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.
Framing Regent Park: the National Film Board of Canada and the construction of ‘outcast spaces’ in the inner city, 1953 and 1994
In 1953 and 1994, the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada produced two documentary films about Toronto’s Regent Park, the country’s first and largest low-income housing project. Farewell to Oak Street charted the dramatic ‘before’ and ‘after’ effects of public housing on the family, social and cultural life of the innercity dwellers whose ‘slum housing’ was demolished in the 1940s and early 1950s to make way for the pioneering housing scheme. In 1994 the NFB made Return to Regent Park. This time round, the film centred on the abject failure of Toronto’s steamrolling urban renewal plans and the efforts of activists to combat drugs, crime and the physical/social stigma of the project. This article argues that both NFB portrayals of the project contributed to the powerful moral and territorial stigmatization of inner-city workers and public housing tenants in the city.
Unemployment, Housing and Household Structure Among Young Adults
ABSTRACT Differentials in unemployment among young adult males are shown to be particularly associated with two factors: housing tenure and early childbearing. Even after controlling for factors such as social class and area of residence, local authority tenants have unemployment rates two or three times as high as owner-occupiers of a similar age. For movers between tenures these differentials are even greater; movers from owner-occupation to local authority tenancy have four times the unemployment rate of those moving in the opposite direction. Large differentials by the family situation of young people are also found, with childless married couples having particularly low unemployment rates. These two aspects are connected by the effect of childbearing filtering couples into different tenures. Finally, the implications for increased social polarization between the two major tenures, and the likely effect on future tenure levels, are discussed.