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 07:18 am (UTC)The government put me here though, because I am broke. I have exactly no problem with that. Originally I was going to be way up on the 8th floor and I was a little upset because I wouldn't be able to see the road from my window. I really enjoy the road, to an extent that verges on need, I pretty much need to see what passes by to help order my brain a little bit and inform the personal narrative. That room didn't work out though, and a while later I wound up getting a studio a few floors down from there, at the uppermost boundary of the trees outside. When I saw the trees is when I realized what a close call it'd been, because aside from the road I think I just like the ground as well. That's where the world is! Through my window I have roots!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 07:56 am (UTC)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.
Where I lived in London, they turned the council flats into yuppie apartments, which is surely the right demographic.
As for Red Road, I was scared just driving past it . . .
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 09:15 am (UTC)http://www.eknewtown.com/
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 09:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 09:46 am (UTC)she wants to understand why being housed by the state has come to be seen as a confession of failure
No-one I know sees it that way! We'd all love enough 'points' to get a council flat.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 12:19 pm (UTC)They do become places where those with high points eligibility are housed. As another respondent said, the "old and impoverished and chronically ill (drug addicts)".
My block had an over thirties, no kids policy which was both good and bad. I always thought that phrase summed it all up and made it no different from anywhere else. It's both good and bad.
Telephone companies would want to place aerial masts on top of some blocks which led to financial sweeteners to the leasers. A grant to repaint the lift? A mural done by a local artist?
Many have community group representation, we had a meeting room on the ground floor where residents could discuss issues with various representatives.
The most interesting thing was the relationships which flourished in a block of 78 maximum. From nodding to avoidance to entertaining to looking out for. I was always impressed with the efforts many made to express themselves.
It always reminded me of that cover for Georges Perec's - Life A User's Manual. Tear the facade off and there is a complex novel of various inter-dependabilities.
A brief anecdote about elevators.
http://niddrie-edge.livejournal.com/40068.html
We often spoke of Manchester's Redbrick digital community in the late 90s as an example.
http://www.overmet.net/press/the_times/story182.html
http://www.overmet.net/press/default.htm
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 12:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 01:14 pm (UTC)(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 01:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 01:27 pm (UTC)Not only that, but as a model for urban planning blocks seem to me to be far more sustainable , making better use of the land and resources than individual plots. Having lived in one now for some 9 years, there are so many advantages: feeling part of a community, shared, minimal upkeep bills, security, views (!)... there is no way I would want to live in a house again.
I actually like a lot of the 70s architecture others are so quick to condemn. I had numerous relatives who lived in blocks in Liverpool and they never saw it as a bad thing.
Another thing people ignore is that most problems (lifts, dirt, plumbing etc) are due to lack of proper investment and maintenance programmes, or lack of social provision for the more vulnerable residents, not an inherent flaw of the blocks themselves. You go to other European countries and those problems just don't exist on a large scale, so it's clear there is some propaganda at work in the criticism of blocks.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 01:32 pm (UTC)New Labour spin doctor Alistair Campbell talks about his passion for Jacques Brel.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/breletmoi
(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 01:39 pm (UTC)(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 01:57 pm (UTC)Perhaps there's a certain level of population density and class polarization that forces the communal aspects into a mode that organicizes these areas like prefab Kowloon Walled Cities? I'll probably wish I had written this comment differently after I hit Post, but that's the problem with being part of the floating population of anons.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:13 pm (UTC)No mention of Iraq, though, or Brel's views on war: "No dream is ever worth a war," he said. Brel, that is, not Campbell.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:14 pm (UTC)Indebted municipal authorities can't wait to get these financial responsibilities off their hands.
A return to the seventies social contract almost looks appealing.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-06 02:16 pm (UTC)(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 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 02:38 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 02:39 pm (UTC)(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)