The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Doreen Massey
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friends, made more expansive by newspapers and TV bringing tales of other
lives. And the times of this space are multiple, too: conjoining memories,
overlayering images, sneaking in hopes for the weekend ahead.
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That shifting, complex, microspatiality of individual yet interconnected
lives is, moreover, set within a broader social history. Which is also the history
of the making and remaking of social spaces. In less than a hundred
years “this place” has passed from aristocratic landownership, through municipal
socialism, toward attempts at neoliberal privatization. The breathing
out and in of individual lives has been set in counterpoint with
programs of social reconstruction that have made and remade this place on
a wider social canvas.
The fields to which the working class of Manchester escaped were
in their social form an inheritance of feudalism. Much of the area was still
in the hands of landowners whose acreages extended over the north of
Cheshire, who could trace their landed lineage back to the eleventh century,
and whose preeminence is still witnessed in place-names and associations.
(The Saturday matinee cinema I used to go to—the Tatton—takes its name
from a family whose power in these parts began at least nine hundred years
ago.) When Wythenshawe was built, the physicality of the place was
changed beyond recognition. A huge council estate (100,000 people, the