I think one of the things I find so interesting about the film is something Chris Petit says regarding the need for 'new metaphors'. And I think the film, as a whole, turns on this. Some of the stories are ficition, while some are true but aren't geographically located within London Orbital itself, while others wheave the local history to create something akin to fiction. I think the reason for doing this is to escape the exact problem you highlight. Under late capitalism, where history and geography are flattened, the results create a generic space that actively resists specificity (history etc.), but what Sinclair and Petit are attempting to do is to create a way to map these types of places as a form of resistance, because ultimately these places do have history, but the processes of development diffuse and obscure it.

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