The Wrong Side Of The Track? East London And The Post Olympics By Phil Cohen
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On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.
The Wrong Side Of The Track? East London And The Post Olympics By Phil Cohen
On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.
The Wrong Side Of The Track? East London And The Post Olympics By Phil Cohen
This essay is part of the forum:
This essay is part of the book review forum:
On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.
The Wrong Side Of The Track? East London And The Post Olympics By Phil Cohen
This essay is part of the forum:
This essay is part of the book review forum:
On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.
The Wrong Side Of The Track? East London And The Post Olympics By Phil Cohen
This essay is part of the forum:
This essay is part of the book review forum:
On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.
Phil Cohen, On the Wrong Side of the Track? East London and the Post Olympics, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2013, 320 pages, £17.99 paperback. ISBN 9781907103629.
This book is much more than a social cost-benefit analysis of the Olympics for London’s East End. It distills the author’s larger body of research gathered during his long tenure as Professor of Cultural Studies at University of East London and head of the London East Research Institute. Along with the likes of Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie, Cohen was among the most insightful contributors to British cultural studies of the 1970s and 80s and remains loyal to the ethnographic ambitions of that intellectual moment. Indeed this book contains echoes of his early work on youth subculture, community and the decline of working class life under Fordism and social democracy. But it also draws on Cohen’s impressive grasp of the field of literary/textual representations, historical and contemporary, in which the East End is situated: from the troubling narratives of Henry Mayhew, Jack London and Iain Sinclair to the obstreperous verse of Dizee Rascal, Ian Dury and Billy Bragg, and the stark photographs of Jason Orton.
On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions. The book is divided into two parts. The first charts the cultural and social history of the East End, its place as a haunt of fears for the respectable classes, and the ways in which its dark symbolism has long attracted the interest of social engineers and moral reformers. In this section Cohen also draws on interviews with young people in the Isle of Dogs to chart the expressions of frustrated localism and the racialized accounts of neighborhood decline. He challenges this reactionary communitarianism in recognizing the great cultural diversity that has always characterized the East End. The history of Olympism and the London games are the subject matter of the second part of the book, and in particular the narrative of urban regeneration, the trump card in seeing off Olympic bid rivals.
Cohen maps the discordant narratives of place. He criticizes the (now defunct) vision of the Thames Gateway as a contrivance of planners with little popular resonance, and draws on data from interviews and focus groups with local residents and workers on the Olympic site to sketch the vernacular geographies of the East End, few of which circulate beyond the locality. For locals, whom (following Robert Putnam) Cohen terms the "bonders," the habits of the urban village are deeply embedded and the Olympics were not their show. As opposed to the "bridgers," who had a more sanguine perspective, bonders were scornful of the grand narratives of Olympism, skeptical that any of the benefits would trickle-down to them, during or afterwards. As Richard Hoggart recognized in Uses of Literacy (1957), the locality is the primary unit of working class communal-political imagination, with any wider source of authority—metropolitan, national, statutory—to be treated with utmost suspicion. Even in circumstances where the national and local appeared to converge—as in the narratives of the Blitz and wartime stoicism—East Enders remained obdurate outsiders. Most resent the pearly-button, "cheerful cockney" stereotypes that are foisted on them in the causeof tourism.
Cohen is most impressive in analyzing the spectacle of the Olympics/ Paralympics, and in particular in decoding Danny Boyle’s "Isle of Wonders" opening ceremony. He describes the gulf between the classical Olympic ideals and the commercialism of modern sport; the irony that the rise and veneration of elite athletes has been accompanied by a decline of popular sporting participation; and, very importantly, he recognizes that sport has become a proxy for politics, a ‘simulacrum of the plebiscitary forms of direct democracy’ dissimulating active participation in the public realm.
For all of its strengths the book suffers at points from inflated ambition. On occasions Cohen dwells on themes that appear tangential. For example, he presents an extended rumination contrasting the values neoliberalism and the moral economy of the gift in the Olympic compact, which can take the reader away from the central threads. This suggests that greater editorial intervention was needed. Nevertheless, this is a most impressive and beautifully written book, but there is a danger that, in being classified as a study of the London Olympics, it will be overlooked by many scholars of urban studies. For anyone interested in hothouse urban renewal, and in the cultural/ narrative dimensions of such processes, this will be a very valuable resource.
References
Hoggart R (1957) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus.
In the papers that follow, we focus on the temporal dimensions of urban planning. We are particularly interested in the uneven ways in which urban spaces in the present – as (always incomplete) materializations of modernist plans past – present new predicaments not just for social life, but for the craft of planning itself.
In this article, I consider the relationship between urban planning and context by investigating the planning practices associated with a land-use plan in Bordeaux described as “adapted to context.”
Homing in on the protracted landscape of construction, I am concerned with how urban experts in Taksim 360, who do not entirely concur with the seemingly determined trajectory of urban transformation in Tarlabaşı, put inevitability to work. I ask: what makes urban experts stay with a project that might not materialize?
By
Alize Arıcan
The Wrong Side Of The Track? East London And The Post Olympics By Phil Cohen
cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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Phil Cohen, On the Wrong Side of the Track? East London and the Post Olympics, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2013, 320 pages, £17.99 paperback. ISBN 9781907103629.
This book is much more than a social cost-benefit analysis of the Olympics for London’s East End. It distills the author’s larger body of research gathered during his long tenure as Professor of Cultural Studies at University of East London and head of the London East Research Institute. Along with the likes of Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson, Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie, Cohen was among the most insightful contributors to British cultural studies of the 1970s and 80s and remains loyal to the ethnographic ambitions of that intellectual moment. Indeed this book contains echoes of his early work on youth subculture, community and the decline of working class life under Fordism and social democracy. But it also draws on Cohen’s impressive grasp of the field of literary/textual representations, historical and contemporary, in which the East End is situated: from the troubling narratives of Henry Mayhew, Jack London and Iain Sinclair to the obstreperous verse of Dizee Rascal, Ian Dury and Billy Bragg, and the stark photographs of Jason Orton.
On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions. The book is divided into two parts. The first charts the cultural and social history of the East End, its place as a haunt of fears for the respectable classes, and the ways in which its dark symbolism has long attracted the interest of social engineers and moral reformers. In this section Cohen also draws on interviews with young people in the Isle of Dogs to chart the expressions of frustrated localism and the racialized accounts of neighborhood decline. He challenges this reactionary communitarianism in recognizing the great cultural diversity that has always characterized the East End. The history of Olympism and the London games are the subject matter of the second part of the book, and in particular the narrative of urban regeneration, the trump card in seeing off Olympic bid rivals.
Cohen maps the discordant narratives of place. He criticizes the (now defunct) vision of the Thames Gateway as a contrivance of planners with little popular resonance, and draws on data from interviews and focus groups with local residents and workers on the Olympic site to sketch the vernacular geographies of the East End, few of which circulate beyond the locality. For locals, whom (following Robert Putnam) Cohen terms the "bonders," the habits of the urban village are deeply embedded and the Olympics were not their show. As opposed to the "bridgers," who had a more sanguine perspective, bonders were scornful of the grand narratives of Olympism, skeptical that any of the benefits would trickle-down to them, during or afterwards. As Richard Hoggart recognized in Uses of Literacy (1957), the locality is the primary unit of working class communal-political imagination, with any wider source of authority—metropolitan, national, statutory—to be treated with utmost suspicion. Even in circumstances where the national and local appeared to converge—as in the narratives of the Blitz and wartime stoicism—East Enders remained obdurate outsiders. Most resent the pearly-button, "cheerful cockney" stereotypes that are foisted on them in the causeof tourism.
Cohen is most impressive in analyzing the spectacle of the Olympics/ Paralympics, and in particular in decoding Danny Boyle’s "Isle of Wonders" opening ceremony. He describes the gulf between the classical Olympic ideals and the commercialism of modern sport; the irony that the rise and veneration of elite athletes has been accompanied by a decline of popular sporting participation; and, very importantly, he recognizes that sport has become a proxy for politics, a ‘simulacrum of the plebiscitary forms of direct democracy’ dissimulating active participation in the public realm.
For all of its strengths the book suffers at points from inflated ambition. On occasions Cohen dwells on themes that appear tangential. For example, he presents an extended rumination contrasting the values neoliberalism and the moral economy of the gift in the Olympic compact, which can take the reader away from the central threads. This suggests that greater editorial intervention was needed. Nevertheless, this is a most impressive and beautifully written book, but there is a danger that, in being classified as a study of the London Olympics, it will be overlooked by many scholars of urban studies. For anyone interested in hothouse urban renewal, and in the cultural/ narrative dimensions of such processes, this will be a very valuable resource.
References
Hoggart R (1957) The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus.
