This article is from the Spring 2014 issue of New Humanist magazine. You can subscribe here.
The UK’s housing crisis is beginning to look like the thread tying all the country’s other social and economic problems together. From floods of foreign money inflating prices beyond comprehension to the punitive bedroom tax sending people into Victorian destitution, from the return of the Rachmannite landlord to the desperately slow production from the housebuilders, it seems as though the entire housing system is rigged to exacerbate inequality. The call has gone up recently to “let the councils build” – to reverse the damage caused by Right to Buy and the Tory dream of a “home owning democracy”, and create a new generation of genuinely affordable, socially rented housing.
Within such a call is the admission that the ideological battle fought over Britain’s post-war council housing was a thorough victory for the Right. Generations of Britons have come to understand the very existence of large-scale modern housing as a symbol for crime, poverty and misplaced optimism. The sense that this was a hopeless experiment, conducted by aloof planners and architects, has become a commonplace. In this context utopia is a word that is to be spat rather than spoken, and if possible, the built evidence of these mistakes must be demolished, to be replaced inevitably with “what people want”.
But this is largely myth. It’s all too easy to neglect the fact that the post-war housing boom (which reached its peak of around 400,000 houses per year in 1968) was not a
socialist idea, but was policy across the political establishment. At the end of the 1940s British cities were still in complete ruin after the war, with millions of the remaining dwellings deemed unfit for human habitation. This shortage was exacerbated by the effects of the baby boom on population growth, so it’s no surprise that by the mid-’50s a “numbers game” had kicked off, with Tories and Labour attempting to outbid each other’s housing targets. To achieve these goals they turned to proponents of industrialised building, who had promised that new factory-building techniques could revolutionise housing.
The model was the car industry, which had been leading the way in the automation and rationalisation of manufacturing. It was believed that the introduction of mass-production into housing would allow for reductions in costs, increases in speed and an end to the inefficiencies and general mess of the construction site. Architects and planners, most of whom worked for local authorities at this point, had been waiting for the opportunity to put new ideas into practice; inspired by the European avant garde of Le Corbusier and others, they wanted to design modern buildings for a modern age, to use new technology and techniques to improve the situation of the millions of people still trapped in overcrowded slums, to create clean, well-designed dwellings with access to open space. And now, at the turn of the 1960s, these desires were perfectly aligned with the new ways of building.
As the housing boom gathered pace and the new estates appeared, complete with tower blocks, “streets in the sky” and all the other innovations of the time, the enthusiasm was palpable. People couldn’t believe the size of their new houses, the central heating, the private bathrooms, the cleanliness, the sheer modernity of it all. The openings of new council estates were events attended by royalty, and for a moment almost all were in agreement that things were moving forward. The grim 19th-century city, with its exploitation, squalor and outright misery, was making way for a more equal 20th-century city, in which everyone had a stake.
But for some this wasn’t nearly far enough. Even by the mid-1960s certain problems were apparent: despite wide adoption, industrialised building was still as expensive as the old methods, and even at full pace the building boom had still not reached the levels that speculative builders had achieved in suburbia between the wars (mainly due to the creation of protected “green belts” around cities). There was also the sense that the world was changing; consumerism, rapid technological change and the freedom represented by youth culture seemed out of synch with the drab paternalism of the estates being built all over. But rather than retreat, the answer for some was to intensify the process: more industry, more automation, more freedom.
The most famous proposal of this tendency is the Plug-In City by Peter Cook of the radical architecture group Archigram, first published in the Sunday Times in 1964. Cook imagined a city where the state would provide the infrastructure: electricity, transport, the actual frames for housing. But instead of one-size-fits-all concrete boxes, people themselves would buy a cheap house just like a fridge or a television, have it inserted into the megastructure, move around whenever they felt like it, and replace it the moment the house (or the lifestyle it accommodated) began to become obsolete. The images of the Plug-In City showed pod-houses, shopping, industry and transport (including then futuristic monorails and hovercraft) threaded into a massive triangulated frame all studded with construction cranes, with escalators and raised walkways taking pedestrians between “nodes” of activity surrounded by giant screens and entertainment facilities. It was a high-tech vision of mass housing for a swinging age, and while it might have looked fantastical, underpinning it was a sober look at the trends of recent years, and a not-that-distant extrapolation.
Inspired by technological advances such as computers and the space programme, not to mention the “instant cities” of music festivals – settlements of 100,000 people which existed for only three days before vanishing again – it became clear to some that the solution to the housing problem was to accelerate, and break for ever the link between housing and traditional, sedentary modes of dwelling. As the students of May 1968 ripped up the streets of Paris, ideas of nomadism gained currency, and architects and designers were inspired. The Dutch artist and architect Constant, an affiliate of the Situationist International, created a plan for a city he called “New Babylon”, embodying a revolutionary notion of freedom and leisure, where people would engage entirely in creative pursuits, set free from industrial drudgery and Fordist ennui. This idea of homo ludens and the rapidly approaching leisure society drove many of the urban concepts of the time, such as Yona Friedman’s Spatial City, which depicted another infrastructural frame propped up in the air above Paris, capable of being configured for any possible function.
By the turn of the ’70s, and with cybernetics and ecology added to the mix, all manner of wild proposals were floating around, from the intangible grooviness of Austrians like Haus Rucker Co, who imagined suggestively tumescent inflatable environments growing off the bourgeois city, to the more technocratically delirious visions of Buckminster Fuller, like his suggestion to build a huge glazed dome over Lower Manhattan which would naturally regulate the climate of the city underneath, a proposal he ominously stated would never be adopted “until environmental and other emergencies make it imperative”. Meanwhile, Soviet urbanists designed huge pyramids for self-contained industrial towns in Siberia, Japanese architects proposed entire cities built on stilts out over Tokyo Bay, while in the US outlandish proposals for permanent orbital space colonies (ostensibly to facilitate lunar mining) got a serious congressional hearing.
Despite the sense of dizzying change, these futures failed to come about, for all manner of reasons. New economic realities after the 1973 oil crisis, serious problems with the industrial housing already built, not to mention a growing political and aesthetic conservatism, all meant that promethean attempts to radically remake the city were suddenly dismissed as hopelessly utopian. But in this wholesale rejection it’s easy to neglect the fragments of these utopias that do exist. Globalised capitalist spaces such as container ports and distribution sheds took on all the developments in industrialised construction from that era, creating highly responsive, automated spaces, ready to respond to rapidly changing markets. The modern airport is also a product of this period: the moving components like a vast robot, the reconfigurable non-spaces in which various different systems are plugged. Even the rise of the shopping mall took on, in its own way, the utopian dreams of the era, creating fluid spaces of desire and entertainment, albeit sublimated through consumption.
It seems that the only kind of space that remained as it had been was the home. Despite one or two attempts at building flexible, replaceable housing, in the UK the nostalgia mode took over. Nowadays it seems that everything has been staked on the home as not only the traditional family’s castle but also as equity, as a machine for generating profit. The crisis is such that we should welcome almost any attempt to alleviate the choked supply of housing – but we should also remember that half a century ago we thought up far more ambitious ways to break the dependence on land and property, and that we might not be in such a predicament if they had been more successful.
