The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Living in Wythenshawe
largest in the world) spread over what had once been scattered farmsteads,
small hamlets, and open country. But the transformation in the social relations
that constructed this space was if anything even greater. Relations of
deference and of knowing one’s place in fixed social hierarchies were engulfed
by a municipal building project whose whole dynamic sprang from
an assertion of rights: the rights of working-class people to healthy, quality
housing. The very physical construction of the new estate asserted the social
principles for which it stood. It was the birth of a new social place: a municipal
garden city (indeed, Wythenshawe is said to have been the first ever).
The new architecture of quality cottage housing for the working class was
also a new architecture of social relations.
In recent years, the estate has once again begun to be transformed
by wider social projects. The national shift to privatization has largely been
resisted here. But it has weakened the hold of municipal socialism, the commitments
to planning, and guaranteed levels of social provision. This time
the adjustment between built form and social relations has been more nuanced,
more varied. There has been no sweeping rebuilding, but the shift in
social climate has reworked both physical detail and social import. The scattered
sales of houses have changed both the physical face and the social
meaning and feel of the place. The same houses have signs now of their private
ownership—add-on porches, fancy brickwork, different front doors. A
slight physical modification bears witness to a little social revolution: a new
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