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Density

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21 June 2014 event

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This event [1] is described thus:

Who will author the future of King’s Cross? You are invited to join us for an in-person and on-location collaborative update to Wikipedia’s entry for King’s Cross Central. We will consider the contents of the existing article and identify what is missing and why. Throughout the afternoon, we will update the Wikipedia entry to more fully reflect the history and contemporary dynamics of King’s Cross from a variety of perspectives. This event is part of the Contested Spaces forum at Central Saint Martins and will be immediately followed by a panel discussion on the theme of Gentrification and Regeneration.

-- Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:34, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Editathon

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Hi, I'm sitting with Rebecca Ross[2] who is coordinating this editing event. The process is that we are crowd-sourcing changes to the current article on paper, engaging as many members of the public as possible.

The results will be written up and then the intention will be to release these as improvements to the current article. This last stage will need discussion as to how the 'release' works. Rebecca has my email and the intention is to coordinate on the release stage.

PS part of the event, after 5pm, was a public discussion (attended by around 50 people) on development of the area and its parallel cultural evolution with the large paper printout of this Wikipedia article as background on the wall. The poem by Daniel Zylbersztajn was quoted.[3] --Fæ (talk) 16:36, 21 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Follow-Up to Editathon

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Rebecca Ross with Chi Nguyen here. We co-organised the event on the 21st of June mentioned above. During the panel discussion which followed we gave some further context to the event which I want to share here:

I am a lecturer in Graphic Communication Design here at CSM and also a postdoctoral fellow in Spatial Practices. I am trained as a graphic designer and also as an urban historian. Chi is just about to graduate from our MA in Communication Design and trained as an Architect in Toronto before coming to CSM. Her project, which also engages with regeneration discourse in this area, "I am not a cappuccino," is currently on display in the Lethaby Gallery as part of our degree shows.

My research and work as a designer focuses on different kinds of interaction between media and communication: images, data, text, and urban change. I'm also co-editor of the Urban Pamphleteer. Our last issue was themed 'Regeneration Realities'. A major theme in my research is how different kinds of imaginaries of what a place has been and could be originate, circulate, and have impact on decision-making and the built environment professions.

I myself first spent time in King's Cross in 2004, my first year in London. I lived in the area and spent time here socially. I became interested in it as a researcher, ultimately writing my MSc thesis in Geography on the history of King's Cross through cartography, mainly late 19th and early twentieth century.

In 2008, when I joined Central Saint Martins, I found out about the college's planned move to King's Cross. I participated in some small ways in our own internal planning for the move and for the past three years I have been coming to work here and experiencing small and large changes up close everyday.

I have also been watching, sometimes as a participant and sometimes as an observer, different organizations, institutions, and forums engaging in various forms of frustrated and fraught dialogue with the council, the developer, architects, etc. There are legitimate strong feelings on the part of many different parties that have not ever been able to be respectfully and sufficiently aired.

So what we've done here today is begin the afternoon with some giant print outs of the King's Cross Central Wikipedia page. We chose this entry because it is largely addressed to the redevelopment and so far we don’t feel satisfied that the whole story of the redevelopment has or will necessarily be fully told in a genuinely public facing way.

We sent invitations out for anyone with an interest in this area to come by and together, right here in the Crossing which is an intersection of public and private, of CSM and the rest of King's Cross, we have together been writing, cutting, pasting, editing, and extending the original entry on paper. We’ve been doing this since 2.30 this afternoon and what you see behind me is where things stand at this point.

So, why did we decide to do this? As everyone here probably knows, most of this area is now controlled by Argent. In addition to the buildings, tenants, street furniture, and security, Argent maintains control over both the way that media inhabits King's Cross and to a large extent how King's Cross inhabits and is portrayed within the media.

There are currently two kinds of texts being written about King’s Cross. One kind of text gets amplified and circulated and another that is powerful but ultimately less mobile and relegated to a more peripheral position:

For example, consider this excerpt from the graphics on the hoarding on King's Boulevard The tapper, tallyman and legged are long gone, and there's small chance of catching a rick master and his nipper about their business. You're quite likely to hear a banker's whistle but the tune would have been very different in King's Cross past. Back then a banker's whistle meant the steam-powered shriek of a shunting engine at work. Now it heralds the jaunty approach of someone in high finance, and the steam comes from a hot cappuccino on a cold day.

This can be compared with a poem called 'Mapping Us!' by Daniel Zylbersztajn

There is a new dandy here,
round water fountains and
millionaire’s courts,
that erased in one sweep
the stench and filth of yesteryear,
the disgraced pushed behind
up North somewhere.

But we are still here,
a left out mass
too peripheral to see,
as cars still roar through our roads,
boy speeders, diesel cabs and Royal Mail vans alike,

The mayor’s promises of years
to calm those roads,
a laughing stock against their speed
and the new high rise builds.

We who live here,
showing tourists the way on maps.

For you we are peripheral,
best we don’t exist at all!

So you raise the rents and price us out,
here’s a Waitrose to an Iceland,
a three Pounds coffee shop,
to a local pub.

Improvement, better, gentrified!

We decided to get involved with the Wikipedia entry for King's Cross in particular because, we wanted to put these two kinds of texts or media in better more critical dialogue with one another on a more even playing field. Though Wikipedia and crowd-sourced content does not always live up to its utopian ideals, it is an extremely public facing, almost a default or first reference, information set that by its own definition is not actually under the control of a single author. Looking at the existing entry, it was time to open up the story that it conveys. There are lots of people who now live and work here everyday -- it's time for that diversity of voices to start to inhabit the place and the first way to do this is through its associated media.

Today we have recorded all of the updates that have been made on paper and over the next couple of weeks will be submitting them as digital changes to the Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia in and of itself has a complex editorial structure but we are arguing that, in describing conditions in the built environment, a contribution made on the ground in-situae by a community should have more credibility than singular contributions made from elsewhere. The dialogue that emerges as we negotiate with the editorial authorities at Wikipedia will be the next phase of the project, regardless of outcome.

The Kings Cross Environment Blog has enquired whether this could become an annual event and this is something we are interested in exploring here. CSM itself has a complex relationship to the regeneration. We are certainly a big chess piece in the ambition to concentrate cultural capital in this area but we are also an extremely diverse institution made up of individual students, designers, artists, and academics, who are here everyday and have many legitimate questions about what has happened and a variety of potential contributions to make to what might happen next. We want our students especially to position themselves in a careful, self-aware, responsible, and genuine way as we continue to think through the future of King’s Cross which is now conjoined with our own future as an art college.

Our next step will be to take some of the changes that were suggested on the day on 21st June and try and incorporate them within the King's Cross Central Page. We are also doing some more thinking about how credible knowledge about a specific place relates to being in that place and to this end are considering running further such events. — Preceding unsigned comment added by KX-alt-edit (talk • contribs) 14:23, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Did anything more come of this? I'm looking at updating and expanding this page to reflect more of the initial controversy. Jim Killock (talk) 11:35, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cull the history section?

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While interesting all of the history is repetition or summary of other better articles. It takes a huge amount of this article. Wouldn't it be better to point to these other articles briefly and then get to the meat which is the actual King's Cross Central developments? Jim Killock (talk) 09:04, 22 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have moved some missing content to the King's Cross page about the Mutoid Waste Company with new references
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Parking a 2018 reference

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Wainwright, Oliver (9 February 2018). "The £3bn rebirth of King's Cross: dictator chic and pie-in-the-sky penthouses". the Guardian. Retrieved 21 November 2018.

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