The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Doreen Massey
Notes
1 See Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (London:
Sage, 1996).
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991), p. 225.
3 “Towards a New Wythenshawe: Dreamers
and Schemers, Plotters and Planners,” in Wythenshawe:
The Story of a Garden City, ed. Derick
Deakin (Chichester: Phillimore, 1989), p. 25.
4 William Jackson, quoted in ibid.
5 “Towards a New Wythenshawe,” p. 25.
6 Abercrombie Report, quoted in ibid., p. 28.
7 Alfred Morris, M. P., preface to Deakin,
Wythenshawe, p. x.
8 This essay was written when the Tory variety
of “Them” was still in government. At this
moment we still wait to see if New Labour will
be understood by those on the estate as “Us” or
just another “Them.”
9 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday
Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984).
10 “The Five Year War: 1926–31—From
Parkland to Parkerland,” in Deakin, Wythenshawe,
p. 44.
11 It would be interesting to compare this
present combination of a language of resistance
and a real powerlessness of the Left with the situation
in the sixties and seventies, and even the
early eighties, when “the Left” in various guises
held power (in the form of the state) and had to
face up to the responsibilities and decisions
which that brings. I’m thinking here of some
countries of the South (Mozambique, Cuba, Angola,
Nicaragua . . .) as well as the Left in power
in various local states in a number of European
countries.
12 The second runway that is to be built at
Manchester Airport has brought together yet another
complex alliance against the city’s plans.
The Bollin Valley had become the new edge
of the urban, where Mancunians now walk
(Wythenshawe having been built) of a Sunday afternoon.
13 Doreen Massey, “Making Spaces: Or, Geography
Is Political too,” Soundings 1 (1995):
193–208.
14 Abercrombie Report, quoted in “Towards a
New Wythenshawe,” pp. 27–28.
15 “The Five Year War,” p. 48.
16 There were two notable exceptions to the
social story. Ernest and Sheena (later Lord and
Lady) Simon were relatively recent landowners—
they themselves bought Wythenshawe Hall and
250 acres. Both of them tireless and effective
campaigners for social reform, they presented
both the hall and the estate to the city. To this
day, constraints still operate on the use of this
land, which was expressly presented “to the people.”
Lord and Lady Simon of Wythenshawe are
still talked of with admiration by those on the estate
who know of its history.
17 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country:
The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London:
Verso, 1985).
18 Osbert Lancaster, Draynflete Revealed (London:
Murray, 1949), p. 1.
19 “Chronicle of Notable Events,” in Deakin,
Wythenshawe, p. xii.
20 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 220.
21 Ibid., p. 201.