Pathways to Social Class by Daniel Bertaux Paul Thompson

Author:Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson [Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9781351500524
Google: Yx0uDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T03:26:41+00:00

Such imagination in transforming shacks into good houses has been a particularly important social dynamic in the shantytowns of Latin America.75 It would be difficult, for example, for a visitor today to the apparently prosperous and well-built southern suburb of Santo Domingo in Mexico City to realize that it had originated in a mass seizure of open land by five thousand in a single day in 1971, and that the houses had been constructed entirely through the self-improving efforts of originally very impoverished families.76 The seizure of Santo Domingo was the most spectacular of all recent Latin American land seizures, but the story of the neighbourhood can be echoed from many other great Latin American cities. Another particularly well-known instance of tenancious self-improvement is the story of Brasilia Teimosa, a now attractive neighbourhood which originated in a ‘favela’ of squatters on land dredged from the harbour of Recife, the metropolis of northeastern Brazil. Its name itself honours the stubborn courage of these poor inhabitants in creating their own new town at just the time when the state with all its power and resources was building its new capital of Brasilia.77

While collective pressure has played a key role in shaping housing provision in Britain and France too, this pressure has taken a political form rather than direct action. This means that rather than actively seizing their chances in a dramatic communal move, poorer French and British families have typically secured their own municipal or state accommodation through demonstrating their passive suffering, often for a period of years. Nevertheless such a move, at least until the drastic curtailment of municipal housing provision in the 1980s, from overcrowded or insanitary private rented housing into a new council house, was the most dramatic single step forward for which they could hope.

Kathleen Peel, for example, whose father was a blind ex-barber from Liverpool, was the eighth out of eleven brothers and sisters, and until she was 12 the family lived crowded into a three-bedroomed terraced house with no indoor toilet. She remembers how when they moved into a council house, 4we thought that was wonderful’. Lorna Selkirk, whose father was a jute spinner, grew up in Dundee with her sister and parents in a tenement flat of just two rooms in all: ‘my father an’ mother slept in the kitchen and my sister and I slept in the room’. As a young mother, she again lived in a similar two-room flat, on the fourth floor of a tenement: ‘we had t’humph that pram up and doon four stairs’. Later they found a larger flat, but again with no lift. When at the age of 35 she and her family were rehoused in a new council flat in a 1960s tower block, ‘we thought we were in heaven’; even though socially it proved less congenial. ‘It was a lot more intimacy in a tenement than what there is up here ... (But) I was never one for socializing, I prefer to stay in my own house.’78

The one big move, in short, could be the outcome of very contrasting situations.

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