The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

selves so relatively powerless. 11 In any case, it is an assumption that allows us
to avoid thinking about the responsibilities of power. It is a way of thinking
that reads “power” as necessarily negative. And it is an assumption that can
lead to the misreading of many a situation. 12
Here in north Cheshire, the resisters against the state, clad in the
mantle of “local people,” were defenders of a local way of life that included
property and privilege. There are few, if any, abstract or universal “spatial
rules.” Local people are not always the bearers of the most progressive values,
“resisters” though they may be. Battles over space and place—that set
of sometimes conflicting embedded sociospatial practices—are always battles
(usually complex) over spatialized social power. 13 Personally, I’m glad
this lot of locals lost, and that the Wythenshawe estate was built.
In part, the battle lines were drawn—in public debate if not in actual
motivations—precisely over the meaning of this place. Two different,
grounded knowledges confronted each other. The progressive planners, it
has to be said, on occasions evinced an attitude redolent of that of English
colonizers in Canada or Australia. They simply didn’t see the existing inhabitants.
Here was open space, ripe for development. The Abercrombie
Report on the suitability of Wythenshawe for Manchester housing noted
that here “there is virgin land, capable of being moulded to take whatever
shape may be decreed, with hardly a village or large group of houses to interfere
with or direct the line of development.” 14 But, of course, no land is
really virgin land; and these locals were powerful, and they resisted. Yet the
spatial terms of their resistance were hardly more convincing, and certainly
imbued with less laudable intentions, than Manchester’s interpretation of
the place. The battle cry “Cheshire should be kept as Cheshire” 15 is precisely
that appeal to conservation-as-stasis which indicates only a lack of argument.
(Yet how often we hear that refrain, from all parts of the political spectrum
and all kinds of “local people”.) 16
And so the estate was begun, a project fueled by idealism, by an
idea of what the public sector might be at its best.
■
Living in Wythenshawe
Negotiations continue to this day over the meaning of this place, over how
it might be known, over the rights to particular spaces, and over whose writ
rules where. The residents themselves take over the making of the estate,
this time in the finely textured, quotidian negotiation of spatialized social
relations of differential degrees of power. There is active aggression: vandalism
and violence, not necessarily against you yourself but visibly, intimately
present—the shattered bus shelter, the massacred sapling (there goes an-