Urban Modernisation and Representations of the Working Class

Sceaux Gardens is an estate of 400 council homes built in the 1950s to replace war-damaged terraced homes and factories in north-east Camberwell in south London. The estate was named after the Sceaux suburb of Paris and each housing block was named after a prominent French figure, but the influence didn’t stop there. Unusual for a London borough, Camberwell had an architect’s department, led by F. O. Hayes. The department designed Sceaux Gardens in line with ‘L’Esprit Nouveau’ principles of French modernist architect Le Corbusier.

This approach was a reaction to the perceived shortcomings of working-class homes, which were overcrowded with a lack of light, sanitation, and green space. The housing blocks were designed with prefabricated components and modern materials and techniques. Single-storey bungalows were interspersed with six-storey and fifteen-story blocks. To maximise views and daylight maisonettes were designed in a ‘scissor’ arrangement, with the upper storey crossing the building to include windows on both sides.

My research is centred on the reasoning and reception of this new approach. Part of a wider wave of new council housing built in the area, Sceaux Gardens is an example of some of the opportunities and shortcomings of bringing ‘L’Esprit Nouveau’ to south London. Contrasting yet complementary to its surroundings, the estate was included in an eponymous conservation area less than a decade after its construction. In 1960 The Architects’ Journal described the design as “the most interesting housing scheme to have come from a Metropolitan Borough Architect’s Department,” but also raised prescient questions about the fire-safety of the tall blocks. The light, privacy, and modern conveniences were praised by residents, but they also had concerns that the designs might act as a barrier to sociability. The estate captures the question of the extent to which the dismissal of the housing of old paved the way for a new future or replaced one set of a problems with another.

Former US President George H W Bush once advised the American public they should be ‘a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons’ in an attempt to draw family values closer to the rural ideal of one, compared to the suburban chaos of the other, regardless of the fantasy nostalgia of the former for a life most Americans had never lived in any generation.

Such judgements can be seen echoed in British representations of families, with the Simpson-esque role being filled by the Manchester estate-based comedy drama Shameless for the early part of the 21st Century. Like The Simpsons it became the target of political intervention over a Shameless – generation venerating stereotypes of – out of work, benefit claiming, substance abusing Council/Social Housing tenants, with these tropes being painted as the natural, inevitable and unavoidable result of life on such estates.

These expressions of life on estates, and their coalescence with concerns around the emergence of policies, for example, under the last Labour Government (New Labour, 1997-2010) to tackle anti- social behaviour through the blurring of Civil and Criminal law in the Anti Social Behaviour Orders they introduced, and the Respect Agenda policy, saw these interventions disproportionally targeted at Council/Social Housing providers and their tenants and residents.

From experiences working for a Housing Research project at the Manchester-based Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, with a North Liverpool Housing Association, Cobalt Housing, and delivering CIH accredited Social Housing programmes to staff in the sector, Dr Colin Stuhlfelder will explore how notions of Othering tenants and residents has suited the political programmes of various governments, as well as exploring how these correlate with media driven stereotypes, and adapt to fit the demographics of different demographics and communities across the UK.

On March 27, 1965, Lebanon’s influential bourgeois French-language daily L’Orient proclaimed on its cover: “In 10 years, two leprous neighbourhoods of the city centre will become the ‘Manhattan’ of Beirut”. Aerial photographs showing the low-rise, densely built-up working-class neighbourhoods of Ghalghoul and Saifi accompanied the headline, juxtaposed with a model of skyscrapers in the international style that would replace them. As part of nation-building efforts between 1958 and 1975, this urban renewal project proclaimed to ‘modernize’ Downtown Beirut (Verdeil: 2010). In twenty articles, L’Orient enthusiastically propagated the project, representing the architecturally, socio-economically, and functionally diverse neighbourhoods as dirty, disorderly, and under-developed, thus stigmatizing them as intolerable slums. Drawing on newspaper records, urbanism plans, contemporary surveys, parliamentary debates and photography, this paper analyses L’Orient’s representation of the working-class neighbourhoods between 1958 and 1975 and the curious absence of questions surrounding the rehousing of its inhabitants, both in the project and its coverage.

Reconstructing the erased neighbourhoods’ history, I argue that their stigmatization by L’Orient as slums inherently opposed to urban modernity was central in popularizing and legitimizing their planned erasure. The newspaper never discussed the project’s exclusion of former inhabitants, their planned displacement, or alternative housing options, which points to a larger, unexplored theme in Lebanon’s modern history. Indeed, despite the availability of resources and trained experts, and the public awareness of a severe, on-going lack of affordable housing, hardly any social housing was constructed. I argue that the absence of rehousing discussions in L’Orient reflects a general lack of concern and responsibility among Lebanese politicians and society’s upper strata to provide social housing to Lebanon’s urban poor. This paper thus contributes to the historiography of slum clearances, social housing, and the involvement of news media in the global 1960s beyond an exclusive focus on Western countries. 

Thematically broad, covering social phenomena as seemingly diverse as unemployment, sexuality, homelessness, Žilnik’s early work, from the mid-1960s to early 1970s, was a moment of ideological reckoning between normative aspirations of socialism in Yugoslavia and actuality of social practices. It was a diagnosis of troubling class dynamics, increased social stratification and rise in social inequality; in short, it mapped system’s many contradictions. Žilnik’s work gave legibility and public representation, indeed a voice, to socially excluded and culturally marginalized. In Crni film (1971) by portraying a group of homeless who are invited to Žilnik’s own apartment, Žilnik is critically self-reflective of his position, and social standing, questioning limits of director’s criticality. Fully cognizant of the artificiality of filming process, subjects are invited to perform and testify their lived experience, making process of construction of social and cultural identities legible, while challenging limits of the medium and process of film making as, after all curated, by the director. Beyond passive reception, these films invite cognitive confrontation with social logic of subject’s position.

The occurring theme is a process of exclusion of socially and culturally underrepresented groups (in socialist Yugoslavia, access to political sphere was legitimized through labor, work and employment status), but also their own vitality, capacity to negotiate circumstances of the context, that is fundamentally inimical to them, despite official ideological registers claiming otherwise. These films investigate relationship between personal and political, individual and collective. Žilnik’s position moves beyond dissidence, his films are expressions of criticism, for their investigation of the limits and potentials of medium and conventions of authorship, but they are also critiques of the system from within, maintaining commitment to socialist project predicated on equality and social justice, they are a call for its change. Žilnik’s work was contextualized from number of standpoints, ranging from histories of displacements and migration, to changing content of worker’s self-management, its ideological narratives and social repercussions. This paper will investigate representations of labor and work in Žilnik’s films, and their many implied meanings, in a nominally socialist society that rested on production base that incorporated significant aspects of market economy.

Although the mass construction of large, prefabricated housing estates began in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1950s, audiovisual production did not begin to focus on it fully until the 1970s, when this construction was also taking place at its greatest intensity. After the political, social, and media-related relaxation that took place in the 1960s, which reflected this construction only to a minimal degree, the new regime, established by the Soviet occupation in 1968, focused on entertainment genres representing an idealized, exemplary form of everyday life to promote the benefits of living in a socialist system. The presentation of the provision of modern housing for the growing population was one of the highlights of its propaganda strategy.

At the core of the proposed paper is a semantic analysis of several key contributions to the image of the housing estate in Czech audiovisual production, set in the period context of the functioning of society, the media and the systems that managed it.

In their essence, the two works depict very similar -even identical- scenes from everyday life in a housing estate complex in completely contrasting ways. The TV series Dnes v jednom domě (Today in a House, 1980) represents the creation of a vibrant neighbourhood community in a newly built block of flats based on the fates of families of different social backgrounds. The counterpoint is Panelstory (Story from a Housing Estate, 1979), which takes a critical look at life on a similar housing estate, depicting it as extremely anonymous and alienated. But tightly controlled media was dominated by positive propagandistic portrayals showing life on the new estates as helping to improve interpersonal relationships, in contrast to the old, bourgeois construction in the city centres such as such as shown in Zítra to roztočíme, drahoušku…! (We’ll Kick Up a Fuss Tomorrow, Darling…, 1976).

The significance of place has been integral to academic debates around working-class representation in 1960s British Cinema, particularly through the work of Andrew Higson (1984), John Hill (1986) and Terry Lovell (1990). While much of this debate has focused on the politics of representation and narrative function of working-class spaces, there has been little discussion of this wider sense of place in relation to post-war urban redevelopment. This paper then offers a re-examination of 1960s British cinema through the lens of post-war redevelopment, particularly the huge upheaval related to the “slum clearances” programme enacted between 1955 and 1975 – a process that demolished 1.48 million homes and displaced 3.66 million people in largely working-class areas (Yelling, 2000). 

The paper will utilise the social realist films of the British New Wave (1969-1963) as a starting point to plot this relationship – particularly focusing on the often insular and suspicious perspective with which these new spaces are framed, one that reflects the “us versus them” mentality centrally articulated in Hoggart’s influential The Uses of Literacy (1957). However, this paper will also argue that only through examining subsequent and parallel cinematic depictions of working-class urban redevelopment does the cycle’s wider significance in a spatial sense becomes apparent. 

The paper will then examine its London-set peers, such as A Place to Go (1963) and Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963), subsequent Northern realism in films like The Whisperers (1967) and Charlie Bubbles (1967), as well as emergent New Towns in I Start Counting (1969) and The Offence (1973). In doing-so this paper will chart the cultural manifestation of post-war redevelopment over the decade, arguing that a key tension emerges within working-class communities between the pull of nostalgia and the optimism promised by such bold, modern and new architectural spaces – debates that still resonate today. 

The Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin, built from 1963 onwards, was the most prominent negative example of social housing in German mass media. A commuter estate without a subway connection (which was planned but never realised); today offering a range of social and commercial facilities which were initially lacking; with flats promising a high standard of living but too expensive for many residents at the time. All this led to discontent fuelled by pedagogues, architecture students, filmmakers and numerous leftist activists, including members of the nascent RAF, which manifested itself in demonstrations, magazines, films and television features.

Drawing on rich material from the 1970s and the growing body of secondary literature, the paper focuses on which social class the housing project was intended for, what kind of social transformation was associated with it, and how this was experienced by the actual residents. It discusses films such as Die Wohnungsfrage (1972), made by Hans and Nina Stürm, and Der gekaufte Traum (1977) by Helga Reidemeister, which engage with proletarian families confronted with high rents and new consumer goods that are almost unaffordable for them.

Using promotional films of the project and texts by the sociologist Elisabeth Pfeil, the paper will show that these individuals were struggling with a vision imposed on them: that of double-income families with only one or two children, in possession of a car and a social network extending into the city. Pfeil, arguably West Germany’s most important urban sociologist, had earlier been involved in studies that had led to a disillusionment with the concept of the neighbourhood unit and had created a new social model that described social space as made up of individualised networks. By the 1970s, Pfeil had turned this empirical research into a normative model, which was opposed by the 1968 generation, who revived the concept of community.

This paper explores the visual culture of creative destruction through Shirley Baker’s photographs of 1960s Salford. The city of Salford continues to be a site of perpetual creative destruction and reimagining. Current scholarship in Baker’s documentary work on post-war Salford is increasingly located in the national imagination, as a definitive image of the losses incurred through slum clearance. In a period where former slum clearance projects are themselves being subject to demolition a re-examination of our understanding of this period seems timely. 

The paper considers the iconicity of Baker’s imagery and how its humanist underpinnings have both popularised and obscured the intentions of the work. Baker’s depictions of working-class life in Salford, in a mode sometimes termed the ‘urban pastoral,’ open up a renewed consideration of the cost of table rasa as a form of urban renewal.

Drawing on the authors own first-hand accounts and correspondences with Baker between 2011-2012 it will explore the extent to which her approach humanises the often-abstract process of urban regeneration, a trait that leaves it susceptible to readings of sentimentality and nostalgia. In an era, suspicious of both the ‘poverty safari’ and ‘poverty porn’, the paper will question why this body of work has escaped such criticism. Situating Baker’s work alongside other documentary depictions of Northern working-class life of this period, the paper will question the works newfound popularity and the merit of its humanist method.

This paper uses Runcorn new town as a case study to explore the relationship between state-led urban redevelopment and working-class women’s construction of ‘home’ in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Much existing historical scholarship on British new towns either focuses on the London overspill towns or privileges the perspectives of male policymakers and planners, neglecting regional perspectives and obscuring residents’ lived experiences. Instead, this paper uses oral history to foreground the gendered, classed, and racialised dimensions of making ‘home’ in a north-west new town. Runcorn was designated as a new town in 1964 to relieve urban overcrowding in nearby North Merseyside. Central government tasked Runcorn Development Corporation with planning and building housing, employment, and infrastructure for 40,000 newcomers. Using Runcorn Development Corporation’s promotional photographs and brochures, the paper suggests that planners designed new housing for white, affluent working-class, nuclear families with breadwinner fathers and homemaker mothers. 

To contradict this official perspective, the paper draws on an original oral history interview with a Black working-class woman who moved to Runcorn from London in the 1970s. It explains how her constructions of ‘home’ were mediated by her shifting experiences of poverty and affluence, race and place, family and friendships, and age and life cycle. Her new ‘home’ was a space of economic hardship, restrictive gender roles, and social isolation. Yet it was simultaneously a site of relative affluence, emotional fulfilment, and newfound self-esteem. The paper complicates historical understandings of ‘home’ in twentieth-century Britain by foregrounding the memories of a woman who contradicted the planners’ exclusionary prescriptions about domesticity. The life history methodology forces us to attend to the dynamism and diversity of working-class women’s domestic identities, suggesting that oral history is one of the only ways to understand working-class experiences of urban redevelopment, public housing, and ‘home’. 

In Salford, urban communities have undergone successive waves of housing clearance, contributing to a loss of collective identity and to long term social and spatial segregation. As a creative practitioner, I produce exhibitions utilising items of material culture from destroyed districts in Salford. 

The project I currently work on is titled ‘Streets Museum’and is inspired by practice-led PhD research at The District Six Museum, Cape Town, South Africa (2006). I then produced a comparable community-led project in Salford, using related strategies. It is part of a wider debate concerning the eradication of place and the search for appropriate sites of memory to commemorate dispersed populations of  post-traumatic landscapes over the past thirty years. 

The exhibitions I make rejuvenate a sense of place, facilitating the voices of ex-residents, despite the eradication of the built and social environment. They enable fragmented communities to become active participants in conceptually re-mapping their former localities, facilitating spaces for social networking, regrouping and cultural empowerment.

I collect and exhibit archives of family photographs, home movies, street signs and maps, portraying the community prior to demolition.  These archives are designed to personalise the story of housing clearance at local level, as at The District Six Museum, where similar objects are utilised to personalise the story of apartheid.  The archives contrast with mass media imagery and documentary photography, which can perpetuate stereotypes of the urban working class as passive victims of a ‘slum’ district, or failed modernist experiment, as in the case of The District Six. 

The two urban areas I will explore in terms of spatial analysis and visual representation are firstly, the District Six area of Cape Town, South Africa, which was demolished under apartheid law,  including slum clearance acts, and also the Salford 7 district.  

The high-rise residential tower blocks that jut out from the urban fabric of much of the UK’s towns and cities are perhaps one of the most divisive building typologies of British domestic architecture. Prior to the second World War, the majority of the UK’s working-class populace were housed in tight rows of terraced housing, built in the shadows of the mills and factories from which Britain’s industrialised economy sprung forth. However, after the conclusion of the second World War the UK’s housing stock had to be rapidly replenished to rehouse the communities displaced both by the destruction caused by war-time bombing raids, as well as pre-existing slum clearance policies introduced to deal with the substandard conditions many Britons were living in. The answer, it seemed, lay in the high-rise residential tower block typology which aimed to tackle the extreme housing demand of the time and limited land availability. 

It can be argued in some respects that the typology met these demands successfully, but at what social cost? This research investigates the social impact of the razing of traditional terrace housing communities and subsequent mass adoption of high-rise social housing in post-war Salford on its predominantly working-class populace, through the case study of the Lower Kersal housing estate and the community that formed within its boundary. Compared to other post-war estates of this scale, there isn’t much academic literature concerning the Lower Kersal estate which was the initial impetus behind this research. The research utilises interviews with ex-residents, ex-residents posts on an online forum dedicated to the estate, and contemporaneous newspapers from Salford during the lifetime of the estate to investigate the quality of the community relations on the estate and to what extent was the step up in living conditions enhanced or mitigated by the social impact of high-density living. 

Vienna’s late 1940s and 1950s social housing architecture can be considered as modern. However, there are two historical Viennese specificities that complicate this matter. Firstly, the so-called Viennese Modernism of the 1910s and 1920s vehemently rejected some of the core tenets of “International Style”-modernism, by accepting continuities with the history of architecture and the historical urban fabric. Secondly, there is no stark, “modern”, contrast coming from large scale housing in itself, as the interwar period saw the large Red Vienna housing schemes being realized throughout the city. 

Focused on rapidly rebuilding after World War II. the architecture in question is often 
discussed as being overly rational, and thereby somewhat dull. However, some of this architecture features mostly overlooked formal references to the architecture of Red Vienna, from 1919 to 1934. 

In our presentation we will compare a few Viennese housing complexes, the so called “Höfe”, of the post-war-era and the Red-Vienna era respectively. The criteria for comparison are formal articulations of the Höfe, that are clearly referential or even hint at a similar typology as schemes from both eras that share the same planners – which was not uncommon, as they were excluded from work in the fascist era and then returned.With this comparison, we want to precisely re-trace the post-war architecture. We propose to interpret it as a re-evaluation in built-form of the Austro-Marxist emancipatory architecture. Our presentation illustrates one of the architectural elements that will be discussed: Housing that bridges over streets – a classic Red Vienna trait that emphasizes public ownership beyond the perimeter, is taken up by many post-war Höfe, however its employment is less ostentatious.

Through this comparison we hope to highlight the specific formal qualities of Red Vienna emancipatory architecture, specifically through reading them against the more neutral rendition of the post-war-era. 

The rapid industrialisation and accompanying housing crisis that occurred soon after the formation of socialist Yugoslavia after the Second World War became two preconditions for the envisioning of residential architecture, one of the focal points of the state’s apparatus. In this ambitious venture, architects were guided by two ideologies: socialist and modernist. Their correlation is embodied in the spatial solutions of collective housing complexes, making them the complex result of the symbiosis of a strong architectural idea and the driven state apparatus. 

The separation from former concepts of urban planning served as a means for the formation of new massive housing complexes, which were to be widespread throughout all of the Federation’s republics. With the introduction of a new architectural expression encompassing important and manifold meanings, it became a hallmark of the newly-formed state, connecting the republics, strengthening and highlighting their unity. Housing represents the existential spatial frame for the everyday lives of its residents, highly impacting the manner in which their day-to-day existence is realised.

The citizens of the new state suddenly underwent a profound change in their everyday lives, stemming from the extremely different living environment they were now inhabiting. The migration of citizens, from rural to urban environments, from privately owned traditionally built single-family dwellings to state (publicly) owned collective housing complexes, drastically changed the living conditions and the circumstances for the creation of interpersonal relations between residents. 

Relying on social theories referring to communities and the relation between space and identity, the aim of this paper is to research the ways in which massive collective housing complexes of socialist Yugoslavia changed city life in accordance with the social-political characteristics of the new state and society, influencing the way in which the residents of collective housing complexes form social relations, communal values and communities as a whole.

The post WWII European context of urban reconstruction is extensively studied but the development policies of non-EU capital cities remain largely unexplored.
This article investigates the urban reconstruction strategy that shaped the centre of Tirana during the early years of the communist regime when the Palace of Culture was also built. Completed in 1966 with President Nikita Khrushchev symbolically laying the first brick, it became part of a large and radical modernisation program which echoed the Soviet aesthetics of socialist realism. The new structure replaced the old bazaar which dated back in the beginning of the 16th century when the city of Tirana began to develop. The clearance of the old bazaar was one of the first imperative measures towards creating the socialist city and an attempt to complete the detachment from the Ottoman legacy. This study sheds light on a specific demolition-based urban reconstruction strategy which used to characterize Albanian communism as a strong central governmental authority over local planning.

As the formal centre of a typical feudalistic town, the bazaar posed a viable antithesis of the centralized economy – one of the pillars of communism. Together with removing the country from Ottoman influences the adopted strategy was part of the efforts which likewise intended to overturn the local status quo.

However, rather than underlying the points of friction between communism and the city’s Ottoman legacy, the main objective of this research is to reveal the multifaceted character of the post-war reconstruction policies which aimed at transforming the city to a concrete spatial agenda for Marxism.

This paper discusses the role of higher education and cultural buildings of the British welfare state and how their architecture relates to the formation of a new class ideology for the working class. Initially, the paper discusses the ideal of education and culture for all, which was intended to improve the lives of people independently of their socio- economic status. The paper investigates how the university and cultural building programs of the post-war British welfare state aimed to educate the population and shape them as modern social citizens. While the expansion of higher education in the 1960s facilitated the transition of the workforce from blue to white-collar workers. .

The paper will then address the gradual transformation of these spaces by the promotion of commercialization and entrepreneurship, especially through the increased importance of consumption and leisure since the 1960s. It will examine how these practices implemented an ideology of individualism within spaces that were built for the working class, which eventually achieved the depoliticization of these spaces. The paper concludes by reflecting on the contemporary privatized learning and cultural spaces and the role of architecture in the creation of factories of commercialized knowledge.