About

Onsite’s Extended subfamily exudes confidence. Its generous proportions project formidable attitude at the heavier end, while the lighter weights possess a surprisingly airy feel, with a more neutral geometry and optically monolinear strokes. Nineteen percent wider than Standard, the middle weights nevertheless perform excellently for text, with the heavier and lighter weights being more suitable for display.

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16 Styles

  • Thin
    Thin Italic
  • Extralight
    Extralight Italic
  • Light
    Light Italic
  • Regular
    Regular Italic
  • Book
    Book Italic
  • Medium
    Medium Italic
  • Bold
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  • Extrabold
    Extrabold Italic
Of course, savvy designers and architects realise that change is on the way. Eve n before the great disrupter Covid-19 proved overnight that workers in pyjama bottoms on their own sofas were just as efficient as those in suits and boardrooms, the landscape was shifting. There are currently 5.5 million businesses in the UK, approximately 4 million more than there were 30 years ago, and the flavour of these businesses is changing, too. The Deloitte Office Crane Survey shows that most of the office blocks constructed in London before 2019 were for the financial sector, whereas since then the scales have shifted in favour of technology, media and telecom. In the 1950s, an average company lifespan was 60 years, whereas nowadays just 12 years would be a good innings. Since companies are changing at an exponential rate, how can office planners keep up? While in theory open-plan allows for more adaptability, collaboration – those serendipitous accidents that produce great ideas – humans are funny creatures who desire privacy just as much as socialising. In fact, according to research conducted by Steelcase, innovators are five times more likely to want to access private spaces – not all that surprising when you consider the rate at which people are expected to learn and rehearse new skills. People’s careers aren’t as linear as they once were, and even if we remain in the same role, new technology is being developed at an astonishing rate. When you consider all this, open-plan seems a ludicrous attack on concentration. The good news for designers is that typical workers simply appreciate good design. Take Second Home in Hackney. It’s full of thousands of plants, organically curved desks, and mid-century furniture. Its façade is made of an ETFE membrane that gives you the impression the building’s been clingfilmed. Everything about the space communicates this sense of ease. Billing itself as a coworking space, Second Home meets hardly any of the specifications that a new office block would have to: it gets boiling hot in summer and requires an extra jumper or two in winter. Nevertheless, it’s always packed. People love it because, well, what’s not to love? What’s more, companies based there create jobs ten times faster than the national average. This is the medium-term future of offices: coworking spaces with super speedy wi-fi – because our new currency is data, and if you can get small businesses going through your network, that’s all the more information you can sell to the highest bidder. By 2035, it will be Gen Z’s turn. They’ll be early on in their careers, the first truly transient ‘work from anywhere’ generation – but just because they can, doesn’t mean they will. Even if it needs to be reinvented by a Zoomer version of Propst, the office as we know it isn’t going anywhere. The human desire to connect is incorrigible, and we’ve all sat through enough laggy Zooms to know you can’t get any work done that way. As such, it’s about time that our offices started working for us.
Coffin Home This condition has left local governments with the choice either to rebuild or to remove these highways, and while some cities like Orlando, Florida have invested billions of dollars in rebuilding and upgrading their highways, others have taken the alternative route. In the early 2000s, San Francisco’s elevated Central Freeway was removed to create the Octavia Boulevard - providing the city with new land used for residential and mixed-use development, public parks, and new open walkable spaces. A large scale infrastructure project known as the ‘Big Dig’ involved rerouting an elevated section of Boston’s Central Artery underground, freeing up space for a large urban park the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and reconnecting the northern waterfront area to the rest of the downtown districts. Initiatives such as these can reconnect our local communities, make urban life more equitable and can go some way towards reclaiming vital neighbourhoods within our cities. Holding out: the last house standing. Not everyone has their price, it turns out. Against the relentless march of development, some buildings stand firm, becoming highly symbolic in the process. In and amongst the memories of holidays, parties and playground embarrassments, one thing I most prominently recall from my childhood is driving along the M62 with my parents, and seeing a house smack bang in the middle of the motorway. My sister and I became obsessed. “Does someone really live there?” we would ask almost every time we drove past. It turns out the house was well speculated beyond the four doors of our dad’s red Rover. Legend has it that the land on which the house stands was once home to Stott Hall Farm, owned by a man called Ken Wild. A typical Yorkshireman, when the plans were approved for the motorway in the 1960s, he dug in his heels and refused to sell his land. As a result of Ken’s stubbornness, the only way that the engineers were able to get around the issue was to quite literally get around it. In fact, much of this folklore of how the house in the middle of the M62 came to be was debunked after a 1983 documentary resurfaced online. It revealed that the true reason was that the motorway had to be rerouted due to a geological fault beneath. Still, the fact that seeing a house in a place that was so unexpected evidently had a lasting impact. Some refer to these kinds of buildings as “holdouts” – the last house standing in the face of development, as a private owner refuses to sell up and move on. Some houses remain, as their neighbourhood is demolished and rebuilt in unrecognisable form, as commercial real estate rises high around it. Mr Wild, rightly or wrongly, was an ambassador of this resilience. Examples are found all around the world. In China, Holdouts are known as ‘dingzihu’s’, or ‘Nail Houses’, where stories of residents who refuse to be trampled by the march of progress often attract media attention. In New York, on the so-called Million Dollar Corner, is a small plot of property next to Macy’s Herald Square at 1313 Broadway. The building had been purchased by Robert H Smith in 1900 for $375,000, which is around the equivalent of $12.2 million in today’s money. He had wanted to prevent Macy’s from becoming the largest store in the world, and was thought to be acting on behalf of the Siegel-Cooper, which had built what they thought was the world’s largest store on Sixth Avenue in 1896.
It is worth noting that the success of such campaigns was due to the number of wealthier, more influential people involved in them. Whilst Jacob’s resistance to Moses’ proposal is a touching David vs. Goliath tale, the relative wealth and influence of the residents of Lower Manhattan she mobilised is not to be discounted. The ECTC, on the other hand, was a rare coalition of middle-class blacks and affluent whites from neighbouring areas; the success of the movement is due in large part to this fact. For the poorest, inner-city residents, without the wherewithal to stop the construction of highways through their neighbourhoods, these proposals were a fait accompli. The historically black neighbourhoods of Rondo, Minnesota; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Black Bottom, Detroit and many more that were gutted to create new highways show the role institutional racism played in the construction of these roads. Inequality is thus inscribed in the American landscape, illustrated by the crisscrossing of the Interstate Highway System. Similar plans for large scale transport infrastructure projects were made in the UK and were either only partially completed, or wholly abandoned. Sir Patrick Abercombrie’s wartime proposal to build highways surrounding London were developed twenty years later by the Greater London Council into the London Ringways Plan. It proposed four concentric rings of motorway surrounding the capital, connecting a series of radial roads directing traffic in and out of the city. Only some piecemeal construction was completed before the plans quickly proved to be too expensive and widely unpopular. The portions of Ringways 3 and 4 that were built were stitched together to form what is today the M25. The North and South Circular roads are also a pared back version of what was to be Ringway 2. Ringway 1, the innermost ring road too was only partially built, the East Cross Route and the Westway are the only parts of the original route that exist today. In each instance, plans to fully realise these roads, or to link them to wider road networks were met with fierce local resistance, some successful, others not. In the late 1960s, the South Cross Route - which was to be the southern portion of Ringway 1 - was intended to run from Battersea in southwest London through the centre of Brixton in the south. The local community was spared this destruction as opposition from various quarters led the GLC to abandon the project. Several years later, the M11 protest of the late 1990s was a campaign against the link road designed to connect traffic from the East Cross Route (A12) in Hackney Wick, East London further east to the M11 via Leyton and Redbridge. Local residents and groups such as the Link Road Action Group rose up in resistance, even members of neighbouring and outside communities travelled to the area in solidarity with the movement. The protesters engaged in demonstrations, and occupied several key buildings on the proposed route of the development.
FAMOUS JOURNALIST & URBANIST JANE JACOBS — It’s called Neom, and the ego behind this fictional non-fiction is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. His $500 billion desert destination includes plans for a fake moon that will light up the city at night. Alongside the plan to plant thousands of trees in the desert and restoring surrounding coral reef, a key part of the design is known as The Line – ‘a city of a million residents with a length of 170km that preserves 95% of nature within Neom, with zero cars, zero streets and zero carbon emissions’, according to HRH. It’s fair to say from satellite images of the Neom project showing just one computer-chip-sized block completed that The Line is so far just The Dot. Currently, all eyes in the climate community are waiting to see how this particular eco-city pans out. Saudi Arabia promised to increased oil production just weeks after making headline green pledges for this year’s COP26 climate conference, Neom is not without its complexities. Indeed, what’s striking is that even the world’s most ‘futuristic’ cities share common concerns with some of humanity’s oldest. The ancient Roman world was recycling buildings millennia ago: The (pagan) Pantheon became a consecrated church in 609CE, while Hagia Sphia flipped from Christian basilica to Islamic mosque – a few minarets here, mosaics there and voila! Fast-forward to the early 20th century and you see that Le Corbusier was facing the same issues of overcrowding and pollution that we face today when envisioned his ‘Radiant City’. Just like Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement, his idea was to build up rather than out – once again, Le Corbusier’s ‘Towers in the Park’ have not exactly aged well, with many of his high-rise buildings now situated in impoverished banlieues on the outskirts of Paris. Whether you’re building Roman aqueducts or experimenting with cutting-edge desalination techniques (in the case of Neom), conserving water has always been a challenge confronting great urban planners and imaginaries. Similarly, public transport, sustainable energy sources, green spaces, and waste management are issues that have been faced by generations of architects. When we are feeding the cows seaweed and drones are planting trees and our Big Tech oligarchs are flying around space in phallic symbols, we will always need people who dare to dream even bigger than them – or at least better. Of course, when one dreams of paradise, you can’t help but simultaneously dream up its shitty cousin Dystopia. But as Oscar Wild said, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always it’s not designed for long term stays, but what’s it like to do extended time in the strange non-place that is the airport terminal? The new plan for King’s Cross in London was widely heralded as a success, yet there was a big backlash following the revelation that facial recognition software had been used in its CCTV systems. Turns out Big Brother Was Watching Us, but they forgot to mention. A similar story unfolded when Google-backed Sidewalk Labs pledged to turn Toronto’s quayside into the most innovative district in the world. It would have used AI to analyse traffic patterns, monitor the speed of cars and attempt to prevent collisions. It proposed a smart, pneumatic rubbish collection system meaning even YOUR BINS ARE WATCHING YOU. The best-laid plans of mice and men, eh? Another political equivalent of a tongue-twister is unfolding in the Saudi desert.
We’re also quite consistently among the least productive countries in the G7. This isn’t a problem that Smartie-coloured bean bags and breakout spaces can fix. How did we get here? Why do we keeping pumping out these open-plan panopticons, these petulant prisons where we’re constantly observed? Well, as is so often the case, the road to this hotdesking hell was paved with good intentions, ergonomic chairs and Noguchi tables: we’re still living in a 60s fantasy, albeit one twisted by the powers-that-be. Launched by iconic furniture designer Herman Miller, brainchild of star inventor Robert Probst, the revolution’s first iteration was dubbed ‘Action Office’. As its name implies, AO was all about movement. A promotional image of its 1964 debut shows two figures, one by a bookshelf and another standing at a desk. Both are abstracted by motion – but despite our 21st century ideals of speed and optimisation, these adverts aren’t selling faster workers. Rather, these blurred figures evoke an art historical idea of gesture, riffing on the Action painting of Propst’s contemporaries de Kooning and Pollock; looking at another ad from the same series boasting ‘visual triggers’, ‘position in space’ and ‘varied physical attitudes’, it’s clear that this was office planning à la abstract expressionism. Certainly, Propst shared with his artist counterparts a frustration with the status quo. He valued directness and immediacy of expression. ‘Today’s office is a wasteland,’ he said in 1960. ‘It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.’ Nonetheless, his modernist vision degenerated into a waste land of cubicle farms, microwaved fish and middle managers, the likes of which would make Kafka turn in his grave. But how did it all go so wrong? The inventor himself blamed the fact that ‘not all organisations are intelligent and progressive. Lots of them are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes.’ Well, sure, but not everyone can make a living turning avant-garde ideas into effortlessly cool furniture and inventions, Propst; in a word, it comes down to money. The reason open-plan offices feel a bit like battery farms is because they are borne of the same rigid, quantitative mindset: packing more people into one space must mean more profit. But, just as the RSPCA has shown that costs for alternative chicken housing systems are practically the same as their cut-price cages, property developers and businesses could probably make more money if they invested in private, hospitable human coops. Of course, savvy designers and architects realise that change is on the way. Even before the great disrupter Covid-19 proved overnight that workers in pyjama bottoms on their own sofas were just as efficient as those in suits and boardrooms, the landscape was shifting. There are currently 5.5 million businesses in the UK, approximately 4 million more than there were 30 years ago, and the flavour of these businesses is changing, too. The Deloitte Office Crane Survey shows that most of the office blocks constructed in London before 2019 were for the financial sector, whereas since then the scales have shifted in favour of technology, media and telecom.
JUST ROOM — It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.’ Nonetheless, his modernist vision degenerated into a waste land of cubicle farms, microwaved fish and middle managers, the likes of which would make Kafka turn in his grave. But how did it all go so wrong? The inventor himself blamed the fact that ‘not all organisations are intelligent and progressive. Lots of them are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes.’ Well, sure, but not everyone can make a living turning avant-garde ideas into effortlessly cool furniture and inventions, Propst; in a word, it comes down to money. The reason open-plan offices feel a bit like battery farms is because they are borne of the same rigid, quantitative mindset: packing more people into one space must mean more profit. But, just as the RSPCA has shown that costs for alternative chicken housing systems are practically the same as their cut-price cages, property developers and businesses could probably make more money if they invested in private, hospitable human coops. Of course, savvy designers and architects realise that change is on the way. Even before the great disrupter Covid-19 proved overnight that workers in pyjama bottoms on their own sofas were just as efficient as those in suits and boardrooms, the landscape was shifting. There are currently 5.5 million businesses in the UK, approximately 4 million more than there were 30 years ago, and the flavour of these businesses is changing, too. The Deloitte Office Crane Survey shows that most of the office blocks constructed in London before 2019 were for the financial sector, whereas since then the scales have shifted in favour of technology, media and telecom. In the 1950s, an average company lifespan was 60 years, whereas nowadays just 12 years would be a good innings. Since companies are changing at an exponential rate, how can office planners keep up? While in theory open-plan allows for more adaptability, collaboration – those serendipitous accidents that produce great ideas – humans are funny creatures who desire privacy just as much as socialising. In fact, according to research conducted by Steelcase, innovators are five times more likely to want to access private spaces – not all that surprising when you consider the rate at which people are expected to learn and rehearse new skills. People’s careers aren’t as linear as they once were, and even if we remain in the same role, new technology is being developed at an astonishing rate. When you consider all this, open-plan seems a ludicrous attack on concentration. The good news for designers is that typical workers simply appreciate good design. Take Second Home in Hackney. It’s full of thousands of plants, organically curved desks, and mid-century furniture. Its façade is made of an ETFE membrane that gives you the impression the building’s been clingfilmed. Everything about the space communicates this sense of ease. Billing itself as a coworking space, Second Home meets hardly any of the specifications that a new office block would have to: it gets boiling hot in summer and requires an extra jumper or two in winter. Nevertheless, it’s always packed. People love it because, well, what’s not to love? What’s more, companies based there create jobs ten times faster than the national average. ‘Today’s office is a wasteland,’ he said in 1960. ‘It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz → áàâä 0123456789 ◌ £0.99† ≠ 4½ & €™ ?!*↴ →↪ 🄋➊➁➍➄➏➆➑➈ ⁂  【SOCIOTYPE©】 Folklore of how the house in the middle of the M62 came to be was debunked after a 1983 documentary resurfaced online. It revealed that the true reason was that the motorway had to be rerouted due to a geological fault beneath. Still, the fact that seeing a house in a place that was so unexpected evidently had a lasting impact. Some refer to these kinds of buildings as “holdouts” – the last house standing in the face of development, as a private owner refuses to sell up and move on. Some houses remain, as their neighbourhood is demolished and rebuilt in unrecognisable form, as commercial real estate rises high around it. Mr Wild, rightly or wrongly, was an ambassador of this resilience. Examples are found all around the world. In China, Holdouts are known as ‘dingzihu’s’, or ‘Nail Houses’, where stories of residents who refuse to be trampled by the march of progress often attract media attention. In New York, on the so-called Million Dollar Corner, is a small plot of property next to Macy’s Herald Square at 1313 Broadway. The building had been purchased by Robert H Smith in 1900 for $375,000, which is around the equivalent of $12.2 million in today’s money. He had wanted to prevent Macy’s from becoming the largest store in the world, and was thought to be acting on behalf of the Siegel-Cooper, which had built what they thought was the world’s largest store on Sixth Avenue in 1896. Macy’s, unfazed, continued to build around the building, and Smith sold the building – albeit not to Macy’s – for a record $1 million in 1911. Across the pond, in London’s East End, a similar feud had already taken place – this time between a department store named Wickhams, and clockmakers and jewellers named Spiegelhalters. At the time of Wickham’s beginnings, it had humble roots – but as their business began to take off, they began expanding across the neighbouring buildings on the street. At the time, Spiegelhalters had been based at number 75, and had been since the 1880s. Wickham asked to expand into number 75, with the Spiegelhalters’ agreeing and moving into number 81. But as Wickham’s customer base grew, so did their ambitions. Eventually, they wanted to create a department store to rival the Oxford Street Selfridges, and create their own version across an entire block on Mile End Road. As with Macy’s, Wickham’s came across an issue when the Spiegelhalters’ refused to sell their shop. Like Macy’s, the company decided to build around them – creating what one of the city’s best known facades and also, as described by architecture critic Ian Nairn, “one of the best visual jokes in London”. But beyond the folklore and feud is a much more insidious side to the notion of the holdout. In the face of power and systemic injustice, the fight for your own home is one that has heartbreaking consequences. In the US, for example, the ‘Eminent Domain’ – the right of the state to take private property without the property owner’s consent – has historically been used to forcibly remove residents, often disproportionately affecting African American communities. Recently, however, an organisation named ‘Where is My Land’ is aiming to change this narrative. “George Floyd could have been a millionaire,” states the about section on the organisation’s website. “So could the descendants of the families who once owned thriving businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ditto for the descendants of the Bruce family of Manhattan Beach, California.
The East Cross Route (also the N. Westway) ...Bearing the brunt not only of the restrictions but public outrage too, the poorest among us were most likely to suffer severe health outcomes as well as the starkest dip in quality of life. The pandemic underscored existing inequalities across myriad aspects of society, illuminating how those facets of deprivation inform each other – but in the race to counter the covid crisis’ continuing damage to the country as well as individuals, have those revelations come too late? What public space really exists today? As of 2022, there remains 1.3 million acres of common land in the UK across more than 9,000 different registrations. Whether owned by a local authority or the National Trust, common land is defined by its availability for use by others; some can be camped on (with the owner’s permission), and theoretically used to graze animals too – a relic of its original intended use, stretching back to medieval times when communities held common plots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that era of hyper-local collectivism wasn’t to last. Rumbling for centuries but at their brutal apex in the 17th and 18th, The Enclosures Acts took that shared land and used it to enrich the already-powerful gentry. On a human scale, not only families but entire ways of life were sacrificed on the altar of agricultural efficiency and, ultimately, profit; is it any wonder that, as cities are sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder, economists are proclaiming a new era of ‘urban enclosure’? The ‘right to roam’, made into law in 2000, is one of our most ancient; today, it applies to only 8 per cent of England. As ever, the past provides an invaluable insight into the present – so what does the future of public-private space look? For answers, one might have to look beyond our little island. In a Parisian suburb, the Atelier d’architecture Autogérée (“studio for self-managed architecture”, aaa) has claimed more than 5 km square for public use. According to its website, the citizen-run project advocates for ‘micro-political’ gestures…to participate in making the city more ecological and more democratic, to make the space of proximity less dependent on top-down processes and more accessible to its users. The ‘self-managed architecture’ is an architecture of relationships, processes and agencies of persons, desires, skills and know-hows. Such an architecture does not correspond to a liberal practice but asks for new forms of association and collaboration, based on exchange and reciprocity and involving all those interested (individuals, organisations, institutions), whatever is their scale. While the state of play in urban centres and beyond can feel disheartening, blueprints for more equitable ways of running a city abound if only we can commit to imagining them. Claiming tranches of land for the many rather than the few, aaa’s model uses capitalism’s own logic of ownership against it – a kind of inversion of the Enclosures. Precisely where such boundaries ought to be drawn and by whom will always be contentious, but treating the public as an interested party seems a smart place to start. While the balance between public and private ownership has always been a delicate one, with peaks and troughs stretching back centuries, never before has the line been so blurred and yet so stark. Lockdown ground the UK to a stop, those without access to private gardens spilled into parks and other outdoor spaces.
Macy’s, unfazed, continued to build around the building, and Smith sold the building – albeit not to Macy’s – for a record $1 million in 1911. Across the pond, in London’s East End, a similar feud had already taken place – this time between a department store named Wickhams, and clockmakers and jewellers named Spiegelhalters. At the time of Wickham’s beginnings, it had humble roots – but as their business began to take off, they began expanding across the neighbouring buildings on the street. At the time, Spiegelhalters had been based at number 75, and had been since the 1880s. Wickham asked to expand into number 75, with the Spiegelhalters’ agreeing and moving into number 81. But as Wickham’s customer base grew, so did their ambitions. Eventually, they wanted to create a department store to rival the Oxford Street Selfridges, and create their own version across an entire block on Mile End Road. As with Macy’s, Wickham’s came across an issue when the Spiegelhalters’ refused to sell their shop. Like Macy’s, the company decided to build around them – creating what one of the city’s best known facades and also, as described by architecture critic Ian Nairn, “one of the best visual jokes in London”. But beyond the folklore and feud is a much more insidious side to the notion of the holdout. In the face of power and systemic injustice, the fight for your own home is one that has heartbreaking consequences. In the US, for example, the ‘Eminent Domain’ – the right of the state to take private property without the property owner’s consent – has historically been used to forcibly remove residents, often disproportionately affecting African American communities. Recently, however, an organisation named ‘Where is My Land’ is aiming to change this narrative. “George Floyd could have been a millionaire,” states the about section on the organisation’s website. “So could the descendants of the families who once owned thriving businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ditto for the descendants of the Bruce family of Manhattan Beach, California. “Yet their families did not reap the full rewards of hard work and entrepreneurship. They were deprived of the accumulation of generational wealth over time. Their land was stolen—illegally, violently—by white Americans,” it continues. These stories are the tip of the iceberg. During a time of unprecedented interest in genealogy, reparations, and social justice, Where Is My Land is determined to help Black Americans reclaim stolen land and secure restitution.” The images of lone houses amid building sites or vast developments can provoke disbelief, but they can sometimes also symbolise hope. Maybe the person in that house has fought for what is theirs, or maybe, as in the case of Where Is My Land, they’ve fought to regain something that had been unjustly taken away. As we move deeper into a world dominated by capitalism, we can cling to Holdouts as the last glimmer of hope that the little guy can sometimes win. Whose land is it anyway? A walk through an urban world of pseudo-public space and hostile architecture. For most people, the question of who owns the street they’re walking down doesn’t feel particularly important – but for the descendants of select families, that ownership is everything. It revealed that the true reason was that the motorway had to be rerouted due to a geological fault beneath. Still, the fact that seeing a house in a place that was so unexpected evidently had a lasting impact. Some refer to these kinds of buildings as “holdouts” – the last house standing in the face of development, as a private owner refuses to sell up and move on. Some houses remain, as their neighbourhood is demolished and rebuilt in unrecognisable form, as commercial real estate rises high around it. Mr Wild, rightly or wrongly, was an ambassador of this resilience. Examples are found all around the world. In China, Holdouts are known as ‘dingzihu’s’, or ‘Nail Houses’, where stories of residents who refuse to be trampled by the march of progress often attract media attention. In New York, on the so-called Million Dollar Corner, is a small plot of property next to Macy’s Herald Square at 1313 Broadway. The building had been purchased by Robert H Smith in 1900 for $375,000, which is around the equivalent of $12.2 million in today’s money. He had wanted to prevent Macy’s from becoming the largest store in the world, and was thought to be acting on behalf of the Siegel-Cooper, which had built what they thought was the world’s largest store on Sixth Avenue in 1896. Macy’s, unfazed, continued to build around the building, and Smith sold the building – albeit not to Macy’s – for a record $1 million in 1911. Across the pond, in London’s East End, a similar feud had already taken place – this time between a department store named Wickhams, and clockmakers and jewellers named Spiegelhalters. At the time of Wickham’s beginnings, it had humble roots – but as their business began to take off, they began expanding across the neighbouring buildings on the street. At the time, Spiegelhalters had been based at number 75, and had been since the 1880s. Wickham asked to expand into number 75, with the Spiegelhalters’ agreeing and moving into number 81. But as Wickham’s customer base grew, so did their ambitions. Eventually, they wanted to create a department store to rival the Oxford Street Selfridges, and create their own version across an entire block on Mile End Road. As with Macy’s, Wickham’s came across an issue when the Spiegelhalters’ refused to sell their shop. Like Macy’s, the company decided to build around them – creating what one of the city’s best known facades and also, as described by architecture critic Ian Nairn, “one of the best visual jokes in London”. But beyond the folklore and feud is a much more insidious side to the notion of the holdout. In the face of power and systemic injustice, the fight for your own home is one that has heartbreaking consequences. In the US, for example, the ‘Eminent Domain’ – the right of the state to take private property without the property owner’s consent – has historically been used to forcibly remove residents, often disproportionately affecting African American communities. Recently, however, an organisation named ‘Where is My Land’ is aiming to change this narrative. “George Floyd could have been a millionaire,” states the about section on the organisation’s website. “So could the descendants of the families who once owned thriving businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ditto for the descendants of the Bruce family of Manhattan Beach, California. “Yet their families did not reap the full rewards of hard work and entrepreneurship. They were deprived of the accumulation of generational wealth over time. Their land was stolen—illegally, violently—by white Americans,” it continues.
Cybernetic — People went about this in different ways. In the UK, a mass urban exodus occurred, and in June and July of 2020, there was a 126 percent increase in people considering properties in village locations, compared with a 68 percent rise in people searching for towns. The research, conducted by property site Rightmove, also revealed regional splits too – such as the number of inquiries from Liverpool residents looking for a village property going up by a huge 275 percent in comparison to the year before. But outside of the context of the pandemic, there have been people striving for a more remote existence for a long time, and many of them in a much more extreme way than simply swapping a Zone 2 two-bed for a Cotswold cottage. Back in 2009, over 34,700 people applied for the ‘world’s best job’ in Australia, which would see the successful applicant become the caretaker of a remote island. Others have built their own remote abodes, the most extreme examples ranging from a home on ‘Just Room Enough Island’ (its real name), which is the smallest inhabited island in the world, to the Casa do Penedo holiday home in Portugal, which was built from four boulders and looks like something straight out of the Flintstones. Poignantly, some psychotherapists prescribe solitude as a way to overcome trauma – advising clients to relinquish themselves of the pressure and judgement of daily routine, to spend time focusing on their mental health. When faced with nothing but our own company, we’re challenged to look deeper than the things that simply fill our time. Perhaps this is what we’re all searching for, and the lure of solitude is in fact a call from within: to reconnect with who we are away from the noise of normal life. Open-plan Panopticon: On paper, it’s a hive of proactivity. But the open plan office is more likely to feel like a hopeless hellhole for those who work in it. So what have we learned? A bazillion different surveys have told us that open-plan offices don’t work, but no need to read them: you can feel it in your bones: flimsy, copy-paste partition walls, plastic plants, biccy runs and what Mark watched at the weekend give you the ick faster than you can say ‘David Brent’. The UK – yes, the old stiff upper lip United Kingdom, with our bungee-cord bootstraps – has twice as many open-plan offices as the global average. We’re also quite consistently among the least productive countries in the G7. This isn’t a problem that Smartie-coloured bean bags and breakout spaces can fix. How did we get here? Why do we keeping pumping out these open-plan panopticons, these petulant prisons where we’re constantly observed? Well, as is so often the case, the road to this hotdesking hell was paved with good intentions, ergonomic chairs and Noguchi tables: we’re still living in a 60s fantasy, albeit one twisted by the powers-that-be. Launched by iconic furniture designer Herman Miller, brainchild of star inventor Robert Probst, the revolution’s first iteration was dubbed ‘Action Office’. As its name implies, AO was all about movement. A promotional image of its 1964 debut shows two figures, one by a bookshelf and another standing at a desk. Both are abstracted by motion – but despite our 21st century ideals of speed and optimisation, these adverts aren’t selling faster workers. Rather, these blurred figures evoke an art historical idea of gesture, riffing on the Action painting of Propst’s contemporaries de Kooning and Pollock; looking at another ad from the same series boasting ‘visual triggers’, ‘position in space’ and ‘varied physical attitudes’, it’s clear that this was office planning à la abstract expressionism. Certainly, Propst shared with his artist counterparts a frustration with the status quo.
Friendships and relationships have evolved and changed through the enforced distance, some lost, some deepened, but through it, many learned different ways to socialise and show care. For city dwellers – after the initial panic of having to stay inside and not visit a supermarket three times a day wore off, of course – the idea of being at the centre of it all wore thin with nothing to do. Instead, romantic dreams of rural escape began to flood our minds. With the time on our hands to discover what made us feel well, we got to know ourselves better. “So many of us have realised that a lot of what we were doing pre-Covid, how we filled our time, was simply because we’d been conditioned to do it that way, because we were following social norms that told us we should live that way, and everyone else was living that way,” writes psychotherapist Nancy Colier in Psychology today. “Pre-pandemic, we were busy doing a lot of things because it’s just what we did, but not necessarily because it’s what we wanted to do, or for that matter, what actually made us feel well.” People went about this in different ways. In the UK, a mass urban exodus occurred, and in June and July of 2020, there was a 126 percent increase in people considering properties in village locations, compared with a 68 percent rise in people searching for towns. The research, conducted by property site Rightmove, also revealed regional splits too – such as the number of inquiries from Liverpool residents looking for a village property going up by a huge 275 percent in comparison to the year before. But outside of the context of the pandemic, there have been people striving for a more remote existence for a long time, and many of them in a much more extreme way than simply swapping a Zone 2 two-bed for a Cotswold cottage. Back in 2009, over 34,700 people applied for the ‘world’s best job’ in Australia, which would see the successful applicant become the caretaker of a remote island. Others have built their own remote abodes, the most extreme examples ranging from a home on ‘Just Room Enough Island’ (its real name), which is the smallest inhabited island in the world, to the Casa do Penedo holiday home in Portugal, which was built from four boulders and looks like something straight out of the Flintstones. Poignantly, some psychotherapists prescribe solitude as a way to overcome trauma – advising clients to relinquish themselves of the pressure and judgement of daily routine, to spend time focusing on their mental health. When faced with nothing but our own company, we’re challenged to look deeper than the things that simply fill our time. Perhaps this is what we’re all searching for, and the lure of solitude is in fact a call from within: to reconnect with who we are away from the noise of normal life. Open-plan Panopticon: On paper, it’s a hive of proactivity. But the open plan office is more likely to feel like a hopeless hellhole for those who work in it. So what have we learned?
SOLITUDE: THE LURE OF ISOLATED LIVING Not only will the future be more equitable, according to Lore, building Telosa from scratch would allow it to become ‘the most sustainable city in the world’. What Lore seems to be glossing over for now is the embedded carbon emissions and the emissions from constructing an entire city from scratch. I’m not the only one who’s sceptical. Commentators have called the whole thing a ‘vanity project’, just a ‘greenwashed Vegas’. Indeed, it’s hard to know where exactly Telosa falls on our Rat-Sinking Ship spectrum. If that project doesn’t sound ostentatious enough, Ingels is currently drawing up a masterplan for the Earth by way of proving ‘that a sustainable human presence on planet Earth is attainable with existing technologies.’ Masterplanet (title needs some work, no?) is BIG’s idea of approaching the planet like an architect master planning a city, and going big is very much the point. One of the plan’s key ideas is a single, planet-wide power grid, to tackle the current problem of inconsistent supply of renewable energy. Speaking with TIME, Ingels explained that adding some solar panels on the roof and so on is all well and good, ‘but most of it is not very effective.’ However, ‘Every time you go up in scale, you can actually do more.’ What’s more, the decisive action taken globally in response to Coronavirus proved it. It’s going to take a plan as radical as BIG’s to bail us out, but so far, the world’s politicians seem a bit too pigeon-livered to deliver; the ‘existing technologies’ that could save our skin are far more likely to be used to profit from it (but in shiny, new ways!) and although the plans of today’s Starchitects can seem peacock-y, what’s far more disturbing is what you can’t see. The new plan for King’s Cross in London was widely heralded as a success, yet there was a big backlash following the revelation that facial recognition software had been used in its CCTV systems. Turns out Big Brother Was Watching Us, but they forgot to mention. A similar story unfolded when Google-backed Sidewalk Labs pledged to turn Toronto’s quayside into the most innovative district in the world. It would have used AI to analyse traffic patterns, monitor the speed of cars and attempt to prevent collisions. It proposed a smart, pneumatic rubbish collection system meaning even YOUR BINS ARE WATCHING YOU. The best-laid plans of mice and men, eh? Another political equivalent of a tongue-twister is unfolding in the Saudi desert. It’s called Neom, and the ego behind this fictional non-fiction is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. His $500 billion desert destination includes plans for a fake moon that will light up the city at night. Alongside the plan to plant thousands of trees in the desert and restoring surrounding coral reef, a key part of the design is known as The Line – ‘a city of a million residents with a length of 170km that preserves 95% of nature within Neom, with zero cars, zero streets and zero carbon emissions’, according to HRH. Satellite communities, separated by greenbelts, surround this central city – an idea that harks back to Victorian urban planner Ebenezer Howard’s ‘garden city movement’. Howard wanted to give working class people an alternative to either farming or working in ‘crowded, unhealthy cities’; meanwhile, Telosa has some utopian dreams of its own. ‘Equitism’ is an economic model where citizens have a stake in the land, such that when the city does better so do they.
Instead, romantic dreams of rural escape began to flood our minds. With the time on our hands to discover what made us feel well, we got to know ourselves better. “So many of us have realised that a lot of what we were doing pre-Covid, how we filled our time, was simply because we’d been conditioned to do it that way, because we were following social norms that told us we should live that way, and everyone else was living that way,” writes psychotherapist Nancy Colier in Psychology today. “Pre-pandemic, we were busy doing a lot of things because it’s just what we did, but not necessarily because it’s what we wanted to do, or for that matter, what actually made us feel well.” People went about this in different ways. In the UK, a mass urban exodus occurred, and in June and July of 2020, there was a 126 percent increase in people considering properties in village locations, compared with a 68 percent rise in people searching for towns. The research, conducted by property site Rightmove, also revealed regional splits too – such as the number of inquiries from Liverpool residents looking for a village property going up by a huge 275 percent in comparison to the year before. But outside of the context of the pandemic, there have been people striving for a more remote existence for a long time, and many of them in a much more extreme way than simply swapping a Zone 2 two-bed for a Cotswold cottage. Back in 2009, over 34,700 people applied for the ‘world’s best job’ in Australia, which would see the successful applicant become the caretaker of a remote island. Others have built their own remote abodes, the most extreme examples ranging from a home on ‘Just Room Enough Island’ (its real name), which is the smallest inhabited island in the world, to the Casa do Penedo holiday home in Portugal, which was built from four boulders and looks like something straight out of the Flintstones. Poignantly, some psychotherapists prescribe solitude as a way to overcome trauma – advising clients to relinquish themselves of the pressure and judgement of daily routine, to spend time focusing on their mental health. When faced with nothing but our own company, we’re challenged to look deeper than the things that simply fill our time. Perhaps this is what we’re all searching for, and the lure of solitude is in fact a call from within: to reconnect with who we are away from the noise of normal life. Open-plan Panopticon: On paper, it’s a hive of proactivity. But the open plan office is more likely to feel like a hopeless hellhole for those who work in it. So what have we learned? A bazillion different surveys have told us that open-plan offices don’t work, but no need to read them: you can feel it in your bones: flimsy, copy-paste partition walls, plastic plants, biccy runs and what Mark watched at the weekend give you the ick faster than you can say ‘David Brent’. The UK – yes, the old stiff upper lip United Kingdom, with our bungee-cord bootstraps – has twice as many open-plan offices as the global average. London contains hundreds of squares, most of which give the impression of being at the public’s disposal. But year upon year of acute budgetary pressure has pressed local authorities to hand control of new developments to private companies; as such, many are subject to shadowy rules made behind closed doors and enforced by independent security services. Beneath a veneer of shallow hospitality, foundational design decisions are deployed to repel those most in need of common space. From CCTV cameras to benches made to discourage rough sleeping, ‘defensive architecture’ telegraphs subtle messages about who is and who isn’t welcome. Unobtrusive it may be, but woe betide the person who misses the memo: if a given stretch of grass is privately owned, then its landlord can implement any number of rules, theoretically at their sole discretion and enforceable by their own staff. No sleeping, no loitering, no filming, no gathering; as is so often the case, it’s homeless people who suffer most from such restrictions – but in 2020, an adjacent section of the population emerged on the sharp end of pseudo-public spaces too. As lockdown ground the UK to a stop, those without access to private gardens spilled into parks and other outdoor spaces. Bearing the brunt not only of the restrictions but public outrage too, the poorest among us were most likely to suffer severe health outcomes as well as the starkest dip in quality of life. The pandemic underscored existing inequalities across myriad aspects of society, illuminating how those facets of deprivation inform each other – but in the race to counter the covid crisis’ continuing damage to the country as well as individuals, have those revelations come too late? What public space really exists today? As of 2022, there remains 1.3 million acres of common land in the UK across more than 9,000 different registrations. Whether owned by a local authority or the National Trust, common land is defined by its availability for use by others; some can be camped on (with the owner’s permission), and theoretically used to graze animals too – a relic of its original intended use, stretching back to medieval times when communities held common plots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that era of hyper-local collectivism wasn’t to last. Rumbling for centuries but at their brutal apex in the 17th and 18th, The Enclosures Acts took that shared land and used it to enrich the already-powerful gentry. On a human scale, not only families but entire ways of life were sacrificed on the altar of agricultural efficiency and, ultimately, profit; is it any wonder that, as cities are sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder, economists are proclaiming a new era of ‘urban enclosure’? The ‘right to roam’, made into law in 2000, is one of our most ancient; today, it applies to only 8 per cent of England. As ever, the past provides an invaluable insight into the present – so what does the future of public-private space look? For answers, one might have to look beyond our little island. In a Parisian suburb, the Atelier d’architecture Autogérée (“studio for self-managed architecture”, aaa) has claimed more than 5 km square for public use. According to its website, the citizen-run project advocates for ‘micro-political’ gestures…to participate in making the city more ecological and more democratic, to make the space of proximity less dependent on top-down processes and more accessible to its users. The ‘self-managed architecture’ is an architecture of relationships, processes and agencies of persons, desires, skills and know-hows. Such an architecture does not correspond to a liberal practice but asks for new forms of association and collaboration, based on exchange and reciprocity and involving all those interested (individuals, organisations, institutions), whatever is their scale. While the state of play in urban centres and beyond can feel disheartening, blueprints for more equitable ways of running a city abound if only we can commit to imagining them. Claiming tranches of land for the many rather than the few, aaa’s model uses capitalism’s own logic of ownership against it – a kind of inversion of the Enclosures. Precisely where such boundaries ought to be drawn and by whom will always be contentious, but treating the public as an interested party seems a smart place to start. While the balance between public and private ownership has always been a delicate one, with peaks and troughs stretching back centuries, never before has the line been so blurred and yet so stark. No matter who owns a particular square: if it’s at the centre of a bustling city, it sends a message about who is welcome in the community around it. But when that very architecture is calibrated to covertly combat certain uses, people who have no other choices are the ones that suffer. Wolves in sheeps’ clothing, private spaces that look public are liable are to bite those who need them most, hardest. But as organisations like aaa know, that dynamic works both ways – by claiming land for collective use rather than individual profit, thousands of lives are positively impacted in one fell swoop. Following the most devastating blows of the Enclosures, campaigns in the 18th and 19th centuries to rebalance public access to London’s streets and squares were largely successful, restoring what had been essentially gated communities into thriving thoroughfares. Now, what was that about the past informing the future? Masterplanning Utopia: The race to build a better world has never been more frenetic, nor the dreamers so hard to believe. We need smart, sustainable cities, and we need them yesterday. Instead, the last ten years have seen the climate crisis squabbled over by ‘Druids’ and ‘engineers’: the former view proposes we reverse harmful emissions and return to a less planet-damaging way of life. The latter insists we innovate our way out of impending doom. Now, 1.5C of global heating is all but inevitable[1], which puts the Druids out of the running, and so far, the 2020s have been dominated by two new opposing camps – we might dub them ‘Rats’ and ‘Sinking Ship’. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, NASA and Boeing, are all planning to colonise space (Rats) leaving the rest of humanity to sort itself out. For both camps – whether terraforming Mars or turning bus shelters into green-roofed ‘bee stops’[2] – city master-planners have never been more needed. Recently, here on Earth, BIG founder Bjarke Ingels unveiled his masterplan for Telosa, which is bankrolled by entrepreneur Marc Lore, who plans to plonk this San Francisco-sized city down in the US desert, exact location TBC. With typical glamour and spectacle, Ingels’ CGI renderings, predictably, tip Starchitect towards Star Wars: a Peroni pint glass-shaped sky scraper, known as ‘the Equitism Tower’ forms the centre of the city.
SOLITUDE — Run through colleagues and acquaintances with the Airport Test in mind and you’ll see how useful it is – though, as bureaucratic anomalies like Mehran Karimi Nasseri or diplomatic exiles like Edward Snowden would attest, hiring games are all very well; not everyone is lucky enough to choose who they’re stuck with. Solitude: the lure of isolated living - One person’s idea of heaven is another’s total hell – and never more so than when it comes to living alone, isolated from all but our own thoughts. Human beings are supposedly naturally sociable creatures, but as with everything, there will always be those who disagree. There are plenty of people, we all know, who largely prefer to be alone – away from the annoyances of daily life, accompanied only by their own thoughts. Given that the Western culture is one built on capitalist societies, however, there aren’t many of us who are able to live truly alone while doing all of the things a modern life requires. The ones who do manage to go off grid rarely tell the world about it (that’s what they’re getting away from after all) so in reality, it becomes very difficult to envisage how living in total solitude truly would be. Most of us had a taste of how it might look during the Covid-19 pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns, during which everything we knew about our day-to-day existence changed. Before this, if you had thought about your close friendship group and the characters within it, you could probably have easily split them into two parties: those who could live in total solitude, and those who couldn’t. The needy and the elusive. The ones who turn up to your house unannounced, versus the ones who send bulk replies to Whatsapp group messages three months after they’ve been sent. But with the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns forcing us all into isolation, it seems as though those boundaries have become blurred. Friendships and relationships have evolved and changed through the enforced distance, some lost, some deepened, but through it, many learned different ways to socialise and show care. For city dwellers – after the initial panic of having to stay inside and not visit a supermarket three times a day wore off, of course – the idea of being at the centre of it all wore thin with nothing to do. Instead, romantic dreams of rural escape began to flood our minds. With the time on our hands to discover what made us feel well, we got to know ourselves better. The Airport Test, well-known in recruitment circles but less familiar to job seekers, is a question for an interviewer rather than an interviewee: namely, would you like to be stuck at an airport with this person? And while it might sound strange, the Airport Test can reveal a lot about a person. For instance, would they be able to keep a conversation going – or lapse into awkward silence? Would they use the time between flights productively, or complain about the wait? Would they be proactive in seeking other travel options, make the best of the situation by visiting restaurants or reading a book, or just get frustrated? With the demands and structures of normal life suspended, surrendered to endless comings and goings without ever definitively arriving, airports can be the perfect petri-dish for a person’s core traits to flourish.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz → áàâä 0123456789 ◌ £0.99† ≠ 4½ & €™ ?!*↴ → ↪ 🄋➊➁➍➄➏➆➑➈ ⁂  【SOCIOTYPE©】 Divided by Highways - Since the Roman times, the efficient construction of good straight roads has been equated with civlised society. Do they really lead to a better world? The highways that sprung up in major Western cities in the latter half of the 20th century were seen as a mark of progress, however, they left a legacy of displacement and destruction in their wake. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US, where the extensive network of highways that characterises so much of its landscape tore through the inner-cities throughout the country. On its surface the benefits of these highways were obvious, they would facilitate the movement of goods and services between rural and urban areas in the country, connect suburbanites to vital places of work and leisure in the city centres, and generally reduce traffic. This last point in particular proved to be a fallacy, as all evidence shows that the induced demand for cars caused by increased road building actually worsens traffic. The philosopher André Gorz illustrates the basic paradox at the heart of highway construction “Since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.” Of course escape is a luxury afforded to very few, and those who remained in the cities had to deal with an increase in noise and pollution, or worse, saw their homes decimated to make way for highway construction. In the US, the most affected were the low-income, predominantly black neighbourhoods who were targeted in accordance with the principles of ‘urban renewal’, a federally backed, crypto-racist program designed to demolish large swaths of land considered to be blighted. President Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 saw the creation of 66,000 kilometres of interstate highways, and the displacement of over 475,000 households and 1 million people. Many of these displaced people were rehoused in low-income public housing complexes, in overcrowded, crime-ridden neighbourhoods, further exacerbating the racial and economic divides that still exist in many parts of the US today. Some highways, however, were never built, they were sometimes blocked by city government officials and in other instances by grassroots efforts involving local residents and activists. In the 1950s, the journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs successfully led a campaign against the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York. The plans, proposed by powerhouse public official Robert Moses would have run through what became SoHo and Little Italy, as well as Jacob’s own Greenwich Village. In Washinton DC, several groups of local citizens’ associations formed the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC) in opposition to highway development in the city. The movement, led by Reginald M. Booker and Sammie Abbott operated under the slogan “white men’s roads through black men’s homes”. It is worth noting that the success of such campaigns was due to the number of wealthier, more influential people involved in them. Whilst Jacob’s resistance to Moses’ proposal is a touching David vs. Goliath tale, the relative wealth and influence of the residents of Lower Manhattan she mobilised is not to be discounted. The
Facilitate movements of goods and services ...It proposed four concentric rings of motorway surrounding the capital, connecting a series of radial roads directing traffic in and out of the city. Only some piecemeal construction was completed before the plans quickly proved to be too expensive and widely unpopular. The portions of Ringways 3 and 4 that were built were stitched together to form what is today the M25. The North and South Circular roads are also a pared back version of what was to be Ringway 2. Ringway 1, the innermost ring road too was only partially built, the East Cross Route and the Westway are the only parts of the original route that exist today. In each instance, plans to fully realise these roads, or to link them to wider road networks were met with fierce local resistance, some successful, others not. In the late 1960s, the South Cross Route - which was to be the southern portion of Ringway 1 - was intended to run from Battersea in southwest London through the centre of Brixton in the south. The local community was spared this destruction as opposition from various quarters led the GLC to abandon the project. Several years later, the M11 protest of the late 1990s was a campaign against the link road designed to connect traffic from the East Cross Route (A12) in Hackney Wick, East London further east to the M11 via Leyton and Redbridge. Local residents and groups such as the Link Road Action Group rose up in resistance, even members of neighbouring and outside communities travelled to the area in solidarity with the movement. The protesters engaged in demonstrations, and occupied several key buildings on the proposed route of the development. Unfortunately this was not enough to stop the construction and the motorway went on to be built as planned, opening in 1999. However the high profile of the demonstrations, and the increased costs of construction and of curtailing the protesters changed British attitudes towards motorway building and led to the review and cancellation of several other schemes elsewhere in the country. An alternative form of resistance to highway construction can be seen in the local response to the construction of the Westway, the 4km portion of the A40 motorway running from White City to Marylebone and elevated over the Paddington and Notting Hill neighbourhoods in West London. The ECTC, on the other hand, was a rare coalition of middle-class blacks and affluent whites from neighbouring areas; the success of the movement is due in large part to this fact. For the poorest, inner-city residents, without the wherewithal to stop the construction of highways through their neighbourhoods, these proposals were a fait accompli. The historically black neighbourhoods of Rondo, Minnesota; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Black Bottom, Detroit and many more that were gutted to create new highways show the role institutional racism played in the construction of these roads. Inequality is thus inscribed in the American landscape, illustrated by the crisscrossing of the Interstate Highway System. Similar plans for large scale transport infrastructure projects were made in the UK and were either only partially completed, or wholly abandoned. Sir Patrick Abercombrie’s wartime proposal to build highways surrounding London were developed twenty years later by the Greater London Council into the London Ringways Plan.

Specification

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Sociotype Journal Issue #3:
“Home”

EDITION OF 1,500 COPIES
220 PAGES • 210 x 275 MM
ISSN 2754-7698

SECTION SEWN, PRINTED IN 4 COLOURS
+ 2 FLUORESCENT PANTONES

EDITION OF 1,500 COPIES
220 PAGES • 210 x 275 MM
ISSN 2754-7698

SECTION SEWN, PRINTED IN 4 COLOURS
+ 2 FLUORESCENT PANTONES

DESIGNED AND PRINTED IN THE UK
ON FSC AND RECYCLED PAPERS BY FEDRIGONI & SAPPI