Urban renewal and the culture of conservatism: changing perceptions of the tower block and implications for contemporary renewal initiatives
The article is divided into two parts. In the first part, we examine the emergence of the tower block phenomenon and summarize the cause of its subsequent decline. The issue is important, for, as we argue, tower blocks have been used to discredit not only public housing, but state welfare provision in general. In the second part, we utilize our analysis of developments in social policy in the United Kingdom in the 1990s to generate a critique of housing renewal strategies. Although it is important not to read across simplistically between politics, cultural crit icism and policy failure, nevertheless with reference to tower blocks we argue there is a commonality between these three issues. By highlighting these links it is possible to show how many of the latest housing pro posals are influenced by a one-dimensional reading of 'modernity', accentuating the negative aspects and neglecting some of the positive attributes. As a consequence, the philosophies that now underpin housing development are, in many respects, regressive and unimagina tive.
From Moorepark to Wine Alley: The Rise and Fall of a Glasgow Housing Scheme
Problem places and problem people a Marxist critique Glasgow's housing 1850-1939 days of hope the early 1970s the early 1970s - discussion the late 1980s conclusion - making sense of Moorepark.
Theoretical Perspectives on Australian Urbanisation: II. Social Components in the Reproduction of Australian Labour Power
Social components comprise those ideological and political forces which control the working-class-including the ’middle-class’ and domestic labour-in the non-work sphere (the community). This is primarily for the purpose of ensuring the maintenance and reproduction of wage labour which, in turn, is basic to capital accumulation and to the continuity of capitalist society. These community controls are primarily ideological because, unlike the work situation where the capitalist class has direct control over labour, there is little direct control over wage labour (and domestic labour) in the community. Ideology, then, as an indirect and ’invisible’ form of hegemony becomes the principal mechanism for controlling labour in the living place. What political control there is comes