6.1 - Introduction
In the early days of its Legacy era the Olympic Park stands as a singular space within its immediate surroundings. Its stadia and manicured parkland are
markedly different to the yards and warehouses of Hackney Wick, the terraced streets of Stratford, or the open fields of the Hackney Marshes. However, the Park bears a striking resemblance to other London spaces: the towers and plazas of Canary Wharf, the venues and hotels of the Royal Victoria Docks and Greenwich Peninsula, and the new green spaces of Burgess Park, Northala Fields, and Gunpowder Park. These spaces share an aesthetic and atmosphere that marks them out and links them together. Their architecture and landscaping signals both a post-industrial urbanism of plate glass and steel and the return of a bucolic pre-urban rurality. In the melding of the two lies a specific playfulness, an emphasis on leisure and the idea of a creative capitalism perfected. These spaces imagine a mode of life in which distinctions between play and toil, home and workplace, the urban and the rural, have lost their significance.
These qualities of space are intimately related to its role within the reproduction of a financialised and creative mode of accumulation. The image of a
frictionless life-work mix that they present is the ideal image of the movements of capital, labour, and commodities that make up the profit regime into which the Park is tied. Embedding this mode of accumulation within East London's urban space, the Olympic Park engenders an everyday life mirrored and confirmed in its material aesthetic. This everyday life is directed towards forms of work that place emphasis on self-directed and 'creative' production, or on managing the fluid movement of financialised capital. It encourages forms of leisure centred on consumption of 'artisan' goods and collective enjoyment of experiential commodities. It is built on forms of rest and inhabitation that are temporary, mobile, and tied into the collection of rent by large-scale property investors. In
short these spaces are designed to facilitate the movement of capital through the autumnal phase of Arrighi's systemic cycle. In doing so they are made to express an image of this return to fluidity rendered almost utopian, as the material aesthetic of an aspirational lifestyle.
This chapter originates in an expansion of focus towards the end of my research period. During my fieldwork I would travel to the Olympic Park by Overground to Canada Water and then by the Jubilee Line to Stratford. I would share cramped trains with bleary-eyed morning commuters, with the same commuters tired on their way home, or with scattered individuals travelling during the day. On weekends, winter saw large numbers disembarking for the Westfield, while summer saw an increased number arriving with the newly open Park as their destination. These movements of passengers were the only significant variable in this journey, which otherwise remained the same, in contrast to my explorations of the evolving Olympic Park. Through repeated navigation of these spaces, I came to understand a set of fine-grained differentiations within the Park and its surroundings, noting similarity and contrast as structuring elements of this space as it was transformed by
inhabitation. In my journey there and back, however, I would be enclosed within a single stable environment and oblivious to the spaces of London through which I passed.
As my fieldwork went on, I became curious about the Park's more distant surroundings. I began breaking my journey to explore places the train passed through, or finding alternate routes to the Park. My regular journey created a sense of unity to space that obscured the fractured and dissonant nature of East London's ongoing redevelopment. This movement under the city presents a skewed representation of its spaces, skipping over (or under) large areas of residential space, disused space, and space dominated by construction.
Instead, it encourages the passenger to imagine their city as comprised of a number of similar spaces distinguished only by the time of passage between them, the materiality of their distance obscured. Travel in this mode reinforces a
sense of unity to those spaces, eliding those contrasting spaces that would undermine it. I became interested in locating the elements by which this unified space is distinguished from the spaces it forgets, and in thinking about the ways in which this appearance of unity is significant.
At this point in my fieldwork year, the Olympic Park had to some extent grown into its inhabitation. The south Park and all venues save the Stadium were open, and attracting visitors. The arrival of summer meant crowds spilling out of the Westfield onto its outdoor dining areas and into the Park. The East Village was lived-in, with children establishing friendship groups, forming alliances, and organising games in the squares between blocks. Rather than a lone presence in empty space I was another walker along the side of the Lea or between Stratford and the Westfield. As such, the relation of my gender presentation to these spaces felt different. Rather than experiencing seclusion as a freeing influence, I looked for ways to feel confident and secure in my feminine presentation within inhabited space. This expansion of focus therefore also meant an attentiveness towards the ways in which my gender presentation was received in contrasting spaces.
In this chapter, then, I examine the Olympic Park as one of a network of similar spaces across London that stand in contrast to those older spatial forms that make up most of the built environment. In doing so, I turn to the way in which the Park relates to the reproduction of a particular mode of accumulation. I suggest that the Park, as well as encouraging an everyday life orientated towards the practices of this mode of accumulation, becomes in its material form a mirror for the ways in which these movements of capital are imagined.
As such, this chapter addresses the third moment of Lefebvre's triad, that of lived and representational space. This objectification of capital in space produces a representational space that can be understood as specific to contemporary financialised and 'creative' capitalism.
I begin with a discussion of the spatial continuities and discontinuities that characterise the Park's relationship to other elements of London's urban fabric, framing these in terms of Lefebvre's 'isotopia' and 'heterotopia'. The following three sections then discuss the key elements of the Park as isotopia: its post-industrial, anti-urban, and leisure-orientated qualities. In each section I will explore the ways in which the material production of the space has contributed to these qualities. I will also outline the ways in which these qualities relate to relationships of production and reproduction that the Park contains, alert to the fact that representational qualities of space are expressed precisely in the ways it is 'lived'. Finally, I will demonstrate that each of these representational
qualities can be understood to express the underlying structures of
accumulation that have produced this space. Here, I will draw on Frederic Jameson's work relating Giovanni Arrighi's systemic cycles to modes of cultural production. I will conclude with a discussion of the Park as a representational space of financialised capital, drawing out some of the contradictions of this status.