertaken before any building work took place. The Games have also facilitated a new level of investment in much-needed infrastructure to East London, with new rail and transport links. They are also leaving in their wake a beautifully landscaped public park—of a size that has not been built since the 19th century.
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It was clear that AD should both mark and review the changing face of its home city in 2012. The theme of regeneration has been embraced by guest-editor David Littlefield, who invited an impressive cast of contributors not only to survey the shifts in the metropolis in East London and elsewhere, but also to question the currency of regeneration itself. When so much lip service is paid to the concept of regeneration, there is the very real danger that it is becoming devalued and may come to mean everything and nothing. What is clear, though, is that regeneration remains to be broadly understood as being about positive change—a force for the good—even if there are widely diverging views about the dynamics of this force and the projects that can truly be categorised as regenerative. At a time when private partnerships have become a requirement for any kind of development, at the large scale requiring injections of capital from overseas, commercial concerns have become the driving force. As Murray Fraser so aptly charts in his article (see pages 14-21), global investment has also impacted the nature of development in the capital in recent years. There has been a marked shift from a US model of urbanism to a more global one, influenced by investors from the Middle East, Far East, Russia and Australia. How can this capital be captured/countered to ensure schemes remain regenerative at a local level? Are there existing models of long-term stewardship that can be drawn on in development? How can we keep championing the needs of the periphery or edge, as well as the commercial centre, without the intervention of effective public bodies?
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—Helen Castle
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