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.
Robert Menzies' Forgotten People
'Menzies' political self was constructed around a denial of experience and an imagined England filled the void. So too for the people and the country he leda' In 1941, RG Menzies delivered to war-time Australia what was to be his richest, most creative speech, and one of his most influential. 'The Forgotten People' was a direct address to the Australian middle class, the 'people' who would return him to power in 1949 and keep him there until his retirement in 1966. Who were these 'forgotten people'? The middle class pitting their values of hard work and independence against the collectivist ethos of labour? Women shunning the class-based politics of men? The parents of Menzies' childhood in the small country town of Jeparit? Australians struggling to maintain a derivative culture at the edges of the British Empire? Or all of them, in a richly over-determined image that takes us to the heart of Menzies' mid-life political transformation? Judith Brett deftly traces the links between the private and public meanings of Menzies' political language to produce compelling insights into the man and the culture he represented.