Our home, tower home
Sep. 6th, 2008 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHave a look at this trailer for the 2006 thriller Red Road, set in the Glasgow tower block of the same name.
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The clichés of urban alienation -- tagging, plastic bags on the breeze, concrete, disorder, paranoia, sex and violence -- are all present and correct. All that's missing is the Massive Attack song. But does high rise living have to be this way? Mightn't the disrepute residential tower blocks have fallen into since the 1980s, and particularly in the UK and the US, be something to do with this mythology itself? Mightn't right wing politicians, from Thatcher and Reagan on, have been trying to smash the socialist utopian agenda built into the 1960s tower blocks and shift everyone into suburban private homes with mortgages?
To people who say that tower blocks are synonymous with massive attacks of urban alienation, Dr Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs -- currently working on The Highrise Project at the University of Edinburgh -- are here to say "It ain't necessarily so". Interviewed on this week's Thinking Allowed, Cairns argued that if you go to Asian cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, the highrise is seen as a vibrant, viable and lively form of living. The same message emerges from the residents of places like Glasgow's Red Road tower, who -- once the usual horror stories are out of the way -- tell tales of communal bonhomie rather than spouting clichés of concrete anomie.
Jacobs and Cairns chose to research and contrast attitudes to the Modernist residential highrise block in two cities, Glasgow and Singapore. The Highrise Project "has been set up, rhetorically," Cairns told Laurie Taylor, "to explore a hunch: that, despite the apparent repetitiousness of globalisation, the inside of architecture, the sites of people's lives, unfold in quite distinctive ways." The highrise was chosen as one of the most notoriously repetitious architectural forms, and two cities on either side of the world were selected to see whether -- as Richard Sennett said in the previous week's programme about urban living -- globalisation really is resulting in cookie-cutter similarity; making it difficult to know if you're in London or Caracas.
What The Highrise Project found out was that even if the Modernist grid of the exterior of a tower block looks the same wherever you are in the world, the insides of the flats are quite different. And that's because the insides of people's heads are different in the East and West. People have different attitudes to things like density, community and public order, and their political feelings about public housing and the central, state organisation of human needs differ too. There are also different feelings about Modernist rationality; a lingering Romanticism has made the British revile figures like Le Corbusier to this day. Even Ikea had to battle it when they launched in the UK.
When I used to live in a Stalinbau on the Karl-Marx-Allee -- in a landmark high density public housing project built by the communist East German government -- I'd sublet my flat each summer while I travelled in Japan. Two summers in a row, my tenant was Lynsey Hanley, who was writing a book about public housing. Granta published Estates, her "intimate history" of UK housing estates, last year. As she explained to Grant Morrison in The Guardian, Hanley, as someone who grew up in one estate in Birmingham and moved to another in East London, "resents the vilification of those who live there - all that sneering at scum, chavs, pikeys and the great unwashed. More importantly, she believes the greatest division between people today isn't the work they do or what they earn or whether they have children, but the kind of homes they live in. And she wants to understand why being housed by the state has come to be seen as a confession of failure... Other European nations were perfectly happy living in skyscrapers where every fourth wall was made of glass - why couldn't Brits be?"
Hanley's answer is that she, too, sees public housing estates as "cages" and "hutches" which make the heart sink. "The architecture of the estate, a vast people-locker "designed by a cyborg", had insanity written into its plan: "How can you fight something as concrete, as concretey, as this?"
But fight highrise public housing is exactly what people began to do; Margaret Thatcher made it a political priority. "By 1979, nearly half the British population lived in local authority housing; then came Thatcherism and the Right to Buy, and now only 12 per cent of us do. Hanley is no rabid opponent of home ownership (she'd be a hypocrite if she was, since she recently joined the club). But she does regret some of its consequences: the dearth of state accommodation for those who need it (there's currently a waiting list of 1.5 million); the widening gap between the mortgage-paying haves and the low-rent have-nots; the loss of the Utopian impulse towards social integration. As she says, "this is no longer a society in which you can be proud, still less be seen to be proud, that your home has been provided by the state".
What we have to realize is that we think of tower blocks the way we do because that's how we want to see them: as "failed states in the sky". The belief that public housing leads to no-go high-crime zones soundtracked by Massive Attack becomes, in the West, a self-fulfilling prophecy as white- and middle-class flight leaves Resident Evil-like landscapes of drugged zombie-losers in the crumbling, asbestos-clad towers ringing winner-takes-all cities. Call Group 4! Install CCTV! Get Irvine Welsh writing about it! But Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong and countless new cities rising in China show that it's only so if you make it so.
At a time when imaginative new solutions to housing problems are desperately needed, say Cairns and Jacobs, it's a shame that self-fulfilling clichés like these have taken highrise public housing off the agenda in the West. They show how a different attitude -- the attitude exemplified, for instance, in highrise community magazines like Our Home, produced for highrise citizens in Singapore in the early 1980s -- can make these "failed" towers into successes. Our home can be -- why not? -- tower home.
[Error: unknown template video]
The clichés of urban alienation -- tagging, plastic bags on the breeze, concrete, disorder, paranoia, sex and violence -- are all present and correct. All that's missing is the Massive Attack song. But does high rise living have to be this way? Mightn't the disrepute residential tower blocks have fallen into since the 1980s, and particularly in the UK and the US, be something to do with this mythology itself? Mightn't right wing politicians, from Thatcher and Reagan on, have been trying to smash the socialist utopian agenda built into the 1960s tower blocks and shift everyone into suburban private homes with mortgages?To people who say that tower blocks are synonymous with massive attacks of urban alienation, Dr Stephen Cairns and Jane Jacobs -- currently working on The Highrise Project at the University of Edinburgh -- are here to say "It ain't necessarily so". Interviewed on this week's Thinking Allowed, Cairns argued that if you go to Asian cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, the highrise is seen as a vibrant, viable and lively form of living. The same message emerges from the residents of places like Glasgow's Red Road tower, who -- once the usual horror stories are out of the way -- tell tales of communal bonhomie rather than spouting clichés of concrete anomie.
Jacobs and Cairns chose to research and contrast attitudes to the Modernist residential highrise block in two cities, Glasgow and Singapore. The Highrise Project "has been set up, rhetorically," Cairns told Laurie Taylor, "to explore a hunch: that, despite the apparent repetitiousness of globalisation, the inside of architecture, the sites of people's lives, unfold in quite distinctive ways." The highrise was chosen as one of the most notoriously repetitious architectural forms, and two cities on either side of the world were selected to see whether -- as Richard Sennett said in the previous week's programme about urban living -- globalisation really is resulting in cookie-cutter similarity; making it difficult to know if you're in London or Caracas.
What The Highrise Project found out was that even if the Modernist grid of the exterior of a tower block looks the same wherever you are in the world, the insides of the flats are quite different. And that's because the insides of people's heads are different in the East and West. People have different attitudes to things like density, community and public order, and their political feelings about public housing and the central, state organisation of human needs differ too. There are also different feelings about Modernist rationality; a lingering Romanticism has made the British revile figures like Le Corbusier to this day. Even Ikea had to battle it when they launched in the UK.
When I used to live in a Stalinbau on the Karl-Marx-Allee -- in a landmark high density public housing project built by the communist East German government -- I'd sublet my flat each summer while I travelled in Japan. Two summers in a row, my tenant was Lynsey Hanley, who was writing a book about public housing. Granta published Estates, her "intimate history" of UK housing estates, last year. As she explained to Grant Morrison in The Guardian, Hanley, as someone who grew up in one estate in Birmingham and moved to another in East London, "resents the vilification of those who live there - all that sneering at scum, chavs, pikeys and the great unwashed. More importantly, she believes the greatest division between people today isn't the work they do or what they earn or whether they have children, but the kind of homes they live in. And she wants to understand why being housed by the state has come to be seen as a confession of failure... Other European nations were perfectly happy living in skyscrapers where every fourth wall was made of glass - why couldn't Brits be?"
Hanley's answer is that she, too, sees public housing estates as "cages" and "hutches" which make the heart sink. "The architecture of the estate, a vast people-locker "designed by a cyborg", had insanity written into its plan: "How can you fight something as concrete, as concretey, as this?"
But fight highrise public housing is exactly what people began to do; Margaret Thatcher made it a political priority. "By 1979, nearly half the British population lived in local authority housing; then came Thatcherism and the Right to Buy, and now only 12 per cent of us do. Hanley is no rabid opponent of home ownership (she'd be a hypocrite if she was, since she recently joined the club). But she does regret some of its consequences: the dearth of state accommodation for those who need it (there's currently a waiting list of 1.5 million); the widening gap between the mortgage-paying haves and the low-rent have-nots; the loss of the Utopian impulse towards social integration. As she says, "this is no longer a society in which you can be proud, still less be seen to be proud, that your home has been provided by the state".
What we have to realize is that we think of tower blocks the way we do because that's how we want to see them: as "failed states in the sky". The belief that public housing leads to no-go high-crime zones soundtracked by Massive Attack becomes, in the West, a self-fulfilling prophecy as white- and middle-class flight leaves Resident Evil-like landscapes of drugged zombie-losers in the crumbling, asbestos-clad towers ringing winner-takes-all cities. Call Group 4! Install CCTV! Get Irvine Welsh writing about it! But Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong and countless new cities rising in China show that it's only so if you make it so.At a time when imaginative new solutions to housing problems are desperately needed, say Cairns and Jacobs, it's a shame that self-fulfilling clichés like these have taken highrise public housing off the agenda in the West. They show how a different attitude -- the attitude exemplified, for instance, in highrise community magazines like Our Home, produced for highrise citizens in Singapore in the early 1980s -- can make these "failed" towers into successes. Our home can be -- why not? -- tower home.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 01:18 pm (UTC)My parent's house isn't suburban luxury, and the council housing neighbouring it isn't Resident Evil-eque squalor, but the contrast between these two places, considering they're right next to each other in the very same cul de sac, is quite stark.
When you walk past the council housing there's always litter blowing about the place, shopping carts abandoned down the side of buildings. the communal bin area is always a mess, the doors are broken, nobody bothers to straighten it and close the doors properly. No pride taken in the place what so ever.
More seriously, there was a murder a few years ago related to drugs - someone was pushed out of a 3rd story window and died after hitting the concrete. There was small children around as this guy hit the ground apparently, it was horrific. I also remember this woman in her 50s who was lying on the pavement near the housing in tears one night. I stopped to ask her what was wrong and she was clearly intoxicated and someone had been beating her, she was bloody and bruised. She kept asking me for money for tobacco... I told her she should call the police and get them to take her to somewhere safe like a friend's or relative's place. She kissed my hand and thanked me for my kindness, then she got up and left, shouting drunken obscenities towards the social housing and the boyfriend who'd been hitting her. A lost cause if ever I saw one.
The private housing part of the cul de sac is very different -- everyone knows each other and theres very much a sense of community. It's very safe and clean. There's a garden committee the neighbourhood community set up that's planted flowers and trees around the area, and every summer the area is visited by a pair of mallards who reside on the central green.
It's almost ironic that the area with private housing should have so much more community spirit than that of the social housing.
What do I think makes the difference?
My parents worked like dogs to save for a deposit for that house, and continue to work hard to pay for their home, as did the vast majority of the people in that sul de sac. When you have to work hard for what you have, you dont take it for granted and you treat it with respect.
With social housing, it attracts people who never had to develop any real sense of self-discipline because they have everything handed to them by the state, which then reflects in their behaviour. It attracts people who have all sorts of psychological issues who are unable to conform to the level required to keep a job, the people caught in the safety net of social welfare.
I support the social safety net wholeheartedly, but I'm also firmly believe that some people just dont have it in them to function as part of a society and will always be either unable or unwilling to conform to the level required to achieve some kind of social utopia. These souls will always be the have-nots.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 01:36 pm (UTC)There are lots of ways of avoiding high-Gini Resident Evil-like scenarios -- the exaggeration of the negative characteristics of rich and poor. They're things like progressive taxation, legislation that requires social housing provision to be a part of all new commercial building developments, and intelligent public housing design like the kind I described at Byker Wall (http://imomus.livejournal.com/389833.html). What's needed is the political will to do these things, rather than Darwinian / Thatcherite stuff about the people who drag themselves up deserving all the rewards they get. Nobody drags themselves up without dragging someone else down.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:21 pm (UTC)We can't do that because we're not clone-like robots existing in an environment entirely under our control. we're not all born equal.
Let's imagine that when someone is born, they're given a house, worldly necessities and a plot of land to grow food. And thats not all -- Let's imagine a world where everyone is overflowing with compassion and has no problems giving to those who are unable or even unwilling to work for their own food or to maintain their own home. Perfect right?
What about creativity? What about respect? what about beauty? what about intelligence? what about self esteem? How do you create a society where everyone is equally creative? how do you create a society where everyone is respected and liked just as much as everyone else? how do you create a society where everyone feels just as content as everyone else?
Even within this communist utopia you want, there will be the beautiful and the intelligent who people will flock to disproportionately. There will be the ugly and the social inept who will attract far fewer admirers. You cant force people to like you, you cant force people to respect you, you cant force people to find you attractive. You cant force someone who have self esteem. You cant force people to be happy. There will always be the Have-nots of society, always, unless you were to strip the population of its very humanity.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 03:08 pm (UTC)In other words, my good looks, or bad looks, or intelligence, or creativity, or whatever, should not somehow make me live on a different planet to the people around me. It should, ideally, lead to a syntagmatic integration: I do this well, you do that well, we all do what we do well and integrate syntagmatically.
But -- and I was thinking about this the other day -- it's very hard to define "syntagmatic justice". It's easy to say what fair treatment is when you're talking about rival paradigmatic elements (things or people which serve the same function: "equal pay for equal work" etc). It's not so easy to know what fair means when people are co-dependent, when they complement each other rather than competing (which is what I mean by syntagmatic). All you can really say is that in that world, outcomes should not be radically different because everyone depends on everyone else, and on the difference of everyone else. The differences should be different, but shouldn't make a material difference.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 06:07 pm (UTC)"good politics isn't about suppressing difference, but about making it make less of a difference."
give a practical example of this.
"All you can really say is that in (a) world (where we're all co-dependant), outcomes should not be radically different because everyone depends on everyone else, and on the difference of everyone else. The differences should be different, but shouldn't make a material difference."
So what's the incentive of the doctor who has to trains for many many years and work long hours if his reward is to recieve the same financially as someone who cleans toilets for a living part time? How does that work?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:49 pm (UTC)Assuming that you intend this to be a dig at capitalism, I have to disagree here. Capitalism is based completely on the principle that both parties in a transaction act in their best self-interests. Such transactions are referred to by economists as "efficient" because both parties end up with the outcome that they desire; after all, who would complete a transaction that wasn't to their best advangtage?
Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize for his work on the direct relationship between competitiveness and economic efficiency. It could be strongly argued, actually, that unfairness (inefficiency) in markets is caused by a lack of competitiveness and transparency. Causes of market inefficiency might be, for example, state monopolies dictating prices, trade barriers, trade unions forcing unsustainable wages, corruption, legislation aimed at polital outcomes rather than economic ones. Anything, basically, that stops an individual acting in their best interests. The problem with modern capitalism is that there's not enough of it to allow truly efficient markets. Thatcher, for example, merely ended one set of state subsidies (eg British Leyland) in favour of another set (eg British Aerospace).
To bring us back to housing, I think the social housing experiment in the Soviet Union should be enough to convince anyone that private ownership is probably the way forward. Remember, that if people are denied the ability to act in their best interests then inefficiency (I'm playing fast and loose with technical language here) will be the outcome. Have you ever seen the social housing in Kiev? It is truly hellish.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 12:58 pm (UTC)Capitalist arguments based on "efficiency" fall apart for me when I consider that the capitalist definition of "efficient" translates as "efficient at making money, without factoring in any other variable".
I can't speak for the other guy but I don't believe in the whole rational actor thing because:
(a) people don't always know if they're making a rational choice (imperfect information)
(b) people's choices are limited
(c) a perfect free market is impossible, and there's nowhere on Earth that is, or ever has been, anywhere near being one.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-09 06:47 pm (UTC)The concept of rational actors is rather ideal and, as you say, has probably never been observed in its true form in everyday life. Having said that, I think that there are some instances where the rational actors model serves as a reasonable approximation, and plenty of instances when it could at least be described as an approximation. There are also plenty of times when it completely fails as a working model. Anecdotally, I've traded on ebay and think that the rational actors model works fairly well in deciding the price of an item, and works out to the advantage of both parties. From my own experience, on the other hand, I don't think it is at all instructive when buying a second-hand bike.
The point of my original post was to refute a throw-away comment from Momus that seemed to imply that as a consequence of our current system of capitalism all personal material gain comes at the expense of someone else's disadvantage. I simply don't think this is true. I mentioned Kenneth Arrow's work on rational actors because, as I understand it, it attempted to show that free markets are fair. I don't actually believe that our market system is particularly fair or efficient, but I also don't believe that it is intrinsically unfair. What I do believe is that businesses are often unfair (and downright creepy), and individuals often behave appallingly.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 05:16 pm (UTC)Yes. Unfortunately, this "principle" is BS.
after all, who would complete a transaction that wasn't to their best advangtage?
Like, billions of people forced to do so?
Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize for his work on the direct relationship between competitiveness and economic efficiency.
Nobel Prices to economists are maybe the only thig more ridicilus than the Nobel Peace Prize.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 10:40 pm (UTC)Billions of people don't live in a free market. Very few people do. Import tariffs, directed subsidies, state monopolies all conspire against fairness in economic transactions.
The point of my post was that I found Momus to be a little negative when he hinted that the economic advantage of one individual necessarily came at the price of someone else's disadvantage. This just isn't true, unless you believe that all trade of commodities and ideas is a zero-sum game. On the contrary, freedom to trade quite often ends up to the advantage of all parties involved. Sometimes, unfortunately, it doesn't, for the reasons I described in my original post. I quite clearly pointed this out so I don't know what point you're making.
This is how you spell "ridiculous". This is how you spell "prizes".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-07 12:55 pm (UTC)And this is how I am not a native english speaker.
I'd like to see you have a try at MY language.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-08 10:39 am (UTC)I'm not sure I buy this; it sounds rather simplistically zero-sum.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 01:53 pm (UTC)What a load of rubbish. Social housing doesn't 'attract' anyone, it is there because people have the right to somewhere to live. Such people then go on a waiting list which is also no picnic.
Not everyone is is in the position to fulfill your Tebbit-eque 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mythology.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:38 pm (UTC)I'm going to quote someone above, as he's made exactly the point I'm making:
"As Hanley emphasises, the problem with public housing is that it has to take in all the drug addicts and dropouts. And it only takes one person to decide to defecate in the lift for the lift to be ruined for all."
This is the point I was getting at.
"Not everyone is is in the position to fulfill your Tebbit-eque 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mythology."
No, but most are.
I have a diploma that cost me the grand total of just 30 pounds because at the time I enrolled at college I was unemployed. I could have also applied for financial aid to pay for the equipment and travel and claimed job seekers allowance but I wasnt that bad off. Thanks to that diploma I now have a job earning a wage I can live on comfortably. There are so many schemes available to make sure people can better themselves, and the truth is, some people just dont bother.
I'm not saying there arent people who really are totally helpless and I'm not saying the welfare system in place is as effective as it could be. But you, you fail to recognise that even if these schemes are in place, some people will just refuse to help themselves, and these are the people destined to always be the have-nots.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:23 pm (UTC)And the haves. They're the ones with privates roads. The poor can't always be blamed for preventing a social utopia, for they are hardly the architects of society.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:39 pm (UTC)