The High‐Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London

Baxter, Richard

doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12451

Cited by 60 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Our work adds to a small number of studies which have turned to explore residents’ experiences of modernist or high-rise buildings and estates (Baxter, 2017; Glendinning, 2008; Jacobs et al, 2008; Roberts, 2017; Thoburn, 2018). In dominant media accounts, such post-war housing has been labelled a ‘failure’ and associated with fragmented communities, antisocial behaviour and urban decline.…”

Section: The Background To This Article: the Project Methods And Appmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A growing body of work within the social sciences draws attention to processes by which those who live in social housing are subject to stigmatisation (Baxter, 2017; Palmer et al, 2004; Roberts, 2017; Thoburn, 2018). These studies highlight the destructive effects of practices which denigrate estates and their residents and reveal how, within neoliberal policies of ‘austerity’, disinvestment in the welfare state has been obscured by moralising discourses about poorer people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Hicks

Lewis

2020

The Sociological Review

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This article examines how residents experience and account for stigma at Claremont Court, a modernist social housing scheme built in Edinburgh in the early 1960s. Although listed as having special architectural interest, the building has been subject to disinvestment and has a mix of residents, including council and private renters as well as owner-occupiers. This article explores micro-distinctions between residents, showing how the categories ‘stigmatiser’ and ‘stigmatised’ are not as rigid as we might expect. It then considers stigma associated not with residents but, rather, the building itself, and argues that closer attention to the relationship between the material and social is required in order to understand residents’ complex articulations of belonging. Finally, residents’ views on dirt and rubbish are explored, showing how they use these signifiers of stigma to reveal concerns about shame and respectability. Responding to the call from this journal for more sociological understandings of stigma, this article argues that interactionist approaches offer an important alternative, one that highlights how stigma is negotiated, resisted and apportioned in everyday life. This perspective reveals residents’ practices in interaction with the material environment, as well as the ways in which stigmatisation processes work simultaneously in upward and downward directions, rather than in a unidirectional way.

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Section: The Background To This Article: the Project Methods And Appmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Hicks

Lewis

2020

The Sociological Review

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“…Returning to the Guardian article discussed earlier, Jenkins (2017) reiterates this claim by juxtaposing the antisocial eff ects of tower block architecture with the pro-social spatial order of the neighborhood and, in so doing, implying there are both a "right" way for modern urban citizens to live alongside each other and "proper" ways to organize urban space. Anthropological theories of architecture challenge such claims to environmental determinism, arguing that people, buildings, and landscapes are mutually constitutive (Buchli 2013;Yaneva 2012), and empirical accounts exploring belonging, sociality, home, and self-making, heritage, and identity in the kind of postwar high-rises discussed here challenge dominant representations of alienation and dysfunction (Baxter 2017;Baxter and Brickell 2014;Melhuish 2005). However, it is the association between the postwar highrise and "complete, cataclysmic" failure (Forty 1995: 26) that dominates the public and political imagination.…”

Section: Making and Remaking "Failure"mentioning

confidence: 98%

“Avoiding the mistakes of the past”

Woodcraft¹

2020

Focaal

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AbstractA powerful dystopian imaginary dominates political and cultural representations of Britain's postwar tower blocks, which continue to be linked to social dysfunction and alienation despite extensive empirical research that challenges such claims. This article asks what contested declarations of failure “do” by examining how “tower block failure” is discursively deployed by placemaking professionals—planners, architects, housing managers, regeneration practitioners—engaged in the construction of a “model” mixed-tenure neighborhood in London's Olympic Park. Examining how the aesthetic figure of the “failed” high-rise housing estate is configured in relation to the normative models of citizenship and community that infuse social and spatial policy, I argue “failure” is entangled with a speculative, future-oriented economy of risk management, which refracts wider questions about the nonobvious forms that power takes in the neoliberal city.

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“…talked enthusiastically of the streets in the sky, describing a complex of uses, sensory associations, emotions, and pleasures" (Thoburn, 2018: 623). Here, then, it may be important to remember that atmospheres are not caused by buildings or places -what Baxter refers to as "design determinism" (Baxter, 2017: 347) -rather they provoke interpretations from residents who, in turn, create Figure 2. Deck access or a "street in the sky" at Claremont Court.…”

Section: The Feel Of the Placementioning

confidence: 99%

“The feel of the place”: Investigating atmosphere with the residents of a modernist housing estate

Hicks

2020

Qualitative Social Work

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Atmosphere is a neglected topic in social work, and so this article considers the production of atmospheres amongst the residents of an extant 1960s housing scheme in Edinburgh (UK). This is in order to address not only the complexity of feelings about living on such an estate but also to consider what consequences the paying of attention to atmosphere’s production and effects might have for a social work concern with welfare and wellbeing. The article is based upon semi-structured and walking interviews with 17 residents – council or private renters and home-owners – of Claremont Court, a mixed, low-rise estate and analyses their description and crafting of atmosphere as a way to understand questions of belonging, welfare and community in situ. After reviewing some existing research on atmosphere and outlining methodological issues relating to the Claremont Court project, the article goes on to consider how residents described their feelings about or sense of the estate and its design before discussing the emergence of contradictory narratives about home. The production of narratives about those needing welfare support is particularly pertinent to atmospheric accounts of the housing scheme, and so the article addresses this before finally making an argument for the relevance of immersive and emplaced accounts of space and place for both social work practice and research.

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The High‐Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London

Cited by 60 publications

References 39 publications

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

“Avoiding the mistakes of the past”

“The feel of the place”: Investigating atmosphere with the residents of a modernist housing estate

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