Internacionales

Several sociologists have viewed space as a basis of social action and conflict, and as a location for identity formation; Foucault (1977) and Lefebvre (1991) have underlined the importance of the designed environment in influencing power relations, and the

impositions that can be made by elite groups, such as planners and architects, through the medium of architecture. In Production of Space (1991) Henri Lefebvre writes of society being increasingly based around prohibitions and commands; this finds its way into urban space (Lefebvre uses the example of the traffic signal), where there are spaces that allow, and disallow – signified by ‘dos and don’ts’. Lefebvre’s model seems to allow little room for resistance, although he does allow for some element of agency;

urban space, in particular, demands order and arrangement, because those who organise it (in the case of this research, planners, architects, housing providers) recognise the presence of disorder, the new and unpredictable situations that

everyday life throws up, and so clamp down on the possibility of openness of meaning and use. Lefebvre’s Marxist approach sees everyday life as exploitative, oppressive and controlled, but capable of being changed (Highmore 2002, 113–5).

Sebastian Ureta (2007) undertook a study of low-income families’ expression of individuality through the personalisation of their new living spaces in Santiago, Chile.

The form of buildings on housing estates in Santiago was a manifestation of the ideas of planners and developers about how low-income populations should live in the city.

Ureta identified two main strategies that families used to adapt to their newly built dwellings. The first was a search for security and comfort in their new homes by

families, by undertaking material transformation of home spaces. Partition walls would be moved and extensions built, the homes in question were owned by their occupants, and so they had more freedom to carry out such work than residents in rented

accommodation. The second strategy was undertaking interior decoration, a process of self-expression and domestication of an otherwise blank box (Ureta 2007, 311–2).

Ureta reviewed how families in Santiago have changed the material configuration of their new homes to adapt them to their perceived needs, and undertaken decoration as a way to express their aesthetic ideas in their homes, but in this case, the

appropriation of a new home by its owners was only one part of the general process of adaptation to a new living environment.

Ureta suggested that the act of a resident or family moving into a new home in

Santiago could be considered as the ‘domestication’ of part of the population, who had previously been living in impoverished neighbourhoods, and would now live in the environs that authorities and urban planners believed were proper residents of Santiago (Ureta 2007, 312). The former living environments of the poor in Santiago were characterised by a do-it-yourself culture. The deregulated and informal nature of life in poorer neighbourhoods led to the establishing of identities and mediation of relationships with the community through the architecture of one’s home. One of the aims of Santiago’s housing policy was to integrate the poor into a way of life in which residing in a well-built home with modern facilities appeared to be the norm; a policy which is perhaps similar to that adopted by housing reformers in late nineteenth century Britain. Certain activities did not fit in with modern industrialised life, and the moral assumptions that went with it, such as a family sleeping in one room,

undertaking work within the home, keeping a lodger – all were perceived as insanitary activities – that created dirt, but were also unhealthy for the body and mind, and were immoral. These new homes could accommodate the ‘modern’ nuclear family, but not the traditional extended one, and so the provision of public housing was a means of transmitting values into the personal space of the family, and enabled control of

‘unconventional’ social relations in the home. There was a disjuncture between the idealised model of urban life promoted by the planner or architect, and the actual lived reality of the housing scheme (Ureta 2007, 314–5). Most of the housing estate

residents had formerly lived in close proximity, if not in the same house, with members of their extended families. The flats on the housing estate were often smaller than the dwellings the residents had left, forcing them to live as nuclear families, with the associated weakening of extended familial networks. This could have the effect of making individuals and families feel exposed and vulnerable, although an element of surveillance by, and on behalf of, neighbours could still be accommodated (Ureta 2007, 320).

As the twentieth century has progressed, social housing tenants have had an

increasing amount of freedom to reshape their homes, and create a meaningful place.

The everyday management routine at the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds, which opened in

1938, and was demolished in 1978, ensured that the external appearance of the estate was maintained in conformity with the architects’ wishes. The estate had a resident gardener and caretaker, and the expected role of the tenant was to ‘take an interest in his house, to pay the rent regularly, not to allow unreasonable wear and tear and to behave as a good neighbour and member of the community’ (Ravetz 1974, 102; City of Leeds 1947, 3); this concept of a community was one imposed from above, not built up from below by tenants and neighbours. The Quarry Hill flats were adaptable to

changing needs and standards, but largely due to work of the tenants. Improvements were made to the flats by the Leeds Corporation in the 1960s and 70s, such as the conversion of open fireplaces in the living rooms to smokeless fuels, and the replacement of worn-out sinks and baths, but the tenants were responsible for the interior decoration of the their flats, an opportunity that was often seized with relish (Ravetz 1974, 172).

Herbert Gans’ study of the West End of Boston in the 1960s (Gans 1962) suggested that people living there had a limited engagement with their surroundings, and suggested that social class had a part to play – the peer group society in the West End was a working-class culture, with a distrust of authority, and emphasis on the

protection of friends and family. The people of the West End shaped the space in which they lived according to their needs. The modernisation of the city, initiated by the local authority and formulated as a strategic plan for the treatment of the space of the city as a whole, resulted in the driving out of factories, food markets, the

expansion of the financial and administrative districts and the removal of low-rent working class neighbourhoods to the suburbs. This was a familiar situation in town planning of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neighbourhoods cannot be studied in isolation, as specimens of a social class or an ethnic group, without understanding their relationship with other areas of the town or city.