A “Quiet Victory”: National Provincial, Gibson Hall, and the Switch from Comprehensive Redevelopment to Urban Preservation in 1960s London

The Victorian City of London’s financial center expanded and renewed its building infrastructure virtually unimpeded by considerations of urban preservation, conservation, or public opinion. The next phase of massive rebuilding, during the long post-1945 boom, appeared likely to follow the same pattern. However, by the mid-1960s, the freedom of City office owner-occupiers and developers to do as they wished with their buildings had become substantially constrained by rising conservationist sentiment. This paper explores this process through the history of the design, building, and eventual aborted demolition of Gibson Hall, the Bishopsgate headquarters of National Provincial Bank for over a century. This paper charts the life of Gibson Hall, in particular its conception, design, and, ultimately, its attempted redevelopment. We also consider the long-term consequences of the rebalancing between economic and conservation objectives for the nature of British urban redevelopment and the adoption of a “throwaway” business headquarters style—to remove any risk of popular support for preservation.

La actuación sobre el medio urbano de regeneración y renovación integrada. El nuevo paradigma de la gestión urbanística en suelo urbanizado = The integrated regeneration and renovation in the urban intervention. The new paradigm of city planning management

ResumenLa actuación sobre el medio urbano de regeneración y renovación integrada (aMU-RRi) configura el nuevo paradigma de la intervención urbana, la preservación urbana con carácter conjunto e integrado. Para ello redefine la viabilidad económica, afecta el deber de conservación del derecho de propiedad a la actuación y articula un modelo de equidistribución de reparto de costes que supera las pautas del urbanismo que hemos conocido.El presente artículo constituye un breve recorrido histórico por los instrumentos y técnicas que ha dispuesto el urbanismo español para la preservación urbana: desde inviable e insostenible modelo clásico del urbanismo, pasando por el modelo de la sostenibilidad que incorporó la sostenibilidad plena y el régimen estatutario del derecho de propiedad, pero que estableció un régimen general de intervención sobre el suelo urbanizado inviable y dejó un hueco falto de regulación para la preservación de la ciudad; para alcanzar la definición de la aMU-RRi con la legislación del modelo por la ciudad y sus adaptaciones autonómicas de medio urbano y que ayudará a la formación del nuevo paradigma urbanístico, basado en la función social del derecho de propiedad que nos hemos dado para la preservación urbana conjunta e integrada de eso que llamamos, la ciudad.AbstractThe integrated urban regeneration and renewal intervention (aMU-RRi) configures the new paradigm of urban intervention, with its joint and integrated character for urban preservation. To this end, it redefines the economic viability, affects the duty of preservation of the right of property and articulates a model of equistribution of distribution of costs that surpasses the urban planning guidelines that we have known.This paper constitutes a brief historical journey through the instruments and techniques that Spanish urban planning has provided for urban preservation: from an unviable and unsustainable classic urban planning model, through the sustainability model that it incorporated full sustainability and the statutory property rights regime, but that established an unviable general intervention regime in the existing city areas and also left a gap due to the lack of regulation for the preservation of the city; and finally up to the definition of the aMU-RRi with city preserving legislation and its regional adaptations and that will help the formation of the new urban paradigm, based on the social function of property rights that we have been given for the joint and integrated urban preservation of what we call, the city.

Urban preservation and the queerying spaces of (un)remembering: Memorial landscapes of the Miami Beach art deco historic district

Based on a case study on Miami Beach’s acclaimed iconic art deco architectural district, this article critically dovetails intersecting hegemonic spaces of preservation, memorial practices and social and sexual identities. It argues how commemorative narratives are selectively encrypted in the local urban environment and its artefacts deemed of historical significance. It especially reveals the tensions arising between art deco (i.e. architectural) preservation and gay (i.e. social) urban preservation, as well as its under-studied largely entrepreneurial nature and attraction for a mainstream, cosmopolitan class under neoliberalism. Drawing from extensive archival, policy, observational, participatory and interview data over 2013–2015, the article revisits in historical perspective how the art deco area, incarnated in the 1920s, developed across class-, ethnicity-, religion- and age-inflected social fragmentations and how this legacy, from the late-1970s onward, segued into the local gay-led preservation movement and select commemorations of the art deco scene. To this background, the study employs the tenet of ‘queerying’ to address the under-researched coalescing frictions in preservation between perceived authentic and engineered trajectories of (gay) place (re)makings alongside reminiscences selected over others. The findings uncover and challenge (un)intentional ‘(un)rememberings’ of the local early history and the recent past, where socially fragmented fault lines and the more recent gay-led preservation track remain overly homogeneously imprinted in dominant preservation communications and performance.