Living Room

Living Room is an interactive, multimodal online documentary. It engages with the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in inner London (UK). The demolition is presented through the point of view of those working-class and racialized residents who find themselves at risk of displacement and dispossession through the regeneration/demolition project, and who refuse its logics. Rather than understanding ‘demolition’ as a one-off spectacular event, the project posits it as an assemblage of processes unfolding in space and time, and across domains and scales. The architecture of the website reflects this understanding of the demolition assemblage as a range of interlocking dynamics which braid together political, economic, legal and architectural concerns with notions of deservingness, domestic space, emotional and financial investments and value creation. The central location of the i-doc is a living room on the estate, which references the everyday living space, where the private realm of domestic life and the public realm of economics and politics bleed into each other. From this central living room the user can chose between 5 different pathways, each linked to a key theme (the law, the media, housing campaigns, walkways, house stories), and a timeline. Each pathway reflects an element of the demolition assemblage, and instantiations of the residents’ refusal emerge within each pathway, at times explicitly, and at times more implicitly. The users of Living Room experience a polyphonic range of counternarratives and oppositional practices that dissenting residents have been producing over 20 years of refusing regeneration/demolition. The non-linear structure of the site follows the anticipatory, recursive and reiterative temporalities that characterise regeneration/demolition and its refusals.