3. Memoria
3.1. Justificación del trabajo, objetivos y plan de trabajo
4.1 - Introduction
Before the Olympic Park could hold the festival crowds of the mega-event, it had to be prepared for their arrival. In the seven years between the successful Olympic bid and the start of the games a site was chosen, cleared of its
previous structures, and re-created for London 2012. Permanent and temporary stadia, wide concrete concourses, and the necessary infrastructure of the games was constructed. After the games finished this site was once again closed to the public, to be re-made for its Legacy era. Narrower footpaths were carved out, new beds and trees were planted, temporary stadia were removed and access roads created. As the Park began to open again in 2013 further work continued on the south of the Park and the East Village (as the Athletes Village was renamed). As the south Park opened in spring 2014 work was getting underway on Chobham Manor, the Park's second residential
development. All the while work has continued on the Crossrail site and DLR station at Pudding Mill Lane. Further work is now beginning on the commercial and residential buildings of the International Quarter and the Manhattan Loft Gardens tower, and is shortly to begin on a UCL campus and a new Victoria &
Albert museum site, all expected to open between 2018 and 2020.
In this chapter I provide an account of the genesis of this construction. As the period in which the Park was created pre-dated my research, and its post-games reconfiguration lay between my two fieldwork stints, this chapter makes heavier use of archival data and interviews. The process of writing this chapter was one of reconstruction – gaining an image of a disappeared space based on discussions with people who knew it, descriptions of it in academic texts, and writing about it in official and press documents. While the design and
implementation of these plans was largely complete before my fieldwork began, it wasn't fully so. As I started my explorations of the Park in November 2013 I found a space still divided by Heras fencing and under construction in many
places. Likewise, as the Park encourages convergence along its borders, more spaces take on a similar character and serve as useful points of comparison. I was able to explore the towpaths of the Lea and the Limehouse Cut to the south of the Park, wandering among boarded up warehouses readied for the
construction of Ikea's 'Strand East' district , reminiscent of descriptions of the Lower Lea Valley immediately prior to the erection of the Olympic fence.
This reliance on archival and interview data, alongside explorations of empty spaces within the incomplete Park and its surroundings, meant that awareness of my gender presentation felt less sharp during the work that went into this chapter. In the busy spaces of the mega-event I presented as unproblematically male in order to avoid comment, and during my later explorations of the
inhabited Park and the Westfield my trans-feminine presentation was a
continual presence in my consciousness. By contrast here I was largely left to myself, reading at home or in Hackney and Stratford archives, wandering through deserted spaces, or having one-to-one discussions with interviewees in cafes7. My consciousness of self-presentation therefore slipped somewhat into the background as my ethnographic technique became less focused on
recording a bodily sense of present space and more directed at the mental reconstruction of a disappeared space.
Due to the manner in which the Olympic Park was created – as a mega-project backed by state money and presented as an act of salvage on a hopeless place – this process of reconstruction was complicated by a web of existing
narratives. While marketing and media representations of the Lower Lea Valley prior to the games largely presented it as a desolate and empty space, the voices of campaigners against the compulsory purchase order told another story. Likewise, new residents of the Olympic Park generally understood the space before their arrival as one devoid of life, yet the compulsory purchase order itself listed myriad small businesses and community concerns. I have
7 At the same time, the difficulty I experienced in approaching construction workers is perhaps the single most significant constraint placed on my research by my gender presentation, especially for this chapter.
picked a path through these narratives, aware that the reduction of a complex lived space to a single image or story is always going to be simplistic.
I also have my own narrative concerns: I am interested in the imposition of order on space, the production of space as a lived abstraction, and the incorporation of space into specific modes of capitalist accumulation. In this chapter I am again interested in the way in which material that lies outside of the immediate valorisation process becomes its animating resource. In the previous chapter this played out as the mobilisation of social excess towards the realisation of value at the Olympic festival. Here a similar dynamic is found in the coerced appropriation of space, an example of primitive accumulation as the 'permanent premise' of capitalist accumulation (Bonefeld, 2001; 5). The post-industrial space of the Lower Lea Valley had been characterised by a set of formal and informal practices that largely acted to reproduce life and labour-power outside of an accumulation process that had left them behind. As the London economy shifted from a manufacturing base towards a financialised and creative service sector these spaces emerged as a twilight zone. Their gradual dis-ordering can be understood as the necessary emergence of a space outside of valorisation, self-constituting as a resource upon which that process can draw, both in the reproduction of labour power and in its eventual re-absorption.
In this chapter I will sketch out a history of the Lower Lea Valley and detail the everyday life that had evolved there before the compulsory purchase order was levelled. I draw on Tim Edensor to characterise this space as 'Dionysian' and disordered, appropriated towards the production of value using post-industrial waste and waste spaces, or towards the reproduction of labour-power in informal residential and leisure spaces. I then describe the clearing of this space, in representation, legal fact, and material reality, that was necessary to the production of the Olympic Park. This process, I argue, can be understood as an imposition of order that proceeds from the imposition of abstract quantity on a space previously dominated by qualitative use. This imposition of abstraction
is a conceptual move that becomes concretised in the levelling of the Lower Lea Valley ready for the creation of the Olympic Park.
Having described this creation of a blank space, I will explore the creation of the games-era Park as the production of an actually-existing abstract space. I will draw on Henri Lefebvre's three formants of abstract space to unpick the
relationship between the geometric, visual, and phallic character of the Olympic Park. I demonstrate that their interrelation produces the Park in its material existence as an abstract space, a space ordered in such a way that it constrains and directs the actions of the Olympic crowd to reproduce this existence. In the final section I turn to the Legacy-era re-construction of the Park, focusing on the ways in which this period of production has tied it into a new regime of
accumulation. This act of incorporation thus completes the imposition of order that the Olympic mega-project represents, by acting once again on the spatial perception and practice of those who will come to inhabit it. Where the games were a specific ordering of life within a single festival moment, the Legacy-era Park is produced to organise and direct ongoing everyday life towards a specific set of productive and reproductive practices.