theory
Urban controversies open traditional social explanations of
architecture up to question. The London Olympic Stadium is used as
a case study in exploring digital methods for controversy mapping.
Urban controversies and
the making of the social
Albena Yaneva and Liam Heaphy
On the one hand, architectural knowledge advances
very rapidly, with new types of materials and
technological innovations entering the field and
multiplying architectural invention. On the other
hand, urban experts, architects and engineers often
debate publicly uncertain urban knowledge and
technologies, risky plans and daring designs,
polarising opinion – as witnessed on numerous
blogs, citizen forums and architecture websites. This
radical transformation in building technologies, in
the reliance upon experts and in the expansion of
architectural networks could have remained
practically invisible were it not for the presence of
another phenomenon: the digitalisation of
architecture and the availability of enormous
Internet databases. The digital technologies at our
command provide us with abundant resources to
follow architectural controversies.
How can we better make use of these digital
technologies and the huge amounts of available web
resources to track controversies and their dynamics?
How can we take more advantage of the newest
developments in architectural computation to
improve the analytical and visual potential of
controversy mapping? How can controversy mapping
enable us to follow and better understand urban
dynamics and design concepts rather than quickly
explaining them with social factors? In this paper we
will discuss the potential of the Mapping
Controversies method in architecture. This method
was initially developed by the French sociologist
Bruno Latour and applied across a variety of
disciplines. Drawing on a rich tradition of semiotics
and literary theory, the method offers new
opportunities for enquiry in social sciences based on
Actor-Network Theory, which consists in following,
documenting and mapping ongoing controversies.
Taken recently to the field of architecture, this
method allows us to witness, analyse and map the
variety of elements of which a building is constituted
together with the vast range of factors that impinge
on design. By encapsulating the dynamics of a
controversy and opening it more to informed
scrutiny, this approach could permit a more efficient
decision-making process. The mapping of the
controversy surrounding the London Olympic
Stadium for the 2012 Games allows us to illustrate the
method and present some new ways of visualising the
1
dynamics of controversies with architectural tools.
Designing the London Olympic Stadium
In the East End of London in 2009, a small army of
contracted workers is raising the new 80,000 capacity
Olympic Stadium, slowly but surely, with the
steadfast rhythm of honeybees. The computer-
modelled design and its artists’ impressions,
unveiled to the public in November 2007, are being
replicated in solid materials and the marketing of
the 2012 Summer Olympics is beginning to capture
the national consciousness. The community of East
London, divided and united many times by the
different scenarios for development of the area and
regeneration prognoses, is now waiting impatiently
for the new stadium to emerge and to change their
lives. Guided visits for the general public are under
way and people are asked to take a seat in the
executive box and imagine how grand the arena
below will appear from this select location on the
day of the opening ceremony. We pause for a
moment and listen to the voices of the actors we see
on the construction site, to follow how they agree
and disagree, argue and anticipate, project and await
the new design.
Going back in time to revisit the bidding process,
one can find out that the actors who gathered
around the bid and voiced agreement and
disagreement shared a different battlefield to those
who, some six years later, gather on the construction
site and anticipate the future of the stadium’s
design. As early as 2003, Keith Mills, then chief
executive of the London 2012 Campaign, and Tony
Winterbottom, then director of regeneration and
development for the London Development Agency,
expressed how the London bid would be contingent
on the ability to provide a lasting cultural and
2
sporting legacy to the city. A preliminary design, or
artist’s impression, was unveiled on 7 November 2004
3
in the UK’s The Independent newspaper. On 12
November 2004, this design was attributed jointly to
hok Sport and Foreign Office Architects, with
theory   arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012 29
30 arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012    theory
Alejandro Zaera-Polo referring to the muscle-like
4
design enclosing the stadium interior. This
preliminary design was used extensively during the
London bidding campaign, where the city competed
against contenders such as Paris, New York, Madrid
and Moscow. A final design had yet to be formulated
and it was thought pertinent to await the decision of
the International Olympic Committee (ioc) before
moving forward with a complete design. The London
bidding team, with the support and efforts of the
then prime minister, Tony Blair, made legacy and
community redevelopment an explicit part of their
campaign, and were therefore bound to these
commitments upon winning the 2012 Games. The
Report of the IOC Evaluation Commission for the Games of
the XXX Olympiad in 2012 reported that:
London has proposed Games based on providing
world-class facilities and services for the athletes, and a
legacy for sport and the community through new and
enhanced facilities and a greater emphasis on sport and
5
physical activity.
Following London’s success in the bid in July 2005,
responsibilities were divided between newly created
and pre-existing bodies, with the protagonists being:
the London Organising Committee of the Olympic
and Paralympic Games (locog), responsible for
preparing and staging the Games; the Olympic
Delivery Authority (oda), responsible for venues and
infrastructure; the Mayor of London, responsible
particularly for ensuring that Londoners benefit
from the Games; the Westminster Government,
represented by the Minister of the Olympics, Tessa
Jowell. The oda, responsible for the design and
construction of the Olympic Stadium, sought a team
6
to determine the definitive design. On 13 October
2006, contributors to Building Design magazine
considered hok Sport (now renamed Populous) clear
favourites in the bidding, attributed both to their
7
excellent reputation and to a lack of competing bids.
foa did not enter an independent bid for the
stadium, nor did many other leading architects, a
fact partly attributed to a long-suffering but
ultimately completed Wembley Stadium, designed
by Foster + Partners and hok Sport Architecture, and
also the most expensive stadium in modern history.
The public tender notice had envisioned some six
competing bids, according to The Independent, but this
8 12
competitive format never materialised. As a result
hok Sport became the de facto winner of the bid.
Little information about it appeared in the press
until a rift appeared between the riba and the oda
following the 2006 riba conference in Venice.
A controversy broke out that year. The
architectural community, as represented by riba,
criticised the lack of expertise and importance of
design and architecture in the oda’s decision-making
processes. These criticisms were spearheaded by
Richard Rogers, who maligned the ‘design and build’
strategy employed as opposed to a ‘design-led’
9
building process. In response to this, the oda
resolved to increase the design input into the
Olympics through a number of new appointments –
including that of designer Peter Cook, famous for his
conceptual work with Archigram in the 1960s. The
Yaneva & Heaphy   Urban controversies and the making of the social
chief executive of the oda, David Higgins argued:
The Olympics is a vast stage show and it needs to be
thought of like that. It’s about the temporary structures,
what they’ll look like and their colour and how they’re
branded. There’s also the sculpture, temporary bridges
10
and landscaping. That’s what we’ve got to get right.
In this sense, Peter Cook’s involvement in iconic
studies like the famous Instant City made him ideal for
the role. As critic Amanda Baillieu noted, Cook might
‘find his Archigram experience useful as he searches
for a solution to the stadium brief which requires a
11
facility to hold 80,000 people’. The oda also
appointed Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota to its
advisory board, hoping now to have allayed the
concerns expressed by the architecture community
in relation to the bidding process and design input.
A team was now assembled to produce the ‘final’
design for the stadium, comprising hok Sport advised
by Peter Cook, with a mandate for retaining an
athletics capacity for London. Yet in the intervening
period between the design team formation and the
unveiling there were reports of continued
controversy over the so-called legacy options for the
stadium. The 80,000-capacity venue is designed such
that 55,000 seats and the upper crown can be
removed and the 25,000 stadium then retained as a
smaller athletics venue. Government ministers and
the oda sought a permanent ownership of the
stadium, with local soccer and rugby clubs listed as
possibilities. Others, most notably Sebastian Coe
(from locog) and Lamine Diack, president of the
International Association of Athletics Federations
(iaaf), were adamant about retaining an athletics
track. London’s bid to hold the 2018 fifa World Cup
has changed the dynamics of the debate as has the
creation of the Olympic Park Legacy Company (oplc),
with Margaret Ford at the helm as chairwoman.
Baroness Ford, a new player on the scene, and Boris
Johnson, the Mayor of London are among several
voices who want to ensure the possibility that the
stadium could remain a World Cup football venue.
Since the beginning, this building has been expected
to have a ‘community-oriented’ look, such that the
components removed from the stadium after the
Games will be useful buildings in their own right.
‘People will enjoy the components […] They will be
put to use in the area, for example in schools’, stated
Cook. However, concerns about so-called legacy
design continue to be raised even as its construction
draws close to completion.
An official press conference for the unveiling of the
Olympic Stadium design was held on 7 November
2007, prompting a flurry of activity on the web as
journalists quickly wrote up articles and people
traded impressions over blogs. Architectural
journals, and newspapers such as The Guardian with
appointed design critics, mobilised to form opinions
about the design. The response was mixed but the
clear majority of the critical reactions from the
British architectural community were negative. Few
were unanimous in their praise, though some
praised the lack of ostentation and focus on
practicality. The controversy accelerated.
The legacy of the stadium building remains highly

debated. It is largely assumed that it will continue its
international role, hosting athletics tournaments
and being promoted for future football and rugby
world cups. The global economic downturn from
2008 meant that cost has become a big factor.
Concerns are voiced about the post-Games usage of
the Olympic Village with its expensive facilities. With
the election of Boris Johnson as the new mayor in
2008, there was an increased impetus on behalf of
the Greater London Authority and Westminster to
ensure that the future of local communities and
London cultural life are increasingly brought into
the centre of the debate.
The Stadium was completed in 2011. Yet, the
controversy over its legacy is more alive than ever.
The football club West Ham originally won the battle
for the Olympic Legacy Park by offering a more
compelling legacy case – to retain the athletics track.
Their proposal is considered to be better than rival
Tottenham Hotspur’s bid which offered ‘an iconic
anchor centrepiece’ where the Olympic Stadium
would be used solely for football and the athletic
track would be demolished. The legacy controversy
continues to unfold as we write.
Explaining the stadium design
Most interpretations of the stadium will be made
after the building is completed. Journalists will be
impatient to break the story; architectural critics will
praise the building passionately and will evaluate
their ways of experiencing the building; the
international sports organisations will be thrilled by
the new venue; and sports fans will be eager to visit
the site and witness the event. Stepping aside from
the design process and leaving design experience
apart will not lead us to understand how the
building will take shape and what the reactions of
the entire design world will be. However, if we follow
the design controversy, now, as it slowly unfolds in
time, we are able to interpret the building taking
shape out there in East London. We will see it as
being connected to both the conditions of its making
and the design experience of architects, builders,
Olympic authorities, the city council, the
communities of East London, the media and
politicians. We will unravel the entire ecology of
design in the making as being significant for
undesigning this building.
What is it about the London Olympic Stadium that
provoked so many good and bad reactions during the
bid, design and construction? What kinds of actors
respond to the design proposals and claim to speak
on its behalf? One way to answer these questions is to
deduce the building’s meaning from stylistic
patterns or any kind of causalities. In the sense of the
mainstream social sciences, to explain a building like
the London stadium means to produce a ‘social
explanation’ of its design. It was a widespread
preconception of architectural theory in the 1970s
and ’80s that architecture and society are related in a
13
‘mirror-fashion’ and this view is still shared by most
14
contemporary critical authors. The ‘social’ is seen
as a separate domain of reality that can be used as a
specific type of causality to account for aspects of
theory   arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012 31
architecture. Yet, embracing this understanding
leads to the danger of double reification: reification
of architecture and its various material and
technological dimensions, and reification of society.
Tackling the stadium controversy in this fashion
would ignore the specificity of the various
architectural issues involved in the debate. In spite of
the fact that the project has its own strengths and
logic, it will be assumed that it simply reflects the
challenges of contemporary urban politics and that
its shape will be commonly associated with the social
context and the cultural and political climates of our
time. In spite of the fact that there are so many actors
enrolled in the controversy, the design will perhaps
be said to pertain to the individual approach of Peter
Cook or to Populous, whose creative solutions will be
praised or criticised for decades. Yet, the other voices
will be forgotten.
Inspired by the pragmatist writers, the new wave of
material culture studies pioneered a consideration
of the diversity of the material world (including
architecture and design) without reducing it to
15
models of the social world. Yet, this tradition, as
noted by the anthropologist Victor Buchli,
paradoxically avoided tackling the physicality and
16
multiple materiality of the objective world. In our
pragmatist attempt to avoid reducing the stadium
design to either its material and technological
dimensions or to its social symbolic form (a divide
still so often reproduced in architectural studies), we
follow the transformations of design concepts and
the meanderings of construction to witness a process
where both the architectural and the social are fluid
and are mutually defining.
Controversy mapping
A building of such cultural importance will
inevitably provoke multiple reactions once it is built
and will draw much criticism from the architectural
community and the press, as well as from politicians,
inhabitants and visitors to the city. Many
architectural blogs will discuss the final design along
with the so-called legacy scenarios, while journalists
will recollect the impressions of the first visitors to
the venue. Numerous groups will feel concerned by
its design and will express reactions of affectedness.
However, it is not necessary to wait until the 2012
Games to hear the critical reactions.
In our approach, we follow the controversy on the
move. The term controversy points to the series of
uncertainties that the stadium design and
construction undergo. It refers to a situation of
disagreement among different actors involved in the
making of the stadium. It is also a synonym of
‘architecture in the making’. Our knowledge of the
London Olympic Stadium controversy is based on its
manifestation in the media and through publicly
available documents on the websites of official
organisations. We follow and enlist the whole range
of actors concerned by the stadium design, whether
they be architects, clients, communities, costs,
design precedents or existing buildings, area
regeneration prospects or legacy scenarios, diagrams
or sketches, beams or structural models, or indeed
   Urban controversies and the making of the social   Yaneva & Heaphy
32 arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012    theory
anything else. With the generic term of ‘actors’ we
designate all beings enrolled in the controversy,
human and nonhuman. We identify the relevant
online sources and map the actors’ relationships
through various actorial diagrams [1]. To determine
the actors, we read the online sources and ask
ourselves if the presence or absence of an actor
makes any difference. For instance, the Beijing
stadium appears to be an actor along with Boris
Johnson, Populous and Peter Cook. This might look
surprising to some. Yet the Beijing stadium design
does make a difference in the London Olympics story,
and this is a difference perceived by many other
actors. Everyone and everything can be an actor as
long as it makes a difference. No one will be surprised
to see that the architect is never on his or her own in
the design and construction process. Many other
individual actors join in: Sebastian Coe, Chairman of
locog, Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Olympics, Ken
Livingstone, former Mayor of London, Jacques Rogge,
president of the ioc, Rod Sheard, architect with
Populous, John Armitt, chairman of oda, David
Higgins, chief executive of oda, Baroness Margaret
Ford, chairwoman of the oplc. There are also many
institutions mobilised in the controversy which
show themselves as full-blown actors: locog, oda,
the International Olympic Committee (ioc), the riba
and the design community, West Ham United, and
the Commission for Architecture and the Built
Environment (cabe). Then there are a number of
nonhuman actors: the Athens 2004 Olympics,
Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games, Recession,
Millennium Dome, Beijing 2008 Olympic Games,
17
Wembley Stadium, among others.
We map the actors’ main statements and trace the
thick mesh of relations among the statements
circulating in a dispute. For instance, among the
most frequent criticisms of the final stadium design
is that it resembles a great ‘circus tent’. The analogy
is interesting as it brings us to the discussion of
legacy, which is central to the controversy debate.
This is a statement that circulates across the actors
enrolled. Peter Cook, in an interview with
Architectural Record, draws the comparison directly,
stating that ‘[i]f it’s a temporary condition, then you
can take advantage of that in the same way as when
the circus comes to town. In a way you could say
18
Instant City is, intellectually, the model’. In an
ironic twist, the appointment of a noted designer
seems to be bound up with the criticism later given
Yaneva & Heaphy   Urban controversies and the making of the social
by the very same design community that complained
about the place of design in the Olympics.
We also visualise the networks. There is no such
thing as an isolated actor. Actors are always interfaces
among different social collectives, as they are both
composed of, and components of, networks. We also
endeavour to reproduce a more nuanced
understanding of the overall dynamics of the
controversy through visualisations of the actors,
showing with whom they are associated, and
outlining how their mediating agency transforms
the debate. Actors are such because they inter-act,
shaping relations and being shaped by relations.
They gain their identity in the disputes.
Whatever the reactions of the actors, good and bad,
slowing down or speeding up, they had a positive
impact because they make us rethink the importance
of stadiums for a big metropolis like London, they
make us go back to the other design precedents and
revisit similar controversies surrounding stadium
design. Evaluating the controversy, the actors
enrolled in it began opening the design ‘black boxes’
of other stadiums, such as the Beijing National
Stadium with its innovative steel structure design
and its thoughtful integration into the layout of the
Olympic Park and its host city. The comparison with
Beijing is recurrent. It is discussed primarily because
of its aesthetics; yet financial and material limiting
factors ensured that a similar scale of construction
was deemed unfeasible for the London Olympics as
the costs of raw materials and labour are greatly
higher in Britain. Just as the 2008 Beijing Olympic
Games were to have a large bearing on how China is
perceived and treated by other nation states and
international organisations, it is now anticipated
that the London Games will be of intrinsic national
importance for the UK, providing an opportunity for
great displays of national socio-political and cultural
vitality. While hosted in a decidedly modern and
wealthy city, the London Olympics will necessarily
differ from the Beijing Olympics in scale. The Beijing
Games were of epic proportions and exceeded in
terms of spectacle and mass organisation many, if not
all, previous Games. The ‘Bird’s Nest’, designed by
Herzog & de Meuron, has won several prizes,
including the Lubetkin Prize from the riba in July
2009. It has been lavished with praise for its
architectural virtuosity, accomplishments in
engineering, and for its thoughtful concept
development. The London Olympic Stadium has been

designed and planned in the shadow of the Beijing
Olympics and, to some extent, its critical
appreciation is slowly morphing from one of
bemoaned dismissal for a lack of audacity to one of
reserved praise for its straightforward commonsense
and legacy planning. Thus, as suggested above, the
‘Bird’s Nest’ stadium is one among many actors
altering the perception of the emerging London
Stadium, along with other precedents such as: the
Athens 2004 Olympics analysed as an example of a
legacy failure, the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth
Games as an example of successful legacy, the
Millennium Dome as an instance of how not to plan
legacy, and Wembley Stadium as an example of poor
economic management. As soon as a design
precedent is discussed, the ‘black box’ of its design is
temporarily opened and dismantled into smaller
attributes. This makes us realise how many actors are
involved in the making and the maintenance of a
stadium today; it tests the attachment to stadium
buildings as well as the cohesion of the communities
around them; as a result of the London Olympics
controversy the stadium gained new allies and critics.
What type of enquiry is this? We are in the midst of
the controversy, we plunge into the press clippings
and the image galleries on the web to try to unravel
all the traces this controversy has left on the web: in
archival materials; government papers; press
clippings covering the community protests, images
and videos. We are immersed in complex data sets
that allow us to reflect not only on the design of the
London stadium but also on all those issues to which
2 legacy and cost. The stadium that looked like a
1 Typology of actors on
case study website
2 Steps of controversy
analysis
3 Actor diagram
theory   arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012 33
design is related. For example, how will the new
design affect the residents of the villages of Old Ford,
Stratford Waterfront, and Pudding Mill? Will the
concerns against its design change any of the design
plans? Which legacy scenario will be accepted and
how will this affect the post-Games life of the
community? Thus, as we collect data on the
controversy and try to analyse and visualise it, we
actively engage in the pragmatist enquiry of mapping
19
the controversy. When tracing the actors’ trajectories
and drawing the diagrams of relations and the
timeline, we do not simply engage in a reflective
process of solving design problems, in a dialogue
with materials and shapes, but rather we interact
with a much vaster and heterogeneous assembly of
20
actors. When dealing with them, we do not simply
learn what design is; rather we learn about what
design does: what kind of effects it can trigger, how it
can affect the observer, divide communities and
provoke disagreements. We delve into the many
consequences of design practice and gain an
awareness of its various implications. So, if we were
about to design a new stadium, especially after the
controversial fame of the Beijing National Stadium,
would we stay in the studio, staring at a model and
‘engaging in a dialogue with materials and shapes’,
trying to solve the paradoxes of design? No, we would
rather plunge into the design world outside the
studio and face its complex ontology.
Visualising controversies
Following the controversies, and the many detours in
the architects’ initial design plan, we cannot talk any
longer about one static Modernist object, a
construction, but rather about an object plus its
anticipated uses after the Games, presented as legacy
scenarios plus a variety of other actors mobilised by
those scenarios. That is how the stadium building
becomes a multiple object, an assembly of contested
issues: community development, sustainability,
   Urban controversies and the making of the social   Yaneva & Heaphy
34 arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012    theory
simple technical or aesthetic object in foa’s images
in 2004 and in hok Sport’s images and plans in 2007,
became socio-technical, socio-aesthetic and socio-
political through the controversy. From being
sketched once and forgotten, it became potentially
alterable; from taken for granted, it became
contested; from immediate, mediated; from rapid,
21
slow; from a static object, a ‘bird in flight’. Not an
autonomous, emancipated, coherent object whose
construction site is growing ‘out there’ in East
London but a complex ecology. Every design move,
every new disagreement is a trail that makes us
reconsider what a building is, and how many
elements it is made from.
Visualising the making of the stadium as a
complex ecology is a challenging task indeed. After
the data was collected and the main maps produced,
we have sought various encoding mechanisms by
which visual methods could help inform the reader
who will not be familiar with the entire body of
media reports [2].
We have created actors’ diagrams [3] and
interactive chronologies that display primary events
based on media representation and which inform
about the principal actors most connected with a
particular event [4]. The diagrams permit an overall
visual depiction of chronological events and grasp
the relationships of the heterogeneous actors
involved in the controversy in a more intuitive and
22
user-friendly way.
At the next stage of the mapping enquiry, we used
parametric modelling to present the dynamics of the
controversy in a fertile and engaging manner while
allowing website users to form their own conclusions
based on a general grasp of the events.
Predominantly used by architects to visualise the
dynamic relations of all technical parameters that
would generate a new design shape, we used
parametric modelling for the first time to visualise
how an assembly of heterogeneous actors, their
locations in time and space, and conflicting concerns
work in tandem to shape the stadium debate. The
animation [5] shows how a controversy unfolds as
driven by matters of concern (especially the concerns
identified here: cost, legacy, community, design) and
provides a world-view of all the actors in relation to
media attention, depicting when they entered and
exited the controversy. The animation allows us to
track the actors’ involvement in the design debate in
a dynamic way and to identify the nature of their
involvement. One can witness the flexible grouping
Yaneva & Heaphy   Urban controversies and the making of the social
4 Timeline of the
controversy
5 Concern-oriented
mapping
6 Dynamic mapping of
the London Olympics
Stadium Design
Controversy
5
and regrouping of heterogeneous actors gravitating
around the concerns, their attraction or shrinking as
time unfolds, and the different speeds of swarm
formation according to the changed magnitude of
the concerns in the media debate. Such a dynamic
simulation allows the exploration of the relative
importance/weight of different concerns over the
course of a design controversy.
A more sophisticated and much more complex
visualisation was produced with the collaboration of
Aedas R&D in London [6]. Its great advantage is that it
shows the varying densities of actor groupings
around particular concerns, and the changing
intensities and speeds of the controversy. It shows a
‘matters of concern’-oriented controversy mapping,
i.e. a mapping with actors clustering according to
particular concerns. The simulation features a user-
friendly interface that enables us to push-and-pull
some of the actors so as to render their connections
more visible, highlighting some significant
connections among actors, which might otherwise
not be visible. There is considerable potential for
further exploration of controversy visualisations in
concrete form by sharing expertise in architectural
computation, digital media, and controversies
studies in the exploration of data-rich case studies.
This experiment with parametric modelling (as
shown in figure 5) and post-parametric
computational tools (as shown in figure 6) also shows
the potential of architectural tools to map human
and nonhuman relationships, to follow multi-
actorial dynamics and time-track the trajectory of
issues. Simulations of the controversy dynamics
illustrate that the design of a building is more
conceivable as a contested assembly of concerns of

23
legacy, community and cost, i.e. as a ‘thing’. As we
follow the evolution of the controversy through our
simulation, we see that these concerns emerge more
strongly after 2007 when the final design is shared
with a larger array of actors. The controversy space
gravitates towards so-called legacy as different long-
term scenarios are debated and a greater emphasis
on communities becomes apparent. September 2009
then marks the onset of the bidding for the stadium,
as West Ham and Tottenham football clubs dominate
the visualisation, while the oplc weighs these and
other contenders during the process. Newham
Council rise in the list of actors as they underwrite
West Ham’s bid, while commercial giant aeg follow
closely behind in their mission to make Tottenham’s
bid successful, together with the resultant removal
of the athletics legacy.
Mapping a design controversy is not about telling a
story with a happy ending, it is about tracing a
tentative trajectory and accounting for the whole
process of design transformations. Following how
controversies unfold, we witness that design is
accountable. We cannot continue to argue any longer
that buildings and architectural institutions are due
to the diffracted presence of society above the built
24
environment. Thus, another way of approaching
architecture will be to state that there are no ‘social
dimensions or factors’ of any sort explaining the
success or failure of architectural projects. Buildings
are not simply projections of the social.
However, buildings could become social as
witnessed in the design of the London Olympic
Stadium, because they possess an immense capacity
of connecting heterogeneous actors. Analysing the
controversy, we observe that the larger the number
theory   arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012 35
of actors and resources mobilised and networked
around the Olympic Stadium design and
construction, the more social design became. This
particular capacity of a building to associate both
human and nonhuman actors makes it an important
25
actor. The social can be found here, in the process of
mobilisation and enrolment of actors, rather than
outside the field of design. The heterogeneous
connections of all actors who disagree and join the
controversy is precisely what gives strength to the
social at the end. By reshaping their connections,
architects and stadium precedents, communities
and sketches, plans and builders, legacy and new
technologies all redefine the design world. That is, a
unique process of traversing the revered boundary
that is said to separate ‘architecture’ from ‘society’,
‘meaning’ from ‘materiality’, ‘technology’ from
‘symbols’. That is, a process where all the
redistributions are possible.
Exploring the Olympic Controversy taught us
that, to understand the entire magnitude of the
design-related transformations in London, common
social science methods remain insufficient. The
shortest route to a clear-cut analysis of this ongoing
controversy will be to express it in familiar
language: to tackle the social issues and
redevelopment plans for the Lea Valley in East
London, the urban regeneration and city
26
re-branding strategies, the role of the Olympics for
27
urban governance and its impact on city politics,
or to measure the tangible and intangible impacts
28
from hosting the Olympics. Alternatively, mapping
the controversy offered access to the complexity of
all these lines of enquiry and prevented us from
embracing them in isolation.
   Urban controversies and the making of the social   Yaneva & Heaphy
36 arq . vol 16 . no 1 . 2012    theory
Notes
1. The paper is based on the results of
the EU-funded project MACOSPOL:
http://www.macospol.org. The UK
part of the project is documented on
http://www.mapping
controversies.co.uk and http://www.
mappingcontroversies.net/Home/
MacospolManchester.
2. Terry Kirby, ‘New Stadium at Heart of
London’s Olympic Bid’, The
Independent (12 November 2003)
<http://www.independent.co.uk/
news/uk/this-britain/new-stadium-at-
heart-of-londons-olympic-bid-735440.
html> [accessed 6 April 2009].
3. Alan Hubbard, ‘Olympics: London’s
80,000-Seater Arena to Win Games’,
The Independent (7 November 2004)
<http://www.independent.co.uk/
sport/general/olympics-londons-
80000seater-arena-to-win-games-
532291.html> [accessed 6 April 2009].
4. ‘London Flexes its Muscles’, Building
Design, no. 1650 (12 November 2004),
p. 2.
5. International Olympic Committee,
Report of the IOC Evaluation Commission
for the Games of the XXX Olympiad in
2012 (6 June 2005), p. 64, <http://
multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_
report_952.pdf> [accessed 23 March
2010].
6. Richard Waite, ‘2012 Olympic
Stadium Contract up for Grabs’, The
Architects’ Journal, 25 July 2006,
<http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/
news/dailynews/2006/ 07/2012_
olympic_stadium_contract_up_for_
grabs.html> [accessed 28 October
2008].
7. ‘HOK Team is Favourite for Olympic
Stadium’, Building Design, 1742 (13
October 2006), p. 3.
8. Matthew Beard, ‘McAlpine Strikes
Olympic Gold with Stadium Deal’, The
Independent, 14 October 2006 <http://
www.independent.co.uk/news/
business/news/mcalpine-strikes-
olympic-gold-with-stadium-deal-
420075.html> [accessed 6 April 2009].
9. Ed Dorrell, ‘Rogers Voices Olympic
Fears’, The Architects’ Journal, 9
November 2006, p. 11.
10. Amanda Baillieu, ‘Design is at the
Heart of What We are Doing Here’,
Building Design, 1759, 12 December
2006, p. 1.
1. Baillieu, Ibid., p. 1.
12. Jack Malvern, Fran Yeoman and
Philip Webster, ‘Sixties Designer to
Bring Taste of Avant Garde to Olympic
Stadium’, The Times (UK), (2 December
2006) <http://www.timesonline.co.
uk/tol/news/uk/article657603.ece>
[accessed 24 March 2010].
13. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Berber House’,
in Rules and Meanings: The Anthropology
of Everyday Knowledge, Mary Douglas
(ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1971), pp. 98–110); Anthony
King (ed.), Buildings and Society: Essays
on the Social Development of the Built
Yaneva & Heaphy   Urban controversies and the making of the social
Environment (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1980).
14. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray
Fraser and Mark Dorrian (eds), Critical
Architecture (London: Routledge, 2007).
15. Daniel Miller (ed.), Material Cultures:
Why Some Things Matter (London/New
York: Routledge, 1998).
16. Victor Buchli, ‘Immateriality and
Things’. Lecture delivered at the
Manchester Architecture Research
Centre, University of Manchester,
7 June 2007.
17. For a comprehensive analysis of the
actors and their relationships in this
controversy, see http://www.
mappingcontroversies.co.uk/london.
The dynamic maps are based on 693
articles sourced from UK
newspapers, namely Evening Standard
(230), Telegraph (18), Guardian/Observer
(236), Independent (54), Telegraph (52),
The Times (81).
18. Bryant Rousseau, ‘The ArchRecord
Interview: Sir Peter Cook’,
Architectural Record, 2007 <http://
archrecord.construction.com/
features/interviews/0711petercook/07
11Petercook-1.asp> [accessed 22 April
2009].
19. The mapping controversies method
implies a teaching philosophy as
well. Only recently was it introduced
in English-speaking universities with
Manchester being a pioneer in the
field of Architecture studies. For
more information on the teaching
platform, see http://medialab.
sciences-po.fr/controversies/.
20. I refer here to the epistemology of
studio-based design described by
Donald Schön in The Reflective
Practitioner: How Professionals Think in
Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
21. Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva,
‘Give me a Gun and I will Make
Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of
Architecture’, Explorations in
Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research,
R. Geiser (ed.) (Basel: Birkhäuser,
2008), pp. 80–89.
22. Beyond this, there are other, even
more semantic web-crawling tools
appearing online, which can connect
with data sources not explicitly
chosen here. Employing complex
linguistic and referential algorithms,
they dig out articles, reports and
official websites connected with
particular topics by noting
interconnectivity between websites,
terminology and keywords.
23. On the notion of ‘thing’ as a
gathering of many conflicting
demands, or as an issue or dispute,
contrasted with ‘object’ (Gegenstand):
what is out there, undisputed,
factual, see Bruno Latour and Peter
Weibel (eds), Iconoclash, Beyond the
Image Wars in Religion, Science and Art
(Karlsruhe: ZKM/Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2002).
24. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:
An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
(Oxford/New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
25. This has been shown previously in
the case of the Whitney Museum
controversies, see Albena Yaneva,
The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist
Approach to Architecture (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2009).
26. John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold,
‘Olympic Cities: Regeneration, City
Rebranding and Changing Urban
Agendas’, Geography Compass, 2:1,
January 2008, pp. 300–18.
27. Peter Newman, ‘“Back the Bid”: The
2012 Summer Olympics and the
Governance of London’, Journal of
Urban Affairs, 29:3, August 2007,
pp. 255–67.
28. Giles Atkinson, Susana Mourato,
Stefan Szymanski and Ece
Ozdemiroglu, ‘Are we Willing to Pay
Enough to “Back the Bid”?: Valuing
the Intangible Impacts of London’s
Bid to Host the 2012 Summer
Olympic Games’, Urban Studies, 45:2,
February 2008,
pp. 419–44.
Illustration credits
arq gratefully acknowledges:
Aedas|R&D, Albena Yaneva and Liam
Heaphy, 6
Nick Dunn and Liam Heaphy, 4
Ambrose Gillick, 3
Liam Heaphy, 1, 2
Danny Richards, 5
Biographies
Albena Yaneva is a Senior Lecturer at
the University of Manchester. She is
the author of the books: The Making of a
Building: A Pragmatist Approach to
Architecture (Peter Lang, 2009) and Made
by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture:
An Ethnography of Design, Rotterdam
(010 Publishers, 2009); guest editor of
Science Studies (2008) and City, Culture &
Society (2011).
Liam Heaphy is a Ph.D. student at the
University of Manchester. His recent
research has been focused on scientific
epistemologies and the linkages between
science and society, particularly with
regard to climate science. As part of the
Manchester Architecture Research
Centre, he has worked on the Mapping
Controversies on Science for Politics
(macospol) project.
Authors’ addresses
Dr Albena Yaneva
Liam Heaphy
Manchester Architecture
Research Centre (MARC)
The University of Manchester
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Oxford Road
Manchester, m13 9pl
uk
albena.yaneva@manchester.ac.uk
liam.heaphy@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk