Urgent Minor Matters: Re-Activating Archival Documents for Social Housing Futures

Abstract

Architectural archives of large-scale housing projects are usually ordered with construction in mind, but can they also function in support of the social in housing? This article reveals how particular notions of inhabitation were inscribed in documents used in the design processes of a post-World War II housing estate, the Byker Redevelopment in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (1968-83). From their site office, Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB experimented with communicative processes with residents, some of which were kept on record and stored. Scribbles on furnished drawings point to particular imaginaries involving sometimes just one household; residents’ voices are noted in lists, in a local newspaper and in evaluative reports. Re-activating the office archive ethnographically, I stitch together episodic accounts from these scant scraps. The aim is not an all-embracing representation of historical events, but instead the possibility to attend to small truths of the social – urgent minor matters – in mainstream housing futures.

Keywords:

• Welfare state
• architecture
• planning
• social housing
• archives
• materiality
• material practice
• participation

Minor Matters

A great deal of publicity has been given to a small number of relatively minor matters that require attention.¹

In 1972, the housing department of Newcastle upon Tyne referred to “minor matters” in a memo relating to a meeting of the tenants’ association of the large-scale housing estate of Byker Wall (as it is called locally). The Byker Redevelopment was carried out by the architects at Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB (REA) between 1968 and1983. Byker’s architects aimed to be “in intimate contact and collaboration with [residents] particularly, and with the relevant authorities generally, to prepare a project for planning and building a complete and integrated environment for living …”²

The Byker Redevlopment was a rolling program of mostly low-density housing enclaves kept separate from traffic.³ From its inception, the Swedish architects set up a local office on the estate, in a former funeral parlor, to manage the project (Figure 1). The site office was an important democratizing feature of the work at Byker and involved impressive record-keeping efforts. In this site office, residents were invited to voice their concerns about neighborly disputes, property misuse, vandalism, and other issues of grievance. Some of this information has been kept in the office archive. In a representative example, office records note that on May 20, 1974 (Figure 2) a tenant came in “to ask about measure of curtains. Ken talked with her 10 minutes. She has been here least 6/7 time[s].”⁴ It was typical of the post-World War II era that aspects of public or social housing use and tenants’ behavior were ruled by government’s deterministic guides and standards. But in Byker, the minor matters discussed included trivialities of lived experience far afield from the object-centered understandings of most architectural records – matters without any obvious relevance to architectural production that were nevertheless found worthy of note.

Figure 1 Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB established a site office in a former funeral parlor in the middle of the Byker Estate. The site office (white building) has since been converted into flats. Photograph by Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, 2020.

Figure 2 Excerpt from office diary, May 1974, documenting visits to Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB's site office in Byker, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

In the decades leading up to the Byker project, the Northern European Welfare States promoted universalist ideas, characterized by an ethos of justness and solidarity, to guide the newly increased consumption of their populations.⁵ Architects and planners were instrumental in envisioning the good, that is to say universalist, life of welfare state citizens. In multi-family housing, for example, extensive research led governments to determine standards and norms for both behavior and built space.⁶ Documents such as furnished drawings, use manuals, and design and planning guidelines (including the Parker Morris standards for housing in the UK) were central to the ways architects mediated the environments they sought to design.⁷ However, critics pointed out that this deterministic schema and its ethos did not account for residents’ personal and unpredictable activities and desires – the anthropological differentiations – that need to be acknowledged if true democratic engagement is to take place.⁸ Their critiques eventually led to radical experiments with citizen engagement in architecture and planning, many of which influenced and were in turn influenced by Byker.⁹ The Grade II* heritage listing for the Byker Redevelopment, awarded in 2007, rather uniquely praises both the project’s architectural and its community-specific characteristics.¹⁰ Today, the Byker archive provides an illustration of the dynamic tensions between planning and design processes and the ways in which residents actively engage in their housing, often in unplanned ways.

As contemporary communities of large-scale social housing estates are increasingly challenged by rising societal inequalities, the example of Byker remains relevant. There is an urgent need to support residents’ active engagement in social housing at the structural level of professionalized frameworks (for instance, those of architecture, planning, and local government), and also to support residents at more particular, everyday levels. I explore these levels by investigating the minor matters retained in the Byker project’s site office records. My work is not necessarily unique; scholars seeking to better understand the consequences for local communities of the globalized financialization of housing in recent decades often find much to explore in studies of the quotidian.¹¹ Through Byker’s paperwork, I gain insight into ever-present issues of involvement and imagine how architects can reorient the conversation about the bureaucratic apparatus of social housing from positions of neutrality to subjective positions that actively inscribe residents’ place-based accounts into their design work.

Byker and the Archive

The archive of the Byker site office offers unique insight into communicative processes between architects tied to the bureaucracy of mainstream housing design and residents. Erskine was a known advocate for the Swedish social democratic program folkhemmet (“people’s home”), in which social order was seen to rely on the cooperation between market, state, and rational, “reasonable consumers.”¹² For REA, the concerns of their “consumer-clients,” the term they used to describe the residents, were foundational to the Byker project; but their work at Byker was also a critique of the normative welfare state apparatus’s marginalization of the practices of traditional, close-knit societies.¹³ REA combined knowledge from “the realms of anthropology, sociology, psychology and the painstaking checking of results” in order to offer support in intimate and personal situations.¹⁴ In this way, REA approached the production of rationalized, mainstream multi-family housing with what were, at the time, new spatial imaginaries, with a focus on place- and people-based practices.

Accordingly, as the Byker architects engaged in written and drawn work that followed the era’s universalist ideas for living, they also invited residents to bring their concerns about inhabitation – however seemingly small and tedious – to the site office. The archive of this site-work thus includes material that offers distinctive insights into small, particular (hi)stories that often remain hidden in the generic approach to the everyday adopted by mainstream design systems. The Byker archive is extensive, as yet uncatalogued, and is stored predominantly in the order of design phases at the RIBA Collections in London. Records from the Drottningholm office of REA are stored at ArkDes in Stockholm.¹⁵ The office archives’ focus is on building information, but minor matters, such as design faults and problems brought to the architects’ attention by residents, are also compiled there.

Archives, scholars point out, contain only selected records of the past and not full truths.¹⁶ This selectivity, and the reality that minorities’ materials rarely appear in institutional archives, raises questions about how (hi)stories of the past can guide us in defining more inclusive futures. In The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage and Order, media historian Kate Eichhorn approaches archival studies with these limitations in mind. Responding to an apparent scarcity of evidence, Eichhorn makes use of an ethnographic construction of research to examine how institutional collections order women’s “outrage,” or resistance histories. She shows that knowledge production and new possibilities for action develop, not in the archive as storage facility, but when the archive is activated in relationship to the people who use texts in various ways to practice resistance, forming what Eichhorn refers to as “textual communities.”¹⁷

This approach to the institutional archive and its records has parallels in anthropologist Matthew S. Hull’s illustration of how documents function in social processes both within and beyond organizational boundaries, inside and outside the office. Hull’s Government of Paper studies the post-World War II masterplan of Islamabad, following documents from, for instance, city planning offices into private homes. The everyday handling of papers such as property certificates, muddled by incongruent methods of mapping ownership, disrupts expectations and hierarchies. Their circulation amongst residents in informal settlements, for example, invites participation and means that documents are worked over or “thickened,” unsettling the normal rulings of paperwork.¹⁸ In this way, Hull shows that planning documents are not autonomous and static, they are media involved in the transfer and formation of information and ideas.

Albena Yaneva focuses more specifically on the architectural archive. Yaneva is an anthropologist who sees the archive as both a storage place for records and a process that organizes information in close relation to the practice of design. She describes it as a realm of endless iterations of fractured and partial records that are continuously extracted, rearranged, and re-activated by multiple participants and for different purposes. The archive is practiced, writes Yaneva, and is a way of “crafting history.”¹⁹ However, histories based on the paper archive are contingent on institutional expertise that always processes and sanitizes what goes into it. Yaneva points out that we must also acknowledge space for messiness if we are to understand design practices. At Byker, that messiness includes the record of the ways in which occupants’ own reproductions of space intertwine with those of mainstream architectural production in untidy but vital ways.

Architects Jos Boys and Julia Dwyer argue that the architectural archival collection, although largely object-centered and often limited to records pertaining to construction, can itself reveal important insights into social processes and histories.²⁰ And they point out that there is often also paperwork “archived” in “individuals’ cupboards, attics or commercial storage facilities.”²¹ These unusual locations contain scant scraps of work beyond what is deemed “proper” that provide important interruptions to traditionally understood archives and can introduce new genres, activities, and concerns to normative understandings of building information.

To spot the minor, then, we must search both inside and outside the dominant object-orientated order of archived documents, and listen for different voices.²² I approach the archive’s minor matters by adopting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s methodological stance in their writing on “minor literatures.” There, a minor matter “begins by expressing itself and doesn't conceptualize until afterward.”²³ In the case of the Byker archive, I regard the minor as that which is often marginalized in paperwork, including scribbles on drawings, evidence of residents nagging, and technicians’ records of snagging. In parallel to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor, I attend to small, particular issues which rarely act as stand-alone archival records within mainstream design documents.²⁴ These scraps seldom make it to the architectural office, much less the archive. But at Byker, they were kept by the architects in the site office, then moved to the archive in their entirety.

I undertake this work because the small and particular truths circulated in REA documents open urgent questions for architectural disciplines, including the question of how we can contribute to the transformation of social housing in ways that support residents. Minor matters remind us of the agency of the architectural community in potentially protecting residents’ access to housing and promoting their well-being in housing at both systemic and localized levels. I seek not to provide an overarching history but to activate the episodic. In line with the archival scholarship mentioned above, I find that the relevance of this minor evidence depends on how it may come to function in the present, within the broader community of those who craft the (hi)stories and future transformation of post-World War II large-scale housing.

Dining Table in Contact with Life on Square

In the archive (Figures 3 and 4). A scribble on an early design development drawing of a dwelling unit reads: “dining table in contact with life on square.”²⁵ The dining table is drawn up against a window. The drawing is one of numerous studies of relationships between the interior of a flat and spaces outside. 94a Raby Street and the adjoining square are explored across three scales and in different projections. At the time, furnished plans for municipal housing complied with space standards which were dictated by meticulously prescribed ideas about and ideals for everyday life. Normative guides such as the Parker Morris report Homes for Today and Tomorrow outlined requirements for room layout and dimensions, for circulation and recreational space, among other things.²⁶ Through their attention to function government reports asserted certain patterns of living. For instance, so-called “meal spaces” were envisioned as contiguous with the working space of the kitchen, so as to meet demands for “informal meals, family meals, and entertaining.”²⁷ They even went so far as to exemplify, and therefore mediate, typical scenarios for inhabitation throughout the day, such as the following from Design Bulletin 6: Space in the Home first published in 1963:

0710 Breakfast has to be served quickly, the school children got ready and the other children looked after as they wake up.

0830 Father and school child are off. Mother gives the other children some food and has something herself. A place where food can be eaten near the work area is useful.²⁸

Figure 3 Detail of drawing of 94a Raby Street, part of Carville Rd Stage Proposed Flats. Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB, August 11, 1976. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

Figure 4 Drawing of 94a Raby Street, part of Carville Rd Stage Proposed Flats. Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB, August 11, 1976. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

Reading the drawing of 94a Raby Street in reference to the normative framework of the guides, I notice a freestanding coat rack and sliding doors to the kitchen that negotiate levels of publicness and privacy. I attend to the document’s generic characteristics and to the work the architects likely would have done to find solutions to particular issues, such as shielding the toil of housework to provide a more leisurely meal space. From the scribbled note, however, I also observe the specific relationships envisioned between the dining table and life on the square.

*

Thirty-one years later, the National Heritage List for England makes no mention of this dining table nor of site-specific ideas for inhabitation. However, the list does take into account the “projecting oriel window[s] to […] no. 94 Raby Street clad in brown weatherboarding. Raby Street with projecting green, dark blue and brown porches, no. 94a Raby Street reached up steps.”²⁹ “My gosh there’s a lot of wood,” exclaimed architectural critic Reyner Banham in a 1975 radio broadcast on Byker, This Island Now, a copy of the typed script for which is in the ArkDes archive in Stockholm (Figure 5). “I mean it’s as if the whole thing had been overrun by an epidemic of garden sheds and garden fences and so on.”³⁰ His verbal enthusiasm mirrors the archival collections’ many drawn variations of timber windows, galleries, stairs and porches like those at 94a Raby Street. Banham concludes: “At Byker where in fact it goes on long enough for the patterns to repeat […] then it begins to look like a convincing aesthetic in its own right.”³¹

Figure 5 Front page of transcript of This Island Now. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

I am curious to learn more about how and if these patterns support the situations of their occupants’ personal lives, as the architects likely imagined. On a walk through the estate, I stop to look at the Raby Street window from the square. I cannot see the dining table; the curtains are drawn. But I exchange glances with a man smoking on the porch across the street. He quickly retreats into the corner flat, closes the door and pulls the blind. Nearby, someone peeps from behind a net curtain as I go by. A group of children pause their laughter as they pass me. I think of the many figures and pieces of furniture sketched out in the drawing collection that indicate scale and guided the draughts-person to imagine inhabitation. Yet, through these fleeting encounters, I gain little information about the relation between the architectural patterns and residents’ actual concerns and doings.

*

Back in the archive, I note how the architects enquired further into residents’ needs by means of lists of complaints submitted by the tenants who had moved into the pilot scheme – the first phase, constructed in the southern part of the redevelopment. On a hand-written record (Figure 6), a resident, Mrs. E. Kirsopp, wrote:

[T]he stairway, our only entrance to the house, should have a gate at the bottom also the railings should be blocked in the same as the stairs as it is now we have no privacy, as the stairs are a playground for most of the youngsters of all ages from all around the district and your out [sic] chasing them three and four times every night. Teenagers as well. ³²

Figure 6 Mrs E. Kirsopp, 230 Kirk Street. List of complaints. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

While lists of complaints were requested by the architects targeting, specifically, snagging, repair, and maintenance practices in the pilot scheme, they were also one of several experiments promoted by the architects to include residents’ voices in the design processes (Figure 7).

Figure 7 Drawing for Tenant of Ground Floor Flats 3. Kendal Rise. Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB. By courtesy of Per Hederus.

*

On a visit to the archive at ArkDes, I meet one of the architects, Per Hederus, who worked on the early stages of the Byker Redevelopment. Hederus passed my table just as I turned the pages in the portfolio to one of his drawings. He stopped to chat, and we started a conversation that continued by email and over Zoom. Hederus had not been involved in 94a Raby Street (and he did not specifically remember the lists of complaints), but he recollected how the furnished 1:50 plans were not only a means to ensure that the design complied with the Parker Morris standards, but also “a way of communicating directly with the staying tenants.” He explained how these particular drawings were “drawn late in the design for each project at the same time as people were allocated their new dwelling. Often this happened in small groups in our office.” A specific kind of “drawing-for-tenant” was invented as a consequence of, but also an aid to these dialogues:

For example, we wrote the dimensions of each window and parapet so the residents could order new curtains. Because we had a lot of visitors [in the site-office] we knew that this was something people often asked about. The drawings were traced freehand and annotated by hand so as not to make this too laborious, because they were not used for anything else.³³

Hederus also described his work on the more spectacular axonometric neighborhood drawings produced to inform the local and professional communities about the design work that went on behind the office window (Figure 8). In both cases, the architects were inventing new genres of documents for information exchanges within otherwise mainstream systems of council housing design processes. These documents were produced both to elicit conversation and in response to messy everyday issues that a lot of residents talked about.

Figure 8 Residents passing a large drawing displayed in the Byker site office window. Photograph by Per Hederus.

*

Many of these everyday issues concerned matters of detailed design. In a letter written to the architects dated November 15, 1972, the director of housing notes, in regard to the pilot scheme also known as the Janet Square Development, that “as number 205 was void I took the opportunity of checking on some of the complaints that have been referred to me by the tenants.” In example, he listed:

Rainwater pipes:- The p.v.c. rainwater pipes especially in public areas are subject to vandalism […] concrete plinths to which the foot of the pipes are attached only encourage children to climb onto them, these children then pull on the pipe and in consequence the top of the pipe is pulled away from the nozzle outlet on the eaves gutter […]

Floors to balconies:- Some tenants have objected to the open slatted type floor to the external balconies on grounds of modesty. This applies especially to floors situated over pedestrian areas.³⁴

Often such details of use are considered too mundane for architectural histories and are reserved for a very select group of techno-managerial specialists. But not at Byker. There, minor matters were negotiated and debated among architects, critics, and politicians. They were even printed in the Byker Phoenix community newspaper produced by residents (Figure 9). Consider the following example written by the Editor:

There are many recorded instances of old people living for months in houses which provide little protection from rain (because the lead is stripped off their roofs), homes which are falling apart because of demolition work two doors, away, of old people (and young) too scared to go to bed at night for fear of fires (either lit by children from remains of workmen’s fires or left burning by the workmen themselves).³⁵

The locals in Byker worried and complained about their old houses which were up for demolition in the redevelopment, about the nuisance of redevelopment, about their new flats (where the urban design was thought to invite children’s play), and even about quiet talking causing too much noise and disturbances in the private realm. In the archive, I traced these issues to experts’ audits, memos, evaluations and instructions for design‚ and also to new genres such as lists of complaints, “drawings-for-tenant,” and the local Byker Phoenix. In these media, the consumer-clients voiced their concerns in various epistolary, technical, evaluative, journalistic and gossipy forms of expression.

Figure 9 Excerpt from Byker Phoenix, issue no. and date unknown: 11. Photograph by Heidi Svenningsen Kajita by courtesy of ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

*

These different communicative processes were linked to the ways specific architectural components became subjects of re-adjustment, re-design and more fundamental re-thinking of the scheme at large.³⁶ For instance, in the minutes from a study group convened by the Northern Mayor Authorities Housing Consortium in 1972 to discuss “Low Rise Higher Density Housing,” the architects reflected on some of the issues previously raised by residents, such as noise from children playing on external stairs and in shared spaces, where play equipment and benches had been provided. The architects ultimately concluded that it was “important that the tenant can withdraw into a more private part of the living space: otherwise stress will result.”³⁷ Taking note of complaints, the architects omitted certain elements; they removed tables and benches from Janet Square,³⁸ and they stated at one point that “external stairs have been eliminated from the low-rise areas of future phases.”³⁹ They changed their design. On the topic of front garden fences, Newcastle’s Director of Housing suggested that the architects should follow residents’ requests and extend fencing to include shrubbed areas flanking the footpaths.⁴⁰ The architects wrote in response: “we feel visually this would be a pity, but if it means that beds get well maintained, it is probably worthwhile.” However, sometimes the architects elected not to change things, and to carry on as planned. Justifying the level of enclosure of private gardens or yards, they continued to find “the general standard of privacy and enclosure reasonable. It was discussed with the tenants at the time.”⁴¹ And, as we know from the low-rise unit at 94a Raby Street, not all external stairs were eliminated. The front garden fences were not in all instances re-designed, and play spaces were still constructed in other parts of the estate. The small issues raised in residents’ complaints were dealt with specifically in each case, as well as in view of overall concerns.

*

Back on site again, I join a game of bingo in Tom Collins House, sheltered accommodation situated in the northwestern part of Byker Wall. I had been invited by Nancy (not her real name). We first met when her dog approached me on one of my walks through the estate.⁴² After the bingo game, a resident, Lily (again not her real name), commented on the large bay window in the common lounge. “We’ve taken the best seat in the house,” she says. “We spend time sitting here watching the vans going in and out.”⁴³ The bay window is described in the heritage listing as one of two “[l]arge bay windows to common rooms facing south and south-west on lower floors. Tom Collins House is the terminating feature of Dunn Terrace, and one of the most prominent elements of the Byker Estate.”⁴⁴

I show Nancy one of the letters of complaint from the archive. “Oh God,” she says as she finishes reading, “it’s still the same [poor maintenance]. The council did away with all the men who used to come around and clean the streets. We don’t have any now. You’ll find in town they have them.” We continue our conversation over tea and biscuits, and other residents join in. They complain about maintenance, care, and the “hundreds of rules,” that, they say, apply to their shared areas. “You’re not allowed to take someone’s washing out the laundry […] and people are waiting to use it.” Another woman chips in: “You can sit for hours waiting for that washer becoming empty, because people forget about the washing.” As the topic leaps from these neighborly conflicts to the topic of sausage rolls, onion pies, and cash-in-hand economies, our attention is suddenly drawn to what is happening outside the window – a community police “undercover” action. I am told that everybody knows the community police who “often pop in […] and ask how things are doing.” As we speak, a couple of young junkies get picked up. “They get their needles from … It’s just beside Morrisons,” Nancy tells me: “one time, they had mattresses, settees and everything around there you know […] You were scared to go down the back […] And I used that path a lot going out with the dog.” Another woman intervenes: “Just when one of the community police come in, Emil, one of them was doing a number two. And they had to wait until she’d finished.” One story leads to the next. The lounge, I am told, had been broken into by “two blokes and a woman. They came in through […] upstairs, the door on the balcony, and had sex on the settee until somebody disturbed them. That was quite a few months ago.” The bingo caller emphasizes “They weren’t just sitting on the settee.”⁴⁵

There is no mention of drugs, sex or number twos in public in the architects’ instructions for the bay window pattern, nor on the drawing of the “dining table in contact with life on square.”

Re-Activating Archival Documents

A motley collection

Above, I list, stack, and leap between minor matters noted by architects, critics, housing officers, government officials, journalists, heritage specialists and residents. The selected graphic artifacts vary in genre, from furnished drawings to a radio broadcast transcript, a local newspaper and residents’ lists of complaints. These archival sources are complemented by excerpts from design guides prescribing housing norms, heritage listings and transcripts of personal interviews. While such minor matters – both generic and particular – were filed in the office archive throughout the rolling program, the records do not only tell stories about work carried out in the site office. They refer to other contexts, too. Thus, I follow details, such as the bay window, from the two institutional archives to the site, to Hederus’ private archive, to government files and to a national heritage listing. The examples of actors, records, and archival locations are non-exhaustive, but even this small selection of sources reveals that issues of inhabitation vary from determined function and esthetic imaginaries to unpredictable material practices. The episodes stitch together different stories, offering opportunities for combining knowledge areas and classifications usually kept apart.

This messy information draws contours of a porous and open-ended architectural design process that disrupts the postwar deterministic rationale.⁴⁶ In the Byker archive most document genres and documenting techniques accord with a proper, sanitized postwar classification and standardization system, but the order leaks. In the archive boxes there are also various accounts of dirt, vandalism, and unruly use. Residents’ lists of complaints and architects’ scribbles on drawings share shelves with and expand the standardized expert documents and normative measures of everyday life.

During Byker’s rolling program the architects, local authorities and residents, both groups and individuals, experimented with participation according to what Mavis Zutshi described, in a 1978 evaluative study, as a “motley collection of techniques and initiatives that […] emerged over the years.”⁴⁷ Zutshi was commissioned by Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service to investigate local authority and tenant groups’ engagement processes, but her report also comments on the architects’ engagement with residents. She recognized it as an indisputable achievement, particularly due to their “informal” and “responsive” approaches that welcomed both agreement and tensions and conflicts with residents. Zutshi explains that the architects established close and sensitive links with their consumer-clients, but that, at the time of her investigation in 1977-78, difficulties in dealing with local authorities led the architects to withdraw from some of their efforts.⁴⁸ Tenant engagement was more a medley than a systematized procedure.

We have known for some time that documents, even – perhaps especially – in motley form, have agency in social processes. As Hull points out, “to restore analytically the visibility of documents, to look at rather than through them, is to treat them as mediators, things that ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’.”⁴⁹ In its archive, Byker’s scraps and more formal documents testify to and project concerns of inhabitation beyond strict disciplinary boundaries of design. In line with Boys and Dwyer, who call for “feminist reframings of the mainstream architectural archive,” I would suggest that an open-ended gaze on the archive is not only a strategy for understanding minority contributions to architecture, it also enables us “to go beyond simplistic divisions between production and consumption, capitalism and radicalism, design and interpretation.”⁵⁰ Documents can circulate information across such divisions to combine unlike purposes. It is a small step from Hull’s study of how paperwork functions in social processes to media historian Cornelia Vismann’s point that oral translators, copyists and others engaged with the processing of paper unwittingly make this paperwork act both for and against the order it upholds. In Files – Law and Media Technology, Vismann asks:

is what was written down an accurate recording of what was said? Does what is stored correspond to what took place? Is it complete? It becomes necessary to establish criteria for the reliability of written records and to furnish means to authenticate them.⁵¹

In Byker, the various techniques employed to include minor matters in the bureaucratic apparatus present us with new archival and history writing possibilities, allowing us to reactivate marginalia that can circulate along unordered paths in and out of architectural design processes and storage systems.

Activist roles are needed again

REA’s interest in residents’ involvement in their housing translated into an awareness of and care for detailed minor matters during the Byker Redevelopment. But according to Zutshi’s review (which is also recorded in the ArkDes archive) the architects withdrew from some of these communicative processes over time as the redevelopment progressed – and so, according to the architects, did the residents. Ralph Erskine, in one of his reflective texts, wrote:

In Byker there is an increasing tendency for people to be satisfied and ‘middle class’ in their attitudes to house, home, garden and neighbors […] Sure, it is a pleasure to see that people thrive […] But at the same time you worry that this satisfaction leads to a more pacified population. At the same time you cannot sustain an active population by building poor environments. Instead the Byker residents will have to take over the role as activists themselves, when the day comes that those roles are needed again.⁵²

Erskine’s call for residents to “take over” is not a rejection of the role planning and architecture play in welfare state systems. Instead, we might read it as a call for resident activism to take place inside the apparatus of systematic welfare. In some ways, the site office anticipated this. It was set up as a response to the residents’ distrust of local authorities, who had been drafting demolition plans for years before REA came on board. But, as Erskine pointed out, there are times when resident involvement in housing is more urgent. As residents had gradually been rehoused within Byker (or moved to other areas) the nature of engagement in their housing may have followed other paths than those of participation in planning and design.⁵³ Today, after years of austerity policies and neoliberal financialization of housing, it may be a time when “those roles are needed again.”⁵⁴ With the community involvement uniquely inscribed in heritage listings, those taking part in Byker’s ongoing transformation processes cannot ignore the necessary links between architectural production and residents’ reproductions of space.⁵⁵ To such work, the archived stories offer clues that can be re-activated for continued appreciation of local engagement.

Considering what the heritage listing in 2007 signifies for Byker’s future, John Pendlebury and Jill Haley argue for transformation managed by and with people who live and depend on this housing. They point out that Byker is characterized as one of the poorest wards in the country, with low educational achievement and low life expectancy. It has four proximate food banks, and nineteen languages are spoken on the estate.⁵⁶ Such challenges should invoke resident activism, according to Erskine. But in contrast to this trust in residents, policies and popular sources often portray people who live in social housing in northern European contexts as “shameless” or “undeserving” citizens who live within a “culture of silence.”⁵⁷ Not only are housing estates negatively referred to as “ghettos” or “concrete jungles,” the stigmatization often extends to residents, who are seen to be unengaged in their housing and society.⁵⁸ In her studies of post-World War II housing estates Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing of 1985, Alice Coleman had already proclaimed that bad physical design, such as narrow walkways and unclear marking of private and public space, is the “cause” of bad behavior and high rates of vandalism.⁵⁹ Multi-family housing first designed to accommodate, even create, reasonable citizens of the welfare state was here negatively aligned with social malaise. When design is causally linked to the social, both design processes and social processes are oversimplified, and ordered in ways that overlook the motley place-based practices by which people lead their lives. If instead we look more closely at such practices, as we can at Byker, we find approaches that are suggestive of how welfare state housing might become more inclusive and work to support residents’ own differentiated reproductions of space.

Simply observing today’s Byker bingo players unpicks at least some of the causal logic in Coleman’s argument. The residents have a functional lounge, including places to sit and a working kitchen, yet this functionality doesn’t guarantee harmony. They value the pleasurable position by the bay window, but they also realize that space is negotiated over time. They may keep a door open for the community police, but they are worried to learn that doors cannot keep out unruly behavior. In the kitchen, I was told, residents cook lunch for builders and make onion pies they sell to visitors. When a profit is made, it is piggy-banked along with any bingo winnings. These earnings allow residents to go on bus trips to explore other parts of the country. Residents, historically and today, cannot be categorized with a single label, and nor can their use of space. They are vulnerable and empowered, passive and active. The medley of clues available in the Byker archive expands ways in which architects can serve tenants, just as they expand our understanding of participation to include the most mundane levels of activity. Sliding notions of inhabitation between predictable everyday use and other, much messier kinds of everydayness may – just – be captured by spending more time on site, more time with snagging and repair, more time fiddling with details than is typically provided by object-centered architectural history and practice. As the documentation of the design processes in Byker shows, REA’s practices were engaging and messy. Even the most sanitized techniques, such as a furnished drawing included site-specific scribbles, a “dining table in contact with life on square,” retain room for particularity.

Walking along routes once drawn, touching materials once specified, or gossiping by a heritage-listed bay window, I glimpse the relevance of the small and particular aspects of the social in housing today. In my encounters with residents on site and during interviews, archival documents are re-activated, raising new questions for my return to the archive. There, I notice manuscripts and scribbles I had not registered before. This iterative-inductive research process mimics the way documents were used to transmit information in Byker within and beyond the office. From the site office, conversations took place and utterings were translated to paper. Documents were sketched out, copied, marked up, edited and finalized only to be revised again during construction. By following the documents ethnographically, we learn that these information exchanges were not entirely disembodied or transmuted by bureaucratic procedures. Building information is embroiled in complicated social agency, unless this is willfully ignored.

The Urgency of Minor Matters: “A Whole Other Story is Vibrating Within …”

As the preceding argument suggests, “other” stories are told in minor, humdrum and time-consuming ways. There is no unifying narrative available here. Bay windows and external stairs were and are both liked and disliked by different residents. At stake in the archive, as Eichhorn reminds us, “are not the worlds these collections claim to represent, but rather the worlds they invite us to imagine and even realize.”⁶⁰ There are urgent needs for the transformation of large-scale housing estates that support what matters to people in these communities at the level of those things that can be generalized and systematized, and also at the everyday level of small, material situations of inhabitation, however difficult this is. Residents write lists of complaints and look after the community police as acts of caring for and sustaining their communities. Architectural archivists, historians, and practitioners also play key roles in how we protect and care about each other in society. To this end, the archival records can re-activate architectural communities’ curiosity toward minor matters of inhabitation.

As I look not only through the archival records but also at them, minor matters are revealed in scribbles and other marginalia, guiding my attention to practices and processes that lie beyond what are generally presumed to be architects’ predominant concerns. By listing and stacking these records, I bypass documents’ usual hierarchies and roles. This analytical mode of avoiding immediate all-embracing narratives and focusing instead on individual instances of expression, allowing them to resonate, is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, who write about how the “cramped space” of “minor literature” – the literature of minorities in a majority language – amplifies their connections to the wider social and political environment in which they operate. That environment cannot be ignored or assumed to be background; it obtrudes. “The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified,” claim Deleuze and Guattari, “because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” ⁶¹

Minor matters – and the practice of recording, archiving, extracting, re-arranging and re-activating them – can make us notice the concerns and socially reproductive processes of the beneficiaries of and participants in “architectural objects,” as well as the contexts in which those “objects,” landscapes or buildings, operate. Minor matters, recorded across behavioral, esthetic, ethnographic and technical information and in various marginalia, may in fact reflect major matters to residents and also to those working in social housing. In this way, records of the architectural archive have agency in past, present, and future social processes, intertwining what are usually distinct knowledge fields involved in the production and reproduction of space.

Minor matters should not be defined as a fixed list of material or spatial concerns, but rather as evidence of a need for continuously sustained attention to residents’ material practices, understood here not only as normative but also as differentiated, involving varying degrees of activism. Under austerity policies, residents in social housing are often ignored, displaced, addressed, even punished for their vulnerability and dependency. Tracing Byker’s history through the office archive and the heritage listing counters this tendency by integrating residents’ voices into an inherently societal conversation about spatial imaginaries. Attending to the minor matters in Byker’s site office archive illustrates the ways in which building information can and should be interwoven into democratic communicative processes.

Ultimately, minor matters demand attention from architectural communities in support of democratic processes in housing, a demand made more acute when increasingly unequal societies force people to depend on support for that housing. I conclude this paper with two observations concerning the role of history-writing and of archival documentation processes in addressing this demand:

(A) In recent years, the architectural characteristics of post-World War II large-scale housing have been increasingly acknowledged as an emerging form of heritage. The heritage listing of community values as well as esthetic values in Byker points us in new directions, suggesting how we might construct and manage architectural histories as social processes. When we look closely, the documents of Byker’s design processes invoke histories beyond those of information concerning architectural objects, stories that challenge us to understand the past as a motley resource to inform the ongoing transformation of the social in housing. I would like to encourage histories that are prepared not always to look for a single, overarching narrative, that re-activate small and particular matters of inhabitation found within mainstream accounts, seeing archival documents as media that are intertwined in social relationships, and productive for re-imagining and exploring existing sites.

(B) The dominant and widely accepted idea of modern large-scale housing as a failure depends on simplified causal relationships between the built environment and social problems. A transhistorical focus on particularities of inhabitation reveals possibilities for de-familiarizing and disorienting this assumed order. Consequently, when confronted with welfare state history, records and accounts of minor matters in housing can be seen to emphasize a messy but positive, affirming history. Re-thinking the decency and solidarity that once underpinned welfare state housing, I urge planning and design experts today to consider more expansive documenting and mediating techniques as integral to their (mainstream) design processes in order to support residents, and to stay curious with them.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to the editors and peer-reviewers of this Special Issue. Thank you also to everyone who helped me with this research including Byker Wall residents and architects for sharing experiences, staff at ArkDes Collection, Stockholm and RIBA Collections, London, and scholarly communities including Svava Riesto and Tilo Amhoff and participants at conference sessions at AHRA 2020 and ACHS Futures 2020, where this research was first presented. Special thanks to Katie Lloyd Thomas for profound support, and to Molly Gage for developmental editing of this article. Thanks also to Masa, Minna, and Sora for sharing what matters most every day.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under [Grant number 9032-00006B – IPD].

Notes on contributors

Heidi Svenningsen Kajita

Heidi Svenningsen Kajita is assistant professor in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen. Currently working on the research project (Im)possible Instructions: Inscribing Use-Value in the Architectural Design Process (2019–23) funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark, Kajita looks at how architecture and planning (re)produce social processes, focusing on the history and transformation of welfare state large-scale housing. She draws on emerging ethnographic-architectural methodology to combine knowledge of users’ everyday practices, normative frameworks for the built environment, and architects' drawn and written work. Kajita is a visiting fellow at Newcastle University (2019–23) and a member of the Society of Artists, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2015-).

Notes

1. M. JG/BA, “Housing Committee: Byker Pilot Scheme,” draft, May 24, 1972. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

2. Ralph Erskine, “Byker: Newcastle,” 1968. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

3. For a thorough account of the project’s phases, see Michael Drage, “Byker: Surprising the Colleagues for 35 Years – A Social History of Ralph Erskine's Arkitektkontor AB in Newcastle,” Twentieth Century Architecture: The Journal of the Twentieth Century Society, 2008, no. 9: 148–162.

4. Quote from office diary, May 1974. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

5. See, for instance, Kenny Cupers, Helena Mattsson and Catharina Gabrielsson, eds., Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020); Janina Gosseye and Tom Avermaete, eds., Shopping Towns Europe: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre, 1945–1975 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olaf Wallenstein, Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State (London, Black Dog Publishing, 2010); Mark Swenarton, Tom Avaermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel, Architecture and the Welfare State (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

6. Examples include Kungliga Bostadsstyrelsen, God Bostad – idag, i morgon (Stockholm: 1954, 1960, 1964); Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MoHLG), Homes for Today and Tomorrow, Report of the Parker Morris Committee (London, HMSO., 1961), available online: https://archive.org/details/op1266209-1001/page/n15/mode/2up (accessed April 5, 2021). See also Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache, “Handbooks and the User Experience,” in Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, ed. Kenny Cupers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

7. MoHLG, Homes for Today and Tomorrow.

8. Numerous critiques of Western authoritarianism in planning and housing design were put forward during the 1960s and 70s by scholars including Henri Lefebvre, John Habracken, Jane Jacobs and Ingrid Gehl, and also through citizens’ own grass-roots initiatives – see, for instance, the Free Town Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark, which was apparently a source of inspiration to some of the Byker architects (unpublished interview with members of the REA team by Sally Watson and Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, November 9, 2020).

9. The participatory ethos of the Byker Redevelopment was informed by national planning policies such as the “Skeffington Report,” the popular name for A. M., People and Planning: Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning (London: HMSO., 1969). And in turn, the Byker project came to influence participatory design practice beyond national boundaries and any specific time period – see, for example, Paul Jenkins and Leslie Forsyth, eds., Architecture, Participation and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

10. Available online: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392118 (accessed March 15, 2020). See also: https://bykercommunitytrust.org/ (accessed November 5, 2021) and John Pendlebury, Tim Townsend and Rose Gilroy, “Social Housing as Heritage: the Case of Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne,” in Lisanne Gibson and John Pendlebury, eds., Valuing Historic Environments (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 179–200. According to these sources, Byker was listed on the National Heritage list for England in 2007 under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990. The listing mentions architectural features and also highlights the rehousing of 40% of the original residents. It goes on to mention the methods used to keep the community informed during redevelopment. The heritage listing was locally advocated and led to reorganization of the management of Byker. Thus, in 2012 the Byker Community Trust (BCT) housing association was established after a stock transfer with Newcastle City Council. In 2021, the ownership and management of all homes and land on the Byker Estate were formally transferred from BCT to Karbon Homes, a company that owns and manages more than 30,000 affordable homes in the North East of England and Yorkshire. A local management office for face-to-face contact with the local community will continue to exist.

11. See, for example, Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, Fragile potentialer i de store planer: rumlige og materielle dimensioner af efterkrigstidens storskala boligbebyggelser i brug (PhD Diss., Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering, 2016); Jennifer Mack, The Construction of Equality: Syrian Immigration and the Swedish City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Helena Mattson and Meike Schalk, “Action Archive. Oral history as performance,” in Speaking of Buildings. Oral History in Architectural Research, eds. Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead and Deborah Van Der Plaat (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), 94–113; and the cross-institutional research project PUSH: Public Space in European Social Housing: https://www.pushousing.eu/about (accessed May 17, 2022).

12. Helena Mattsson, “Designing the Reasonable Consumer: Standardisation and Personalisation in Swedish Functionalism,” in Swedish Modernism, eds. Mattsson and Sven-Olaf Wallenstein, 74–99.

13. See e.g. Ralph Erskine, “Democratic Architecture – the Universal and Useful Art: Projects and Reflections,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 130, no. 5314, September 1982: 642–659; Ralph Erskine, “Den lojala Arkitekturen,” Arkitektur 1981, no. 7: 4–9; Ralph Erskine, “Byker. Nybyggnad var bästa lösningen,” Arkitektur 1977, no. 6: 23–24; Ralph Erskine, “Funktionalism eller dekorerad låda,” Arkitektur 1987, no. 7: 36.

14. Ralph Erskine, “Democratic Architecture,” 644.

15. The Byker office archive at RIBA Collections, London, holds the entire contents of the Byker site office that was set up for the project. I wish to thank RIBA Collections, and especially Sally Watson, who supported access to this as-yet uncatalogued archive. I have searched a small part of the vast collection of manuscripts that are boxed predominantly in order of design phases: Pilot Scheme, Perimeter Block, Kendal St, Grace St and Gordon Rd, Bolam St, Dunn Tce, Chirton St, Janet St, Raby St, Carville Rd, Ayton St, Avondale Rd, Clydesdale Rd and Harbottle St. The ArkDes Collection, Stockholm, contains the less extensive Byker material from REA’s Drottningholm office.

16. See e.g. Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Keith Thomas, “Working Method,” London Review of Books 32, no. 11, June 10, 2010; Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

17. Kate Eichhorn, “Sites Unseen: Ethnographic Research in a Textual Community,” Qualitative Studies in Education 14, no. 4 (2001): 566; Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013).

18. Matthew S. Hull, Government of Paper (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012); Matthew S. Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2012): 251–267.

19. Albena Yaneva, Crafting History Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2020).

20. Jos Boys and Julia Dwyer, “Revealing Work. Interrogating Artifacts to (Re)View Histories of Feminist Architectural Practice,” Architecture and Culture 5:3 (2017): 502.

21. Ibid., 498.

22. In this research, I combine archival and fieldwork studies. Fieldwork activities include personal interviews with residents in Byker (January–March 2020); meetings with researchers at conferences, in libraries and university offices, and in seminars and meetings (2019–2022); meetings with curators in archives (2019–2022); and conversations with architects who worked on Byker Redevelopment through personal interviews, email correspondence and a seminar (2019–2020).

23. As quoted in Réda Bensmaïa, “Foreword: The Kafka Effect,” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, edited by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), xvii.

24. My interest in the “minor” matters of the mainstream office archive learns from how Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literatures have been deployed in architecture and urban studies, e.g. Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Kirsty Volz, “Reconsidering ‘Minor’ Archives: The Case of Australian Architect Nell McCredie,” Architectural Histories 8, no. 1:24; Klaske Havik, Kris Pint, Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner (eds.), Vademecum – 77 Minor Terms For Writing Urban Places (Rotterdam: NAi010 Publishers, 2020).

25. Note on drawing of Carville Rd Stage Proposed Flats that shows 94a Raby Street, Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB, August 11, 1976. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

26. MoHLG, Homes for Today and Tomorrow.

27. Ibid., 10.

28. Design Bulletin, 6: “Space in the Home,” Great Britain: Ministry of Housing and Local Government (London: HMSO., 1963), as quoted by Julia Park in One Hundred Years of Housing Space Standards: What Now? Available online:

http://housingspacestandards.co.uk/assets/space-standards_onscreen.pdf (accessed March 2021): 23 (Park refers to the 1968 metric edition of Design Bulletin 6). See also MoHLG, Design Bulletin 14: “House planning: a guide to user needs with a check list” (London: HMSO., 1968).

29. Heritage list entry number: 1392118. Statutory address: 94a, Raby Street. Available online: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/ (accessed March 15, 2020).

30. Reyner Banham quoted in broadcast script for This Island Now by Jeremy Bugler, March 20, 1975, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm. In the broadcast, Banham and Bugler are joined by Vernon Gracie (project architect), Caroline Purchess (social administrator of the site office), Ralph Erskine, Ken Galley (planning officer) and residents, unnamed.

31. Ibid.

32. Mrs. E. Kirsopp, 230 Kirk Street, letter of complaint. RIBA Collections, London.

33. Unpublished email exchange between Per Hederus and author during April 2020. My translation.

34. P. J. Dixon, Director of Housing, City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne, Janet Square Development, November 15, 1972. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

35. Editor, “What can we do …?” Byker Phoenix, issue unknown: 11. Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm.

36. Heidi Svenningsen Kajita and Katie Lloyd Thomas, “On File and As File: Tracing Communicative Processes in the Byker Archive,” paper presented at the symposium The Practice of Architectural Research at KU Leuven, October 2020. In this paper, we show how complaints raised by residents were transferred into building information via documents circulated between architects, contractors and technical consultants.

37. Northern Mayor Authorities Housing Consortium, “Study Group on Low Rise Higher Density Housing: Minutes of the meeting held 22 May,” June 26, 1972. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

38. A.G. Smith, Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB: letter, November 8, 1971. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

39. Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB: “Pilot Scheme,” date unknown. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

40. P. J. Dixon, Director of Housing, City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne, letter to Vernon, April 4, 1972. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

41. Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB: “Pilot Scheme,” date unknown. Byker, RIBA Collections, London.

42. Personal interview with “Nancy” in Byker, March 3, 2020. Follow-up telephone conversations during April 2020.

43. The quotes in this paragraph refer to unpublished transcripts from a personal interview with residents in Tom Collins house in Byker, March 3, 2020.

44. Available online: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392110 (accessed March 15, 2020).

45. Unpublished transcripts from interview with residents in Tom Collins House, March 3, 2020.

46. The open-ended design process poses an alternative to what Katherine Shonfield describes as the “dream” of science’s ordering, purifying system – see Katherine Shonfield Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London: Routledge, 2000). Shonfield critiques the way in which the order of the postwar years led to standardization and classification of construction that in turn eradicated “feelings,” pointing out that construction science’s role is to keep everything in its assigned place.

47. Mavis Zutshi, Speaking for Myself: a Report on the Byker Redevelopment (Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service, April 1978). Byker, ArkDes Collection, Stockholm: 51. Drawing on the recommendations of the “Skeffington Report for Public Participation” (see note 9), Newcastle Council had set up the “Community Development Project;” it was as part of this that Zutshi analyzed interactions between architects, local authorities and residents.

48. Zutshi, Speaking for Myself, 40.

49. Bruno Latour quoted in Matthew S. Hull, “Documents and Bureaucracy,” 39.

50. Jos Boys and Julia Dwyer, “Revealing Work,” 502.

51. Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 52.

52. Ralph Erskine, “Byker,” Arkitektur, 1976, no. 8: 6. My translation.

53. See Peter Malpass, “A Reappraisal of Byker. Part 1: Magic, Myth and the Architect,” Architects’ Journal, 169, no. 1979: 961–969; Sirrka-Lisa Kontinnen, Byker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983); Sirrka-Lisa Kontinnen, Byker Revisited (Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 2009).

54. Erskine, “Byker.” Erskine’s acknowledgement of residents’ activist roles in democratic processes is particularly relevant today when the current financing of housing is known to challenge citizens’ access to affordable housing, as shown, for example, in the report The State of Housing in the EU 2019, Housing Europe Observatory, available online: https://www.housingeurope.eu/resource-1323/the-state-of-housing-in-the-eu-2019 (accessed November 29, 2021).

55. The research for this article was first presented in the context of heritage studies at the ACHS Futures 2020 conference in a session on social housing chaired by Svava Riesto and Marie Glaser (see https://achs2020london.com/). It was then pursued with a focus on issues of inhabitation at the AHRA conference 2020, “Housing and the City,” in a session chaired by Nick Beech.

56. John Pendlebury and Jill Haley, “The Byker Community Trust and ‘the Byker Approach’,” in Hope Under Neoliberal Austerity: Responses from Civil Society and Civic Universities, eds. Mel Steer, Simin Davoudi, Mark Shucksmith and Liz Todd (Bristol: Policy Press, 2021).

57. “Shameless” was a British TV drama series portraying council housing tenants. Anika Seemann, “The Danish ‘Ghetto Initiatives’ and the Changing Nature of Social Citizenship, 2004–2018,” Critical Social Policy 41, no. 4 (November 2021): 586–605, demonstrates how residents are negatively seen as “underserving” in the Danish context where words like “ghettos” are used to describe areas of social housing. The term “culture of silence” is used, for instance, in Swedish reports on so-called “vulnerable areas” – see e.g. Riksrevisionen, Rätt insats på rätt plats – polisens arbete i utsatta områden, RIR:2020 (Stockholm: Riksdagens interntryckeri, 2020), 16.

58. See Anika Seemann, “The Danish ‘Ghetto Initiatives,” also Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, Jennifer Mack, Svava Riesto, Meike Schalk, “Between Technologies of Power and Notions of Solidarity: A Response to Danish Ghetto Plan and Swedish Vulnerable Areas Documents,” in Architectures of Dismantling and Restructuring Spaces of Danish Welfare, 1970–present, edited by Kirsten Marie Raahauge, Katrine Lotz, Deane Simpson, Martin Søberg (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2022). “Concrete Jungles” is a term critically referred to in John Pendlebury and Jill Haley “The Byker Community Trust and ‘the Byker Approach’,” 58.

59. Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipsen, 1985); Robin Abrams, “Byker Revisited," Built Environment 29, no. 2 (2003): 117–131. Abrams studies Byker by applying Coleman’s behavioral criteria and finds that the failure of Boylam Court, in the southern part of the estate, can be blamed not only on social measures but also on the “idiosyncratic” and “exclusionary” design of the plan (Abrams: 117, 125).

60. Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism, 160.

61. Deleuze et al`., Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 17. My emphasis.