Regeneration: Imaginaries of Decline and Renewal

In this talk Dr. Ben Campkin (Director, UCL Urban Laboratory) will consider how the definition, discourse and practice of regeneration in London have shifted from the 1920s to the present. He will focus, in particular, on housing, with an example from the 1920s, an historical evaluation of the architectural, political and cultural representation of the Aylesbury Estate, and a coda linked to the Olympic-led redevelopment of East London. Using exemplars of particular types of urban image taken from related contexts internationally, he will examine the wider imaginaries of social, material and spatial disorder encircling each London site.

Ben Campkin is an urbanist and architectural historian. He is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (2013) and co-editor of Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007/2012), Cities Methodologies (forthcoming, 2015), and the series Urban Pamphleteer (2013-). Ben collaborates on the project Picturing Place, exploring the agency of images in urban change, recently featured as a series of articles in Guardian Cities. He is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and has been Director of UCL's cross-disciplinary Urban Laboratory since 2011.