Outrage: ‘Sites of social condensation are being dismantled, neglected or sold off to the highest bidder’ | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/campaigns/outrage/outrage-sites-of-social-condensation-are-being-dismantled-neglected-or-sold-off-to-the-highest-bidder/10023953.article
From Moscow to London, promises about new homes are disguising cynical expropriation
A vast pavilion in the All-Union Exhibition Centre hosts the Moscow Urban Forum 2017: musak, smart cities jargon, flickering LCD screens, Ken Livingstone sitting in the corner eating a sandwich, boutique festival organisers plotting gentrification schemes with developers, and so on. The expo stalls dotted around the premises belong, by and large, to real-estate developers, in particular to those signed up to ‘My New Home’ (Moy Novy Dom) – Moscow’s newly launched housing renovation programme.
KROST’s giant LCD screens loop quasi-documentary footage of pensioners in their dreary, obsolete Khrushchev-era kitchens followed by triumphant fly-throughs of gleaming new polychrome high-rises. GALS Corp opts for renderings of gleaming new towers decorated with neo-Stalinist cornices and crenellations.
#dfs #espace_social #espace_public #expropriation #appropriation #expulsions #urban_matter