S29 - The Retreat of the Making City

Author(s)

Matthijs Degraeve (Free University of Brussels (VUB))

Keywords

Construction, Spatial Clustering, GIS

Abstract

In contrast to the well-studied shopkeepers, little empirical evidence exists on the locational patterns of artisans in transforming urban spaces. By GIS mapping a large dataset on Brussels construction entrepreneurs (c. 1830-1930), this paper shows that their degree of spatial clustering steadily declined in the long run. From the mid-nineteenth century, clusters of building artisans were displaced from cheap, densely built neighbourhoods in the inner city, due to planning policies and real estate dynamics favouring the presence of a wealthier bourgeoisie. While spreading out as pioneers into the developing suburbs, remarkable clusters also emerged there in similar lower middle-class neighbourhoods.

Author(s)

Bethan Bide (University of Leeds)

Keywords

Fashion, Manufacture, Deindustrialisation

Abstract

As the commodity chains supporting the fashion industry became ever more global and complex throughout the twentieth century, the work of constructing and maintaining the reputations of fashion cities also needed to evolve. Taking London as a case study, this paper considers how London’s fashion industry responded to the decline in high-end tailoring and dressmaking in the city in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Between 1935 and 1950, London saw a dramatic decrease in the number of fashion manufacturers operating in the city, leading to a corresponding drop in Londoners employed as skilled makers. The demand for the types of high-end tailoring and dressmaking on which the city’s fashionable reputation was built collapsed under the weight of rising prices and the increasing availably of good quality, inexpensive ready-to-wear, manufactured in large, purpose build factories in Northern British cities, South Wales and Glasgow. This caused an identity crisis for London fashion. This paper explores how fashion businesses, industry groups and the British government responded to London’s diminished role as a manufacturing centre by promoting the city as a fashionable destination through fashion shows, trade publications and retail promotions. By tracing these techniques throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the paper unveils the role they played in the careful construction of London’s growing post-war reputation as a centre for innovative fashion design, leading to its role as a creative hub in the 1960s. However, uncovering this labour also unravels how these strategies worked to exclude certain people and places from the story of London fashion, obscuring the role played by predominantly female and immigrant workers in the city’s less fashionable postcodes in favour of the more glamorous architecture of London’s West End, not to mention concealing the increasingly diverse supply chains the connected London fashion brands to cities elsewhere in Britain and beyond. This paper concludes by asking how the reinvention of London as a symbolic fashion city in the aftermath of deindustrialisation has been used to mask issues of sustainability and exploitation in London’s fashion industry.

Author(s)

Ioana Gherghel (University of Cambridge)

Keywords

Since its masterminded creation about one century ago, the neighbourhood of North Evington in the east of Leicester has undergone a painful process: from a dream of autonomous, self-sufficient community it turned into a highly productive neighbourhood ridden by informality. This industry is powered by the exploitation of local and immigrant labour and although uncovered almost a decade ago, it still operates at the same parameters today. As a result, North Evington became a neighbourhood filled with suspicion and a largely neglected, self-contained area of Leicester. 

Despite the widespread deindustrialisation of the UK, North Evington survived as an atypically productive urban neighbourhood. Not surprisingly, the architecture of the shifty local factories desperately retreats from the city through boarded-up windows, ambiguous entrances and poorly maintained structures. In this context production space sits in direct opposition to the public realm and the thick factory wall thus becomes the edge of contact between two territories in tension. This interaction is dramatically different to Wakerley’s vision of constant dialogue between production and social infrastructures, a relationship that partially survived until the 70s, but which was then lost, with early informal production developing in the area in the 80s. 

This thesis traces the constant renegotiation of the boundary between the workplace and the social place as a means to scrutinise North Evington’s socio-economic development as a productive urban fragment. Drawing on Herbert’s (2004) ethnographic research of Leicester and Dr Hammer’s (2014) illuminating study on the local informal industry, this study investigates the potential of North Evington’s heritage to catalyse a new phase in the area’s socio-economic development by altering the tensions between its work and social territories. 

Through the analysis of alternative models of productive communities such as Murano, where making is intimately and opportunistically in contact with the public realm, and Lewis, where the production infrastructure of tweed nearly completely overlaps with the social life of the island, this study explores themes of identity and agency through the spatial conditions of the making city.

Abstract