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

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 Questions

1. 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.