The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURE
Places are spaces of social relations. Take this corner of a council estate: on
the southern outskirts of Manchester, across the Mersey from the city. It is
like many others, an ordinary place.
My parents lived here for nearly fifty years and have known this
spot for even longer. Their lives have taken it in, and made it, for over half
a century. Both they and it, and their relationship to one another (“place”
and “people”), have changed, adjusted, readjusted, over time. Right now, as
I write, my mother’s infirmities enclose her in a nursing home that stands
on “the exact spot” where once my sister and I went to school.
My parents used to come “here” before the estate was built. Venturing
on a weekend across the river and up across the rolling farmland. For
Manchester’s working class what was to become Wythenshawe was then a
healthy walk, a cheerful day out south of the Mersey. Young lives were then
quite spatially confined: bus rides into town, a week’s holiday on the coast,
were the farthest you usually went. So a weekend walk in country air was a
real expansion of the spatiality of life.
Years later, with two grown daughters now, and living on the estate
laid out across that farmland (but the trees were still there, their maturity
both contrasting with the rawness of new houses and providing a reminder
of when this place had been another place) they made this very same spot in
latitude and longitude home base for spatially much more extended lives.
From here, my parents made sorties to London, occasional trips abroad, visits
to daughters who had moved away. This was where we gathered, at weekends,
for Christmas.
Old age brought a closing-in again—a drawing-in of physical spatiality.
The body imposes some limits. Infirmity and frailty can close down
the spaces of older people’s lives. My mother restricted to a wheelchair, her
eyesight failing badly. Only once has she in recent years left the nursing
home for more than an afternoon walk or ride. “You can see the Pennines
from here,” we always used to say. You could turn your eyes to them and
dream. But my mother’s eyes no longer reach that far. My father too, no
longer able to drive a car, finding walking difficult, wanting to stay each day
near Mum, felt the spatiality of his later life draw in, settle down into yet
another new, this time again more local, pattern. It is as though their lives
breathed out and in again. And the place of this place in those lives was
molded accordingly.
And yet, of course, their lives—all our lives—are lived in spaces
(time-spaces) that are far more complex than you would ever divine from
maps of physical mobility. Even now, the spaces of old age are stretched by
memories of holidays and travel, opened out by visits from family and