T17 Manifesto 02

Humans can bare a lot of bad of urban life. They put up with overlooking, congestion, pollution, social problems and through that they got to work every day, get paid every month and pay mortgages till the rest of their days. They are inspired by the dreams of a good life with a house, a car, a good job and a decent local school for their children. It’s not so much to ask for. We are promised a city is our best chance to realize those dreams so we put up with it.

I came to London by bus. I got off in Victoria Central in 2006 and like thousands of other immigrants in the same situation started looking out for a relative – my brother Daniel. From Victoria we set to a long journey to the East of London and after an hour and a half my first neighbourhood in London was revealed before my eyes. Plaistow housed a mixture of Italian, Turkish and mainly Indian communities.. It was dirty and unwelcoming to the unfamiliar eye. The streets of terraced 2 storey housing seemed endless and were dotter with abandoned properties and one of those houses became my first London home. Our ‘family’ of 5 which in 6 month grew to 10 lived in a house of 5 rooms with no kitchen, no central heating, couple of windows missing and a very slovenly running water. But it was cheap. It allowed for existence, it was good.

I had no money at first, job turned difficult to find but not impossible. Soon I began working for a restaurant earning minimal wage. On the way to work from Plaistow to I first saw the towers of Canary Wharf, than a reflection of myself in the window of the tube train and at the end picturesque splendour of Knightsbridge. I served cocktails all day and evening. On the 3 hour journey back I squeezed inside bus 25 from Tottenham Court Road together with Londoners returning home from their night out. I got off at Stratford and hastily walked ‘home’ for 30 minutes not taking any shortcuts. Canary Warf was showing me the way.

We moved out to a hostel in Finsbury Park, I found another job and applied to Kingston University. I was paying rent and eating out sometimes. Everything was going well.

To cut the story short I am now working in architecture, still studying architecture yet these days I don’t look at those past experiences as ‘all was well’. It was hard work, and it still is the work of so many English and Immigrants. The wages are small, the rents are high, the properties are impossible to buy. For some as hard as they work it is simply beyond their capabilities. Yet they look up to the towers of London and go through another thin year. Social inequality continues and the stage of this drama is the city.

This complex urban world houses many differences. City gives jobs and aims to provide for all yet it hasn’t succeeded yet. There are lots to be done. Planning has always tried to eliminate the social injustice and ease the pressures of the city. At the same time there is a danger that overregulation which is an inevitable result of planning policies. This will eradicate the grey area which part of I once was. The cheep flexible adjustable environments which host people of all backgrounds struggling in the city are disappearing replaced by immaculate supermarkets, shiny developments and glamorous parks. I ask myself what is more important.