Super Diverse Streets London

[2012]

As a researcher with the ‘Ordinary Streets’ project at LSE Cities, I spent several months learning about the culture of trade on Rye Lane – a dense, multicultural high street in the neighborhood of Peckham, South London. Rye Lane is a street where businesses and shoppers regularly out-maneuver tight spaces and budgets. It is an entrepreneurial and cultural destination, where a newly arrived immigrant can rent an outdoor market stall for a daily rate of £10 – using only a mailing address and a mobile number to secure a permit; where a woman can buy exactly the same foods she cooked, hair style she wore and movies she watched in Lagos – all in the same shop; and where a young refugee from Iraq manages a store that he subdivided from one to eight micro businesses – each one run by immigrants.

I created a way for planners, politicians and other outsiders of influence to consider Rye Lane’s street-level innovations as culturally and economically successful. I also wanted to encourage architects and planners to increase their appreciation for the design sensibilities of informal, flexible and multicultural businesses. My goal was for planners to navigate the street through the stories of entrepreneurs and locals, so that they could better plan designs and policies that elevated existing cultures.

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