Arrive and retreat: London’s ultra-prime apartment blocks as dark urban renaissance

Abstract

The expansion of an archipelago of residential blocks across London’s West End has created an urban renaissance of sorts, but it is a rebirth that has targeted the expanded ranks of the global super-rich, yielding a visibly luxurious, often vacant residential remaking, rather than the aspirations for a diverse, vibrant and open urbanism envisaged some years ago for the city. New luxury apartment blocks offer high levels of privacy, security and the seamless integration of bodies and vehicles into underground or enclosed entry points. These ‘ultraland’ blocks are less places of conviviality and encounter, offering instead a kind of dark space urbanism that facilitates a partial social engagement with local environs by barely present owners. Combining an analysis of the planning applications for these developments with extensive street observation in London’s West End we discuss the social and spatial integration of these developments. We argue that a key effect is one of social ‘reduction’—the sense of null spaces that absorb bodies, furnishings and cars in ways that are the antithesis of earlier ambitions for socially vital and democratic urban spaces. We discuss the significance of these changes for contemporary life in the city more broadly.