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Boundaries shift. Architecture is often viewed with a sense of permanence but time brings a fluidity to the physical fabric of our cities. Boundaries are not erased with each new community that settles but reclaimed, repositioned and repurposed. Architecture adapts.

Boundaries are the result of many forces that push and pull the city and its inhabitants; the political zeitgeist, the will of developers reacting to the financial opportunities of a place, the need for growth and modernity often at odds with our desire to keep the familiar. ‘Gentrification’ shifts boundaries and large areas of the city that once housed artists and students become unaffordable. We ourselves are shifted by boundaries.

London has faced recent criticism for becoming a ‘property portfolio’ where booming prices and government policy has led to a social apartheid within the city. London is home to anincreasing number of  ‘ghost towers’ as foreign investors, deterred by tightening regulations and a looming Brexit, find the glut of luxury developments less appealing.

Writer and activist Jane Jacobs led a campaign in the late 1950s to save what we consider today to be quintessential New York, Little Italy and Soho, from Robert Moses and his developer’s scythe. Jacob’s 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities celebrated the active sidewalk; ‘Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves’.

Truly democratic public space is of vital importance to an activated city. George Monbiot in his 2017 book How Did We Get Into This Mess? warns against the semi-privatisation of public space noting that UK city centres ‘are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas’ where street life is ‘reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation.’ The UK Government has recently appointed a Minister responsible for ‘loneliness’ while the co-chair of the Jo Cox Commission for Loneliness reports ‘When the culture and the communities that once connected us to one another disappear, we can be left feeling abandoned and cut off from society.’

Good architecture is a key protagonist in the story of a successful city. When Lina Bo Bardi designed a building having been set the conditions that it must not obstruct important views of the city beyond or destroy a valued ground level gathering space she pulled the building in two making the elevated form of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art completed in 1968 one of the 20^thcentury’s most iconic works.

The London Festival of Architecture offers an opportunity to celebrate the city and to bring us together to consider what we must cherish and what must be challenged.

I did two things this week in preparation for LFA 2019. The first was to visit a hospital-based project in Waterloo that intercepts young victims of gang violence and then works with them for 6 months back home. The second was a meeting with a leading contemporary dance company which, as part of its outreach, creates choreographies to bring together people of all ages and backgrounds.

So what do knife crime and dance have to do with a festival of architecture, or the built environment for that matter? The stark picture of London, as it sets about addressing a housing crisis and failing high streets, is of growing inequality, intolerance, child poverty, homelessness and isolation. Rather than improving people’s lives, many communities see regeneration and development as something that is done to them, not with or for them.

I happen to believe strongly that it’s the collective responsibility of those of us shaping the city’s built environment to rise to the social challenge that this represents. The question of how to value and bring value to London’s existing communities is at the heart of this, yet our preoccupation is with the red line that marks the boundary of a site — whether as a physical constraint, a design challenge, or an economic opportunity. Behind physical boundaries there are invisible social boundaries, yet they only feature in development currency to the extent that we choose to identify them, reveal them and respond to them.

In fact I’m an optimist and I think we’re moving in the right direction. I was heartened at the launch of the RIBA’s current exhibition, Making it Happen, New Community Architecture, to hear curator Pete Collard describing a growing interest among students and young architects in “designing for public good”. This isn’t just about being more socially aware, it also makes good economic sense — thriving communities add value in every sense.

That’s why, for this year’s festival, I am working on two projects exploring how physical and social boundaries overlap. The first is a series of short films, one of which will trace an apparently innocuous postcode boundary, with a voice-over of comments by the young victims of violence for whom this boundary has a very different meaning. The second is a cross-cultural and inter-generational dance project on the theme of ‘boundaries’, culminating in two site-specific public performances.

The Festival is now so well-established, its reach so impressive, that it can call upon London’s huge pool of design talent to come up with ambitious events responding to all manner of boundaries — social, cultural, technical, material and physical. The LFA not only shows the world what London’s designers have to offer, it’s an important showcase for what we can offer our city, which is why ft’work greatly values being a Patron.

I see this year’s theme as an opportunity to push the festival’s own boundaries, to reach outside the design world to all Londoners.

The West End Project is a splendid thing. It involves widening the pavements of Tottenham Court Road, excluding all motor vehicles except for buses. Gower Street will revert to two lanes for traffic and will be enhanced by a segregated bicycle route.

The first phase of the project will be completed in spring this year in plenty of time for the delayed opening of the Elizabeth Line which will spew over 200,000 pedestrians a day onto the pavements around the new station.

High-quality new paving is being installed. Elegant and smooth, it aspires to the sort of placemaking one finds as a given in European cities like Barcelona, Madrid and Milan. But why on earth is there an untidy line of mortar which straggles down the middle of the sidewalk, spoiling its pristine appearance?

It’s a small and often unnoticed boundary that is a characteristic part of the London street scene.

New paviors butt uncomfortably against panels of glazed blocks that allow daylight into the basements of the buildings fronting the street or panels that allow smoke out in the case of fire.

It’s not just a problem for Tottenham Court Road, but many of the public space improvements of recent years. Look at the impressive work that has been carried out in Bond Street recently and you’ll find the same thing happens where there are basements which run out under the highway.

In some cases, it has been possible for designers to negotiate with the building owners to extend the paving treatment over their private property, but not where there are glazed blocks. In some areas, it was not possible pave over private property because it would have meant the local authority taking on liability for any structural damage – something that it was understandably unwilling to consider.

The project was made considerably more complicated by time-consuming negotiations; even where there was a willing property owner, lawyers ensured any agreement was hard won. Sometimes tenants wanted a seamless sidewalk, but property owners weren’t interested.

These little boundaries, these untidy lines between public and private city reflect the primacy of property ownership in the capital. The problem has been overcome where the historic estates are funding street improvements, and since they own the freeholds of all the buildings, they are able to extend paving up to the building edge.

So do we seek a way to recreate the seamless sidewalks of our continental neighbours or do we accept London’s untidy, pragmatic way of responding to physical change? It’s probably the latter, although it would be nice to think that contractors could come up with a more elegant solution for joining the public and the private elements of our pavements than a smear of mortar.

Where does one place end and another begin? The nature of commercial development in cities like London means that sites are almost always developed in complete isolation. The need to deliver independently viable schemes drives development language: ‘Our scheme in Clapham’; ‘Our site in the heart of The City’. What this immediately engenders of course, however well the scheme is designed, is a sense of disconnection from the surrounding environment and an abrogation of responsibility to see an individual site as part of a living, breathing eco-system. The creation of false boundaries.

We can look back, with rose-tinted hindsight, to the days when Abercrombie and Forshaw had all of London on their drawing board and an opportunity to present a vision for the core of virtually an entire city. I’m sure there are many in London’s Boroughs and in City Hall who would love the power to deliver such a vision today. Fortunately, what happens to London now is delivered from a more localised and democratic imperative.  Well…that’s the theory anyway.

Of course, the gutting of London’s borough planning departments by austerity and the private sector plucking out the best people, means that planning teams can just about deal with the workload of applications. The days when borough architects could design and control how community development played out are long gone, replaced by an adversarial system where the much deeper pockets of private sector developers tip the scales well in their favour. One of the clearest results of this is the piecemeal, boundary-strewn development programme that characterises much of London today.

So, what to do? How do we encourage developers to look over their own fences, to see the world around them and care about more than that which drives their development appraisals? Architects have a clear role to play. What drives architects, so much more than developers, is an understanding of people. How they want to live, work and relax and how they want to interact with the places where they live. That requires an inherent understanding of how boundaries are broken down, how people travel and how they relate to those around them. Like meerkats, architects need to be the first up on their hind legs, sniffing out what’s going on in the world and reporting back to the group – in this case, their clients.

It’s the responsibility of developers to work WITH planners to demonstrate a clear understanding that whilst there might be real financial and construction boundaries to development schemes in cities, political and social boundaries only exist where they are built. How about if we all came to work every day determined to step outside the boundaries we create, work together and see our city for what it is, a beautiful mess that works best when it is at its most free.

• Del Hossain is Managing Director of Adrem Group. Del is an Architect, a Wellbeing Psychologist, a former London Business Mentor of the Year and has been a Managing Editor for Business publications for the RIBA. In this essay he shares his take on our theme of boundaries, following a recent trip to Colombia.

Comuna 13: the transformation of a bario through colour

What do the East End of London and Medellin in Colombia have in common? Beyond the commonality of notorious gangland families immortalised onto film, they have also both existed as impoverished environments. Today, both places have had a miraculous metamorphosis and crossed significant boundaries because of technology and creativity.

The once dilapidated terraces of Shoreditch are now a nursery for creativity and state of the art technology-based entrepreneurialism, which has become a threshold of change. Imagine a similar grit and position it into Central America and you have the vibrancy of the barrios with their reconquered spaces in Comuna 13 in Medellin.

Medellin has 16 favelas, the most notorious of which was Comuna 13. Cradling the side of a valley of a huge hill, boundaries were crossed with catastrophic repercussions and in 1993, Comuna 13 was called the most dangerous place in the world. Violence and car bombs were commonplace but the city’s urbanist leader, Echeverri, created a programme to address these territories. By looking at the urban environment through the planning of a social infrastructure such as schools, play spaces and communal areas, murder rates were significantly decreased by 95%. This in itself is an incredible story of how an unapproachable area with a no-go boundary became approachable but add to that the power of art and the human story emerges.

The youth of the community started to depict the narratives and recent history onto the walls through mesmerising graffiti. The amazing street art attracted so much mainstream attention that competitions took place for the best pieces, with artists practicing in sheds used as make-shift artists’ studios.

A reference to mothers waving white flags, surrendering to soldiers to stop them from shooting

Each piece of Graffiti depicts a different tale

Spanish Hip-Hop

In the recent years, the internet had brought Spanish Hip-Hop into the favelas as another creative medium. As a result, young internet sensations are able to make a better income through digital streaming. Other creative but more traditional business pursuits such as cooking, and hair dressing salons have also sprung up, alongside collector’s edition street wear such as t-shirts and hoodies.

Further assisted by government funds, the community now have access to escalators built alongside the hill, saving tremendous time and effort of climbing over 300 steps. With better connectivity to outside communities, local businesses are able to utilise this to develop and thrive.

This is a positive example of boundaries being changed and the transformation of an embattled neighbourhood through improved urban planning, art and a community led culture.

An escalator traversing up the hill introducing a raft of people and interests to the barrios

• Peter Murray is the founder of the London Festival of Architecture and the chairman of New London Architecture. In this essay he shares his thoughts on our 2019 theme of boundaries.

London grew and flourished because of its river, but of all the capital’s boundaries, the Thames must be the greatest. When the Romans built the first London Bridge in AD 50 they linked the stable, rising north bank to the marshy low-lying south; to this day the varying geological makeup of two banks has impacted hugely on their development and their prosperity.

Until the opening of Putney Bridge in 1729 London Bridge was the only crossing in the capital – earlier plans had always been defeated by lightermen who were worried about losing their ferry monopoly. Since then the proliferation of crossings from Tower to Hampton Court has done much to knit the south and north of the capital together; except in the east. Between the Tower and Thurrock, only the much-maligned Emirates Air-Line cable car takes people across the Thames above water. There are plans afoot to remedy this situation – Silvertown Tunnel, due to open in 2024, will ease blockages in the Rotherhithe and Blackwall tunnels and designs are being prepared for a walking and cycling bridge between Rotherhithe and Canary Wharf as well as rail connections across to Thamesmead – TfL funds permitting.

The tunnel proposals are rightly criticised for merely increasing the number of cars and the volume of pollution; active travel infrastructure – walking cycling and public transport as mooted in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy – must surely be the way forward to deliver sustainable connectivity and allow convergence of riparian communities. After all, it was the Jubilee Line extension and the Millennium Bridge which did most in recent years to boost the local economy of  Southwark. Road bridges don’t have the same effect – vehicles are, in the main, driving through, not stopping and adding to the economy.

Which brings me to the nub of this blog: the proposed car-free bridge from Nine Elms to Pimlico, the result of a competition launched five years ago. The winning designers Bystrup and Robin Snell Architects are still at consultation stage in the search for a suitable landing site on the north bank. Both political parties in Westminster Council are fighting the plans as are the residents of Pimlico resurrecting once more the historical conflict between the established north with the upstart south.

Recently, I brought the wrath of local amenity groups on my head by accusing them on Twitter of being Nimbies. For some reason, they find this insulting in spite of the fact that they are saying in no uncertain terms “we do not want this in our backyard”. While some of the antagonism towards the project is based on the loss of public space around the landing points, talk to locals and they just don’t like the idea of the influx of cyclists and pedestrians from the south through their ‘urban village’.

Which made me realise how relevant LFA’s theme is to the contemporary debate about development. How do we get the balance between such local communities and the wider city? As a cyclist, I always find it odd that people will accept thundering traffic through their neighbourhood but fight tooth and nail to stop a new cycle route, as we have seen in Swiss Cottage with Cycle Superhighway 11 and in Chiswick with the CS9.

Permeability is an essential part of placemaking in today’s city, focusing on active travel and healthy streets to link communities rather than separate them – and that includes communities on both sides of the river.

• Meneesha Kellay is public programmes curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and was previously curator at the Museum of Architecture and assistant director of the Architectural Association Night School. She is also a member of our curation panel. In this essay she shares her thoughts on our 2019 theme of boundaries.

Architecture in its built form transcends borders and boundaries and is therefore a fitting theme for LFA 2019, the year that the UK is due to leave the EU. It is widely accepted that Brexit will have a negative impact on the architecture and construction industry, not least because one in five of all architecture professionals in London is an EU national. The history of architecture as an international language, together with Britain’s 40-year relationship with the EU, has changed the DNA of the architecture industry. It sees no boundaries between nationalities, and how architecture practice will change following Britain’s exit from the EU is a troubling unknown.

Within London, boundaries are ingrained in the way the city is planned and built. Through the boundaries of London’s boroughs and their policies, the process of building varies subject to different processes and priorities, as well as considerations of quality, design and innovation. Public and private boundaries are blurred with the increase of cross-funding; private sale housing funds public buildings such as schools and community centres. Thinking beyond the red line boundary can mean the difference between an exciting, varied streetscape and solidifying the compromises of the past. Zooming in closer at the building scale, a well-considered boundary condition can make a good neighbour and allows social interactions to occur – we can meet at the boundary.

Architecture is an inherently social practice, serving both its users and the public at large, however as a profession it is not representative of the communities it serves. More focus needs to be placed on breaking down boundaries to access to architecture for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, people of colour and to support women throughout their careers. I look forward to seeing some of these and many more interpretations of boundaries being explored in LFA 2019.

• Tom Guy is a partner at Guy Piper Architects and the founder of the Architecture LGBT+ network, and this year worked with the LFA on a competition to design a float for the 2018 Pride in London parade. He is also a member of our curation panel. In this essay he shares his thoughts on our 2019 theme of boundaries.

When I think of the theme of boundaries, I think of social boundaries and barriers within the construction industry. As diversity has progressed through the last few decades, barriers have been broken down and social norms have been challenged; however, the construction industry has lagged behind. Only 73% of architects are out at work and 39% have heard homophobic or transphobic slurs in the workplace in the past year, whilst one in seven women architects have experienced sexual harassment.

Through the theme of boundaries, I hope we can explore events through the festival that continue the work of the LFA’s pink elephant campaign to call out discrimination in the built environment. In 2018, Architecture LGBT+ ran a competition with the LFA to design a float for the Pride in London Parade. Hawkins/Brown’s winning design was realised by Sir Robert McAlpine and for the first time Architects were represented in the 30,000-strong parade. The Parade, which starts outside RIBA on Portland Place, before crossing Oxford Circus to make its way to Trafalgar Square, itself breaks down the normal boundaries between thoroughfares, pedestrians and traffic.

Through the festival I hope we can enable people to feel free to fulfil their potential by living a life without boundaries.

• Sarah Castle is a founding director of IF_DO, an award-winning architecture practice, and is a chapter lead for Urbanistas, a network supporting women working in the built environment. She is also a member of our curation panel. In this essay she shares her thoughts on our 2019 theme of boundaries.

The LFA theme of boundaries sets up countless interesting and exciting possibilities for exploration. As architects we deal with boundaries on a daily basis – from Macro to Micro scales.

The world’s population is increasingly urban with more than half of us now living in urban areas. As architects we can have a huge impact on the experience of people living within cities, in the way that we shape the built environment. And as urban populations grow, and the boundaries of London expand, we must question the nature of the city and its edge. I look forward to events within the LFA programme which explore and expand upon these issues: how should we approach density when creating successful, high quality places to live? How should we design and regulate the boundary of London, and what level of protection should we apply to the green spaces that surround this expanding territory?

It is also sometimes necessary to break down boundaries, including those which prevent or discourage women and minority groups from joining and remaining part of the profession. Boundaries within architecture can be structural – in the way that we approach education and regulation – and they can also be cultural, and I am hoping to see propositions within the LFA programme which question this further. It is 100 years since the first female architect was admitted to the RIBA and it is really important that we continue to break down those boundaries which reinforce gender and social imbalance within the profession.

On a smaller scale, I am excited to see how architects approach boundaries at the scale of the individual building. Even the smallest project affects the environment, the local community and the economy. The impact that projects have is not limited by the site boundary, and by thinking of a bigger picture and questioning the nature of boundaries, we can create buildings that do so much more.

• Sumitra Upham is curator of public programmes at the Design Museum. Previously, she was design curator at Oxo Tower Wharf, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and part of the exhibitions team at White Cube, London. She’s also a member of our Curation Panel. In this essay she shares her thoughts on our 2019 theme of boundaries.

‘Boundaries’ feels like a pertinent theme for London Festival of Architecture 2019.

Over the last 12 months, London has witnessed unprecedented challenges, as its population continues to grow rapidly. The rise in environmental concerns, high living costs, social inequality and political extremism are just some of the factors creating new socio-economic boundaries for the city.

For the next LFA, I’m keen to help develop a programme that responds to the unique social challenges of the city. I’d like to explore how we can use the framework of an architecture festival to geographically link parts of London that are otherwise disconnected, and as a tool for welcoming people to the city, from all walks of life.

With racism and religious intolerance growing across the globe, it feels imperative that this year’s festival celebrates the rich cultural diversity of communities living in London. I hope to see proposals with an agenda to dissolve social and cultural barriers and build platforms for marginalised voices.

Festival highlights for me each year are those unexpected spatial projects that play with the physical boundaries of the city – e.g. outdoor installations, interventions in unusual buildings, performances in public spaces, and community engagement activities. These projects provide opportunities for greater social integration and give us the opportunity to navigate the city in new and unexpected ways.

I’m also particularly keen to see proposals from a younger generation of emerging practices, confronting the boundaries of the architectural profession itself.