The Social Experiences and Uses of Post-War Modernist Urban Heritage Conservation and Regeneration: London’s Southbank Centre

Patricia Aelbrecht

doi:10.3390/heritage4020037

Abstract

Since the 1960s, post-war modernist heritage has been largely criticised and victimised by the public opinion because of its material failures and elitist social projects. Despite these critiques, post-war modernist heritage is being reassessed, revalued and in some places successfully rehabilitated. There is a growing recognition that most of the critiques have often been the result of subjective and biased value and taste judgments or incomplete assessments that neither considered the urban design nor the users’ experiences. This paper aims to contribute to these reassessments of post-war modernist urban heritage legacies. To do so, it places the user’s social experiences and uses, and the urban design at the centre of the analysis, by using a combination of ethnographic methods and urban design analysis and focusing on the public spaces of Southbank Centre in London, the UK’s largest and most iconic and contested post-war modernist ensemble with a long history of conservation and regeneration projects. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the importance of including the users’ social experiences and uses in the conservation and regeneration agendas if we want to achieve more objective and inclusive assessments.

Highlights

Since the 1960s, post-war modernist heritage has been largely criticised and victimised by the public opinion because of its material failures and elitist social projects
The last three decades have been marked by a slow but increasing recognition of the value, significance and legacies of our post-war modernist heritage, of its most iconic buildings [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. This was largely influenced by a growing international movement for the conservation of modern architecture and urbanism driven by the formation of international conservation bodies and organisations in the early 1990s such as the International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO), International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and Association for Preservation Technology (APT)
(The International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO) is a non-profit organisation devoted to the conservation of modernist heritage; the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) is a non-governmental international organisation dedicated to Academic Editor: Humberto Varum

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1960s, post-war modernist heritage has been largely criticised and victimised by the public opinion because of its material failures and elitist social projects. The arguments usually put forward by its critics are that despite its social and design merits in the post-war reconstruction and in solving the housing shortage and urban decay, it failed to deliver what it promised and to recognise the damaging consequences of its belief in new technology, technocratic planning and the founding design principles of the modern movement—large-scale, non-contextual, rational order, emphasis on movement and material hardness—on the social life of those spaces designed [2,3] Despite these critiques, the last three decades have been marked by a slow but increasing recognition of the value, significance and legacies of our post-war modernist heritage, of its most iconic buildings [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. (The International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO) is a non-profit organisation devoted to the conservation of modernist heritage; the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) is a non-governmental international organisation dedicated to Academic Editor: Humberto Varum

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion