Stratford

• Why did Stratford need regeneration?

  • high unemployment
  • lots of people in low paying employment
  • lots of derelict land
  • many office buildings abandoned
  • young people has low aspirations
  • River Lea was heavily polluted
• Stratford's fridge mountains an eyesore to the locals, and was 20 foot tall
• Stratford town centre was redone after being built in the 1970's, giving it a modern look when Westfield came in
• The athletes village has been relaunched as a housing estate called East village, with 2800 new homes (40% of these will be affordable)
• The olympics caused the building of Chobham academy, which has improved the education opportunities in the area
• the aquatics centre houses a 50m pool for the community and school
• Stratford got a tube station to connect it to the rest of london
• the olympics bought more than £9 billion of investment to east London, most of which went into transport
• Lloyds estimated that the olympics would bring in an extra £10 billion to the UK's economy
• Title of Stratford fieldwork:

  Has the impact of regeneration around Stratford been positive?
• the aim of the Stratford regeneration was the improve the economic, social and environmental opportunities in stratford
• Location of Stratford:

  • can be reached in 45 minutes from Wickford, so the visit can take place in a school day
  • its close enough to a train station that we do not have to use coaches
  • its a small enough area to walk round in a day
• Risk assessment:

  • need to be careful while catching a train
  • need to be careful while crossing roads
  • potential for sunburn
• Word association:

  How we did it-

  • at each site we made a list of 3 words we thought most described the area

  Why we did it-

  • we then compiled a class list of these words so we could get a good idea of peoples perceptions

  What could be improved-

  • everyone was from the same school and area, so there was a bias for peoples opinions (ask for others opinions)
• Pedestrian count:

  How we did it-

  • at each site we counted the number of people who walked past in a minute, and then did the same for different types of vehicles

  why we did it-

  • so that we could see how busy the area was, which would tell us if the regenerated areas were busier

  what could have been improved-

  • were done at different times of the day so we cannot compare them directly, it was raining and was a work day, so people were not out
• Fieldsketch:

  how we did it-

  • we drew a field sketch of the housing areas that hadn't been regenerated and added annotations

  why we did it-

  • so that we could see whether the area that wasn't regenerated was poorer quality than the areas that had

  what could have been improved-

  • this was only our perception of the building and does not reflect the views of the people who live and work in the area
• EQS:

  How we did it-

  • at each of the six areas, we measured the areas on a criteria from -2 to 2, with 2 being the best score

  Why we did it-

  • to see if things such as number of amenities were different in different areas

  What could have been improved-

  • we could have looked at a wider criteria to help us to distinguish between the different sites
• a word cloud is an image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance
• in Stratford station, the words most used were busy and dirty, whereas In east village this became quiet and relaxing
• the pedestrian count gradually decreased over the sites from around 23 to 15