The Threshold and its Potential for a (post) Covid-19 Urban Society

Lisa Weigl

The Threshold and its Potential for a (post) Covid-19 Urban Society Lisa Weigl, MA City Design, 2020

‘‘The Threshold and its Potential for a (post) Covid Urban Society‘‘ Lisa Weigl, MA CITY DESIGN, 2020 248345 Royal College Of Art, London Kensington Gore

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t is 4 o’clock in the afternoon, a day in the middle of spring, the sun has found its way through the clouds, against all British clichés. I’m taking my daily walk, trying to avoid groups of people along River Lea. Keeping a 2 Meter distance is my new main challenge, it is the new polite greeting towards strangers as well as friends. It is the new normal.

This might have sounded perfectly insane a few weeks ago, even for London, a metropolis in which eye contact equalled an intimate relationship.

But now our lives have shifted. Everything we counted as everyday habits, standing right on the escalator, sitting squeezed between two strangers on the tube, getting annoyed by people walking too slow – probably tourists anyway, meeting with friends at a pub, going to markets to get the fresh food you need, popping into the supermarket to get that bottle of wine you think you deserve after a long day, spontaneous ventures to Soho or daytrips outside of London, sitting on benches, all these activities, public activities, are now seen as criminal offences. Public space is policed and surveilled. One might say a fundamental right has been taken from society and at the same time these measures are what keeps society alive at this very crucial time in history.

The media is comparing our current crisis with World War Two, an though it might feel like it at times, though hardly anyone has actually experienced it, it is not at all like a country during war. The National Portrait Gallery as well as various cinemas stayed open during the WWII to keep spirits up.

Today even Trafalgar Square is as empty as it has probably never before been in history.

The new normal is called ‘Social-distancing’ and one wonders what kind of imprint this will leave on all of us even after a vaccine

has hopefully circulated and immunity cures what caused all this exceptional and ever so surreal new world, Covid-19.

The city is empty and yet it is not. Public spaces, squares, central main streets, high streets, they are almost uninhabited. This questions the whole city’s existence. The city was made for inhabitation, to be taken over. Density is what kept it alive, made sense of it. The people are still here, though not in public spaces we find ourselves seeking shelter in our own homes. And it is here, where class divisions are made visible.

Space has been maldistributed amongst the city’s residents. Our experiences of selfisolation and the lockdown are shaped by class. Lindsey Hanley, freelance writer and the author of Estates: an Intimate History, is raising the rhetorical question of how they cannot be, when the rich have escaped to second homes (e.g. Scotland’s chief medical officer), when bus drivers and nurses are dying on their jobs, and when our ability to tolerate large amounts of time at home is determined by how much space we have at our disposal? Space – how it’s apportioned, how it’s governed, how it’s made available to some and denied to others – is always political. For the urban working class, (…) trapped inside flats where children have no option other than sharing bedrooms or “affordable” homes built to minimal space standards, there’s not so much choice.1 Karel Teig argues in his book The Minimum Dwelling, that Buddha’s advice ‘freedom means leaving the house’, still very much applies to our own time. This translates into ‘casting off the dead weight of the traditional apartment. (…) It is here, that

1 Lynsey Hanley, ‘Lockdown Has Laid Bare Britain’s Class Divide’, The Guardian.

Indeed one can observe a clear tendancy of people streaming to the outside. The daily exercise, as ordered by the Government, preferably takes place in parks – though lingering is strictly forbidden. Parks have always been intended as places to regain health, this is how for example Victorian reformers such as the physician John Snow, who established the link between cholera and poor sanitation and the statistician William Farr campaigned and petitioned for urban parks amongst working-class environments, such as Hackney’s Victoria Park – the ‘people’s park’, 1845. Exactly this park has been closed until May, whilst the ‘royal parks’ in Central London have stayed open. Victoria Park lies in the Boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, two of the densest populated Boroughs in London, Boroughs that have been testing grounds for post war Estate developments.4 Lindsey Hanley as well as Karel Teige are dedicating their criticism to the minimum dwelling, the traditional floorplan which reduces space to the bare minimum. Such as these can be found in Housing Estates in the named Boroughs. The Borough of Tower Hamlets foremost is the Borough that struggles with overcrowding of dwelling spaces. At the same time it is almost in the centre of

current, major city redevelopments as seen along the Lea Valley belt (Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Haringey, etc.). It is not only Social renters that are living in these Boroughs, it is young professionals that take over rightto-buy-flats, which by today make 60% of the intended Social Housing dwellings UK-wide.5 The mix of tenants often creates anonymity, more than modern cities are dealing with already.

Such dwellings, being called home by many in the urban surrounding are now the only spaces of retreat accessible for a majority in Housing Estates tenants at this stage of social distancing. Not every neighbourhood has the same privileges, which now can be described as a garden, a quiet room to study in, a possibility to buy food nearby or open space around the next corner.

In this essay the potential of the threshold for a post Covid-19 society shall be explored. It analyses the hidden potential of thresholds belonging to urban minimum dwellings, mostly in Housing Estates - represented by access decks, semi-private circulations and landings - to enable a reorganization or even creation of public and private care relations in times of a pandemic (Covid-19).

To understand the typology of that very, it is crucial to understand the importance that has been assigned to it over the historical development of various forms of that very, as well as the changes which thresholds have made possible to this day.

2 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, p.3.

3 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, p.23.

4 Lynsey Hanley, ‘Lockdown Has Laid Bare Britain’s Class Divide’, The Guardian.

5 Kate Macintosh, 100 Day Studio: Kate Macintosh.

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the relationship between men and women could end up being unliberated from having to endure the stress of common disturbances in a shared apartment.‘ Karel Teige even describes a primordial class struggle between man and woman, children and parents, as well as the so-called conflict between generations.2 Walter Benjamin points out that ‘the apartment becomes far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out’.3

The Minimum Dwelling 3

Karel Teige describes the Minimum Dwelling as having become the central problem of modern architecture.6 Through industrialization, the movement towards urbanity, a new class has emerged, the one which in Great Britain has been called the working class, which historically consisted of industrial workers. Teige names them as the ‘tools of the current economic order’7. These needed to be accommodated in the city as close as possible to the new industrial areas. The idea of the Minimum Dwelling originates from the need for low cost solution and the aim to develop construction techniques based on speed and standardization. Therefore the space of individual dwellings was reduced to only the most necessary arrangement of space. Originally the first proposals had the idea of transferring certain functions of the dwelling to communal facilities and buildings (recreation, laundry, meals, health & childcare). The crucial differentiating point is the degree of autonomy with which different states have followed and realized this aim. Russian Constructivists have worked on the idea of dom-kommuna and with it wanted to create a new society through a house that shares all facilities but the own individual room. German Bauhaus extracted the newly planned dwellings from the city and created ‘Siedlungen’, the ‘cooperative city’ on the outskirts of Berlin

by Gropius for example, though they had no direct power to influence the city. Red Vienna built inside the city limits with their scheme of the ‘Gemeindebauten’, e.g. Rotes Wien, which had their communal facilities in the courtyard areas8 (collective facilities like two central laundromats, two central baths, two nursery schools, a dentist, a library, business offices, a doctor’s office and

a pharmacy8).

Great Britain’s reaction towards a new kind of dwelling started with the design for the first traditional layout, the model dwelling (see Fig. 1), introduced by Prince Albert and Henry Roberts in 1851.10 It concentrated on the new understanding of morality and intimacy in the family and created foremost rather private than communal life as there were no intended common and shared spaces or facilities outside the own dwelling.

However there are examples which show that in a time of industrialization, a new way of living which brought, no doubt, various new challenges, communal life has been valued after all. Such architectural examples in housing and urban developments can also be seen in the UK, especially in developments by London’s Housing Trusts, e.g. Lennox House (see Fig. 2), 1937 by J E M MacGregor built by Bethnal Green and East London Housing Association11 or the Bauhaus experiment of the Isokon (see Fig. 3) by Well Coats in 1929, though not being Social Housing it worked on the concept of sharing common facilities as kitchen, a food hall or services such as shoes cleaning.12 Apart from some rare exceptions (mostly induced by visionary young post-wararchitects) it was the idea of the single dwelling, the individual, private home which dominated the British building booms.

After WWI it was the idea of ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ which were built into the city. After WWII a housing boom followed to not only met the demands of homeless city dwellers

6

Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, p.1.

7 cf. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.80.

8 cf. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.82.

9 isaforum2016, ‘About a Red City and a Pink Building: Communal Housing in Vienna’, ISA Forum 2016.

10 ‘Henry Roberts (1803-76) - The Model Houses for Families, Built in Connexion with the Great Exhibition of 1851, by Command of His Royal Highness the Prince Albert... / by Henry Roberts.’.

11 ‘1-35 Lennox House, Cresset Road, Hackney, Greater London, Historic England’.

12 cf. Isokon Gallery, Isokon Gallery Booklet, 1st Edition.

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Rotes Wien, Vienna (built between 1926 and 1930) The biggest and one of the best-known communal housing complex in the world being built under the Social-Democratic period in Vienna to improve the living conditions of the city’s residents. The concept was based on a city in a city, very similar to the concept we today see in the Barbican complex in London.

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Isokon Community Kitchen, until 1934 then got tranformed into a communal Bar for the buildings tennants always being the centre of artists and thinkers to come together to discuss and exchange ideas (e.g.

Gropius, Agatha Christie)

but also the demands of building a ‘new Britain’ which could be translated as ‘slum clearances’ in the UK’s cities.

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Again, a post war Britain should get a deserved new type of home. The one with running water, heated rooms, an interior bathroom. What was missing, not so much in Britain’s New Towns on the edges of the City, a descendant of England’s Garden Cities, but more so in inner city Estates, in prefabricated blocks as well as High Rises, was the intended recreational outdoor space, though existing but more as dysfunctional empty voids in the built fabric. The connection to the street. What is therefore missing until this day is a meaningful threshold between the public and the private. Whilst what gets separated by an over-governed void is an often overcrowded dwelling, reduced to its very minimum and never intended to host more residents than rooms located in dense areas of the city, and a distant street scape not directly accessible by those very. One should be aware that the typology of the hierarchical 3-Bedroom apartment is and will not be able to adapt to

our current and future needs. It is not only the society and its habits that have shifted but also new challenges that erupt almost daily in the fast paced life the city dwellers are living.

Thresholds in cities occur in different scales. This can happen on the scale of a doorstep in the shape of an entrance, an area of defined or undefined space, or as a mere metaphorical way of crossing.

The original meaning of ‘threshold’ is a doorsill, namely ‘a length of wood, masonry, etc. along the bottom of a doorway’’.14 The word threshold itself is of uncertain origin. ‘‘The first element probably is related to Old English þrescan (see thresh), either in its current sense of “thresh” or with its original sense of “to tread, trample.”15 The meaning of the second part of the word is assumed to have been lost even in old English, it probably has been altered to conform to hold. Recently, ‘‘(...) Liberman16 revives an old theory that the second element is the Proto-Germanic instrumental suffix *-thlo and the original sense of threshold was a threshing area adjacent to the living area of a house.’’ 17 Therefore the threshold, being seen as an intermediating space of common labour represented a platform for the organization of the community’s life.

An aspect which will be elaborated more thoroughly in a later paragraph.

Walter Benjamin elaborates the difference between ‘Schwelle’ and ‘Grenze’. The

The Threshold

So we can build a new home for ourselves: a new Britain. No difficulties, except our own making, stand in the way of knowledge, enthusiasm and unbounded skill wait for the opportunity. We alone the people of this nation are its deciders, its creators, its builders.

A new world we must make: with what success we make it rests in ourselves. The choice is our own.

The future begins today. - Thomas Sharp, Building Britain; the Town Planning Review; 194113

13 Thomas Sharp, ‘Building Britain: 1941’, Town Planning Review, 23.3 (1941).

14 ‘THRESHOLD | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary’.

15 ‘Threshold | Origin and Meaning of Threshold by Online Etymology Dictionary’.

16 ‘Our Habitat: The Etymology of “Threshold”’, OUPblog, 2015.

17 ‘THRESHOLD | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary’.

Thresholds itself first appear as a boundary, something which must be crossed in order to transfer to another place. Speaking of housing it would translate into separating the inside from the outside. However this act of separation is always and simultaneously an act of connection, an entrance and an exit. In various cultures it is getting marked through rituals - these might get performed in shape of an entrance ritual for example residing guardian gods or spirits. Threshold spaces are common spaces, they get used collectively regardless of the fact how many people are using it, this might just be a family, kinship, neighbourhoods or even complete strangers. Common space, used without policed governance outside of the user-group (residents), and therefore distant from total surveillance, is produced through collective inventiveness, which is either triggered by everyday urgent needs or is unleashed in collective experiments in inventing possible forms of space sharing and sharing-through-space.20 Thresholds are first and foremost a space of movement, again this can be understood as either literal movement, coming and going, entering and exiting, or metaphorical movement of change which also includes shifts in society, this may regard passing from childhood to adolescence, single to married life, life to death – a social transformation that molds individuals, and therefore an area of common life, social relations and organization, which is always in the making.13 Walter Benjamin quite physically, describes

the threshold as a space with spatial quality, it is not just a line but a space of multifacetted negotiation.21 The most obvious and frequently used threshold which can be found in the urban enclave is the street. A threshold, which especially during times of a lockdown is valued more than ever before as a surrogate to private porches. The concept of the street implicates the act of passage and positions the city as commons. Stavros Stavrides writes in his book Common Space, that ‚these thresholds explicitly symbolize the potentiality of sharing by establishing intermediary areas of crossing, by opening the inside to the outside‘.22 The street is the connecting tool of the city, the organ and its most important public spaces, this does not only applies to transportation, but also to neighbourhoods and households. Taking the example of the street trade and markets which have the potential of creating conditions of living together as well as founding a support network for the neighbourhood which then leads to shared habits, everyday rhythms and forms of regulation. Above all the street creates a security network which the block is able to profit of. Jane Jacobs argues in her work The Death and Life of Great American Cities that streets cannot function without homes directly branching off them, neither can they be counted as safe if this cannot be given. Everyone living on a specific street must be able to overlook and use the street in order to create a lively and safe

18 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings.

19

Till Boettger, Threshold Spaces: Transitions in Architecture.

Analysis and Design Tools, p.47.

20 cf. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.102.

21 Stavros Stavrides, Towards the City of Thresholds, 2019.

22 cf. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.120122.

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German word ‘Schwelle’ connotes a zone, a change, a transition.18 Thresholds interrupt boundaries for the transition from one zone to another. (…)

An interface between action spaces and retreat areas.19

Angela Davis speaking at a Black Panther gathering in New York 1960s, claiming the street fully for the expression of their opinion and at the very same time create a temporary monument of power

London, Soho, early 1960s Using the street scape to take over space for cultural activities (music and dance)

Girl in Pram, Bimingham 1960s The neighbourhood worked on a trust and kinship bond system. Children were left outside, breathing ‘fresh air’whilst mothers did housework inside the dwelling.

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‘One reason it is taking so long is that the estate is so strung out – the number of people per acre at Greenleigh being only one-fifth what it is in Bethnal Green – and low density does not encourage sociability’25 called it ‘turning’ all knew each other, it was a multi-generational network who’s long residence and sense of history towards the place they lived, by itself did something to create a sense of community with other people in the district. The network shared the same background, the same political views, though their home was their own private realm and the high street a very real social barrier.26 Life took place between those two barriers, the threshold. The life in the 50s and 60s gets describe as the

opposite of lonely, family and kinship took over the responsibility of the care network and governed their own working class community, this includes childcare, food supply, education even. In Bethnal Green children in prams were left at the front doors

‘Provided that the rows are pointed in the north-south direction, the basic advantage of the gallery type is its capacity to offer optimal conditions for healthy living, giving all apartments good light, both front and read sun exposure, and direct cross ventilation for all living spaces.’27 as one could be sure about the observing eye of the neighbour.

What can be argued against Willmott and Young’s oberservations, apart from their ignorance towards ties that would have existed outside the family and kinship structure, which would have been concluded as controversially excluding towards Irish and Bangladeshi settlers28, is that the family bonds which get described are based on the structure of nuclear families, which implements the male part as the working element, leaving the house and spending most of the daytime outside the domestic dwellling whilst the responsibility in the home was based on the female element of the family. Women were therefore forced to form bonds of reliance, which can be seen

23 cf. Jane Jacobs and Gerd Albers, Bauwelt Fundamente, Bd.4, Tod und Leben großer amerikanischer Städte).

24 cf. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

25 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, p.153.

26 cf. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, p.105-106.

27 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, p.281.

28 Madeleine Bunting, ‘Kin Outrage’, The Guardian, 24 April 2007, section Society.

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environment.23 The urban street will always be a mainly anonymous space, however it works as a theatrical stage – family, kinship, religious, ethnic or professional networks take part in the play and inhabit the street as groups and individuals (e.g. the flaneur, as Benjamin describes him24) as acts of encounter at different times of day.

A prime example which should be mentioned here is post-war Bethnal Green in East London. Micheal Young and Peter Willmott have studied family and kinship ties in a working-class neighbourhood which has been a focus of the new urban Estate developments in the 1950s. East London’s communities might have been one of the strongest and most characteristic communities of the city and yet it has been split up through the displacements to New Towns outside of the city’s boarder. The families living in the same street, or as they

as a reoccurring pattern in today’s Covidsociety - trapped in the own dwelling units, though in this case mostly without family or kinship bonds as today’s urban reality means the cherishing of anonymity inside the city’s boarders. Though what the city dwellers get more and more aware of is the fact that social bonds might be something which work a tool to deal with isolation and loneliness during a lockdown. And whilst the residents of Bethnal Green had the chance to leave a place many of them considered unsafe or dirty and move to the New Towns in order to guarantee their children a better future (though this shift brought with it new challenges to social bonds and the absence of those),29 this escape route is an absent option for the majority of today’s city’s minimum dwellers.

The reality many of the residents which moved from Bethnal Green out to one of London’s New Towns had to face is just one example of neighbourhoods that have ended up being displaced or split up through the Estate building boom post-WWII and therefore lost the predominance of their kinship network. Primarily this was the cause of a lack of density in the new layouts of the New Towns and City Estates. The direct access to the street got lost amongst front gardens, endless hallways and similar.

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What we understand is that the dense street, again, is the most important tool to create common space, or more so, it has the potential to be the common space.

The street has operated as a tool of communication, especially for young generations, to be claimed and opinions expressed. Culturally it has served as a stage and especially as a place of (political) protest. An example of this can be seen in the latest Black Lives Matter protests around

the world and the mural paintings in yellow letters, using the street as the clearly most publicly existing and accessible canvas.

We know today, after experiments in the direction of Garden Cities to prevent the spread of diseases in the city, that the spread of a virus is not predominantly caused by densities. Yet to prevent or inhibit future pandemics, we may need to find different

‘Architecture and Urbanism are united through human associations that occur in space.’ - Peter Smithson, Conversations with Students30 physical forms for density, permitting people to communicate, to see neighbours, to participate in street life even as they temporarily separate. Current examples of how streets organise themselves during the Covid-19 Pandemic, with our without streetwide schemes can be seen in the ‘StreetspaceLDN’ concept introduced by the Mayor of London to reduce the foregun air pollution in the city. The scheme aims to close down streets for cars or even bus routes around the centre of the city and enable millions more journeys on foot and by bike.31 Another example are various neighbourhood scale organised food supplies. These are induced by the residents themselves and mostly connected to a mobile store concept delivering, specific to the according shop concept, food items.

Housing Estates are mostly lacking this

29 cf. ‘Family and Kinship in East London Revisited | Fabian Society’.

30 Peter Smithson, Catherine Spellman, and Karl Unglaub, Peter Smithson: Conversations with Students, p.91.

31 Transport for London, ‘Euston Road Temporary Cycle Lane Construction Set to Begin as Mayor’s World-Leading Streetspace Plans Continue’.

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The ‘Dusty Knuckle Bakery’ delivery van serving neighbourhoods with bakery goods by mobilising their shop.

London, Soho during the ease of lockdown in the city.

The StreetspaceLDN concept has been applied to various streets in the centre. History of claiming the threshold space repeats itself once again.

Laubenganghaus,Paul Heim and Albert Kempter, 1929 being one of the first modernist projects with an outer access circulation.

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specific opportunity of directly taking part in the street-life through not having a direct access to the street.

However there have been various developments in typology to achieve the direct connection to a pathway, this might not apply to High Rise Apartment with double loaded corridors, however, the idea of a street translated into Housing Estates or even raised into the sky has been realized by many architects, also in the UK. The idea of the corridor itself originates from the schematic layout of the Renaissance palace (see Fig. 5), it would be built axial and monumental. The Gallery Type of Housing Estate, which has developed paralelly to that originates in the first half of the nineteenth century.32 Its various advantages have been

rediscovered by Modern architects and built in improved ways.

The hallway or corridor also gets described as being the unobservable tool of observation

by Stephan Trßby the author of History of Corridors. Until the 17th century the meaning of corridor as we know it today didn’t exist. It only described the dividing line between the wall of the city and the wilderness. Corridor as a passage and therefore a connecting tool in architecture and city planning first got described in 1620. In the two World Wars a corridor was a dividing line and at the same time threshold two opposing parties fought to claim as a piece of land.34 Through all the changing definitions one can argue one thing indefinitely - corridors and therefore

thresholds, are spaces of communication and carry the possibility to adapt, either working as a defending line if needed, or a space of commoning.

The Laubenganghaus (also see Fig. 4), designed by the architects Paul Heim and Albert Kempter and exhibited in the Breslau WuWa exhibition of 1929, was one of the first examples of this type.’ Other examples are the Frankfurt Hellerhof colony, Walter Gropius’ residential dwelling house in Spandau-Haselhorst colony and the open gallery design of the Bauhaus. Karel Teige is talking about the ‘Zeilenbau’ who’s open corridor landing as a feature is not without significance for the prevention of tuberculosis.34 This shows useful parallels to the current Coronavirus, a virus also affecting the lungs. Frankfurt architects Kaufmann and

Boehm presented calculation for economical affordability on the International Congress of Modern Architecture in Brussels in 1935 and came to the conclusion that especially the open gallery type is more economical than a single-bay staircase type35, not least because of the health factors. This concept later earned more fame through Le Corbusier’s design of Streets in the Sky in Unité d‘habitation (later seen in Smithson’s & Sheffield). He extracts the corridor from the city itself, the street and transforms them into actual streets, leading

32 cf. Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, p.281.

33 Stephan Trüby, Geschichte des Korridors, 2018th edn (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018).

34 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, p.276.

35 Ibid.

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Alton West Estate, Point Blocks, 1960s Though sometimes being planned narrow, the idea of Streets-in-the-sky has found many repetitions in other projects - the question of fear of heights shall not get asked in this particular case.

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‘As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades and stairways (…) passages equal ‘pores’ in the urban life.’ Walter Benjamin36

Margaret Thatcher visiting the first official Right to Buy Family. Clearly tea-time had to be cramped into an example of a minimum dwelling. Arguably the Conservative party does not have a place in the working class people’s lives.

directly to the apartments. What should be mentioned, talking about the open corridor type, is the by-product which many of the built projects have ended up being designed with, is the ‘kilometer-long house’37 with an endless corridors and therefore a continuous internal communication system which ends up leading to challenges being organized internally as a common space.

A project which gets criticized, because of this malfunction, multiple times in history and has now been demolished, is Streets in the Sky by the Smithsons as seen in Robin Hood Gardens in London or Park Hill in Sheffield by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith. The Smithsons, founders of Brutalism, referred their designs back to the long gallery for walking, talking and display of paintings in Elizabethan times (England, 1500s) as well as art galleries in general as these are places one walks, talks and only pays fragmentary attention to all they are passing. They also mention the quality of emptiness, the ‘space between’ or as Walter Benjamin phrases it the ‘homogeneous empty time’38, which they compare to the work of their friend

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13 36 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings.

37 Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, p.320.

38 cf. Walter Benjamin, Security, Territory, Population, p.252.

2017s production ‘How to talk to girls on parties’, a punk/space age/coming of age film, some scenes were filmed in Park Hill’s Streets-in-the-sky (Sheffield, Ivor Smith, Jack Lynn, 1959) and show how the main

The theme of Robin Hood Gardens is protection. (...) Do we now need urban spaces with this concept (...)? Can our cities benefit from urban structures that render protection spaces mobile and expansible?43 character Enn has created himself a living room on one of the Estate’s access decks.44 The Smithsons even call their access decks ‘circulation places instead of passages’45 encouraging neighbourly interaction.

Against what it was intended to be, the concept now gets criticised for serving ‘the thief and the rioter’ 46. Observing this aspect neutrally one can argue that enabling the rioter to act freely in the Streets-inthe-sky as an surveillance space might be the foundation of self-governance and freedom of expressing opinions. The shared ‘circulation spaces’ operate as elements for the community to adapt to their individual needs, these can also be urban and political activism, even as a symbol for the struggle of the estate residents themselves.47 Robin 39 Joao Cunha Borges and Teresa Marat-Mendes, ‘Walking on Streets-inthe-Sky: Structures for Democratic Cities’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 11 (2019), p.5.

40 cf. Teaching Urban Morphology, ed. by Vítor Oliveira, The Urban Book Series (Springer International Publishing, 2018), p.250.

41 cf. Joao Cunha Borges and Teresa Marat-Mendes, ‘Walking on Streets-in-the-Sky: Structures for Democratic Cities’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 11 (2019), p.5-7.

42 Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, ‘Criteria for MassHousing’, Architectural Design, 1967.

43 Borges and Marat-Mendes, ‘Walking on Streets-in-the-Sky: Structures for Democratic Cities’, p.13.

44 John Cameron Mitchell, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, 2017.

45 cf. Alice M. Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, p.36-38.

46 Ibid.

47orges and Marat-Mendes, ‘Walking on Streets-in-the-Sky: Structures for Democratic Cities’, p.11.

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Nigel Henderson, photographs of everyday life in Bethnal Green. Once again this leads back to the focus on the street, a space they describe as clearly defined and regulated but not restrictive. The Smithsons claim that the street is indeed adapting to the changing need and desires of urban life – the patterns of movement in the city – and that therefore the development of new urban housing starts with a new conception of the street.

The concept of ‘Streets in the Sky’ should effect the urban life on a multiscalar basis by occupation patterns, density and mobility.

Their first projects, a concept for the Golden Lane development in which the ‘streets’ are not just an access structure, but already suggest a deeper urban consequence.39 The proposal performs as an urban morphology. Maretto says that the transition from the individual to the civitas is far from obvious and often requires an intermediate stage for collective identification, which is exactly what the neighbourhood is 40 In the case of the Smithsons, not just the neighbourhood structure proposed by the estate design, but the inclusion of streets-in-the-sky, provide this immediately recognizable intermediate stage.41 Streets-in-the-sky organize the dwelling blocks around social spaces which work as an infrastructural network. The architectcouple wrote an article on ‘Criteria for mass housing’ in 1967 in which they point out the function of open air areas within housing estates. They argue that these achieve ‘(...) an adaption to lifestyles, expression of identity, integration of technical elements and construction technologies, articulation of visual structure and function, open-air areas linked with inside areas, enjoyment of weather changes, spaces for children and storage, maintenance, and implications of repetition.’42 In John Cameron Mitchell’s

The famous milk delivery man in Sheffield’s Park Hill being a classic british morning ritual which also works on access decks. Can this be a a service structure that the Covid-society can profit of again?

How to talk to Girls on Parties, 2017

Enn’s living room on an access deck in Park Hill, Sheffield in the film ‘How to talk to Girls on Parties’

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Hood Gardens, the Smithons’ built concept of Streets-in-the-sky has been demolished (still ongoing) due to being deemed dysfunctional in today’s understanding.

Apart from private developers being part and playing into this decision of demolition, which ultimately can be described as yet another victim of gentrification, one must ask the question of why the Estate has been working all these years, since its first residents in 1972. And most of all, what now gets considers as failure, crime and escape routes being blamed on architectural dysfunction, can actually be led back to political failures and stereotyping. Of course one must question the decision of excluding instead of weaving social housing into the urban fabric in general, though would Housing Estates get the deserved credibility and freedom of living without stereotyping the architecture or residents or over-governing, one must conclude that the built fabric could be inhabited in a more successful and adaptive way, weaving a closer knit network amongst residents.

Alternative solutions which should be mentioned and have been worked on in the UK are the projects by Cook’s Camden. Their low rise, high density Estate developments strive to create direct accesses to the ground floor street level. As an example, Neave Brown in his Fleet Road as well as Alexandra Road project has created a direct access to the Estate’s connecting walkway.48 Again the street takes over a substential importance in the organisation and interaction of a neighbourhood its care and community network.

the street as a threshold has been valued throughout architectural and urban history.

What was visible, in Bethnal Green as well as in Naples were scenes like Benjamin describes: ‘Staircases were transformed into noisy play areas, absolutely integrated into the life of the buildings, the ‘passion of improvisation’ is visible in the inventive inhabitation of their standardized and minimum sized houses’49. The staircase was not simply used to cross an in-between area.

Rather, much of everyday life shifted to the stairways, as well as in front of doorways, in the pavement areas and in the empty space between the kitchens of the facing blocks – an extension to the home, an expanding communal life.

These spaces of constant movement, adaption to changes and places of common now lead to the question how these are capable of inducing change. Which social changes are these thresholds, especially close to densely populated areas of the city, Housing Estates, capable of accommodating? They clearly work as the biggest opportunity for most of the city dwellers to leave their urban homes in times of a pandemic, but are there examples which can proof an incisive effect on residents lives?

During the current lockdown phase one can observe the importance of these thresholds and the taking over of such. Stairs are getting used as benches, front doors as reading nooks, landings as balconies. Especially landings and stairs, the circulation of the building can be seen as common space. They are analytically neither seen as public nor as private but as

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So what can be concluded through the translation of streets to raised walkways and open landings is, that the relevance of 48 cf. Mark Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing 2018.

49 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings.

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circumscribing and isolating the threatening ‘other’. Disciplinary power prescribes rather than prohibits. He explains it through the logic of disciplinary power and it is here where we can find another parallel to the current worldwide situation: the example of the plague stricken town. To control the status of the city’s population a mechanism of surveillance was created.51 Agamben phrases it differently and talks about, what he calls ‘red zones’ and ‘the forbidden city’.52Learning to accept these red zones means learning to inhabit exception. As yet there are still numerous regulations prohibiting to the residents of such open landing equipped housing from using these according to their needs. These can even mean that residents are prohibited to leave a doormat in front of their entrance door to individualise the threshold to their own home.53

An Outlook

a neutral space in between. It is the landing or even the open landing which, historically, has always accommodated the social needs and was converted into living spaces. The collective private realm of the residents can be seen as the place where differences meet, but also where different life courses have a platform to get noticed. It is here, in the special realm of the threshold, where women moved towards emancipation, with the threshold representing a neutral space that gives them ground to share, a place that is not identified by or with any of them25, but instead represented a platform for them to organize themselves and communicate their demands and needs.

Stavrides describes that in Housing Estates he observed, it was the terraces where common laundry facilities were situated, these became stages of an everyday theatricality where mostly women met.50 These ‘pores’, historically, were places where women were offered facilities which would relieve them of certain everyday burdens, or at least share them. It was these spaces that helped the working class woman to emancipation, to socialize and become visible as workers themselves. It was also women through their mother daughter as well as kinship ties that ensured that the neighbourhood of Bethnal Green was organized the way Young and Willmott were able to observe. As an example of drastic social changes, the threshold therefore has provided an ideal ground. The liberation of women might have been seen as more or less of a disaster, however our view today is one of a rightful war fought for equality.

Foucault argues that, whereas sovereign power prohibits, disciplinary power surveys, classifies and tries to separate the normal from the abnormal not in terms of banishing the negative but in terms of carefully

However, thresholds in Housing Estates are areas in the urban fabric which potentially escape total surveillance. In these spaces, which represent a social world in which the different groups of the society find their place, belonging becomes an important factor. Often this is based on shared identities, shared habits and shared values however it is the shared or common need which creates the common

Community does not merely exist, it is made. – Stavrides54

50 cf. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.171.

51 Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography.

52 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

53 cf. City of London, ‘City of London Housing Service Fire Safety Protocol Communal Areas in Residential Buildings’.

54 Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.80.

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Riba, architecture.com

Dawson’s Heights; Egg Delivery on Access Deck, 1973

space. And whilst in a Housing Estate there are never same identities or same values living under one roof, there now more than ever certainly is a common need, the need for using a threshold as an escape. Stavrides argues that the creation of common space involves practices of translation that ‘builds bridges between people with different political, cultural or religious backgrounds (…), which need to communicate in order to collaborate and create common stakes, new shared habits and views and new common dreams‘. Stavrides further argues that in such closed common worlds people might even lose their previously established privileges when they practice community survival, no matter as through natural or man-made disaster, as they all share the same fate. This leads to networks of encounter and mutual support, the diffusion of new forms of urban collective life. Thresholds mark occasions and opportunities for change.

Thresholds create or symbolically represent passages towards a possible future.55

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The pandemic brings with it now common needs: ‚The first factor has to do with survival. (…)

In the peripheries of big cities, (…) people experience exclusion and insecurity.

The second factor has to do with long established experiences of cooperation. (…) This means a collective wisdom which established through negotiations.

The third factor (already present before the crisis) that has been contributing to the emergence of the common is the spread of concrete ideas for a world of equality and solidarity beyond capitalism.‘56 A Housing project which can be seen as an example during the Covid-19 outbreak is Dawson’s Heights (see Fig. 6) in Southwark

by Kate Macintosh, 1972. The Community has been organizing save food deliveries

A shared memory of a common world (even when severely shaken) can play an important role in shaping practices of commoning. Stavrides57 for the elderly residents whilst using their threshold spaces in the centre of the building and the central courtyard (Kate Macintosh has been planning the Estate without direct car access, but instead common spaces) as their space to escape the own domestic layout and communicate. Shared access decks reminding of the concept of Streetsin-the-sky have previously operated as food distribution networks and yet again get adapted as such.58 One of the most famous services that were provided in Park Hill or Robin Hood Gardens during the 1060s-1990s as well as in other Housing Estates equipped with open access decks was the daily milk delivery to each individual front door. This concept as a simple example, though milk delivery rarely being used today, proves the potential for the decks to operate on the idea of care provision, even without a direct contact to the residents.59 The Haggerston Estate in Hackney for example has been running a food Co-Op, starting in November 1972 from an empty ground floor flat on the estate. The concept simply ran on a resident managed scheme,

55 cf. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.127.

56 Stavros Stavrides, ‘THE COMMON, IN, AGAINST, AND BEYOND THE PANDEMIC CRISIS’, Common Notions.

57 Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons, p.203.

58 Kate Macintosh, 100 Day Studio: Kate Macintosh.

59 Philip Allan Magazines, Geography Review Magazine Volume 32, 2018/19 Issue 3, p.4.

unoccupied thresholds already are and will take advantage of these available means. R. Sennett observes about Housing Estates: ‘the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities’.62 It will be an interesting development to look out for in a post Covid-19 society amongst Estate boundaries to see communities create themselves.

What can’t be changed in a matter of days or weeks, especially not during the current lockdown regulations, and neither will be any time soon in the future, is the lack of housing provision for various long waiting lists of people in need of accommodation.

But instead what should be recognized is the potential of the city to operate on its very own self-governed network in times of a crisis as this.

There is no doubt, that life after Covid-19 will not be the same, neither socially nor economically. It is not only the issue of trapping people for too long in a home environment that is influenced, in an absolute and quantifiable way, by class, but the lasting social effects this virus will have on our society. Four out of five Social Renters are currently in sectors which are affected by restrictions through the lock down, no doubt it will also be a majority of these which will be affected by the high numbers of unemployment even after the outbreak is under control. A new life demands new forms. People will want to live a decent life, if this will be denied, it is this vital force which creates a movement in societies. Housing Estates with previously

Access decks, semi-private circulations and landings need to be free from restrictions and the possibility to grow and extend to be a place of true self-governance. This means to enable a reorganization of everyday life and interactions amongst residents according to the new needs and measures caused by the pandemic. In these thresholds lies a possibility to balance the shifted density in living habits (gathering in dwellings) due to the pandemic regulations by initializing access to the outside, extending the dwelling to the threshold spaces and therefore creating a new network of care in the urban realm as we learned to understand it in 2020.

60 Hackney Food Co-Op 1973, 2014.

61 ackneyinnit, ‘Hackney Peoples Press – the First Three Issues, 1973’, The Radical History of Hackney, 2016.

62 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 1st Edition, 2009.

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which worked as buyers and staff for the shop, providing non-profit food and household items to wholesale prices. Though forced to close down by the GLC as being seen as a threat to local shopkeepers, the Co-Op ran successfully for almost a year with the well known slogan ‘Power to the People’.60 Being seen as a tool to create a community the signature led petition tried to save the cooperative corner shop, the community’s hub in an area very much suffering under stereotyping and prejudices and ultimately racial and class tensions.61 Imagining a similar concept in today’s struggle of unemployment and food shortages during the early and ongoing stages of the pandemic could be a presumably suiting solution for residents as well as a connecting tool to the neighbourhood network.

C O MMO N S PACE C O MMO N AC C E SS C I R C UL ATI ON

victorianlondon.org/houses/princealbertsmodel

historicengland.com

F IG. 1 - MO D E L LO D G E, 1851

F IG. 2 - L E N N OX H O U S E, 1937

TYPICAL PLAN | 1:200

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F IG. 3 - ISO KO N, 1929

themodernhouse.com

URBAN GROWTH | 1:500

FIG. 4 - LAU B EN GAN G HAU S, 1929

tumblr.com

FIG. 6 DAWSON’S HEIGHTS, 1973

live.staticflickr.com

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F I G. 5 - HAR DW I CK HALL EN G LI SH R EN ASSAI N CE

Riba, architecture.com

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Swenarton, Mark, Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing 2018 (London: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2017) Teige, Karel, The Minimum Dwelling (Cambridge, Mass. : Chicago, Ill: MIT Press, 2002)

Images Isokon Kitchen, 1934, https://www.architecture.com/image-library/ribapix/ image-information/poster/isokon-flatslawn-road-hampstead-london-the-kitchen-withthe-pantry-on-the-left-of-the-ground-floor-/ posterid/RIBA17846.html

Margaret Thatcher, Right to Buy, 1980, https://omghcontent.affino.com/AcuCustom/ Sitename/DAM/080/Thatcher-Patterson-MIN.jpg

Rotes Wien, Vienna, 1874, https://balkanstories.net/2017/04/30/wie-majda-turkic-dasrote-wien-sieht/

Park Hill Sheffield, milk delivery, https:// situatedarchitecture.files.wordpress. com/2014/12/municipal-dreams_streets-in-thesky.jpg?w=485&h=677

Girl in Pram, 1960s, https://www.instagram. com/p/B-kEK2EgOE9/ Soho street-live in the 60s, https://img. zeit.de/zeit-magazin/leben/2015-07/soho-london-fs-bilder/01-soho-london.jpg/imagegroup/ original__880x586__desktop Black Panthers, New York, https://d28vr35rno8k21.cloudfront.net/images/kKXb5tis_angela.png Soho street-live today, https://pbs.twimg. com/media/EdJjVwiX0AcnZts.jpg Dusty Knuckle delivery, https://media.timeout.com/images/105660599/1372/772/image.jpg Laubenganghaus, 1929, https://66.media. tumblr.com/604f5239d39215877a8e7953f054d289/ tumblr_okeazqXj6u1ucf8j2o1_1280.jpg

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Alton West, Point Blocks, https://www. architecture.com/image-library/ribapix/image-information/poster/alton-west-estateroehampton-london-view-across-the-estatefrom-the-access-deck-of-a-maisonette-slab/ posterid/RIBA26242.html

How to talk to Girls on Parties Scene (film screenshot via learningonscreen.com)

Model Lodge, https://www.victorianlondon. org/houses/princealbertsmodel.gif Lennox House, https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ C84BfJKXgAA8G_C.jpg:large Isokon, https://assets.themodernhouse.com/ wp-content/uploads/tmh/26833/DSC_2612.jpg Renaissance hallway, Hardwick Hall, https:// live.staticflickr.com/8305/7981942577_ 0fa82b685a_b.jpg Dawsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Heights, 1973, https://www.architecture.com/image-library/ribapix/ image-information/poster/dawsons-heightsoverhill-road-dulwich-london-taking-a-delivery-on-one-of-the-access-galleries/posterid/ RIBA121719.html

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