The Measures Taken

The Plan: Totalitarian
The death of the street
Classification of Simple Speeds and Complex Speeds
Arrangements made to come to an agreement on imminent LAWS of machine civilisation, laws which can halt the menace of modern times
The mobilisation of the soil, in both cities and rural areas
Housing as a branch of the public services
The green city
The civilisation of the road replacing the civilisation of the railway
Landscaping the countryside
The radiant city
The radiant country
The twilight of money
The essential joys, satisfaction of psycho-physiological needs, collective participation, and individual liberty
The renaissance of the human body
Le Corbusier’s 14 principles of La Ville Radieuse, 1935

From the Radiant City to the City on Fire
In one of his perspicacious articles on the French riots, Lenin brings up an old chestnut on the ‘alienating’ effect of post-war architecture; on the remnants of the utopianism of Le Corbusier, and their becoming a setting for class warfare rather than the harmonious community theorists envisaged. This comes soon after the start of the demolition of the Aylesbury Estate in South London, which had the curious honour of being Europe’s largest housing scheme, in favour of low rise and presumably yellow-brick blocks. There are a few questions here though- if high rises are inherently unconducive to community, why are the cities of East Asia not hotbeds of anomie and unrest? If these housing schemes inherently create ghettos, then why is it so expensive to live in the Barbican or the Trellick Tower? And aside from this, surely there’s nothing less atomised than a community in revolt, in the rioters united against the police? But this isn’t to say that there’s not a great deal of truth in this critique.


Lenin’s piece is reminiscent of Jonathan Raban’s proto-punk urbanism in The Soft City, which attacked these theories back when they were still the orthodoxy of urban planners. The arguments are all rehearsed here- first of all, the planners are anti-urban, obsessively rationalist- a schematism ‘where a handful of watercolour humans, tapering from the shoulders down, flit their spidery way through an architecture so simple and gigantic that they cannot corrupt it.’ Along with this comes an argument, surprising when heard from socialists, that this attacks commerce, the high street. The post-war international style completed an ideological circuit from visionary collectivism to capitalist technocracy, writ large in the formidable featurelessness of the World Trade Center. In a 2003 piece in Area, Marshall Berman contrasts this top-down idealism with the direct democracy of the Athenian agora- ‘the WTC was an example of the kind of urbanism that tried to clear away the street…what they wanted was to clear the city of what Rudy Giuliani used to call ‘the pedestrian glut’’ Meanwhile, authentic democracy is shabby, unkempt, disordered… ‘Plato and Aristotle couldn’t stand it, but this is where the poets appeared and the politicians gave their speeches…both Plato and Aristotle had plans to break up the agora, as did the anonymous writer known as the Old Oligarch, who scandalised the agora, and said ‘you can’t tell the masters from the slaves.’ Everybody alike, all sloppy’

The Estates Stick up like Stacks
Even when their houses are whitewashed, the sky will be dark; devoid of joy they will tend to drink for excitement; they will go on deteriorating; and as to their children, the more of them grow up to manhood, the lower will be the average physique and the average morality of the coming generation.
Alfred Marshall, The Housing of the London Poor, 1884


At some point, a fusion of Utopianism and Marxism- let’s not forget that one of the Bauhaus’ aims was adapting William Morris’ theories for mass production- curdled, perhaps at some point in the 1950s- suddenly business wanted in; Nazi sympathiser and pioneer of architectural postmodernism Philip Johnson would sneer at functionalists who wanted to provide for ‘some proletarian superman of the future’. A thesis could be written about the failure of post-war planners to deliver the promised Radiant City. In Britain it could be dated from the defeat of Nye Bevan’s housing plans in the 1945 government. Bevan was always incredibly scathing about the tendencies of capitalist building towards the twee and the kitsch- he promised to wipe the slate clean after the 1930s’ ‘marzipan period’ and its ‘silly little bungalows’- as with Attlee’s slogan that ‘nothing is too good for the working man.’ After Bevan was replaced by the more pliant Hugh Dalton, British development would pivot on an uneasy dialectic between dystopian modernism and obscurantist new towns.

Despite this, the 1950s-70s’ ‘cities in the sky’ are in the first decade of the 21st century, along with Bevan’s NHS, the most visible remnants of British Socialism- one is still enormously popular, so much so that Thatcher and Blair’s attacks on it have to be veiled in fulsome tributes; the other something of an embarrassment. Michael Collins’ contrarian ‘biography’ of the English Working Class depicts the kitsch embellishments people would make to their flats on the Elephant and Castle as micro-resistances- ‘….instead of living behind the same cobalt-coloured door as all their neighbours, they were choosing their own, and maybe adding a pane of glass with a rain effect and a brass doorknob’. I’ve lived in a couple of what, with insight into their transient, experimental nature, Americans call ‘projects’ and Scots call ‘schemes’. One was the ‘Flower Estate’ (all the roads named after flowers!), built in the 1930s, on the edge of the city of Southampton. People had their own gardens. A few had timbers stuck here and there. It was overwhelmingly white, had a large skinhead contingent, and was the most psychotically violent place I’ve ever lived -including Brixton, for the record. The other was Northam Estate, a flagship development next to the by then barely used docks, built in the early 60s- singled out for special praise for its rationality and order by Nikolaus Pevsner. It was all there, the pointless patches of grass, the windswept precincts and signifiers for urban anomie. It’s quite friendly.

Collapsing New People
Architecture is the weakest of the arts, in so far as it is the most dependent on the collective sensibility of the period…if the world would only build temples to machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect.
Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design, 1919

There is another afterlife to these structures, one shown by the success of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards, or the belated campaign to save Portsmouth’s Tricorn Centre, which runs parallel to the revaluation of Penguin paperback designs, or of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; a savouring of their futurism and optimism, their refusal of the customary English torpor. Nostalgia against Nostalgia. The ‘left-wing melancholy’ behind such a project of conservation was most poignant on 1471’s ‘Arndale Britain Revisited’, in which the original sites were usually privatised, or had become shopping centres, or in some way lost their original otherness. England came back from it’s post-war retreat in the 1980s, with Prince Charles as its architectural night in shining armour, in glorious victory against ‘Britain seen as a building, forward looking country, a country that still had faith in progress….’ ‘These were postcards, not of past glories, of statues and monuments, but of a modern, progressive Britain, of motorways, technical colleges and holiday camps. The postcards span a period, at my best guess, roughly 1955 to 1978. An England dead and gone.’

I was pleased when reading The Soft City to find that a typical Radiant City was, in fact, about a mile or two up the road from where I was born- in the Millbrook district of Southampton, described by Raban as ‘a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people. Laid out on a sloping plain, it has 50 acres of grassland at its centre, a great, useless balding green space of sickly turf and purely symbolic value. What one sees at first are the tower blocks, 24 storeys high, of pre-stressed concrete and glass, known, I am told, as ‘slab block/scissors type’ should anyone want to order more. The roads are service roads- they loop purposelessly around the estate in broad curves that conform to no contours. There is no street life in them…the stay at home mother in a tower-block flat can be as alone as an astronaut marooned in space: indeed, the sociological space in which she moves is almost as uncharted.’ Even in the late 90s, this desolation hadn’t lessened any- though the most feared area was in fact the low-rise 80s red-brick cul de sacs nearer the centre, which lumbered under the wonderfully 80s Labour Council name of Mandela Way. 1981, or Broadwater Farm, or the Paris Banlieue today, would partially give the lie to his last point- ‘tower block planning, by driving people into disconnected private cells, reliably insures against insurrections. Bad neighbours make for a certain kind of social security; Millbrook breeds vandals, but not revolutionaries.’- and rioters are usually somewhere between the two. But there is an undeniable ring of truth to the claim that ‘we should not fall for the assumption that utopias are usually the work of optimists. Far more often they are thinly veiled cries of rage and disappointment.’ These developments, even to their aficionados, are defined mainly by their failure. Perhaps it’s here that I should declare again a personal interest…

Everyone on Park Hill came in Unison at Four Thirteen AM

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us back to the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary.
In Chirico’s paintings (during his arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time.
Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, Internationale Situationniste 1, 1958


In Southampton in the late 1990s, there was very obviously a war going on, and our side was losing. We would walk along Western Esplanade in torrential rain, where on one side two psuedo-Mies blocks were wrapped in plastic like Laura Palmer, readied for their imminent detonation; on the other side, a vast ‘leisure complex’ was under construction, filling in the spaces left by the city’s industry, still not recovered from the blow inflicted on it by Heathrow. This huge development would take over the entire Western half of the City Centre; in a significant irony, at the same time the redevelopment of the residential inner city, St Mary’s, was being botched, riven with backhanders and corporate favours- eventually it would be chopped to pieces in a manner that Robert Moses would be proud of. (this little episode is recounted in George Monbiot’s Captive State). In 1997, this process was only underway, and the city could still be reimagined- the twee arches, the faux-limestone, the endless shopping centres could be pretended away by concentrating on the clean lines, the ferocious concrete, the sheer despotic size of developments like Millbrook, or the pugnacious 20 storey tower block Shirley Towers, like a middle finger stuck up at the squat Victoriana and Mock Tudor of SO15. The delight when the brutalist flats by the Central Station were listed, in the teeth of opposition from the City Council and local press.

The record that obsessed us at the time was on Pulp’s 1993 Intro, a 10 minute fantasia called ‘Sheffield: Sex City’, in which every contour and line of the post-industrial city is infused with eroticism- opening with a list of Sheffield suburbs intoned with sublime sensual relish, and eventually coming to a climax of utopian urbanist carnality, as ‘everyone on Park Hill came in unison at 4.13am, and the whole block fell down’. Park Hill, with its endless walkways and Constructivist/Brutalist intersections and permutations, exemplifies the truly visionary potentialities of the post-war moment perhaps better than any other structure, it’s vaulting over-ambitiousness almost ensuring that it’s inhabitants never had to touch the ground. To sexualise such a structure isn’t much of a rhetorical leap-one thinks of the geometries of Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, in which the intersection of two walls is as erotic as that of two legs. A slight reimagining of the remnants of the past and you have an incredible commingling of space, sexuality and socialism.

By the mere act of walking we were perpetuating some kind of offence against Southampton- the new order would be totally impenetrable to the pedestrian. The structures which would, by the end of the century, become ‘West Quay’, ‘Western Esplanade Shopping Park’ and ‘Leisure World’ were the revenge of the suburbia of Hampshire and its Cars against the persistently Labour-voting City in its midst, and they killed it stone dead. In 1959 Guy Debord wrote in Internationale Situationniste that ‘the breaking up of the dialectic of the human milieu in favour of automobiles masks its irrationality under psuedopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society’. The reconquest of the city and the architecture that accompanies it attempt to abolish lived time, to do away with history, as can be seen by the pallid historical eclecticism of the buildings that encase the shops and leisure facilities. Just round the corner from West Quay’s looming frontage is its car park, tucked in behind medieval walls, though totally visible to pedestrians (who are of course irrelevant). Here, bizarrely, functionalism survives- a shell of minimalist concrete contours, with no attempt at gloss or decoration- the not so hidden reverse.