Oct 11, 2005 - learn what it means to live in a highrise building in Red Road. ... highrise or the multi-storey flat, which today for several reasons has once ...
Highrise Housing as a Building Event
This paper was presented at the ESRC seminar “Housing Research and Science Technology Studies” – Department of Geography, University of Durham, 11th October 2005
Ignaz Strebel, Jane M. Jacobs and Stephen Cairns
AHRC Highrise Project Geography / Architecture Institute of Geography The University of Edinburgh Drummond Street Edinburgh EH8 9XP
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Abstract Multi-storey or highrise housing in the UK is currently at a crossroad, and many Housing Authorities have to decide whether to refurbish existing multi-storey flats or to demolish them and invest in entirely new housing stock. Our wider research project on ‘Modernist Highrise Housing’ locates itself in this context and seeks to contribute to debates on urban sustainability, density and optimal land use, as well as pressure for access to affordable housing in cities. In this paper we wish to bring into view the technological life of the highrise. Technology does not stand outside of the question of highrise living (as a ‘cause’ or ‘solution’ to its quality) it is entirely entangled with it. We therefore suggest understanding highrise living as a building event including various agents. We argue that the ability of a highrise building to ‘hold together’ and provide a satisfactory home for its residents or to ‘fall apart’ and become unliveable – sometimes even demolished – is dependent upon the extraordinary and ordinary dramas of associations between people and technologies. We are going to show examples of empirical data collected at different scenes where such associations are created, reorganised and sometimes given up.
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Prologue “Oh yes, garden gates. I have a theory... I could write you a book about garden gates as well. That’s another one of my obsessions at the moment. [I have to deal with them daily.] I just want to get rid of the messes of my hands. […] Because… how the way gates are made. I have probably five hundred on my walk. This is not a joke. [I am a gate expert.] I hate them bloody things. Two to three dozen of the doors open only thirty degrees; because they go straight on steps. I am not joking. Why are there steps? They frequently jam. […] You try to pull them and they spring back in your hand. I have actually spilled blood over mail because of it. And people are complaining about me not shutting their gates. […] I mean literally I would say three quarters of all the gates are not hung in properly. They are not properly put up and fall into pieces. They are just the greatest pieces of sloppiness that I know” (Interview, Resident Red Road).
Introduction This extract is taken from an interview with a resident of the Red Road multi-storey flats in Glasgow. Gavin1 lives in one of the 25-31 storey tower blocks, which Glasgow Housing Association has announced to be demolished within the next ten years. During the interview we learn what it means to live in a highrise building in Red Road. The notorious problems of maintaining the housing estate, the dissolution of the Tenants Association after stock transfer, problems with asbestos, the half-hearted upgrading of the blocks in the 1980s, the housing of asylum seekers in the 1990s, former attempts of Glasgow City Council to transform one of the blocks into a student residence, the caretaking system, CCTV, the demolition and regeneration plans of GHA. At the end of the interview, when we asked Gavin about his personal feelings towards living in a highrise building, he tells us about why he likes to live in a multi-storey flat. He is contrasting this housing experience with that which he has had as a postman on his daily route in a suburban neighbourhood in Glasgow. As highrise researchers we were amused about the way Gavin contrasted his highrise living environment with this unique experience of the ‘house and garden’ housing form. Gavin’s garden gate experience is a remarkable and pithy account of a negative encounter with the seemingly universally loved ‘house and garden’ housing option. This reflections offer us a distinctive way to position the purpose of this talk: Whilst housing in general is usually framed in terms of policy-making, social categorisation and cultural values, we wish to understand housing also as a technical matter. Technology does not stand outside of the question of the quality of life in housing (as either a ‘cause’ or a ‘solution’), we argue that technology and the built form is entirely entangled with it. In our AHRC funded research project we are dealing with the specific built form of the residential highrise or the multi-storey flat, which today for several reasons has once again come to public attention: First, there is an awareness of the failure of state-sponsored modernist highrise housing. Such Highrises in the UK are falling apart, they are stigmatised, not functioning properly and Housing
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We have changed all names of interview partners
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Authorities are having to decide whether to refurbish existing multi-storey flats or to demolish them and invest in entirely new housing stock. Demolition is often the chosen option. In Glasgow, the city’s original stock of around 250 modernist multi-storeys is mainly intact but rumours circulate, that half of the highrises, built from the 1950s onwards, will be gone in around 20 years. Edinburgh Evening News has recently polemicized that with ownership transfer of the city’s council houses to a housing association four thousand homes will be demolished and replaced by ten thousand new mostly low-rise homes. Gracemount and Sighthill highrises are especially threatened by these decisions (Edwards 2005). In a contradictory vein, UK cities are under pressure to deliver affordable housing in central areas. Multi-storey flats are a potential solution for such high demand for dwelling spaces, which is created through centrally located service industries: hospitals, call centres, IT Firms, for example (Transport, Local Government and the Regions 2002). Third, Housing Associations are not only concerned with questions of alternative uses of highrise buildings, but they see also that today highrise living has become fashionable again. Whilst demolition decisions are taken, private highrise developments spring up at prestigious central sites such as on the Clyde in Glasgow or the harbour front in Leith. Under these circumstances our research project re-considers this housing type. It contributes to a better understanding of the residential highrise, its historical trajectories, current lived circumstances, and specific built and technological features.
Building Events The scholarship on technological and material aspects of housing has taken many forms. The theoretically and methodologically disparate fields of, for example, ‘housing architecture’, ‘household technologies’, ‘rational homes’ or ‘intelligent homes‘ scrutinize technological aspects of housing in one way or the other. Earlier versions of such scholarship privileged technological and material aspects of the built and designed environment, often requiring it to enable and facilitate practices and forms of living private spaces. In more recent studies now appearing in academic journals such as Housing Studies, Housing Theory and Society and Urban Studies the technical and formal qualities of housing and its inherent technologies serve more and more as base for research concerned with meaning and the social construction of housing (Jacobs, Kemeny, & Manzi 2004). An example might be Glenndining’s and Muthesius’ remarkable Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland and Wales (1994). The book shares with older stories of housing architecture an interest in a building’s physical presence: its format and shape, architectural style and construction detail. However, the authors reveal the ‘sociogram’ (Latour 1987) which lays behind the architectural form and the technological infrastructure of the residential highrise. In the case of Glasgow, for example, highrise typologies, technological features and local construction practices act as proof of evidence for a specific Glaswegian and Scottish ‘rage for modernity’ (Gaonkar 1999) in the replacement of the nineteenth century tenement city. There is now a growing range of scholars whose work engages with a more symmetrical treatment of the social and the material world or what Latour would probably call the ‘technogram’ of housing and housing architecture (Latour 1987). Applied to the housing question
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a technogram would allow to bring ‘things’ (humans and non-humans) together and to show how each ‘thing’ takes part respectively in ‘stabilising’ or ‘destabilising’ housing as a sociotechnical hybrid. Not all of these studies use Actor-Network terminology, but there is a series of attempts to propose theoretical and methodological frameworks to deal with various issues of hybrid associations, which are constitutive features of housing. Jenkins’ detailed study ‘11 Rue du Conservatoire’ (2002), for example, complicates the idea of hybrid associations by looking not only at how associations are produced in the projection and building process of a building, but at the building itself. He does not simply talk with or watch users, but he proposes to think about the diverse fields of relations that hold a specific building together over time and in space, including pipes and cables, managers and users, owners and investors. In Jenkins’ study the materiality of the building is a ‘relational effect’, its ‘thing-ness’ is an achievement of a diverse network of associates and associations. It is what we might think of as a ‘building event’ rather than simply a building. Conceived of in this way a building is always being ‘made’ or ‘unmade’ – always doing the work of holding together or pulling apart.
The Highrise Project Our research project investigates these themes by way of a specific type of architecturetechnology-house: the modernist, state-sponsored, residential highrise. The residential highrise has been, in a variety of guises, drawn up into a range of indisputably grand stories and organisational events: utopian visions for living, stellar architectural careers like that of Le Corbusier, bureaucratic machineries of mass housing provision, national projects of modernisation, the claims of critical social sciences, spectacular instances of failure, as well as popular and academic imaginaries about globalisation. These stories and events are components in the networks of associations that work to keep this form in place or to pull it apart – that is they contribute to its materiality. And it is such stories of how the highrise stay assembled or comes apart, which form the key focus of our research project. We want to tell these stories by doing ethnographic work on two carefully chosen modernist highrise blocks having both very polarised but completely different histories and fortunes.
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(HDB 1967, pages 28 and 29)
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The post-independence housing programme of Singapore, administered from 1959 onwards by the Housing Development Board (HDB), is our first example of highrise housing. Singapore’s housing programme was a fundamental component in the enthusiastic making of a postindependence nation. Through the HDB’s mass (HDB 1967, pages 28 and 29) housing programme it is possible to see a whole range of localised innovations and animations that subjected the high-density, highrise form to its own agendas as much that form, and the mechanisms of governance that supported it, may have subjected the people who came to live in it to logics of the modern. Through an archaeology of a modernist housing block and its upgrading history we hope to understand how modernist highrise architecture, far from being imposed on docile and fragile native cultures, is adopted, adapted and translated with great vigour.
We develop our research secondly by revisiting one of the originary sites of ‘supertall living’ in Europe: the Red Road highrise development in Glasgow UK. In 1962, when the first of its planned highrise blocks was completed, the 31-storey building could claim status as the tallest residential block in Europe. This status was both celebrated and attracted the attention of an emerging scepticism about supertall living. One commentator of the time referred to Red Road as 'the climax of a veritable orgy of tower buildings in the Glasgow suburbs' (The City Regions', Architectural Review 1967). Later historians of the tower block in the UK were to describe Red Road as the most obvious example of the 'discrepancy between Modern ideals of technically and organisationally advanced building, and disorganised practice' (Glendinning and Muthesius 1994, 318). Red Road is now one of the most undesirable public housing options in Glasgow. The development will be demolished and the site regenerated within the next 10 years.
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This is a draft of a mapping of scenes at and ‘around’ Red Road, in which associations are created, shaped and abandoned.
Words, Things and Gestures Whilst in housing sociology user satisfaction research had always played a prominent role, there is little ethnographic work done either on living in ‘modern’ homes or on the precise theme of dwelling in multi-storey flats. We have therefore chosen to build on an approach which, in first instance, prioritises what people do and favours, in the second instance, what people say about how they live in and manage multi-storey flats. We are interested in how at certain scenes of highrise living associations are created through gestures, things and words. In the following we would like to present some preliminary data, collected in the last few months, on the Glasgow site. The demolition fate the Red Road flats are now facing has circulated as a rumour for several years now in Glasgow and especially in Ballarnoch, where the Red Road flats are located. It is the announcement made by Glasgow Housing Association in the media in April 2005 to demolish the estate within a time span of 10 years, which is at the origin of the collected data. At this stage we do not want to deliver an analysis of this data. We simply want to raise some issues, which could guide us to a more symmetrical analysis of the highrise as a building event, and open this data to comment from the workshop.
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We will now show some video footage recorded at two scenes represented in the map. Our first video extracts brings us to the heart of the controversy produced by the demolition announcement by GHA in the media. Shortly after the demolition announcement a group of residents started a Save our Homes Campaign and invited for a public meeting.
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It makes sense to look at controversies in order to understand the role of technology within a living environment. The announcement of the demolition of the Red Road flats is a starting point to understand the characteristics of the highrise as a building event. Callon, Lacoumes and Barthe (2001) emphasise that in controversies not only do different social actors bump into each other, but the role of technological artefacts are newly negotiated. A controversy spins around an uncertainty. According to Callon, Lacoumes and Barthe “actors start individually or collectively to collect cases, which confirm a new threat. Uncertainties which surround them, favour the informal and sometimes wild elaboration of not verified and often not immediately verifiable hypotheses” (2001, page 43) 3. Controversies are socio-technical spirals. Investigations are accomplished; new explanations for older interrelations are delivered. Then, new actors will be brought in, who propose new solutions and so on. It is through a meeting like the one of the Red Road Save our Homes Campaign, we began to understand, how technology interferes with the social. (How dump, broken sanitary installations, asbestos problems are part of Red Road ‘falling apart’). The second scene we would like to discuss is a visit in the flat of a participant of the Save our Homes Campaign Meeting, who after the event invited us to visit him in his flat.
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This is our own translation.
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We asked George if we could film our visit in his house. The first stage of our encounter consisted of an in-depth interview. We are as much interested in the tenant’s history as in the actual living situation of the tenant. Whilst the tenant and the researcher are sitting in one place the living room – we discuss different topics and a range of ‘things’ - documents, letters, photographs, pictures and maps – enter in in order to animate the encounter between interviewer and interviewee. The second stage of the encounter consists of a visit of the flat. Adopting a reflexive point of view (Lomax & Casey 1998) we are interested in the associations animated by the presence of a stranger (researcher) and a certain technology (video camera) in a private home. Obviously we are in a private space and through our visit we are ‘making’ things public. Our interest is in how during our visit tenant and researcher are activating built environment and furniture, gestures and bodily movements, conversations and texts to produce a public version of the tenant’s story, the flat itself and the flat in the highrise environment.
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Bibliography Callon, Michel, Lascoumes, Pierre, & Barthe, Yannick. (2001). Agir dans un monde incertain: essai sur la démocratie technique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Edwards, Gareth. (2005, 9 September). Eyesores to be flattened. Edinburgh Evening News. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. (1999). On alternative modernities. Public Culture, 11. Glendinning, Miles, & Muthesius, Stefan. (1994). Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. London and New Haven: Yale University Press. HDB. (1967). Bukit Hoo Swee estate. Singapore: Housing and Development Board. Jacobs, Keith, Kemeny, Jim, & Manzi, Tony (Eds.). (2004). Social Construction in Housing Research. Ashgate: Aldershot. Jenkins, Lloyd. (2002). Geography and architecture: 11, Rue du Conservatoire and the permeability of buildings. Space and Culture, 5(3), 222-236. Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lomax, H, & Casey, N. (1998). Recording Social Life: Reflexivity and Video Methodology. Sociological Research Online, 3(2). Transport, Local Government and the Regions. (2002). Tall Buildings: Memoranda submitted to the Urban Affairs Sub-committee: House of Commons.
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