ERASED CITY - Urban strategy : Archipelago versus Distributary
The site of the project is located around Walbrook Wharf adjacent to Cannon Street station in the City of London. The City, also called 'Square Mile', is the historical, financial and political district at the heart of London, known for political debates and the contention of urban space.
With the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) or the “Great Recession” starting in 2007, financial services, such as commercial and investment banks, in the city of London have been the target of a lot of criticism. For example, the anti-capitalist 2009 G-20 London summit protests, 2010 UK student protests and 2011 anti-austerity protests show social discontent with the political, economical, educational and health systems. The protesters often act through vandalism and a strategic occupation of public space defined as “common land” by law.
Already in 1998, protests coinciding with the G8 Summit in Cologne, Germany, converged on the City of London as part of the day’s “Crusade Against Capitalism.” Events of the day included subversive action against the oppressive forces of capitalism, including the opening of fire hydrants along the route of the lost river Walbrook, symbolically releasing the river to ‘reclaim the street’ from the capitalist forces of city growth which had subsumed it.
In 2009, thousands of anti-capitalist protesters again took to the streets outside the Bank of England to express their anger at the role of the city in the financial crisis. Thus it becomes apparent that the path of the lost river Walbrook below the banks in the Square Mile has become a historical site for protests.
“Twenty years ago, Canary Wharf was a wasteland in east London’s docklands.
Now it sprouts skyscrapers, including Britain’s tallest, that provide palatial premises for global banks with giant trading floors.
There are now almost as many financial staff working in just this one area as in the whole of Frankfurt,
London’s main European rival, says George Iacobescu, Canary Wharf Group’s chief executive...
Within the square mile itself, the City’s incessant demand for more space has led to a huge wave of new developments.”
(The Economist, 19 October 2006)
Despite the claims of George Iacobescu before, recent statistics have shown that the global financial crisis has led to the de-centralization of the financial district to Canary Wharf or other economically powerful global cities such as Frankfurt, Tokyo or New York. One can speculate that the bankers are leaving the centre, that the City of London risks to become a shrinking, dying city and needs revival by testing different urban strategies borrowed from contemporary architectural and urban theories.
"London’s Square Mile is shrinking faster than any financial center in the world. "
(Bloomberg. Jan 17, 2012)
“A Green Archipelago” was such a rescue project for the shrinking city of Berlin, the capital city of Germany, led by Oswald Mathias Ungers in 1976.
Due to its tragic history, Berlin has a low density of population dispersed over a large, undefined urban territory and no real financial district. Large areas of the city have ended up in ruin because they are no longer needed.
In some ways Berlin is still a dying city today and may hence serve as a precedent for London's current uncertain situation, where construction processes are put on hold and finanical services are expected to move to other countries.
Ungers proposed a theoretical Berlin which would consist of green interspaces and zones of urban density. The grid of the partially artificial, partially natural, romantic landscapes, suburban zones such as parks, woods, agricultural lots, would be crossed by highways connecting the moments of intensity of life.
According to Rem Koolhaas, “through the parallel actions of reconstruction and deconstruction”, necessary to reinforce and unburden some parts, “such a city becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post-architectural landscape of erasure where what was once city is now a highly charged nothingness.”
Although ''Berlin - a Green Archipelago'' may serve as a case study for London, one needs to take into consideration that London’s historic and financial centre lies in the middle of a larger metropolitan city and has a different urban and social conditions than Berlin.
Rather than forming islands of cultural density, revealing the trace of the lost river Walbrook and extending the Thames into the city will simultaneously act as a catalyst for a new life against the monocultural, capitalist world and simultaneously provide an escape for the rising water levels putting London in a risk of flooding.
“When the Thames Barrier was being designed in the 1970s, global average sea levels were rising at about 1.8 millimetres a year and global warming was not seen as a threat,
but in the past 15 years the rate has nearly doubled to about 3.1mm a year and many scientists expect it to accelerate still further.”
(The Independent, 22 March 2006)