Outside the Timber Lodge cafe stands a display case containing a stylised three-dimensional representation of the Park, constructed from cut-up black and white maps and layered card. The sides of the structure bear slogans – 'from a stadium to a tourist hot-spot', 'turning a 30-year plan into a reality' – alongside artists' impressions of the finished Park and photographs of the construction
process. On the front, text reads: 'E20 will become a living breathing piece of the city'.
Fig 29. Announcing E20 as a 'living breathing piece of the city'
Here the Olympic Park is hailed by postcode as a segment of London's urban fabric. Of course, this postcode itself betrays the fact that this recently defined space is newly-inserted into that fabric. 'E20' is the fictional postcode in which Eastenders takes place, applied to the Park in reference to the soap. Having rendered this space (and its postcode) material, granting a concrete existence to abstract plans, the developers and managers of the Park wish for it not only a tangible and thingly existence, but a 'living, breathing' one.
The Park in November 2013 stood in stark contrast to its festival liveliness during the games. The wide spaces that had held crowds wandering between stadia, eating picnics, watching events on huge screens, and perusing
merchandise, now stood empty. The avenues between residential blocks in the East Village were silent save for the occasional sounds of ongoing construction work and most windows opened onto bare apartments, loose cables trailing
from ceilings. The southern part of the Park was completely closed, and the northern part was still frequented mostly by workers finishing the winter planting. The fact that this was still visibly the Olympic Park – marked by the sweeping architecture of the stadia and the twisting shape of the Orbit, by the Olympic rings that crown the northern Park and banners hung from lampposts – made this sense of stillness all the more eerie.
Fig 30. The empty Aquatics Centre concourse, in February 2014
This was not a 'living breathing piece of the city' but a space characterised by its lack of life. In comparison with Camberwell where I was living, and with
neighbouring Hackney Wick and Stratford, the Park was marked by an absence of social interaction. Wandering across these spaces I was often a lone figure in a wide landscape. Meanwhile the Westfield, even on weekday afternoons, felt bustling and busy: defined by bodies crossing paths to look in shop windows, queueing for food, or passing through to Stratford station. Outside it was possible to wander for hours without passing another human, the curving lines and smooth surfaces of the Park uncomplicated by encounter with others.
Where the Westfield was carefully climate-controlled (never too cold or too hot, so atmosphere faded from perception) in the Park the weather was amongst the most significant variable factors in the experience of space. In the early days of
my winter fieldwork I found myself often remarking on this weather: 'Outside is desolate – the cold exaggerated by a strong wind across the empty space of the park, despite the clear sunshine'.
In interviews with residents of the East Village the initial emptiness of the Park was a commonly cited experience, characteristic of moving to E20. Speaking to Daniel, a worker at the Viewtube cafe and long-term resident of East London, he remarked that 'it's a bit weird – all these big new buildings. East Village has been empty for a long time, so it feels even more like that – like a zombie movie or something'. Similarly, John, a new resident of the East Village and current employee of the Crossrail project (having also worked for the Olympic Delivery Authority during the construction of the Olympic Park), described his view across the empty side of the East Village as akin to a 'ghost town'. At the same time the sense that this space and community were just becoming established, just beginning to develop a social life, was one draw to the Park for many of the East Village residents I spoke to. Peter expressed this: 'I was one of the first to live here, and when we arrived there was such little community, so much building work still around us. But it feels like, you're kind of creating something, which is a responsibility in itself'.
Alex, another resident, recently finished his Masters degree and moved to the Park from nearby Bow on the basis that he could 'get on the housing ladder' as a part-ownership tenant of Triathlon Homes. He explained to me in early
summer 2014 that for him the key attraction of the East Village was that it is 'something of an enclave in Newham'. For Alex, perhaps more than for those residents who only rent, part of the attraction of the Park is that his property is likely increase in value over time. The East Village, he argued, is distinct from its surroundings partly due to 'a significant effort to keep it that way' on the part of the hands-on management of Triathlon and Get Living London. He hopes this would ensure it avoids 'any sort of disintegration, or anti-social behaviour
associated with other places'. For Alex the fact that this space represents Olympic Legacy and stands as centre-piece for a wider transformation of East
London inspires a confidence that it will develop in a certain way. However, this hope is always expressed alongside a related anxiety that the Park might become tainted by its proximity to the relative poverty of Newham. Peter described his experience of this anxiety:
I think it's gonna come down to the community in the East Village. When I first mentioned to people that I was gonna come live here, a lot of people said that because it's in Stratford, it's gonna get run-down, not be very nice. So in 5 or 6 years, it'll be who lives here, what it's like. It could go a few ways – it could get run-down, but I think there's too much money around it for it to do that. It could become really cold and lifeless, particularly through the fact that apart from Westfield there's no reason for people from Stratford to come through. Or it could become a thriving community, because there's a lot of money coming in, a lot of eyeballs on it in government, not just in the UK, there's people globally looking at this as a test-case, and if it doesn't work, there'll be questions asked.
In these potential futures of the Park it is possible to understand the insistence of the assertion that 'E20 will become a living breathing piece of the city'. For the owners and managers of the Olympic Park, the Westfield, and the East Village, the risk that the space will remain 'cold and lifeless' is just as dangerous as the possibility that it will become run-down or disordered. Managing the Park consists of treading a line between the encouragement and the organisation of social life.
Lefebvre's categories of appropriated and dominated space are useful here. In The Production of Space Lefebvre describes 'domination' and 'appropriation' as two related but antagonistic modes by which nature is transformed by human activity. Dominating practice and its associated space is ascendant under capitalism: 'instances of such space are legion, and instantly recognisable as such: one only has to think of a slab of concrete or a motorway' (ibid; 164). This mode of practice creates spaces that are 'closed, sterilised, emptied out' (ibid;
165). In contrast, appropriation proceeds more organically by the actions of a social group – 'time plays a part in the process, and indeed appropriation cannot be understood apart from the rhythms of time and life' (ibid; 166). While 'history – which is to say the history of accumulation – is also the history of their
separation and mutual antagonism', domination and appropriation are always found together, as two tendencies within spatial practice (ibid). While the domination of space subsumes its appropriation, the imposition of dominated space is always 'modified in order to serve the needs and possibilities of a group' (ibid; 165). That is, appropriation, even when 'utterly subjugated', cannot fully disappear (ibid; 166).
This antagonism between domination and appropriation is that which is expressed in the opposition between sterility and disorder that characterises anxieties about the Park's future. As Daniel put it to me: 'there is a risk that that community will only ever exist in the imaginations of planners who produce posters with photoshopped images of smiling people. If there is the opportunity for people to produce community, then it might happen, but it is never certain'.
The production of spaces like the Olympic Park necessarily proceeds in a 'dominated' manner, as the 'realisation of a master's project' (ibid; 165).
However, the appropriation of those spaces – their inhabitation and use,
transformation and adaptation – is necessary for those spaces to be reproduced in the everyday. The Olympic Park, to fulfil its purpose as a space of production and of reproduction, had to become a 'living breathing piece of the city'.
Lefebvre's concept of the appropriation of space owes a debt to Martin Heidegger's 'dwelling' (Stanek, 2011; 87). However, there are significant differences to the ways in which these ideas play out. For Heidegger, to 'dwell' expresses an essential relationship between the human subject and space:
'space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience' (Heidegger, 1951; 154). Instead, dwelling is the 'stay within the fourfold among things' (ibid). This 'fourfold' consists of the earth, the 'serving bearer' of dwelling; the sky, the eternal 'vaulting path of the sun'; divinities, the 'beckoning messengers of the godhead'; and mortals, human beings, who dwell and die 'on earth, under the sky, before the divinities' (ibid, 147-8). The position of the human subject within this fourfold unity springs from the act of dwelling, which is at root a gathering, and 'preserving' of that unity (ibid; 149).
Heidegger illustrates this with the example of a bridge which 'gathers the earth and landscape around the stream' (ibid; 152). The bridge produces a location around which space comes into being. Building is thus a prerequisite for dwelling, that produces space in 'letting appear' the 'simple oneness' of the fourfold (ibid; 156-7). For Heidegger dwelling is precarious, risking an existential homelessness. Against this threat Heidegger presents a static and rooted understanding of the ideal relationship between space and the human subject.
This emphasis on rootedness and its attendant shadow of Heidegger's fascist politics led Lefebvre to remark that 'mass graves are outlined on the horizons of Heideggerianism' (Lefebvre, cited in Elden, 2004a; 78).
However, despite the dangerous implications of Heidegger's politics, Stuart Elden writes that Lefebvre aimed to 'ground Heidegger, to make his analyses more real' (ibid; 79). Japhy Wilson discusses this use of Heideggerian elements in Lefebvre's understanding of abstract space. Here Heidegger's existential homelessness becomes an expression of spatial alienation. In the reproduction of abstract space the accumulative nature of capital comes into conflict with the non-accumulative nature of everyday life. Rather than making a 'dangerous appeal to the “rootedness” of “traditional” societies', Lefebvre shifts 'from
Heidegger to Marx', in order to position appropriation as creative (Wilson, 2013;
371). Where Heidegger sees a precarious dwelling under threat from modernity, Lefebvre sees a more concrete conflict between the dominated and alienated production of abstract space and an everyday life that appropriates and thus makes that space liveable. As Wilson describes, for Lefebvre humans 'dwell poetically' when their 'inhabiting is in some sense [their] creative work”' (Lefebvre, 1966; 130).
In the Preface to the Study of the Habitat of the 'Pavillon' Lefebvre writes that Heidegger warns against the 'economic or technological', those influences on the production of space that Lefebvre groups under 'domination' (Lefebvre, 1966a; 122). However, he goes on to suggest that Heidegger cannot offer an
escape from this 'world ravaged by technology', save by pointing to 'another (as yet unperceived) world' (ibid; 122). The aim of the study of the pavillon, in contrast, is to 'seek a route by which a solution could be sketched out, to appear on the horizon' (ibid; 123). This avenue of movement in a world increasingly determined by dominated space is the concept of appropriation.
Significantly, in the atomised suburban new-build homes of the pavillon Lefebvre still finds appropriation, writing that 'appropriation is the goal, the direction, the purpose of social life' (ibid; 130). This living creation without which 'social development, properly speaking, remains nil', is 'always a social fact, but is not to be confused with the forms, functions, and structures of society' (ibid;
130-131).
Just as capital is characterised by the subsumption of concrete praxis by social abstractions, so too does dominated space subsume and determine the
appropriation of space, conditioning its own reproduction in the process. For Lefebvre, concrete space, 'the space of gestures and journeys, of the body and memory, of symbols and sense' corresponds to 'dwelling', and thus to
appropriated space (ibid; 189). At the same time this concrete space is
'misunderstood by reflexive thought, which instead resorts to the abstract space of vision, of geometry' (ibid). This is not a mistake but a reflection of the social constitution of space itself, in which the dominating and the appropriated, like the abstract and the concrete, are related dialectically: space is a 'realised' abstraction, and a mode of domination remade in appropriative practice (ibid).
The relationship between appropriation and domination as modes of spatial practice therefore offers a means by which to explore the relationship between concrete and abstract space. However, this distinction alone does not fully capture the contradictory constitution of space as a concrete abstraction.
Lefebvre's suggestion that the appropriative 'cannot be understood apart from the rhythms of time and life' indicates the missing element from this
understanding of practice. To this discussion of the dialectical relationship between abstract and concrete space, Elden introduces the temporal. As
concrete space is constituted by an appropriative practice ('gestures and journeys') that occur in time, this concrete content of space is always also 'time inscribed in a space' (Elden, 2004a; 189). As spatial abstraction is conditioned by a material domination of space it too can be expressed in this inscription of the temporal on the spatial. It is therefore to the time and rhythm of practice in the Park that I will now turn.