Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The authors would like to extend their thanks and appreciation to Bob Catterall for his infectious enthusiasm and guidance. They also thank Nick Wolff. His insightful comments and enviable knowledge of urban regeneration in Britain have proved invaluable. Personal thanks go to members of city-bound collective, and in particular to Sophie Nibbs for her ongoing commitment to the development of this two-part feature. Like many of City's special features, this two-part series was developed in the wake of a collaborative, public event. Following on from talks and discussions at ‘NEOutopia’—a two-day event at the Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC) in London—it presents four specially commissioned papers broadly centred on the contentious and all-too-familiar issue of urban regeneration. With contributions from Louis Moreno, Francesco Sebregondi (Part One), city-bound collective and Caspar Pearson (Part Two), ‘NEOutopia: Architecture and the Politics of the New’ develops some of the key themes addressed at C4CC: the speculative nature of development, the demise of social housing in Britain, the ‘visual culture of urban development’ and capitalism's ceaseless predilection for ‘the new’. Organised by city-bound collective, a group of former Visual Cultures students from Goldsmiths College, NEOutopia was a transdisciplinary event that consisted of an exhibition, an evening symposium and a day of film screenings on 26 and 27 November 2011. Central to the event was the presentation of the archival project NEOutopia. Explored in Part Two of this feature, in the paper ‘Notes on NEOutopia’, the project revealed a fictional development plan for the area of Elephant & Castle in London. Further information on the project and the events at C4CC can be found at: http://cityboundcollective.com/category/events/ Notes Johnson's famous comment, taken from Boswell's autobiography, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Vol. 3, is stated in conversation with Boswell. Boswell, who lived in Scotland and only visited London periodically, states: ‘I suggested a doubt, that if I were to reside in London, the exquisite zest with which I relished it in occasional visits might go off, and I might grow tired of it. JOHNSON: “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”’ (1859, p. 120). The phrase ‘speculative landscape’ is taken from F. Sebregondi, ‘Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate’, in Part One of this special feature for City. For more critical analysis on these issues, see the following contributions to a debate ‘How Should We Write about London?’ in City 10(2) (2006), pp. 183–224: consisting of an Introduction, pp. 183–184; I. Gordon, ‘How Should We Write about London?: The Working Capital View’, pp. 185–196; M. Edwards, ‘Hamlet without the Prince: Whatever Happened to Capital in Working Capital?’, pp. 197–204; and S. Sandhu, ‘Aborigines and Unfortunates: Life and Labour across Nocturnal London’, pp. 205–214. Also, see B. Catterall, ‘Is it All Coming Together? Further Thoughts on Urban Studies and the Present Crisis: (9) The Play's the Thing?’, City 10(3) (2006), pp. 393–407. For further discussion of Sukhdev Sandhu's book Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night (London: Verso, 2008)—‘a fine investigative portrait of the heyday […] of New Labour's neoliberal London as a slicked-up, postindustrial form of commodity urbanism’—see B. Catterall, ‘Is it All Coming Together? Thoughts on Urban Studies and the Present Crisis: (14) Another City is Possible? Reports from the Frontline’, City 12(3) (2008), pp. 402–403, 404–405 (including notes 5 and 6) and 414. This quotation is taken from L. Moreno, ‘Looking Backward: Towards the Critique of Neo-modernity’, in Part One of this special feature for City, where the author cites the ideas put forward by Henri Lefebvre in The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (London: Allison & Busby, 1976). See the essay by Sebregondi, ‘Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate’ in this issue. The Heygate estate appeared in 76 films between 2007 and 2010, and has inspired many creative projects. These have included a sound art project by Will Montgomery, discussed in W. Montgomery, ‘Sounding the Heygate Estate’, City 15(3–4) (2011), pp. 443–455; and a film by the artist Marcus Coates, Vision Quest—A Ritual for Elephant & Castle displayed within a disused department store in the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre (12–29 April 2012). In this comment, Sebregondi is referring to ‘Strata SE1’—a development built adjacent to the Heygate estate in Elephant & Castle and completed in 2010. Strata SE1, informally known as ‘The Razor’, is a 148-metre, 43-storey skyscraper designed by BFLS and is one of the tallest residential buildings in London. The Heygate estate appeared as a backdrop in the film Harry Brown (2009, dir. Daniel Barber, 103 min)—a British crime thriller following the story of Harry Brown (played by Michael Caine), a widowed Royal Marines veteran, living in a crime-ridden Elephant & Castle. See the paper by Sebregondi, ‘Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate’. See the paper by Moreno, ‘Looking Backward: Towards the Critique of Neo-modernity’ in this issue. Quoted in Moreno, ‘Looking Backward: Towards the Critique of Neo-modernity’. Quoted in Moreno, ‘Looking Backward: Towards the Critique of Neo-modernity’. This phrase is taken from an advertisement for the development ‘One Hyde Park’ in London's West End, as mentioned in Moreno, ‘Looking Backward: Towards the Critique of Neo-modernity’. This phrase is taken from the tag-line for ‘Heron Tower’ in Bishopsgate, London, as mentioned in Moreno, ‘Looking Backward: Towards the Critique of Neo-modernity’. Quotation taken from Sebregondi, ‘Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate’. Quotation taken from Sebregondi, ‘Notes on the Potential of Void: The Case of the Evacuated Heygate Estate’. Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmma CumminsEmma Cummins is a writer and founding member of city-bound collective. She recently joined City as Coordinating Editor after completing a master's degree in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College.