Red Pepper » Tales of the City

Steal this veg

admin — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 05:09:21 +0000

In April this year, Edible Public Space (EPS) gained formal access to a food growing project in a public space in Chapeltown, Leeds. EPS was born last September, when a group of people involved in environmental activism and agricultural projects around Leeds started to discuss how to establish a food project on public land that could radically challenge the way urban space is managed and designed.
Arguing that the institutional management of public space in the UK is currently repressive, EPS not only claims a right to the city as a right to shape and use public spaces in convivial ways (for community gathering without having to ask permission, for example) but also wants to bring back the culture and practice of food production to the core of urban life.
‘We are more and more forced into predesigned landscapes of consumption, into privatised, enclosed streets which plan and channel our emotions. We have lost the ability to imagine our city and to make it the place we want it to be,’ says Anzir, a group member particularly interested in organising engaging, playful activities for its gatherings. ‘With EPS we want to reverse this trend. We want back the right to play, and to eat and shape our public spaces.’
The local council’s declining budget is another part of the context. ‘It is ridiculous the amount of money spent annually by the council for mowing the grass. They could rather give the land to groups like us to be cultivated collectively and become a source of fresh food and an opportunity to learn how to grow food and feed ourselves,’ explains Pete, another group member.
In the interests of building a heterogeneous group, including families and people without a background in activism, EPS decided not to use tactics such as squatting or guerrilla gardening. Instead, networking with existing community groups and following council procedures has been their route to what they hope will be a long-term project. It has not been without its frustrations. Organising anything more than a family picnic needs advance permission, and fly-posting is not allowed. Instead Mary, aged 85 and active in a local tenants’ association, organised a team to distribute 2,000 flyers door to door and in all the shops and community display boards in the area.
EPS promotes collective growing based on the principle of non-ownership of produce, community-led project design and land management, mutual learning and re-skilling, non-consumption based on the right to gather in public space and the mix of playful activities with food growing. So when the Parks Department asked ‘But what if people start stealing the veg?’ EPS had to explain that it would consider that a success.
Changing public space
Mention urban agriculture and it is easy to summon up a picture of a back-garden hobby for the middle classes. Some of it is. But some of it is challenging the modern capitalist city, its modes of production and reproduction of social life, and raising issues of social and environmental justice.
Projects of this kind adopt three broad approaches, which are sometimes intertwined or overlapping: promoting alternative and convivial ways of using public space; sharing private resources for food production; and converting residential areas or spaces around housing estates and transport infrastructures for food production.
Urban wild food walks in public parks and urban green belts organised by groups such as Leeds Urban Harvest and Invisible Food in Brixton claim, more or less explicitly, the right to urban food and to places for foraging (see guerrilla guide, page 55). They promote a more spontaneous use of the city’s green spaces, and particularly of all those spaces that as ‘public land’ are collectively owned and are currently managed by local authorities. They reclaim the right to gather outdoors and to harvest the existing food, the right to a non-consumption based sociality, to escape the rules of the capitalist economy – to have free and non‑CCTV-tracked fun.
Darrin Nordahl, in his recent book Public Produce: the new urban agriculture, offers a good collection of visionary projects in US cities, which break the rules of ordinary space management, stressing a shift from ornamental to edible urban spaces in public policy.
Another form of urban agriculture getting a more mainstream hearing is land sharing. These projects do not directly challenge the capitalist city, but perhaps represent an embryonic reconstruction of the commons, a resurgence of collective use of land that is a firm and immediate answer – in the form of mutual aid – to the growing waiting list for allotments, concern for food quality, food miles and community building. Projects such as Abundance in Sheffield, Grow Your Neighbour’s Own in Brighton and Hove, and Transition Town land sharing groups promote the construction of networks of people willing to share their privately owned land with people without access to land, create publicly accessible fruit trees databases for collective harvesting and processing, and offer free opportunities for re-skilling.
Urban zoning
A third group of initiatives are challenging and reworking the consolidated land zoning and labour structure of the traditional capitalist city of the global North. In these projects suburban neighbourhoods, large industrial estates, neglected spaces or even interstices around transport infrastructures (for example, around railways in Tokyo and Vancouver) are transformed into food production units, and managed by informal grass-roots groups or co-operative agricultural enterprises.
Detroit, which has experienced one of the most drastic population declines and economic collapses of the post-Fordist era, with huge numbers of derelict buildings and 5,000 vacant acres of public land, is maybe the most emblematic case. Urban agriculture there is becoming one of the most efficient and viable ways for local communities to provide food and relieve poverty and ‘food deserts’ (the absence of fresh food in poor neighbourhoods). The great availability of urban vacant land and the growing popularity of food growing in this city suggest that it has the potential to become a training ground for radical alternatives to the post-industrial city, its land management, redevelopment trajectories and community empowerment.
A wide range of groups, communities, and organisations are now involved in urban agriculture in the city. Particularly interesting is the work of the Detroit Food Justice Task Force, and its Cook Eat Talk project, which is mapping ‘the unseen food justice skills, networks and relationships in Detroit’. Whether urban agriculture in Detroit will evolve from a solidaristic/subsistence tool to a main vehicle of a self-sufficient sustainable food system remains to be seen, but in the meantime its inspiration has spread around the northern hemisphere.
Housing estate food growing, mobile food farms on sites under development and rooftop agricultural projects are emerging in other large cities too. In Belgium, the Brussels-based Auto‑nomie project is combining a critique of the massive growth of car ownership and its environmental impacts with the provision of mobile kitchen gardens by transforming used cars into growing spaces. In Bristol, a food-growing project has been established by Eastside Roots inside the Stapleton Road train station.
In London, initiatives such as Growing Communities (Hackney) and Organic Lea (Lea Valley) have been leading the way for more than ten years in urban and periurban land reconversion, reskilling, and making local food available to city dwellers. Meanwhile Grow Heathrow in Sipson has grown out of the mobilisation of local people opposing the construction of the third runway, and the aftermath of the Heathrow climate camp in 2007. It is a growing project realised inside abandoned former market garden greenhouses, and was squatted a year ago, just before the government dropped the plans for the airport expansion. Grow Heathrow is now in its second growing season, and is a community garden embedded in local life.
The more we look closely at this wide range of agricultural projects, the more we begin to understand the complexity of the socio-environmental injustice issues they bring to the surface. From the rules you have to comply with in order to use publicly owned land to the extortionate price of land, particularly in urban and periurban areas; from the regulation of land zoning and allotment leasing, which prevents people from establishing agricultural projects beyond self-consumption; to discriminatory neighbourhood design which makes it common to have densely populated neighbourhoods without decent green space.
The emerging urban agriculture movement can not only tackle some of these issues, but begin to challenge the consumerist priorities of the modern city, creating a better way for us to live in the process.

School without walls

admin — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 04:11:20 +0000

First published 1978

The Child in the City explores the many ways that children experience their urban environment. It looks at why some children are isolated from the streets and cities in which they live and why others can use them as spaces for play and discovery. In particular, the book looks at how children have reacted and adapted to the move from inner cities to suburbs, commuter towns and council estates in the 20th century. It asks whether it is true, as many people believe, that something has been lost in the relationship between the child and the modern city and considers how we might make this relationship a more rewarding relationship for both the child and the city.
The author, Colin Ward, worked as a town planner and architect and was perhaps the most famous English anarchist of the 20th century. Anarchism for Ward was not something to be left for the future. Instead it was ‘a description of a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.’ This drove his interest in self-organised clubs and leisure activities such as youth clubs, allotments, holiday camps, squats and co-operatives.
His dual interest in anarchism and architecture encouraged his interest in the way that ordinary people renovated or designed their homes and communities. It also drove his desire for welfare and housing policies that encouraged people’s participation rather than their alienation from their local areas. Ward’s central philosophy was the idea that people find fulfillment through personal responsibility and involvement. He therefore advocated polices that allowed people to work on a small scale – for example, citing a street where people received grants to re-do their houses as preferable to the mass slum clearances of inner city areas.
The Child in the City is one of Colin Ward’s most beautiful and influential studies. The work is an evocative exploration of how children’s street culture, work, and games provide the child with a variety of sensual and spatial experiences. These new experiences and the ability to move around and explore are shown to be an important part of a child’s education. Or, in Ward’s own words: ‘The city is in itself an environmental education, and can be used to provide one, whether we are thinking of learning through the city, learning about the city, learning to use the city, to control the city or to change the city.’
In particular, the book looks at the ways that children interact with their social and built environments differently and at times in opposition to adults. For example, a derelict space might be an eyesore for an adult but become an exciting adventure playground in the eyes of a child. The way that children adapt their built environments for a private world of play is something that is celebrated in the book. However, when children come to be at war with adults and their environment, the book suggests that this is a result of their lack of involvement in society and in the city.
Ward spent much of his life seeking ways of involving people in their communities and campaigning for council tenants to have more control over their own housing. He was a fierce critic of the way that state housing was distributed – for example, poorer families would often be placed together in one estate. He also spoke out against the government’s policy of mass development, which meant that large estates were built without regard to existing centres of community and with few amenities. He argued that mass building projects directed by the state left little room for individual preference, involvement and responsibility and amounted to a paternalistic politics.
In today’s political climate it is interesting to return to a writer who took a libertarian approach to welfare and housing policy. Today, the debate on what kind of welfare provision should be provided has been replaced with a debate about whether welfare should exist at all. It is worth revisiting writers like Colin Ward so that we remember to prioritise happiness, self-respect and personal involvement in politics, housing and communities rather than simply an improved material standard of living.
Mostly this book is a classic, however, because Colin Ward is such an enjoyable writer to read and the book is full of children’s personal stories. The exuberant ways in which children have adapted their environments for play comes across in his prose and cannot help but bring back accompanying memories from childhood. Educationalists, architects, social policy makers and libertarians would benefit from reading a book that looks at ways to bring children out from a culture of poverty through life in the city, in the ‘school without walls’.

Revenge of the repossessed

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:13:00 +0000

This April marked four years since the collapse of New Century Financial, a top US sub-prime mortgage lender, which arguably lit the fuse of the global financial crisis. The scale of home loss in the US continues to shock. More than five million homes have been repossessed since 2006 and distressed mortgages account for a third of the entire US housing market. New tent cities have sprung up to house the millions who have lost their homes, while millions of homes lie empty.
Although Britain has so far avoided the extremities of the US, Spain and Ireland, all the elements of a perfect storm are gathering in the wider housing system. Large numbers of households can simply no longer afford their mortgage. In 2004, there were 8,200 repossessions in the UK; in 2009, that figure had jumped to 48,000. Last year it was 36,300 and similar numbers are predicted for the coming years due to low growth, mass unemployment and public sector cuts.
The implications are serious for an economy so indelibly tied to the fortunes of the housing market. Repossessions further depress house prices, in turn reducing household wealth, increasing crime, hitting consumer spending, making it more difficult for people to move home because of falling equity and worsening credit ratings for large numbers of people, which will increase their cost of borrowing in future years. And none of this compares to the destructive effects of home loss to people and community.
Falling house prices should have helped those first-time buyers previously locked out by the bubble. Yet despite a 25 per cent average fall in house prices since 2008, unaffordability remains endemic. Shelter recently calculated for England that a household would need a £60,000 deposit and an annual salary of at least £55,900 to afford the average house price of £226,648. But most first-time buyers cannot even muster the £25,000 deposit typically needed to get a mortgage at affordable rates in the new era of risk-free lending. There is also a wider threat to the banking system – should repossessions keep rising and first-time buyers fail to get on the housing ladder, then banks will be left holding hundreds of thousands of devaluing properties, threatening their balance sheets and liquidity.
But the contradictions go much deeper. As more and more households join the queue for a home of their own – the numbers on local authority housing waiting lists have nearly doubled since 1997 to around five million – the combination of a dysfunctional housing market and a precarious economic outlook is wreaking havoc on new supply.
Since 2006-07, house building completions have slumped dramatically to their lowest levels for nearly 90 years. Increasing numbers of would-be owners are thus remaining in the private rental sector. This is causing demand to outstrip supply in many parts of the country, not least London where over the past year rents have soared by 7.3 per cent and will soon hit £1,000 per month on average.
Around 10 per cent of all rent is unpaid or late. Companies specialising in helping landlords to evict tenants say that evictions relating to rent arrears rose by 12 per cent in 2010 compared with 2009.
Rising food and energy bills, falling incomes, increased economic insecurity and the associated reduced access to credit mean for growing numbers of people a weekly battle to keep a roof over their heads. Shelter believes that more than two million people used their credit card to pay their mortgage or rent during 2010, an increase of almost half on the previous year. No wonder homelessness and rough sleeping are on the rise again.
The coalition’s housing nightmare
If things are bad now, the coalition government is about to make them a whole lot worse. Top of the bill are the draconian cuts and changes to housing benefit (see Red Pepper, Feb/Mar 2011). Private tenants will be hardest hit, especially households in inner London and other high-cost rental areas who will be displaced to the urban periphery in their tens of thousands because they won’t be able to afford the rent.
Grant Shapps, the millionaire Conservative housing minister, summed up the coalition’s revanchist attitude to the urban poor to the Guardian back in October 2010: ‘Just because you are on housing benefit, that shouldn’t give you the ability to live somewhere, where if you are working and not on benefit you can’t. We’d all love to live in different areas, but I can’t afford to live on x street in y location. The housing benefit system has almost created an expectation that you could almost live anywhere, and that’s what has to stop.’
The government’s Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme, which enabled homeowners facing a loss of income to reduce their monthly mortgage payment for up to two years, was closed down in April. Inside Housing recently revealed that homeless ex-offenders in Nottinghamshire are being issued with tents and sleeping bags by the probation service because of government cuts.
More fundamentally, the coalition is declaring war on the most affordable and secure housing we have in the social rented sector. The small but symbolic return of new council housing in the dying days of the Labour government has been killed off, along with the previous model of government grant funding to support housing associations’ commercial borrowing to build social housing.
Enter stage right the coalition’s so-called ‘affordable rent’ scheme under which housing associations that want to build new housing will compete for a far smaller pot of subsidy and be allowed to (read: must) charge 80 per cent of local market rents. The government is also empowering all social landlords (including councils) to offer flexible two year tenancies to all new tenants. We are witnessing the death of social housing as we knew it. On top of this, the government is preparing to make squatting a criminal offence in England as in Scotland.
Origins of the crisis
We should be under no illusions about the coalition’s purpose – it is the return of what Ralph Miliband called ‘class war Conservatism’, this time with a Liberal face. But to understand fully what is going on here requires an historical perspective, which tells us three things vital to a politics of resistance.
First, the UK housing crisis did not originate in the boardroom of Lehman Brothers. It is, as Engels explained 140 years ago, an endemic feature of capitalism everywhere that it continually condemns significant numbers of people to housing misery, and periodically blows up into a wider crisis.
It was the catastrophic failure of private landlordism during the 19th and early 20th centuries that gradually impelled state intervention in the form of public housing. During the post-war era, a mixed economy of public and private house building helped to constrain the boom-bust cycle and replace the dominance of the private landlord with a mix of home ownership and council housing. The long-term withdrawal of local authorities from housebuilding has coincided with a highly volatile period of housing market instability, with no fewer than four boom-bust cycles since the early 1970s.
Second, the roots of the present housing crisis can be traced to the over-accumulation crisis of capital of the 1970s, which arguably gave birth to the evil twins of financialisation and neoliberalism. Expanding home ownership was vital for finding new sources of accumulation for finance capital. This is why neoliberalism made the privatisation of public housing in Britain its flagship policy, shutting down affordable and secure alternatives to the market and co-opting key sections of the working class into what Thatcher called ‘popular capitalism’.
All our eggs were placed in the home ownership basket, and it was the potent combination of extravagant lending, speculation and the financial commodification of housing that drove the market higher and higher. Mortgage securitisation – selling on mortgage debts of varying degrees of risk as investment bonds and using the capital to start the process again – generated the so-called ‘cheap and easy credit’ necessary to enable the poorer and more precarious sections of the working class to buy: the so-called ‘sub-prime market’. As the bubble grew, and competition between lenders intensified, those at the front-end of sub-prime lending responded with ever-riskier lending that was only sustainable if house prices continued to rise and interest rates remained low forever. They didn’t.
Third, New Labour fundamentally embraced the privatisation agenda and oversaw a disastrous decade of pro-market housing policies that only fuelled the problem. Now in opposition under Ed Miliband, the Labour Party is undergoing a housing policy ‘review’, but it is unlikely to move substantially away from its longstanding belief in home ownership and housing market wealth, nor its misguided faith in a market-dominated approach to providing affordable housing.
Building a movement
We urgently need to resist the coalition’s current housing onslaught, yet resistance has so far been slow to take off. A new housing coalition has been launched called Housing Emergency, which involves Defend Council Housing with a number of trade union and housing groups, including the Christian body Housing Justice, and the more community-based direct action of London Coalition Against Poverty (see www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk). It aims to bring grass-roots pressure to bear on MPs and councillors in opposing a raft of government measures.
Naturally, Housing Emergency faces real obstacles to mobilising outright mass resistance, such as the weakness of the tenants’ movement, the lack of support from official tenants’ bodies and housing charities and the government’s clever stigmatisation of housing benefit claimants and social housing tenants. On the tactical front, pressurising MPs and councillors is going to achieve very little unless targeted directly at bringing down the coalition, and much of the legislation is already through.
But what the campaign really lacks is a genuine cross-tenure approach that mobilises around every aspect of housing precarity – and that includes homeowners in mortgage arrears or being repossessed. Individual home ownership (and mortgage-bondage) might form an essential pillar supporting capitalism, but when a household is repossessed for failing to meet mortgage payments or is compulsory purchased by the state to make way for a new housing or commercial development, we should fight to defend the homeowner. Commodification and displacement, not tenure, should be our enemy.
Perhaps the anti-cuts movement’s lack of inspiring alternatives to decommodify the provision of a decent, secure, affordable home partly explains why some housing activists appear more inclined to take advantage of the ‘big society’ agenda than resist it. The opportunities for genuine community ownership and control being floated as part of the localism bill might be limited, but they are attractive to people looking to generate more co-operative housing schemes.
Co-ops have long been advocated by some socialists and anarchists as a superior housing alternative to the market than what the writer Colin Ward called the ‘municipal serfdom’ of state housing. In the past decade, the potential of community land trusts (CLTs) to create affordable, secure housing has become increasingly attractive. Popularised in the USA and gaining ground in rural Britain, a CLT is a community-controlled organisation that owns the freehold of land and thus controls land use in perpetuity. By taking land out of the private property market, CLTs stop speculative and inflationary forces driving up property prices and rents for the existing community. At the same time any increase in value (or equity growth) stays with the local community and does not becomes private profit. Communities can therefore, in theory at least, build their own permanently affordable housing geared to individual income levels and available across all tenures.
While we should embrace, not fear, the creation of non‑hierarchical, directly democratic, and collective forms of housing, I seriously doubt whether CLTs can create real housing alternatives to the market on the scale and timeframe required. Given their desire for community control, the length of time it takes to get a CLT off the ground and the need for private borrowing to build, they appear best suited to very small residential developments favouring those on above-average incomes.
Proponents of CLTs openly acknowledge that their favoured approach depends almost entirely on the discounted sale or gifting of public assets while private property itself remains untouched. The fear is that proponents of CLTs and co-ops will side with the privatising state when it attacks council housing in order to unlock housing land for community ownership. Public housing might be an imperfect and corrupted commons, but it has protected people against private landlordism, and guaranteed tenants much lower rents and much higher housing rights and protections than the private market. There is no guarantee that CLTs will do this.
Resisting commodification
We thus need to find a way of building a housing movement that simultaneously resists the commodification of housing and its consequences, and creates alternative forms of decommodified housing without undermining what we have already got. Following the proposals of Peter Marcuse for the US context, at one level this would be a movement demanding radical reforms that would seek to ameliorate the effects of the housing crisis and tackle its root causes.
These would include: a moratorium on all evictions, repossessions, compulsory purchases, privatisations, demolitions, and benefit cuts; the right of home owners to sell their homes at a fair value to the local authority in return for security of tenure as tenants in their existing homes; full funding for the existing public housing stock to be refurbished and maintained at a decent standard; and stronger rent controls in all sectors to bring down the cost of housing and undermine speculation. A land value tax might also be useful here.
Because such measures will be resisted by capital and neoliberal politicians, the political strength of this housing movement will depend on two core attributes. First, its ability to bring together public tenants, homeowners, private renters and the homeless around a shared agenda to build at every scale a broad-based campaign for affordable, secure, dweller-controlled housing regardless of tenure. And second, the creation of non-market alternatives – whether using the existing legal apparatus or through extra-legal activities – in the here and now that provide people with degrees of security from eviction or repossession.
No single tenure or housing model should be given preference but a key principle must be that no initiative should undermine any existing provision of affordable housing or the ability of people to stay in their homes and neighbourhoods. Empty or misused private land and property could be occupied to provide free squatted housing that would be defended from repossession attempts.
Existing homeowners, meanwhile, looking for more collective ways of living together, could sell their homes to a new housing cooperative, swapping their existing mortgages for rents that build up an equity stake in the now collectively-owned asset. Significantly, these homes could no longer be bought and sold in an anonymous competitive market place, creating a collective shield against the speculative and competitive forces driving up the high and inflating prices in the private housing market. If such a model could be generalised to the point that it had critical mass in any defined geographical neighbourhood, it could play a huge role in regulating the private housing market, and in turn, the enormous cost of housing.
These actions to decommodify and socialise public and private housing cannot by themselves mean the end of capitalism and thus the end of the housing question. But the process of tenants mobilising for community control is an essential part of building an anti-capitalist movement, creating social relationships, providing examples of what a society based on use-value could be like and helping to create the social and moral basis for a movement to bring that society into existence.

Roads to freedom

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:05:50 +0000

Observe a main road into any British city at rush hour, and the queues sum up what’s wrong with the way we currently organise society. Long lines of polluting, energy-guzzling individual vehicles designed for speeds in excess of legal limits, travelling no faster than a bicycle or horse. Most have only one occupant. The drivers don’t look happy; they are picking their noses, texting, talking on phones, listening to music, staring out of the window, honking, muttering. Although they may not realise it they are inhaling concentrated pollution through air conditioning systems. Many are overweight or obese, due to physical inactivity; all are sitting in classic repetitive strain poses making tiny movements while their bodies remain rigid.
What about the people making the ‘right’ choices? Those in buses are only too often caught in the same queues. They pay heavily for the privilege: bus travellers, like train travellers, are seeing fares rise well above inflation again, while total motoring costs are in long-term decline. Pedestrians and people waiting at bus stops breathe in petrol and diesel fumes and struggle to cross the carriageway between the stop-starting cars.
Cyclists are frequently consigned to tiny cycle lanes carved out of nearside motor traffic lanes; as well as being unpleasant these place cyclists at risk of being hit by left-turning motor traffic. And where are all the children? They aren’t playing in the streets (categorised as ‘dangerous behaviour’ in the road injury Stats19 database). Often, they will be driven to school.
Britain is still suffering the effects of decades of prioritising the car. The Buchanan Report (Traffic in Towns), bête noire of the environmental movement, makes this clear. Back in the 1960s Buchanan was in fact honest about the future impact of the car on the city. He said planners had a choice: they should either bulldoze historic cities to accommodate mass car ownership or keep our small-scale historic city designs and dramatically restrict car use. In the end, they did a little of both, with the dystopian results Buchanan predicted.
Unpleasant alternatives
Alternatives to the car are now often expensive, unpleasant and/or inconvenient, particularly outside London. Our toxic property market has helped turn swathes of the country into commuter belts, with long-distance travel built into people’s lifestyles. As epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett argue, hugely unequal societies, like Britain, are hostile and frightened societies. The car appears more attractive when the streets are frightening, when strangers appear not as ‘friends you haven’t yet met’ but as potential threats. It is a symbol of separation and of ‘safety’ achieved through arming yourself.
Motor vehicles do not kill and maim on an equal opportunities basis. Children living in poor areas are at higher risk of road injury than children living in richer areas. In common with older and disabled people, children are disadvantaged by car-dominated societies; they can’t see over 4x4s, easily circumnavigate pavement parking, or cross junctions in the short time allowed. ‘Vulnerable road users’ are blamed for the violence that they experience; in the ‘Tales of the Road’ campaign the government tells children it’s their fault if they are injured or killed if they don’t wear bright clothing. Car-dominated planning effectively disables and excludes large numbers of people.
The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition seems to believe that in the long run electric vehicles will save us. Electric vehicles can improve local air quality but they won’t improve road safety, equalise access to the streets, make us more physically active or cut congestion. And given how we currently source electricity, they will be largely carbon-powered.
There is no technical fix; social change is needed. But persuading people to change their travel behaviour is only likely to be successful on a large scale if public transport, walking and cycling are made more pleasant, more convenient, more convivial and more affordable than driving. This is not usually the case in Britain today – although driving is frequently stressful and unpleasant, it is often seen as the ‘least worst’ option.
Humanising transport
Making transport in cities work differently requires creating streets for people rather than cars, prioritising human-scale transport. This would encourage walking and cycling, which generate the greatest social, health, and environmental benefits, with public transport widely used for longer journeys. Making public transport affordable and accessible is important, and Britain’s bureaucratised and privatised hotch-potch hinders this. However, we already offer free bus travel for older people, which has been shown to have wider social benefits, enabling people to socialise with others in their communities. In Belgium, the town of Hasselt has had a zero-fare bus policy since 1997, paid for out of municipal and Flemish taxes. The additional municipal cost is around 1 per cent of the city budget.
Despite the power of the automobile lobby, cities across the world have been made more liveable through the redistribution of space. In Bogotà, Colombia, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa saw curbing the car as an equalities issue, building political support on that basis. Streets were re-allocated to give more space to rapid bus transit, pedestrians and cyclists. Copenhagen in Denmark prioritised cycling in many city streets (see page 56), and more than a third of journeys to work are now by bicycle.
In the Netherlands several decades of planning for cycling, from high-quality infrastructure to financial incentives, has led to more than a quarter of all journeys being made by bike. One promising if currently highly corporatised initiative in the UK is public bike hire. Such schemes can help turn the bicycle into an accessible form of public transport shared between citizens, making it less of a specialised and ‘sporty’ activity.
In the UK the city with the most sustainable transport is London, where public transport use is high and car ownership low. Reasons include land-use and planning factors such as access to local shopping facilities, limited availability of land for car parking, and relatively short journeys to work that can by made by bicycle or public transport. For transport to be made more sustainable it requires thinking far more broadly than just about ‘transport’, but about how people live their lives and what they need to do day-to-day.
Utopian schemes
Utopian ideals and plans continue to inspire campaigners. These include Situationist city plans, produced by groups such as Amsterdam’s ‘Provos’, who proposed dramatically restricting car access to the city and leaving thousands of ‘White Bicycles’ freely available for city residents to use. Writers from Walter Benjamin to Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau have celebrated the potential of walking and wandering to disrupt top-down city plans. Resistance to top-down planning is constant, even if often fragmented and unspoken – inscribed as footprints in the grass where pedestrians follow ‘desire lines’ rather than official detours.
But planning is not the enemy per se; there is always planning even if it’s hidden and privatised. While the car is a symbol of corrosive hyper-individualism, the car-system depends on massive public and private investment. It represents the organised and expensive control of the many by the few, creating inhuman environments that generate the need or desire to drive. City residents regularly resist this by attempting to humanise their streets and stop them becoming mere corridors for through traffic, often in the face of state indifference or hostility.
Finally, we should remain critical of claims to city sustainability. Gentrified city centres where the affluent walk, cycle, and take taxi journeys might be supported by sprawling, impoverished suburbs where the poor are reliant on long and unpleasant bus journeys to get to town. So promoting walking, cycling, and public transport needs to be linked to an equalities agenda, where all can participate in these modes. This can form part of a new utopian vision of cities for people, what we might call ‘planning for wandering’ – designing cities so that people of all ages and abilities can easily and pleasurably get around by foot, by bicycle, or public transport.

Out of our space!

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:03:11 +0000

The past decade has seen more construction in Britain than at any time since the post-war period, when the tower blocks and arterial roads of the 1950s and 1960s sliced through cities and communities, giving planning a bad name forever after.
Today, More London, Regents Place, Kings Place and what promises to be the biggest of all, Westfield Stratford City, are just a few of the landmark projects characterising the urban landscape in London. This was the architecture of post-industrial New Labour, which has witnessed regeneration projects, large and small, take over every town and city in Britain. Outside London, Liverpool One, Cabot Circus in Bristol and Highcross in Leicester put their indelible mark on those cities.
As the foundations for these schemes were laid, what passed almost without notice is that these places would also begin to change our public life and public culture, removing large parts of the city, including the streets, from a genuinely public realm and handing them over to private companies. These would own and control the entire area, policing it with private security and round-the-clock surveillance. The consequence has been the creation of a new environment characterised by high security, ‘defensible’ gated architecture and strict rules and regulations governing behaviour.
The point of all these regulations and high security is, apparently, to make places cleaner and safer and to address the problem of soaring fear of crime, which is among the highest in Europe. Despite continuous statistics showing that crime, including violent crime, is falling, people simply don’t believe it, with 80 per cent of Britons fearing crime is on the up.
In my book, Ground Control, I argue that it is this new city, with its security, controls and ultimately undemocratic nature that is the problem rather than the solution, undermining trust between people and increasing fear. It is also creating sterile, strangely similar places devoid of local character, where even innocent activities such as taking photographs are forbidden, not to mention handing out political leaflets, busking without permission or selling the Big Issue.
Private ownership
During the 1980s, Canary Wharf and the Broadgate Centre, the two emerging finance centres in east London, were virtually the only high security, privately owned and privately controlled places that functioned like this. They were also exceptional places – financial districts, created in response to the deregulation of the financial markets and ‘big bang’ of 1986, with its demands for big banks and large trading floors. Now, a generation later, what began specifically to serve the needs of business has become the standard model for the creation of every new place in towns and cities across the country.
Alongside the ‘big bang’ architecture of Canary Wharf and Broadgate, out-of-town shopping centres such as Meadowhall, just outside Sheffield, and the MetroCentre in Gateshead were the architectural signature of the 1980s. They were encouraged by Thatcher’s loosening of the planning system – a policy that was later reversed because of the damaging effect it had on high streets. What has happened over the past decade is that, to find a way around planning restrictions, shopping centres moved wholesale into the centre of cities, creating open-air property complexes that also own and control the streets, squares and open spaces of the city.
In fact, the streets of London, and other cities, have not always been public. During the early 19th century, before the advent of local government and local democracy, cities such as London were parcelled up and owned by a small group of private landlords. These included the Earl of Bedford, who controlled Covent Garden, and the Duke of Westminster, who ran the whole of northern Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico.
These places include some of the finest Georgian and early Victorian squares, but what we don’t see today are the hundreds of gates, bars and posts, along with the private security forces that were employed by the estates to keep out those who did not belong there. Following growing public outrage, which paralleled the rise in local democracy and was reflected by two major parliamentary inquiries, control over the streets was passed over to local authorities and gates removed. Since then it has been common for local authorities to ‘adopt’ the streets and public spaces of the city which means that whether or not they actually own them, they control and run them.
Now this process is being reversed, alongside a huge shift in land ownership, away from public places and buildings in public ownership and towards the creation of these new estates. The London mayor’s guidance, published last year and supporting public places remaining public, is a first step in halting this process. But it is uncertain how much impact it will have, particularly as Westfield Stratford City and the Olympic complex – which received planning permission before the guidance was out – will be privately owned estates.
Authoritarian environments
While more security is supposed to make us safer, it removes our personal and collective responsibility for our own safety. It replaces ‘natural surveillance’ – the ordinary interaction between strangers that keeps places safe – with a more authoritarian environment, which only increases fear and dilutes trust between people. Fear and trust correlate directly with happiness, which is perhaps one reason why levels of unhappiness in the UK are double those in continental Europe, where the culture of security is far less developed and cities remain more open, free and democratic.
Denmark has a similar crime level to Britain, attributed to a binge drinking culture, urbanisation and a large population of young people, which both countries have in common. That’s where the similarities end because Denmark is also the happiest country in the world, according to the World Values Survey, with high levels of trust and low levels of fear. The security conscious, defensible enclaves taking over our cities and our streets are anathema.
But while Stratford City will go ahead, bailed out by the government, the property market model that fuelled the creation of these places has collapsed. Although the Olympic developments have been saved, a great many other large schemes have halted. In Bradford, for example, Westfield planned another large privatised part of the city but the site is now just a hole in the ground. This is one of many such around the country.
Shared space
While the ‘boom-bust’ economics of the model have been hard hit, ideas from Europe around the use of ‘shared space’, which has much in common with ‘natural surveillance’, have begun to take off in London. And another question increasingly heard is whether in today’s resource constrained environment we can afford all the costly security that goes hand in hand with the expansion of privately-owned places. In that context the mayor’s guidance seems ever more relevant.
At the same time less showy schemes, which remain genuinely public, have begun to come on-stream in London. Windrush Square in Brixton in South London is just one such example where it has needed no heavy handed security presence to transform central Brixton, an area long-notorious for drugs and crime, into a thriving public square.
In Edinburgh community groups are fighting to establish the Canongate Literature Centre on a site that is no longer being developed. The proposals, for a publishing, literacy and writers’ centre, would include communal meeting, exhibition and performance space and affordable offices for community enterprises. But despite overwhelming local support the local authority remains reluctant to sanction a scheme that places community at its heart, holding out instead for a return to ‘business as usual’ and the creation of yet another privatised consumer space. Saddest of all is that in the stalemate between community and council the place lies empty and unused.
But at least alternatives are now under discussion. A few years ago it seemed certain that the private provision of public space, calling to mind a pre-democratic approach to the city, was the only option on the table for all regeneration around the country. Worse, it appeared to be taking place almost by stealth with few people aware of what was happening, literally beneath their feet. Today there is at last a debate and some real alternatives on the table. It is not just a question of public versus private but of the democratic nature of the city.

High hopes

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 04:59:48 +0000

Architecture, of all art forms, is the one most tied up with the state, corporations and large-scale clients. It’s capital-intensive, it involves the large-scale use of specialist skilled and unskilled manual labour to produce and is frequently very high-tech. Any considerations about the uses of architecture to help create an egalitarian or even anti-authoritarian society have to start with the grim fact that the power that builds, builds its power.
Experiments in freedom
There have been plenty of attempts to create architectures that don’t rely on the division of labour and the massive investment of capital or technology – and they’ve often produced interesting, if inconclusive results. In the reaction to the massive global redevelopment that followed the second world war, there were a few attempts at producing what could be called an anarchist architecture. Sometimes this was at the level of theory, as with Anarchitecture, a group in 1970s’ New York that attempted a largely imaginary architecture of chaos and accident, inspired by various ‘disasters’ caused by failed construction and dereliction.
There was Bernard Rudofsky’s hugely influential book Architecture without Architects, which catalogued forms of ‘vernacular’ building all over the globe, from the Mediterranean to south-east Asia. These were self-built, accidental townscapes and villages that somehow seemed to retain some kind of order and form. A few took from Rudofsky the notion that this pre-modern construction could be revived and continued. But the results in the gigantic conurbations and industrial landscapes where the majority of us live were always going to be more a matter of formal imitation on the part of architects, rather than office clerks and electricians getting busy with the wattle and daub.
The architect Walter Segal got further than most, with the self-build kits he designed for non-architects to construct their own houses, with local council sponsorship, in Lewisham, south London. These ‘Segal houses’ were an ‘experiment in freedom’, as one post-modernist slogan had it – but, outside of their innovative techniques and democratic promise, they looked oddly like stripped-down versions of mock-Tudor suburbia, low-rise and low-density. An entire city replanned like this would be so dispersed and sprawling as to create havoc with public infrastructure, like any other piece of suburbia. So if we can’t build our own, is there any way that architecture – controlled and bankrolled as it is by bosses and at best bureaucrats – can really assist with the creation of a new society?
The answer to this could lie in two large council estates in northern, industrial English cities, built in the post-war decades. Irrespective of the 30 years of glib scorn they have faced, the modernist estates that were built en masse after 1945 were the best working-class housing this country has ever had. These council houses, maisonettes and towers were bigger inside, following the rigorous ‘Parker-Morris’ standards (named after a 1961 government report), were largely better built, and were, at least initially, more popular than the overwhelming majority of the back‑to-backs and two-up two-downs they replaced. The refusal to build more like them since the 1980s has created a terrible shortage of working class housing and a scramble for rented accommodation on which the likes of the BNP have gleefully capitalised, blaming immigrants rather than the failure to build.
For the most part, though, their provision and management wasn’t particularly democratic, at least not in the strict sense. They were in the grey area of the post-war compromise, where that which couldn’t make a profit (health, transport and so on) was run publicly, with most else still private. For a brief moment, housing, now an almost mythical cornerstone of the Anglo-Saxon casino economy, was wrested partly out of the hands of speculators, landlords and estate agents. Residents, though, seldom got much of a choice of where and in what they would be moved after their dilapidated old housing was demolished.
The first run of redevelopments faced fierce criticism for breaking up working-class communities, either in the form of the low-density, vague, indistinct new towns such as Stevenage and Hatfield, or through creating Platonic, rationalist landscapes of towers in open space in place of pre-existing networks of social life and solidarity. There have been two famous, avant-garde, modernist attempts to change this, to create viable social spaces – and they have faced very different fates.
Streets in the sky
Park Hill, in Sheffield, was the first attempt to solve this problem. Like any other post-war redevelopment scheme, it was the product of emergency – the need to rebuild a teeming, crumbling slum of back-to-backs crowded above Sheffield’s Midland station. The key idea of the architects, J L Womersley, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, was that there should be some way of building into the new estate the solidarity, bustle and cohesiveness that was so often lost when the unsanitary, unfit for human habitation housing of these areas was destroyed. Their solution was the development of a very old idea – ‘deck-access’, the pedestrian walkways that led into flats in hundreds of blocks built since the 19th century – into that new social space.
The ‘streets in the sky’, as they were called, were wide areas running through each of the estate’s blocks and interconnecting them. The estate was built on a sharply sloping site, so the ‘streets’ were arranged so that you could walk onto them from ground level at one end, and could continue along until you were on the tenth storey without ever going up stairs. The ground level space, meanwhile, had shops, two schools, and no fewer than four pubs.
Nowadays, Park Hill’s attempt to create a working-class community in the sky is often described as ‘utopian’. It might well seem so at this distance, but this was not at all the architects’ intention – what they attempted was merely to create a viable, working piece of city. All evidence points to the fact that for Park Hill’s first few decades, this is exactly what it was. Like anywhere else, it had crime and solidarity, mundanity and expansive, awesome city-views, was hated by some and loved by others (although perhaps the emotions were more extreme in the latter case). Moreover, it was only one part of a larger effort in council housing across the city, taking advantage of the extraordinary Peak District topography in Sheffield; each hilltop estate was intended to relate to each other.
Initially, Sheffield City Council ran a housing exchange system, so that families could leave Park Hill for the low-rise suburban estate at Gleadless Valley, and single young people do the opposite. Given the fact that by the 1970s the majority of housing in the city was run by the council, this was easy to do. Yet today, if you visit Park Hill, you’ll find at one end a reclad, shiny block of luxury flats, at the other a bustling if dilapidated council estate, and in between, a huge swathe of dereliction. What happened?
What did for Park Hill was a combination of the mass unemployment that hit Sheffield in the 1980s, decimating the city to this day; and in the 1990s and 2000s, a Blairite council bitterly hostile to council housing. Thousands of council homes were demolished here as part of the ‘housing market renewal’ scheme in a failed attempt to stimulate demand and new building. Park Hill was given to a property developer, which nearly went bust halfway through stripping the block both of its original fabric and its residents. When finished, three quarters of it will be private housing, sold on the open market. This act of class cleansing is usually accompanied by a narrative of how the streets in the sky failed miserably. Yet if you walk around the inhabited part of the estate, you will find open doors, chairs left outside, and children playing in the streets. They’re just the wrong class of inhabitant.
Walls and bridges
So, for whatever reason, the attempt to design in solidarity and community here is being destroyed. Is there another example, a different model, which could manage to do the same things by different means?
Newcastle’s Byker estate, designed by a team led by Ralph Erskine, begun in 1969 and abandoned, unfinished, in 1981, has long been both an architectural and social cause celebre. Looked at coldly, it’s hard to see why. First, it’s a council estate, and a big one, the product of post-war comprehensive redevelopment involving the mass demolition of terraced housing – none of the ‘mixed tenure’ insisted upon by contemporary planning policies.
Second, it’s full of winding paths and walkways, some of them of concrete. There are no ‘streets’, not much in the way of defensible space. There are a lot of communal spaces – parkland, squares – which have no clear ownership. Architecturally, it’s hardly in keeping with the surroundings. It’s full of bright colours, abstract forms, and a very modernist sense of sublime scale. It’s as poor as it is iconic – it even had its very own famous crime case, the duct-living miscreant ‘Rat Boy’. Surely it should be being ‘decanted’ and filled with aspirational lofts and creative clusters by now?
It’s not too far, in fact, from Park Hill, but instead of its tenants being the object of class cleansing, they have just been given effective control over the estate, and the debt the estate has accrued over the years has been written off. Tory housing minister Grant Shapps has even hailed it as ‘the big society in action’. So what’s the difference?
When you walk round it, the immediate differences are of upkeep, planting and care, rather than architecture. The bright, inorganic colours of the original scheme are still respected; the communal areas are pretty, not scrubby; ill-considered and cheap later additions to the estate are conspicuous by their absence. It looks coherent, confident, totally modern.
The fact that it still feels optimistic here is a legacy of the extraordinary care taken in the planning and design of the estate. Residents were involved from the start. Development was famously incremental, with tenants’ reactions to each part influencing the next, and the architects lived and kept their office in the area, so that they were constantly in touch with the people for whom they were building.
The result is a great architectural variety, within its coherent palette of materials and details – an undulating ‘wall’ of multicoloured brick shelters the place from traffic noise. Inside, the wall becomes a long block of flats oddly redolent of Park Hill, but it curves around a variety of different terraces, squares and a couple of tower blocks. The spaces in between are lush, with lots of parkland, benches and odd little objects taken from the old demolished district.
By the 1980s Byker had attained in local hearsay as fearsome a reputation as any big estate. But somehow its original ideas haven’t gone away. The estate is now being run by a charitable body, controlled (in theory) by its tenants, which surely means that the practice of residents’ active participation in redevelopment that it ushered in has a real, and serious legacy. The irony is that the Byker approach is being hailed by the housing minister as the ideas that underpin it are being destroyed across the country.
This sort of giant, proud, confident inner city estate, keeping a working-class population in the centre of the city, is the very thing that the government’s housing benefit proposals will eradicate (not to mention it being the sort of single-class ‘ghetto’ that New Labour abhorred). Byker’s careful, slow, bespoke (and expensive) planning is also the antithesis of the coalition’s cheap and nasty enterprise zones and free schools.
Clearly, Shapps’ hailing of the place is not to be taken seriously – imagine the coalition apoplexy if people demanded more places like Byker – but it reminds us of something. Local authorities, which now present themselves as powerless emissaries of central government, were once able to make real, viable experiments in city planning for collectivity, solidarity and modernity. They could do so again. We could have whole cities like this, rather than a few embattled, isolated enclaves. But first, we’d have to stop seeing the state and democracy as eternal opponents.

Our right to the city

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 04:28:55 +0000

A tussle is taking place in Westminster politics over the word ‘progressive’. Conservatives are divided over whether to claim the word from the left as part of the detoxification of the Tory brand or denounce it as an anodyne cover for dubiously pinko sentiments. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg casts around for coalition policies to promote as progressive to try to deflect the flak from the decidedly anti-progressive spending cuts.
Internships, Clegg thus weakly proposes, should be subject to open interviews, not awarded to family friends. The grammar school boy should have the opportunity to enhance his CV too. The issue of payment is not broached. Yet this intervention is part of a wider agenda to recast ‘meritocracy’ as the acme of progressive ambition. No need for the redistribution of wealth here. In fact, no problem that the cuts are redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich, so long as a few of the poor themselves can be redistributed that way too.
The Labour Party is not immune to pouring meritocratic wine into ‘progressive’ bottles. The contradiction inherent in Labour’s need to re-engage its working class support, while still appealing to ‘the squeezed middle’ (best expressed in Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign oxymoron ‘aspirational socialism’), dovetails with the dominant culture of commodification. Even those genuinely seeking redistribution express little vision beyond enabling more people to privately buy their way out of material deprivation.
In choosing to focus on radical visions for our cities in this issue of Red Pepper, we are hoping to show that something more attractive, and more challenging to capitalism, is possible. In his important 2008 essay for New Left Review, ‘The Right to the City’, David Harvey wrote: ‘The right to the city is … a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation.’
This sense of collectivity in the way we live in the city is something we need desperately to reassert. Yet this is not just an ideological problem. The physical city has often been constructed in a way that reinforces an outlook framed by atomistic individualism. We peer out of our windows at the noise, pollution and physical danger of traffic. Our fear of crime has soared in a cityscape that is increasingly privatised and subject to surveillance (see Anna Minton, page 26). Individual home ownership guts our common interest in solving the housing crisis as homeowners hope for ever‑increasing property prices.
Yet alternatives exist. As Chiara Tornaghi shows (page 22), various embryonic urban agriculture projects can be starting points for reclaiming the commons while cutting down the environmental impact of our food and multiplying the public green space in our cities. The post-war period of building new social housing may not have been universally successful, but as Owen Hatherley points out (page 28) the architects and planners in those years often had a vision of building design as serving a higher social purpose. Not everyone will agree with the modernist result, but it’s clear that community, democracy and solidarity can all be built into the city, and with them quality of life.
Given where we start from however, building a new radical urbanism will not be easy. We are helped in some ways by the aftermath of the financial crisis. The neoliberal juggernaut has been slowed and with it the building frenzy throwing up private apartments, shopping complexes and the infrastructure of boutique lifestyles for the wealthy.
At the same time, the perennial crisis in housing has been exacerbated, leading to rising repossessions and homelessness. Any movement to claim the right to the city needs to tackle the housing question centrally. As Stuart Hodkinson argues (page 20), such a movement must start with the immediate issues around providing affordable housing but seek always to decommodify housing and move towards collective ownership and control. In doing so, it will inevitably encounter a whole range of other issues, from the redistribution of wealth to the power of multinationals to the problem of gentrification.
Recent events in Bristol, with the so-called ‘anti-Tesco riot’ in the Stokes Croft area, are illustrative of this wider battle over the character of city life. The issue is not limited to a single, if symbolic, supermarket branch, but encompasses a struggle over gentrification and the entry of major retailers into an area currently characterised by local shops – many catering to ethnic minority communities – squatted buildings and some inspiring non‑profit community and arts spaces (see RP Aug/Sep 2008).
This concentration of radical urbanism is relatively unusual, but it need not be so. Combined with a movement to fight urban inequality, and a strategy of reclaiming the commons in housing, public space and elsewhere, such spaces can provide both a better way to live and a thorough-going challenge to the priorities of the capitalist city.