Siting re-assemblage: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Abstract

Focusing on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as a dramatic case, this essay reimagines landscape as an assemblage practice in the context of assemblage thinking in the visual arts, contemporary social theory, and urban geography. The essay shows landscape to be both a productive object of assemblage analysis and a new resource for the analytic itself, contributing to an assemblage epistemology by foregrounding the need to think across extremes of scale (from the microbiological to the macroeconomic); to apprehend not just horizontal but also vertical composition; to consider the vitality of matter as the empirically given; and to recognize assemblage in time, as a perpetual process of re-assemblage. A complex physical and technological re-assembly project in different modes, the Park has a double life_as the primary site of the XXX Olympiad and Paralympics and, post-Olympics, as a long-term socioeconomic catalyst for East London. But to succeed as a catalyst, the re-assemblage must sustain enough centrifugal, de-territorializing force to effect new socio-material assemblies.