THEORY

Historiography

1903: The “Alienating” Metropolis of Simmel

In Georg Simmel ‘s seminal 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, the city is understood as a system whose incessant stimuli are reflected in its inhabitants’ alienation and individuation. Referring to the shift from the feudal and religious structures of the country to the modern metropolis, “money economy and the domination of the intellect,” Simmel argues, started to form their closest relationship. Reactions ranged from a rapid proliferation of suburbs - as a form of bucolic escape - to new experiments in dense, urban living that promoted new forms of collective life.

1920s: Housing at its Most Socially Efficacious (Revolutionary Housing).

Soviet revolutionaries sought the discovery of new forms of collectivity to replace the individualism that permeated bourgeois society. Projects for Constructivist “commune houses” such as Stroyykom RSFSR. M.O. Barshch and V.N. Vinogrado used technological and spatial innovation attempting to bring about a new revolutionary social consciousness, through the activities of the home. For the Bolshoviks, such “social condensers” were designed “[i]n order to facilitate a rapid and painless transition to higher social forms of housekeeping . . .” Although rare, a few constructed examples of “social condensers” exist, notably Narkomfin (the people’s Commissariat for Finance), construced in Moscow in 1928-30 by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis.

1930s: Council Housing.

Early forms of public housing began to appear in the late nineteenthcentury, notably Boundary Estate (Arnold Circus) in London’s Bethnal Green. These ideas were eventually absorbed into government policy in the early twentieth-century. The Housing Act of 1930 required councils to prepare slum clearance plans for the first time, resulting in pioneering social advances in housing such as Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate in Clenkenwell, London, conceived in the late 1930s and built between 1946 and 1949.

1933: Housing as Bourgeois Revolution.

Designed after the 1929 crash, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse with its verdant public grounds and continuities of public programmes running through raised linear dwellings was an attempt to elevate architecture above basic Fordist principles of efficiency. As Deborah Gans puts it, this concluded “. . . his search for a political mechanism to bring his larger project – nothing less than the mythic-economic recalibration of man’s relation to material through architecture – into the world.”. In Manfredo Tafuri’s words “even today, the most advanced and formally elevated hypotheses of bourgeois culture in the field of architectural design and urbanism.”

1956-1982: A “Public City.” (Keynesian Architecture).

Prefigured by Keynesian economic principles, London’s Barbican is a hybrid public arts-orientated “artificial” podium containing more than twenty different public programmes, two large residential squares and a car free site. With a residential population of up to 6,000 people in three forty-storey towers and a series of seven-storey slab blocks, it was designed as a drive to increase the residential population of the inner city in a time of urban retrenchment after WWII. Homes were rented from, and the entire complex was managed by, the Corporation of London. Note the complexity of the section.

1980 onward: The City as Capital Accumulation. The rise of neoliberalism, privitisation and “the right to buy” subsumed the city, and the residential lives of its citizens, deeper into imperatives of capital accumulation. Modernism’s social project was dismantled along with the social-state. Gentrification - defined by Neil Smith as “… the process by which working class residential neighbourhoods are rehabilitated by middle class homebuyers, land-lords and professional developers” – became the de facto modus operandi of urban “development.”

1924: Architecture

Axonometric Barshch and innovation the activities designed “ of housekeeping

1930: Architecture

Designed after grounds and unities.” was Tafuri’s words bourgeois culture

1956-1982: A Prefigured by hybrid public public programs, population of storey slab blocks, the inner city entire complex

1980 onward:

The rise of the the residential Gentrification residential neighbourhoods and professional “development.” processes, has shop and stall

Protests are rarely original communities development government often accept lucrative