Visions of suburbia

Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety and reaches out in speculative attempts to do something new; exists on the outer edges of lives, looking inwards with hopes, some day, to be more essential. Art, literature and music are, in short, suburbs to the grands projets of our lives at their most significant.

Over the next year the Architecture Foundation will present new films, walks, talks and another instalment of the Doughnut Festival, to contemplate the transformation of London’s outer ring. It’s an interesting moment. The capital is not physically expanding, but the relationship between inner and outer is significantly altering and will go on altering. Pretty well the whole of central London is in the process of gentrification, or, worse, of speculative development of areas not meant to be lived in. The impacts have been extraordinary, and not intended.