The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Doreen Massey
uct of a continual—weekly, daily—negotiation between differentiated,
practiced spatialities.
SPACE/POWER
Continual negotiation means, in turn, that space/place is a product of and
imbued with social power. The spatiality of my parents’ lives is negotiated
within a lattice of differentially powerful spatialized social relations.
Some of their confinement we regularly put down to “Them”: to
“capitalism” or “the Tories.” 8 The meagerness of state pensions, the low level
of social services, and the difficulties of public transport (think what “high
tech” could do for the mobility of the old, the frail, the infirm, if only it were
differently directed), the broken paving stones. All these things entrench a
rigid framework of constraint: they restrict your movement, literally close
down your space, hem in that less tangible sense of spatial freedom and ease.
Their weight is undeniable.
But things are also more complicated than that. The very creation
of this estate was the result of a battle. Moreover, it was a battle in which
were ranged against each other a powerful local state (the city of Manchester)
and the local people of rural north Cheshire. Planners against the people.
The state against private citizens. The classic terms of so much current
debate slide easily into place: domination versus resistance, strategy versus
tactics, 9 the system versus local people.
That romanticized classification/identification would here be quite
misplaced. The state, the planners, the system were here a collection of socialists
and progressives battling to win more, and healthier, space for the
city’s working class. The “locals” combined a relatively small number of
villagers, a high proportion of people who commuted into Manchester to
work, and a group of large landowners. The commuters depended on Manchester
for their livelihood but wanted nothing to do with the consequences
of their large incomes—the higher taxes of the city, the necessity of living
among the poor. A poll taken in three of the parishes central to “the local
struggle” showed that 82 percent of the parishioners wanted to resist Manchester’s
advances; yet nearly half of them worked there. 10 The landowners
had extensive, spreading acres, could often trace a lineage back through several
centuries, and lived still at the apex of a set of (spatialized) social relations
that had even now more than a touch about them of feudal settledness
and an expectation of deference. There is a tendency in recent literature to
glorify “resistance,” to assume it is always ranged against “domination,” to
accept without further consideration that it is on the resisters’ behalf that
we should organize our rhetoric. Maybe this is because today we feel our-