Bilfinger Berger Award

TWO OF THE THREE WINNERS OF THE BILFINGER BERGER AWARD OUTLINE PROJECTS IN LONDON. AND NO WONDER: LONDON IS ALREADY BEING HAILED AS THE CAPITAL OF THE 21st CENTURY OR SIMPLY “THE FUTURE.”

Vendors in the market stalls on Whitechapel Road speak English or Polish, Chinese or Arabic, Hindi or Urdu. Here, in the eastern borough of Tower Hamlets, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists live side by side. White people, black people, people with freckles and people with dreadlocks.They come from democracies and dictatorships, from countries that drive on the right, as well as those that drive on the left. The shops sell samosas, falafel, hummus and fish & chips, saris and headscarves, bibles and Bollywood DVDs.“London is the future,”as Mayor Ken Livingstone put it in 2005, after the city had celebrated being given the go-ahead for the 2012 Olympic Games:“Here, we have the whole world in one place.”

Only about 70 percent of the more than 7.5 million people who live in the city were born in the UK.“People are voting with their feet,” said a study by the London School of Economics. For London. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who will move to London by 2016, the majority are expected to come from overseas. “London wants to be the capital of the 21st century,” wrote the German newspaper Handelsblatt recently,“just like New York was the capital of the 20th century. In a Europe that would rather seal itself off from globalization, it’s the only metropolis that is growing.” So it’s no coincidence that two of the three winners of the first Bilfinger Berger Award wrote about projects in London: the Idea Store, a new library concept in Tower Hamlets, and the Congestion Charge, the city’s toll system.

A FANTASTIC CHAOS
“London is a real mix; the population is not very strongly segregated on the grounds of ethnic origin or income,”explains Richard Burdett. The 51-year-old is an architect and city planner at the London School of Economics. In 2006, as curator of the Architectural Biennale in Venice, he compared the metropolises of the world.“You can design a city to emphasize or diminish the differences between people. Urban planning brings architecture and democracy together,” says Burdett. He slides a chart showing several city maps across the table. He has marked the social status of the individual districts in different colors. The map of London is as colorful as a patchwork rug. Burdett points to it and rhapsodizes: “London is a fantastic chaos,” The colorful jumble of people on Whitechapel Road is reflected in the glass front of the new library, which juts out at an angle into the street; when it rains, passers by shelter beneath it. The Idea Store’s glass facade is broken up by blue and green stripes resembling the bar code on a pack of chips or a cola can. But products and services of much greater substance are on offer inside: books, computer and Internet access, as well as courses in Spanish, Thai cooking, yoga for children and even writing job applications. The Idea Store is a combination library, community college, vocational training center, video store, Internet café and day care center: a shop for ideas, a place of education.

NEW SELF-CONFIDENCE
Berlin-based urban studies expert Cordelia Polinna (32), came across the Whitechapel Idea Store two years ago while researching her Ph.D. thesis. The store was about to be opened—the third from a total of seven such establishments in the Tower Hamlets district. “This modern architecture in a relatively poor area fascinated me,” she says. The mix of general public education and good design raises the quality of life in the entire district. According to Polinna, the new sense of self-confidence felt by the people who live there could set in motion a whole spiral of positive developments: better education, greater cohesion and, ultimately, economic revival. At some point in the future, London’s East End, traditionally home to the working class and immigrants, could also be an interesting location for the middle class.

And as city planner Richard Burdett emphasizes, for the development of a city it is important to get away from a situation where the inhabitants would favor a house in the suburbs if they could afford it:“Suburbanization is a disaster for the environment and for social cohesion. It creates ghettos and prevents the development of an urban fabric.” Mayor Ken Livingstone has been working toward an “urban renaissance” for London since he took office in 2000. He has set up the London Climate Change Agency and the London Development Agency. In 2004, the Greater London Authority passed a new regional development plan that restricts London’s growth to the space contained within its current footprint. The city will not be allowed to encroach further into the green belt.This can only be achieved if currently disadvantaged areas, like Tower Hamlets, are transformed into desirable places to live. And if the people in the city feel happy there: the Mayor wants London to be the first “sustainable world city.”

PUBLIC TRANSPORT NOW MORE ATTRACTIVE
14 kilometers per hour was the average speed in London’s city center at the end of the 1990s. London put a stop to that by implementing a toll of £ 8 (about ¤ 11.50), a move which caused many drivers to switch to public transportation. The number of cars in the center of London fell by 33 percent in the very first year; the number of cyclists, on the other hand, rose by 19 percent and the number of buses increased by 23 percent.The toll generates about £ 50 million (¤ 72 million) a year, with 80 percent of the net income going into expanding the bus system.This means bigger buses that run more often on more routes—and faster, as well: after all, the number of vehicles on the roads is now some 20 percent lower—a success story described by Georgina Santos from Oxford University for the Bilfinger Berger Award.

“Transport for London,” the operator of the toll and London’s subways, buses and cycle paths, is already planning its next steps. The congestion charging zone was extended to the west in February 2007, and the toll for drivers of cars that are particularly environmentally harmful is set to rise to £ 25 (¤ 36) some time in the next few years. Especially surprising is that, according to surveys, more than half of the motorists paying the toll are now in favor of congestion charging. Part of its success is owed to the fact that the people of London were given the chance to have a say and help shape the scheme—citizen participation is one of the key impulses for the development of cities in the future, according to a research paper by Prognos AG summarizing the findings emerging from the Bilfinger Berger Award. In Tower Hamlets, too, the local authority got the population involved before building the Idea Stores. On the phone, on the streets and in supermarkets, interviewers asked people why they didn’t use libraries more often, what could be done about the fact that a third of people left school with no qualifications, and how they could get young and old alike interested in educational programs. Three years later the answers had been brought to life in glass, steel and concrete: the first Idea Store was opened in 2002. Visitor numbers have since tripled.

CULTURE COUNTS
The floor of the Whitechapel Idea Store is as red as a piece of children’s candy; the walls are neon-green and the many armchairs and sofas are really comfortable. In the children’s books section on the ground floor, rap music is booming out of a loudspeaker. The bookshelves in the café on the fourth floor are sorted by the color of the book covers, a cup of tea costs just 80 pence and the glass wall gives the impression of looking out over the whole of London. All of the seats are taken. “I come here two afternoons a week, to drink tea with friends and to read,”explains Margaret (61). Rasitha (18) is at a desk studying for his highschool diploma; Nikolai (35) has just discovered that Internet access here is free of charge. Sarah (34) has her eight-month-old son, Manu, on her lap and is ordering herself a coffee and a piece of cake: “What other cafés have high chairs, baby changing stations and even a day care center?”

“Nothing has changed London as much as the cultural efforts,”says city planner Richard Burdett. He points his finger at a map of London, indicating somewhere south of the Thames. “Ten years ago, I’d never have gone to this part of the city.”Then someone put a glass roof on an abandoned brick-built power station and installed the Tate Modern inside, the world’s biggest museum of modern art. The tourists came. More than four million, every year. And then City Hall moved into the dilapidated working-class district across the Thames; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was restored and a harbor promenade built. Now, Borough Market sells champagne and oysters.“Cultural projects are like seeds. They grow into plants that revive the district they are planted in,” says Richard Burdett.

(Text: Inka Schmeling; Photos: Frank Schultze)