Inhabitation, Housing and the City

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For a discussion of this separation, see Gülsüm Baydar, “Spectral Returns of Domesticity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 21 (2003): 27–45.

2. The “Housing and the City” AHRA conference in Nottingham was attended by 220 delegates, from 23 different countries.

3. At the time, this juxtaposition of public and private, or perhaps it was a collapse of the terms into each other, was unfamiliar, unexpected. We have since become used to the resulting exposure, which Jean Baudrillard might call an “ecstasy of communication” – see Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 130–131.

4. “[P]eople in work that is not ‘key’ talk about how nice it is working from home, not having to commute, and people in key work keep going to work. Relationships to home and to the services that surround and make home possible are shifting”, wrote Edwina Attlee in her book Strayed Homes (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 176, completed at much the same time as the conference took place.

5. For a discussion of the emergence of mass housing as a category, see Miles Glendinning, Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – A Global History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), Introduction and Part I.

6. It is not incidental that the first attempts to define urbanism as a discipline appear in the early twentieth century – see, for instance, the founding of Town Planning Institute in England in 1914, or of the first school of urban studies in France, Paris’ Ecole des Hautes Etudes Urbaines, in 1919. The transition in Lefebvre’s terms from “the right to the city” (Le droit à la ville, Paris: Seuil, 1968) to his focus on “the urban” in La révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) has influenced our use of the two terms, the city and the urban.

7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

8. We refer here to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactic in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (London, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xix. A strategy is a system of control, of institutionalised power, while a tactic is a practice of everyday life by which we can avoid being engulfed by strategies, even if only for a moment.

9. A selection of papers from the conference that were more directly concerned with housing as built form can be found in Housing and the City, eds. Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale and Nick Haynes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).

10. Anna Minton’s keynote, “Big Capital: Who is London For?” was delivered online on November 19, 2020.

11. Anna Minton, Big Capital: Who Is London For? (London: Penguin, 2017).

12. See Anna Minton’s essay in this issue, “From Gentrification to Sterilization? Building on Big Capital,” Architecture and Culture, vol. 10, no. 3: 387–407.

13. Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville, translated by Eleonore Koffman and Elizabeth Lebas in Writings on Cities (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1996), chapters 2–17; Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/convention_eng.pdf (accessed August 2022).

14. William Davies, “Elites without Hierarchies: Intermediaries, ‘Agency’ and the Super-Rich,” in Cities and the Super-Rich: Real Estate, Elite Practices, and Urban Political Economies, edited by Ray Forrest et al. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 34–35, quoted by Matt Reynolds in this issue.

15. Homes for Today and Tomorrow (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), 4.

16. Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change, edited by the Centre for Urban Studies (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1964), xiv.

17. Homes for Today and Tomorrow, iv.

18. See Heidi Svenningsen Kajita’s article in this issue, “Urgent Minor Matters: Re-Activating Archival Documents for Social Housing Futures,” Architecture and Culture, vol. 10, no. 3: 483–511.

19. Miles Glendinning notes that the names given to mass housing vary “not only between languages but between countries” (Mass Housing, Introduction). In the UK, housing that by the 1960s had come to be called “council housing” – housing built by local government – is now a specific type of “social housing” – housing provided at reduced rents. It would be interesting to know when each of these terms came into use; “public housing” does not seem to have been an official label in the UK, though it, too, is used.

20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 40.

21. See Youcao Ren and Jan Woudstra’s article in this issue, “Between Fengshui and Neighbors: Case Studies of Participant-Led House-Making in Rural East China,” Architecture and Culture, vol. 10, no. 3: 512–533.

22. See Lilian Chee’s end matter to this issue, “Housing and Domesticity,” Architecture and Culture, vol. 10, no. 3, 554–558.

23. Arendt, op. cit., 47. 45-47 ff.

24. Attlee, op. cit. 171. We have paraphrased the words Attlee takes issue with. They are used by John Allan in describing architect Berthold Lubetkin’s emphasis on the articulation of entrance porches, lift lobbies, staircases, etc.: “those moments at which the private individual becomes a public citizen” (John Allan, Berthold Lubetkin, Architecture and the Tradition of Progress, London: RIBA Publications, 1992, 379). Attlee enjoys the architecture but is concerned by the way in which “citizen” applies only to those who have been able to “become” public.

25. Arendt, op. cit., 179 ff.

26. Ibid, 137.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina Borsi

Katharina Borsi is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She teaches design and architectural and urban history and theory. Her research focuses on the intersection between housing, domesticity, and urbanism.

Diana Periton

Diana Periton teaches in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. Her research studies the development of the discipline of urbanism in the early twentieth century, particularly in France, asking what urbanism’s various practitioners understood a city to be. She is a founding editor of Architecture and Culture, first published in 2013.