The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Keiller
we have unemployment, a lot of low-paid service-sector jobs, and a large
number of people who are “economically inactive,” including “voluntary”
caregivers and people who have been downsized into a more or less comfortable
early retirement, many of whom once worked for privatized utilities.
The enormous irony of the Tory twilight is that their protestations that the
United Kingdom is a prosperous country are largely true. There are even a
few signs of a revival in the manufacture of indigenously financed hightechnology
consumer goods. The United Kingdom is a rich country in
which live a large number of poor people and a similar number of reasonably
well-off people who say they are willing to pay for renewal of the public
realm. There seems to be no reason why the United Kingdom cannot
afford a minimum wage, increased expenditure on welfare and education,
incentives for industrial investment, environmental improvements, reempowered
local government, and other attributes of a progressive industrial
democracy.