Reconstructing Modernity: Space, Power and Governance in Mid-Twentieth Century British Cities by James Greenhalgh

Author:James Greenhalgh [Greenhalgh, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781526114143
Google: K3vcyAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 36036578
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2017-12-15T01:46:18+00:00

3

The city and the suburban village

In the previous chapters I demonstrated how local government in Manchester and Hull sought to holistically produce more orderly and functional cities and described the variety of challenges that they faced. Nowhere are these attempts to shape a certain type of society through the manipulation of space more in evidence than in the creation of social housing estates either side of the Second World War. The remaining two chapters of this book are thus concerned with the production of these estates, the ideas that underpinned their designs and the difficulties they faced. Whilst, of course, being practical attempts to address the long-standing shortage of housing and alleviate slum conditions, plans for social housing were also socio-spatial schemes to engender community and sociability, which reveal governmental concerns about the nature of society as a whole. The successes and failures experienced add to the story of urban modernism in the post-war period, showing local corporations learning hard lessons about the limits of their influence, the size of the state and their effectiveness as landlords. The period also evidences the emerging power of both retailers and shoppers to challenge the spatial logics of the planners, alongside the manner in which the practices of everyday life could contest the uses and meanings of certain spaces. The suburban estates of the mid-twentieth century emerge, not as clichéd bywords for conformity, nor as merely symbolic failures, but complex spaces through which we might understand the nature, motivations behind and difficulties faced by local corporations embarking on ambitious programmes of urban renewal in residential settings.1

The starting point for the examination of housing estates in this chapter is the ‘neighbourhood unit’: a conceptual template for suburban living adopted by the British government in 1944 and applied widely in the subsequent decade, particularly in new towns and large estates.2 It was an attempt to create a series of suburban villages of around 5,000–10,000 people, based around centralised amenities in which all the needs of daily life – schools, shops, leisure facilities – might be found.3 The ‘neighbourhood principle’ had been advocated since the 1920s, particularly in America, as a model for planning the provision of facilities, producing a pleasant environment and curtailing vehicular traffic around housing.4 Importantly, though, the neighbourhood unit that emerged in post-war Britain was also a response to uneasiness about the lack of ‘community spirit’ on inter-war estates, which translated into the governmental strategies of local corporations and manifested in the adoption of the neighbourhood unit as a central planning principle in 1944. As such, the neighbourhood represented a strategy of governance based on a belief that the right sort of space could play an instrumental role in reinvigorating community spirit, sociability and neighbourliness across class divides. Yet, whilst the neighbourhood unit was presented as a new, thoroughly modern solution to inter-war problems, it was not. Many of the features proposed in the post-war period were remarkably similar to those proposed and built during the 1920s and 1930s. Its presentation as

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