Islington Kings Cross: Urban Design Framework

Framework masterplan
Developing a Vision
An important part of developing this urban design framework was to establish a vision, that is
not prescriptive or utopistic but normative and inspirational. The analysis revealed that what
seems like a collection of isolated spaces are still interlinked. Understanding the production
of boundaries reveal the socio-spatial forces that are at play: ‘space is never empty: it always
embodies a meaning’ (Lefebvre 1991).
The masterplan for the Triangle site is planned to a be a heterotopia in Foucauldian terms.
Foucault outlined (1986) in ‘Of other spaces’ that in comparison to utopias that are unreal,
fantastic and perfected spaces, heterotopias are real, existing ‘counter-sites’ that simultaneously
represent, contest and invert structures around them. While the new Triangle site will
inevitably reproduce some of the inequalities and oppressions around it, it would also hopefully
reveal and challenge the rules of current trends of urban development that leads to social
cleansing, loss of employment land and more generally planetary dispossession and ecological
demise (Weston 2012).
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