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Urban controversies and the making of the social Albena Yaneva and Liam Heaphy Architectural Research Quarterly / Volume 16 / Issue 01 / March 2012, pp 29 - 36 DOI: 10.1017/S1359135512000267, Published online: 20 July 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1359135512000267 How to cite this article: Albena Yaneva and Liam Heaphy (2012). Urban controversies and the making of the social. Architectural Research Quarterly, 16, pp 29-36 doi:10.1017/S1359135512000267 Request Permissions : Click here

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theory Urban controversies open traditional social explanations of architecture up to question. The London Olympic Stadium is used as a case study in exploring digital methods for controversy mapping.

Urban controversies and the making of the social Albena Yaneva and Liam Heaphy On the one hand, architectural knowledge advances very rapidly, with new types of materials and technological innovations entering the field and multiplying architectural invention. On the other hand, urban experts, architects and engineers often debate publicly uncertain urban knowledge and technologies, risky plans and daring designs, polarising opinion – as witnessed on numerous blogs, citizen forums and architecture websites. This radical transformation in building technologies, in the reliance upon experts and in the expansion of architectural networks could have remained practically invisible were it not for the presence of another phenomenon: the digitalisation of architecture and the availability of enormous Internet databases. The digital technologies at our command provide us with abundant resources to follow architectural controversies. How can we better make use of these digital technologies and the huge amounts of available web resources to track controversies and their dynamics? How can we take more advantage of the newest developments in architectural computation to improve the analytical and visual potential of controversy mapping? How can controversy mapping enable us to follow and better understand urban dynamics and design concepts rather than quickly explaining them with social factors? In this paper we will discuss the potential of the Mapping Controversies method in architecture. This method was initially developed by the French sociologist Bruno Latour and applied across a variety of disciplines. Drawing on a rich tradition of semiotics and literary theory, the method offers new opportunities for enquiry in social sciences based on Actor-Network Theory, which consists in following, documenting and mapping ongoing controversies. Taken recently to the field of architecture, this method allows us to witness, analyse and map the variety of elements of which a building is constituted together with the vast range of factors that impinge on design. By encapsulating the dynamics of a controversy and opening it more to informed scrutiny, this approach could permit a more efficient decision-making process. The mapping of the

controversy surrounding the London Olympic Stadium for the 2012 Games allows us to illustrate the method and present some new ways of visualising the 1 dynamics of controversies with architectural tools. Designing the London Olympic Stadium In the East End of London in 2009, a small army of contracted workers is raising the new 80,000 capacity Olympic Stadium, slowly but surely, with the steadfast rhythm of honeybees. The computermodelled design and its artists’ impressions, unveiled to the public in November 2007, are being replicated in solid materials and the marketing of the 2012 Summer Olympics is beginning to capture the national consciousness. The community of East London, divided and united many times by the different scenarios for development of the area and regeneration prognoses, is now waiting impatiently for the new stadium to emerge and to change their lives. Guided visits for the general public are under way and people are asked to take a seat in the executive box and imagine how grand the arena below will appear from this select location on the day of the opening ceremony. We pause for a moment and listen to the voices of the actors we see on the construction site, to follow how they agree and disagree, argue and anticipate, project and await the new design. Going back in time to revisit the bidding process, one can find out that the actors who gathered around the bid and voiced agreement and disagreement shared a different battlefield to those who, some six years later, gather on the construction site and anticipate the future of the stadium’s design. As early as 2003, Keith Mills, then chief executive of the London 2012 Campaign, and Tony Winterbottom, then director of regeneration and development for the London Development Agency, expressed how the London bid would be contingent on the ability to provide a lasting cultural and 2 sporting legacy to the city. A preliminary design, or artist’s impression, was unveiled on 7 November 2004 3 in the UK’s The Independent newspaper. On 12 November 2004, this design was attributed jointly to hok Sport and Foreign Office Architects, with theory arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012

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Alejandro Zaera-Polo referring to the muscle-like 4 design enclosing the stadium interior. This preliminary design was used extensively during the London bidding campaign, where the city competed against contenders such as Paris, New York, Madrid and Moscow. A final design had yet to be formulated and it was thought pertinent to await the decision of the International Olympic Committee (ioc) before moving forward with a complete design. The London bidding team, with the support and efforts of the then prime minister, Tony Blair, made legacy and community redevelopment an explicit part of their campaign, and were therefore bound to these commitments upon winning the 2012 Games. The Report of the IOC Evaluation Commission for the Games of the XXX Olympiad in 2012 reported that: London has proposed Games based on providing world-class facilities and services for the athletes, and a legacy for sport and the community through new and enhanced facilities and a greater emphasis on sport and 5 physical activity. Following London’s success in the bid in July 2005, responsibilities were divided between newly created and pre-existing bodies, with the protagonists being: the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (locog), responsible for preparing and staging the Games; the Olympic Delivery Authority (oda), responsible for venues and infrastructure; the Mayor of London, responsible particularly for ensuring that Londoners benefit from the Games; the Westminster Government, represented by the Minister of the Olympics, Tessa Jowell. The oda, responsible for the design and construction of the Olympic Stadium, sought a team 6 to determine the definitive design. On 13 October 2006, contributors to Building Design magazine considered hok Sport (now renamed Populous) clear favourites in the bidding, attributed both to their 7 excellent reputation and to a lack of competing bids. foa did not enter an independent bid for the stadium, nor did many other leading architects, a fact partly attributed to a long-suffering but ultimately completed Wembley Stadium, designed by Foster + Partners and hok Sport Architecture, and also the most expensive stadium in modern history. The public tender notice had envisioned some six competing bids, according to The Independent, but this 8 competitive format never materialised. As a result hok Sport became the de facto winner of the bid. Little information about it appeared in the press until a rift appeared between the riba and the oda following the 2006 riba conference in Venice. A controversy broke out that year. The architectural community, as represented by riba, criticised the lack of expertise and importance of design and architecture in the oda’s decision-making processes. These criticisms were spearheaded by Richard Rogers, who maligned the ‘design and build’ strategy employed as opposed to a ‘design-led’ 9 building process. In response to this, the oda resolved to increase the design input into the Olympics through a number of new appointments – including that of designer Peter Cook, famous for his conceptual work with Archigram in the 1960s. The

chief executive of the oda, David Higgins argued: The Olympics is a vast stage show and it needs to be thought of like that. It’s about the temporary structures, what they’ll look like and their colour and how they’re branded. There’s also the sculpture, temporary bridges 10 and landscaping. That’s what we’ve got to get right. In this sense, Peter Cook’s involvement in iconic studies like the famous Instant City made him ideal for the role. As critic Amanda Baillieu noted, Cook might ‘find his Archigram experience useful as he searches for a solution to the stadium brief which requires a 11 facility to hold 80,000 people’. The oda also appointed Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota to its advisory board, hoping now to have allayed the concerns expressed by the architecture community in relation to the bidding process and design input. A team was now assembled to produce the ‘final’ design for the stadium, comprising hok Sport advised by Peter Cook, with a mandate for retaining an athletics capacity for London. Yet in the intervening period between the design team formation and the unveiling there were reports of continued controversy over the so-called legacy options for the stadium. The 80,000-capacity venue is designed such that 55,000 seats and the upper crown can be removed and the 25,000 stadium then retained as a smaller athletics venue. Government ministers and the oda sought a permanent ownership of the stadium, with local soccer and rugby clubs listed as possibilities. Others, most notably Sebastian Coe (from locog) and Lamine Diack, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (iaaf), were adamant about retaining an athletics track. London’s bid to hold the 2018 fifa World Cup has changed the dynamics of the debate as has the creation of the Olympic Park Legacy Company (oplc), with Margaret Ford at the helm as chairwoman. Baroness Ford, a new player on the scene, and Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London are among several voices who want to ensure the possibility that the stadium could remain a World Cup football venue. Since the beginning, this building has been expected to have a ‘community-oriented’ look, such that the components removed from the stadium after the Games will be useful buildings in their own right. ‘People will enjoy the components […] They will be put to use in the area, for example in schools’, stated 12 Cook. However, concerns about so-called legacy design continue to be raised even as its construction draws close to completion. An official press conference for the unveiling of the Olympic Stadium design was held on 7 November 2007, prompting a flurry of activity on the web as journalists quickly wrote up articles and people traded impressions over blogs. Architectural journals, and newspapers such as The Guardian with appointed design critics, mobilised to form opinions about the design. The response was mixed but the clear majority of the critical reactions from the British architectural community were negative. Few were unanimous in their praise, though some praised the lack of ostentation and focus on practicality. The controversy accelerated. The legacy of the stadium building remains highly

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debated. It is largely assumed that it will continue its international role, hosting athletics tournaments and being promoted for future football and rugby world cups. The global economic downturn from 2008 meant that cost has become a big factor. Concerns are voiced about the post-Games usage of the Olympic Village with its expensive facilities. With the election of Boris Johnson as the new mayor in 2008, there was an increased impetus on behalf of the Greater London Authority and Westminster to ensure that the future of local communities and London cultural life are increasingly brought into the centre of the debate. The Stadium was completed in 2011. Yet, the controversy over its legacy is more alive than ever. The football club West Ham originally won the battle for the Olympic Legacy Park by offering a more compelling legacy case – to retain the athletics track. Their proposal is considered to be better than rival Tottenham Hotspur’s bid which offered ‘an iconic anchor centrepiece’ where the Olympic Stadium would be used solely for football and the athletic track would be demolished. The legacy controversy continues to unfold as we write. Explaining the stadium design Most interpretations of the stadium will be made after the building is completed. Journalists will be impatient to break the story; architectural critics will praise the building passionately and will evaluate their ways of experiencing the building; the international sports organisations will be thrilled by the new venue; and sports fans will be eager to visit the site and witness the event. Stepping aside from the design process and leaving design experience apart will not lead us to understand how the building will take shape and what the reactions of the entire design world will be. However, if we follow the design controversy, now, as it slowly unfolds in time, we are able to interpret the building taking shape out there in East London. We will see it as being connected to both the conditions of its making and the design experience of architects, builders, Olympic authorities, the city council, the communities of East London, the media and politicians. We will unravel the entire ecology of design in the making as being significant for undesigning this building. What is it about the London Olympic Stadium that provoked so many good and bad reactions during the bid, design and construction? What kinds of actors respond to the design proposals and claim to speak on its behalf? One way to answer these questions is to deduce the building’s meaning from stylistic patterns or any kind of causalities. In the sense of the mainstream social sciences, to explain a building like the London stadium means to produce a ‘social explanation’ of its design. It was a widespread preconception of architectural theory in the 1970s and ’80s that architecture and society are related in a 13 ‘mirror-fashion’ and this view is still shared by most 14 contemporary critical authors. The ‘social’ is seen as a separate domain of reality that can be used as a specific type of causality to account for aspects of

architecture. Yet, embracing this understanding leads to the danger of double reification: reification of architecture and its various material and technological dimensions, and reification of society. Tackling the stadium controversy in this fashion would ignore the specificity of the various architectural issues involved in the debate. In spite of the fact that the project has its own strengths and logic, it will be assumed that it simply reflects the challenges of contemporary urban politics and that its shape will be commonly associated with the social context and the cultural and political climates of our time. In spite of the fact that there are so many actors enrolled in the controversy, the design will perhaps be said to pertain to the individual approach of Peter Cook or to Populous, whose creative solutions will be praised or criticised for decades. Yet, the other voices will be forgotten. Inspired by the pragmatist writers, the new wave of material culture studies pioneered a consideration of the diversity of the material world (including architecture and design) without reducing it to 15 models of the social world. Yet, this tradition, as noted by the anthropologist Victor Buchli, paradoxically avoided tackling the physicality and 16 multiple materiality of the objective world. In our pragmatist attempt to avoid reducing the stadium design to either its material and technological dimensions or to its social symbolic form (a divide still so often reproduced in architectural studies), we follow the transformations of design concepts and the meanderings of construction to witness a process where both the architectural and the social are fluid and are mutually defining. Controversy mapping A building of such cultural importance will inevitably provoke multiple reactions once it is built and will draw much criticism from the architectural community and the press, as well as from politicians, inhabitants and visitors to the city. Many architectural blogs will discuss the final design along with the so-called legacy scenarios, while journalists will recollect the impressions of the first visitors to the venue. Numerous groups will feel concerned by its design and will express reactions of affectedness. However, it is not necessary to wait until the 2012 Games to hear the critical reactions. In our approach, we follow the controversy on the move. The term controversy points to the series of uncertainties that the stadium design and construction undergo. It refers to a situation of disagreement among different actors involved in the making of the stadium. It is also a synonym of ‘architecture in the making’. Our knowledge of the London Olympic Stadium controversy is based on its manifestation in the media and through publicly available documents on the websites of official organisations. We follow and enlist the whole range of actors concerned by the stadium design, whether they be architects, clients, communities, costs, design precedents or existing buildings, area regeneration prospects or legacy scenarios, diagrams or sketches, beams or structural models, or indeed Urban controversies and the making of the social Yaneva & Heaphy



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anything else. With the generic term of ‘actors’ we designate all beings enrolled in the controversy, human and nonhuman. We identify the relevant online sources and map the actors’ relationships through various actorial diagrams [1]. To determine the actors, we read the online sources and ask ourselves if the presence or absence of an actor makes any difference. For instance, the Beijing stadium appears to be an actor along with Boris Johnson, Populous and Peter Cook. This might look surprising to some. Yet the Beijing stadium design does make a difference in the London Olympics story, and this is a difference perceived by many other actors. Everyone and everything can be an actor as long as it makes a difference. No one will be surprised to see that the architect is never on his or her own in the design and construction process. Many other individual actors join in: Sebastian Coe, Chairman of locog, Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Olympics, Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, Jacques Rogge, president of the ioc, Rod Sheard, architect with Populous, John Armitt, chairman of oda, David Higgins, chief executive of oda, Baroness Margaret Ford, chairwoman of the oplc. There are also many institutions mobilised in the controversy which show themselves as full-blown actors: locog, oda, the International Olympic Committee (ioc), the riba and the design community, West Ham United, and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (cabe). Then there are a number of nonhuman actors: the Athens 2004 Olympics, Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games, Recession, Millennium Dome, Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, 17 Wembley Stadium, among others. We map the actors’ main statements and trace the thick mesh of relations among the statements circulating in a dispute. For instance, among the most frequent criticisms of the final stadium design is that it resembles a great ‘circus tent’. The analogy is interesting as it brings us to the discussion of legacy, which is central to the controversy debate. This is a statement that circulates across the actors enrolled. Peter Cook, in an interview with Architectural Record, draws the comparison directly, stating that ‘[i]f it’s a temporary condition, then you can take advantage of that in the same way as when the circus comes to town. In a way you could say 18 Instant City is, intellectually, the model’. In an ironic twist, the appointment of a noted designer seems to be bound up with the criticism later given

by the very same design community that complained about the place of design in the Olympics. We also visualise the networks. There is no such thing as an isolated actor. Actors are always interfaces among different social collectives, as they are both composed of, and components of, networks. We also endeavour to reproduce a more nuanced understanding of the overall dynamics of the controversy through visualisations of the actors, showing with whom they are associated, and outlining how their mediating agency transforms the debate. Actors are such because they inter-act, shaping relations and being shaped by relations. They gain their identity in the disputes. Whatever the reactions of the actors, good and bad, slowing down or speeding up, they had a positive impact because they make us rethink the importance of stadiums for a big metropolis like London, they make us go back to the other design precedents and revisit similar controversies surrounding stadium design. Evaluating the controversy, the actors enrolled in it began opening the design ‘black boxes’ of other stadiums, such as the Beijing National Stadium with its innovative steel structure design and its thoughtful integration into the layout of the Olympic Park and its host city. The comparison with Beijing is recurrent. It is discussed primarily because of its aesthetics; yet financial and material limiting factors ensured that a similar scale of construction was deemed unfeasible for the London Olympics as the costs of raw materials and labour are greatly higher in Britain. Just as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games were to have a large bearing on how China is perceived and treated by other nation states and international organisations, it is now anticipated that the London Games will be of intrinsic national importance for the UK, providing an opportunity for great displays of national socio-political and cultural vitality. While hosted in a decidedly modern and wealthy city, the London Olympics will necessarily differ from the Beijing Olympics in scale. The Beijing Games were of epic proportions and exceeded in terms of spectacle and mass organisation many, if not all, previous Games. The ‘Bird’s Nest’, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, has won several prizes, including the Lubetkin Prize from the riba in July 2009. It has been lavished with praise for its architectural virtuosity, accomplishments in engineering, and for its thoughtful concept development. The London Olympic Stadium has been

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design is related. For example, how will the new design affect the residents of the villages of Old Ford, Stratford Waterfront, and Pudding Mill? Will the concerns against its design change any of the design plans? Which legacy scenario will be accepted and how will this affect the post-Games life of the community? Thus, as we collect data on the controversy and try to analyse and visualise it, we actively engage in the pragmatist enquiry of mapping 19 the controversy. When tracing the actors’ trajectories and drawing the diagrams of relations and the timeline, we do not simply engage in a reflective process of solving design problems, in a dialogue with materials and shapes, but rather we interact with a much vaster and heterogeneous assembly of 20 actors. When dealing with them, we do not simply learn what design is; rather we learn about what design does: what kind of effects it can trigger, how it can affect the observer, divide communities and provoke disagreements. We delve into the many consequences of design practice and gain an awareness of its various implications. So, if we were about to design a new stadium, especially after the controversial fame of the Beijing National Stadium, would we stay in the studio, staring at a model and ‘engaging in a dialogue with materials and shapes’, trying to solve the paradoxes of design? No, we would rather plunge into the design world outside the studio and face its complex ontology.

designed and planned in the shadow of the Beijing Olympics and, to some extent, its critical appreciation is slowly morphing from one of bemoaned dismissal for a lack of audacity to one of reserved praise for its straightforward commonsense and legacy planning. Thus, as suggested above, the ‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium is one among many actors altering the perception of the emerging London Stadium, along with other precedents such as: the Athens 2004 Olympics analysed as an example of a legacy failure, the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games as an example of successful legacy, the Millennium Dome as an instance of how not to plan legacy, and Wembley Stadium as an example of poor economic management. As soon as a design precedent is discussed, the ‘black box’ of its design is temporarily opened and dismantled into smaller attributes. This makes us realise how many actors are involved in the making and the maintenance of a stadium today; it tests the attachment to stadium buildings as well as the cohesion of the communities around them; as a result of the London Olympics controversy the stadium gained new allies and critics. What type of enquiry is this? We are in the midst of the controversy, we plunge into the press clippings and the image galleries on the web to try to unravel all the traces this controversy has left on the web: in archival materials; government papers; press clippings covering the community protests, images and videos. We are immersed in complex data sets that allow us to reflect not only on the design of the London stadium but also on all those issues to which

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Visualising controversies Following the controversies, and the many detours in the architects’ initial design plan, we cannot talk any longer about one static Modernist object, a construction, but rather about an object plus its anticipated uses after the Games, presented as legacy scenarios plus a variety of other actors mobilised by those scenarios. That is how the stadium building becomes a multiple object, an assembly of contested issues: community development, sustainability, legacy and cost. The stadium that looked like a

1 Typology of actors on case study website 2 Steps of controversy analysis 3 Actor diagram

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4 Timeline of the controversy 5 Concern-oriented mapping 6 Dynamic mapping of the London Olympics Stadium Design Controversy

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simple technical or aesthetic object in foa’s images in 2004 and in hok Sport’s images and plans in 2007, became socio-technical, socio-aesthetic and sociopolitical through the controversy. From being sketched once and forgotten, it became potentially alterable; from taken for granted, it became contested; from immediate, mediated; from rapid, 21 slow; from a static object, a ‘bird in flight’. Not an autonomous, emancipated, coherent object whose construction site is growing ‘out there’ in East London but a complex ecology. Every design move, every new disagreement is a trail that makes us reconsider what a building is, and how many elements it is made from. Visualising the making of the stadium as a complex ecology is a challenging task indeed. After the data was collected and the main maps produced, we have sought various encoding mechanisms by which visual methods could help inform the reader who will not be familiar with the entire body of media reports [2]. We have created actors’ diagrams [3] and interactive chronologies that display primary events based on media representation and which inform about the principal actors most connected with a particular event [4]. The diagrams permit an overall visual depiction of chronological events and grasp the relationships of the heterogeneous actors involved in the controversy in a more intuitive and 22 user-friendly way. At the next stage of the mapping enquiry, we used parametric modelling to present the dynamics of the controversy in a fertile and engaging manner while allowing website users to form their own conclusions based on a general grasp of the events. Predominantly used by architects to visualise the dynamic relations of all technical parameters that would generate a new design shape, we used parametric modelling for the first time to visualise how an assembly of heterogeneous actors, their locations in time and space, and conflicting concerns work in tandem to shape the stadium debate. The animation [5] shows how a controversy unfolds as driven by matters of concern (especially the concerns identified here: cost, legacy, community, design) and provides a world-view of all the actors in relation to media attention, depicting when they entered and exited the controversy. The animation allows us to track the actors’ involvement in the design debate in a dynamic way and to identify the nature of their involvement. One can witness the flexible grouping

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and regrouping of heterogeneous actors gravitating around the concerns, their attraction or shrinking as time unfolds, and the different speeds of swarm formation according to the changed magnitude of the concerns in the media debate. Such a dynamic simulation allows the exploration of the relative importance/weight of different concerns over the course of a design controversy. A more sophisticated and much more complex visualisation was produced with the collaboration of Aedas R&D in London [6]. Its great advantage is that it shows the varying densities of actor groupings around particular concerns, and the changing intensities and speeds of the controversy. It shows a ‘matters of concern’-oriented controversy mapping, i.e. a mapping with actors clustering according to particular concerns. The simulation features a userfriendly interface that enables us to push-and-pull some of the actors so as to render their connections more visible, highlighting some significant connections among actors, which might otherwise not be visible. There is considerable potential for further exploration of controversy visualisations in concrete form by sharing expertise in architectural computation, digital media, and controversies studies in the exploration of data-rich case studies. This experiment with parametric modelling (as shown in figure 5) and post-parametric computational tools (as shown in figure 6) also shows the potential of architectural tools to map human and nonhuman relationships, to follow multiactorial dynamics and time-track the trajectory of issues. Simulations of the controversy dynamics illustrate that the design of a building is more conceivable as a contested assembly of concerns of




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23 legacy, community and cost, i.e. as a ‘thing’. As we follow the evolution of the controversy through our simulation, we see that these concerns emerge more strongly after 2007 when the final design is shared with a larger array of actors. The controversy space gravitates towards so-called legacy as different longterm scenarios are debated and a greater emphasis on communities becomes apparent. September 2009 then marks the onset of the bidding for the stadium, as West Ham and Tottenham football clubs dominate the visualisation, while the oplc weighs these and other contenders during the process. Newham Council rise in the list of actors as they underwrite West Ham’s bid, while commercial giant aeg follow closely behind in their mission to make Tottenham’s bid successful, together with the resultant removal of the athletics legacy. Mapping a design controversy is not about telling a story with a happy ending, it is about tracing a tentative trajectory and accounting for the whole process of design transformations. Following how controversies unfold, we witness that design is accountable. We cannot continue to argue any longer that buildings and architectural institutions are due to the diffracted presence of society above the built 24 environment. Thus, another way of approaching architecture will be to state that there are no ‘social dimensions or factors’ of any sort explaining the success or failure of architectural projects. Buildings are not simply projections of the social. However, buildings could become social as witnessed in the design of the London Olympic Stadium, because they possess an immense capacity of connecting heterogeneous actors. Analysing the controversy, we observe that the larger the number

of actors and resources mobilised and networked around the Olympic Stadium design and construction, the more social design became. This particular capacity of a building to associate both human and nonhuman actors makes it an important 25 actor. The social can be found here, in the process of mobilisation and enrolment of actors, rather than outside the field of design. The heterogeneous connections of all actors who disagree and join the controversy is precisely what gives strength to the social at the end. By reshaping their connections, architects and stadium precedents, communities and sketches, plans and builders, legacy and new technologies all redefine the design world. That is, a unique process of traversing the revered boundary that is said to separate ‘architecture’ from ‘society’, ‘meaning’ from ‘materiality’, ‘technology’ from ‘symbols’. That is, a process where all the redistributions are possible. Exploring the Olympic Controversy taught us that, to understand the entire magnitude of the design-related transformations in London, common social science methods remain insufficient. The shortest route to a clear-cut analysis of this ongoing controversy will be to express it in familiar language: to tackle the social issues and redevelopment plans for the Lea Valley in East London, the urban regeneration and city 26 re-branding strategies, the role of the Olympics for 27 urban governance and its impact on city politics, or to measure the tangible and intangible impacts 28 from hosting the Olympics. Alternatively, mapping the controversy offered access to the complexity of all these lines of enquiry and prevented us from embracing them in isolation. Urban controversies and the making of the social Yaneva & Heaphy



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Notes 1. The paper is based on the results of the EU-funded project MACOSPOL: http://www.macospol.org. The UK part of the project is documented on http://www.mapping controversies.co.uk and http://www. mappingcontroversies.net/Home/ MacospolManchester. 2. Terry Kirby, ‘New Stadium at Heart of London’s Olympic Bid’, The Independent (12 November 2003) [accessed 6 April 2009]. 3. Alan Hubbard, ‘Olympics: London’s 80,000-Seater Arena to Win Games’, The Independent (7 November 2004) [accessed 6 April 2009]. 4. ‘London Flexes its Muscles’, Building Design, no. 1650 (12 November 2004), p. 2. 5. International Olympic Committee, Report of the IOC Evaluation Commission for the Games of the XXX Olympiad in 2012 (6 June 2005), p. 64, [accessed 23 March 2010]. 6. Richard Waite, ‘2012 Olympic Stadium Contract up for Grabs’, The Architects’ Journal, 25 July 2006, [accessed 28 October 2008]. 7. ‘HOK Team is Favourite for Olympic Stadium’, Building Design, 1742 (13 October 2006), p. 3. 8. Matthew Beard, ‘McAlpine Strikes Olympic Gold with Stadium Deal’, The Independent, 14 October 2006 [accessed 6 April 2009]. 9. Ed Dorrell, ‘Rogers Voices Olympic Fears’, The Architects’ Journal, 9 November 2006, p. 11. 10. Amanda Baillieu, ‘Design is at the Heart of What We are Doing Here’, Building Design, 1759, 12 December 2006, p. 1. 1. Baillieu, Ibid., p. 1. 12. Jack Malvern, Fran Yeoman and Philip Webster, ‘Sixties Designer to Bring Taste of Avant Garde to Olympic Stadium’, The Times (UK), (2 December 2006) [accessed 24 March 2010]. 13. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Berber House’, in Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge, Mary Douglas (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 98–110); Anthony King (ed.), Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built

Environment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 14. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian (eds), Critical Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007). 15. Daniel Miller (ed.), Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (London/New York: Routledge, 1998). 16. Victor Buchli, ‘Immateriality and Things’. Lecture delivered at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester, 7 June 2007. 17. For a comprehensive analysis of the actors and their relationships in this controversy, see http://www. mappingcontroversies.co.uk/london. The dynamic maps are based on 693 articles sourced from UK newspapers, namely Evening Standard (230), Telegraph (18), Guardian/Observer (236), Independent (54), Telegraph (52), The Times (81). 18. Bryant Rousseau, ‘The ArchRecord Interview: Sir Peter Cook’, Architectural Record, 2007 [accessed 22 April 2009]. 19. The mapping controversies method implies a teaching philosophy as well. Only recently was it introduced in English-speaking universities with Manchester being a pioneer in the field of Architecture studies. For more information on the teaching platform, see http://medialab. sciences-po.fr/controversies/. 20. I refer here to the epistemology of studio-based design described by Donald Schön in The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 21. Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, ‘Give me a Gun and I will Make Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture’, Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, R. Geiser (ed.) (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), pp. 80–89. 22. Beyond this, there are other, even more semantic web-crawling tools appearing online, which can connect with data sources not explicitly chosen here. Employing complex linguistic and referential algorithms, they dig out articles, reports and official websites connected with particular topics by noting interconnectivity between websites, terminology and keywords. 23. On the notion of ‘thing’ as a gathering of many conflicting demands, or as an issue or dispute, contrasted with ‘object’ (Gegenstand): what is out there, undisputed, factual, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash, Beyond the Image Wars in Religion, Science and Art (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 24. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:

An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 25. This has been shown previously in the case of the Whitney Museum controversies, see Albena Yaneva, The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 26. John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, ‘Olympic Cities: Regeneration, City Rebranding and Changing Urban Agendas’, Geography Compass, 2:1, January 2008, pp. 300–18. 27. Peter Newman, ‘“Back the Bid”: The 2012 Summer Olympics and the Governance of London’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 29:3, August 2007, pp. 255–67. 28. Giles Atkinson, Susana Mourato, Stefan Szymanski and Ece Ozdemiroglu, ‘Are we Willing to Pay Enough to “Back the Bid”?: Valuing the Intangible Impacts of London’s Bid to Host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games’, Urban Studies, 45:2, February 2008, pp. 419–44. Illustration credits arq gratefully acknowledges: Aedas|R&D, Albena Yaneva and Liam Heaphy, 6 Nick Dunn and Liam Heaphy, 4 Ambrose Gillick, 3 Liam Heaphy, 1, 2 Danny Richards, 5 Biographies Albena Yaneva is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. She is the author of the books: The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (Peter Lang, 2009) and Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Rotterdam (010 Publishers, 2009); guest editor of Science Studies (2008) and City, Culture & Society (2011). Liam Heaphy is a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester. His recent research has been focused on scientific epistemologies and the linkages between science and society, particularly with regard to climate science. As part of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, he has worked on the Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics (macospol) project. Authors’ addresses Dr Albena Yaneva Liam Heaphy Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) The University of Manchester Humanities Bridgeford Street Oxford Road Manchester, m13 9pl uk [email protected] [email protected]




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