Olympic regeneration replaced London’s wild liminal spaces with commercialized dead zones

Evidence

Savage Messiah’s London is overshadowed by the looming megalith of ‘London 2012’, which over the course of the last decade has subsumed more and more of the city into its banal science fiction telos, as the Olympic Delivery Authority transformed whole areas of East London into a temporary photo opportunity for global capitalism. Where once there were ‘fridge mountains and abandoned factories’ out of Tarkovsky and Ballard, a semi-wilderness in the heart of the city, now a much blander desert grows: spaces for wandering are eliminated, making way for shopping malls and soon-to-be-abandoned Olympic stadia. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 467

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Fits the reader’s interests in urban infrastructure and how megaprojects reshape landscape — a direct example of demolition-as-‘regeneration’ rhetoric, and of spending on spectacle over actual use. The ‘soon-to-be-abandoned stadia’ parallels infrastructure built to look good, not to endure.
• XREF: connects to: SoHo lofts were decayed commercial spaces repurposed into art venues — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 1119

Broader Connections

• SoHo lofts were decayed commercial spaces repurposed into art venues #complicates (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1119