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Futures past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2015

William Mann
William Mann*
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Extract

For the 2012 Olympics, London was announced to us in images and words which combined sophisticated rhetoric and crude simplification. Two related promises emerged from the compact between design and politics: to replace a fragmented, neglected and polluted area with a smooth, harmonious new city district; and to bequeath an enduring foundation, a ‘legacy’, to the future. The references to ecology and inequality can be identified with their early twenty-first century moment, but the spatial strategy of a city in a park was something of a throwback to the twentieth and nineteenth centuries: a techno-pastoral in which nature redeems the city from its fallen state. In short: a vision of the future inherited from the past.

Type
Criticism
Information
arq: Architectural Research Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 302 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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