The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
Notes
1 See Hackney Gazette, 23 March 1990.
2 Hackney Gazette, 12 January 1990.
3 Ian Nairn, Outrage, a special number of the
Architectural Review, Vol. 117, no. 702, June
1955.
4 On theming see John Thackara’s “Unthemely
behaviour,” The Guardian, 8 January
1987. As Thackara concludes: “‘Lifestyle design’
disenfranchises the ‘non-targeted’, and kills off
the old-style street with its volatile mixture of
nationalities and classes. The marketeers claim
that theming replaces outmoded class barriers;
but control of space planning and the imagery
therein remains in the hands of those, such as
brewers, who have a close resemblance to oldstyle
bosses.” This is an important point, well
made, and I’m glad to say that the majority of the
people on Dalston Lane have no reason to understand
a word of it.
5 Barbara Jones, The Unsophisticated Arts, Architectural
Press, 1951.
6 Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy,
HMSO, 1950, p. 263.
7 Lord Beveridge, Voluntary Action: A Report
on Methods of Social Advance, Allen & Unwin,
1948, p. 301. As Beveridge writes, “In a Totalitarian
society all action outside the citizen’s
home, and it may be much that goes on there is
directed or controlled by the State. By contrast,
vigour and abundance of Voluntary Action outside
one’s home, individually and in association
with other citizens, for bettering one’s own life
and that of one’s fellows, are the distinguishing
marks of a free society” (p. 10).
8 Ibid., p. 324.
9 As an influential report claimed, the “Political
sympathies of those who staff QUALGOs are
almost invariably left-wing. The middle-class
Tory lady, once so dedicated a worker for charity,
has been elbowed out by ridicule, snubbing and
such unacceptable demands upon her time as
obligatory attendance at training class.” See
Teresa Gorman et al., Qualgos Just Grow: Political
Bodies in Voluntary Clothing, Centre for Policy
Studies, 1985, p. 9.
10 See, for example, Ali Mantle, Popular Planning
Not in Practice: Confessions of a Community
Worker, Greenwich Employment Resource Unit,
1985.
11 Sue Cavanagh and Vron Ware, At Women’s
Convenience: A Handbook on the Design of Women’s
Public Toilets, Women’s Design Service, 1990.
12 Owen Kelly, Community Art and the State:
Storming the Citadels, Comedia, 1984, p. 1.