Resultado de los ensayos de resistencia a compresión

What began as a nineteenth-century crusade to house the urban poor in clean and comfortable surroundings eventually turned into just another industry, co-opted by large building firms who received state subsidies to build quickly and carelessly, and encouraged by the short-term thinking of governments whose votes relied on quick solutions to visible problems. (Hanley, 2007: 50-51).

Neighbourhoods constructed between the 1950s and 1970s are more likely to have a poor reputation than pre-war neighbourhoods.

(Permentier, et al., 2008: 837).

Of course ‘problem people’ have to live somewhere and in the minds of many the spaces they inhabit are (or at least once were) ‘council estates’. ‘Council estates’, or large and concentrated areas of social housing, as I touched on in the introduction, have attached to them a particular set of social, economic, political and cultural meanings in the United Kingdom which provide an important context for my research. The ways in which such locations have been reported, not only in academic, policy literature and news media but also in literature, film, television and photography reflect not only the socio-economic and political significance of the ‘council estate’ (and by definition those who live there) but also their cultural and symbolic significance. In many ways the significance of the ‘council estate’ reflects a social and political paradox that is captured in both the symbolic meaning and physical reality of the geographies of social housing, what Hanley sees as ‘the paradox of council housing’. She states,

32

… that it exists at all in a society dedicated to the acquisition of wealth and property induces pride; that it has to exist at all, because that society excludes so many from the wealth and property that the rest of us enjoy, is a source of shame (2007: 50).

In the academic literature the struggle to find a suitable phrase for these areas has resulted in the development of various descriptive phrases including ‘sink estates’ (Coleman, 1990), ‘problem estates’ (Atkinson, 2000; Atkinson and Helms, 2007; Atkinson and Jacobs, 2010; Boland, 2008; Dean and Hastings, 2000, 2003; Fraser, 1996; Johnstone and Macleod, 2007; Johnstone and Mooney, 2007), ‘stigmatised community’ (Howarth, 2002), ‘discredited neighbourhoods’ (Warr, 2005), ‘broken neighbourhoods’ (and MacLeod, 2007), ‘representational ghettos’ (Slater and Anderson, 2012), ‘welfare ghettos’ (Hancock and Mooney, 2013), and ‘banlieue’ (Hatherley, 2012). While these authors do not necessarily mean that these locations are as described and are not necessarily using these phrases in a pejorative way (although Coleman and Hatherley clearly do) the struggle to discursively represent these locations demonstrates the limits of our conceptual and discursive abilities and can tend towards reinforcing stigma rather than challenging it. If nothing else it certainly reflects the apparent dominance of negative readings and connotations generally associated with social housing estates.

Skeggs (2004) provides a further refinement to this argument as she highlights that whilst the term ‘class’ may have all but disappeared from political rhetoric, alternative references, such as those highlighted above, have been substituted in its place. Furthermore, she argues (2004:112) that the specific naming of areas themselves, for example Wythenshawe, are continually utilised as shorthand to name those whose presence was seen to be potentially threatening and dangerous. Haylett (2001) highlights how this type of naming fed directly into ‘New Labour’s’ approach to the urban poor when she highlights the

33

‘heavy symbolism’ that accompained the launch, by Tony Blair, of a range of New Labour policies designed to tackle social exclusion on Aylesbury Estate in London on the 2nd June 1997.

Not only are there a variety of labels and names available for ‘council estates’ but those who live there are also deemed to possess, by virtue of living there, certain key and defining characteristics ranging from “passive, dependent and disengaged’’ (Blokland, 2008:40) to those of a more criminal or threatening nature (Baeten, 2002; Campbell, 1993; Clement, 2007; Damer, 1974, 1989; Fraser, 1996). For Seabrook those so named are really victims of the social and economic restructuring that accompanies the process of post- industrialisation. In discussing the notion of the ‘underclass’ he suggests that the fragmentation of the traditional working-class exposed those who had been sheltered and accommodated within industrial-based class structures to more visibility.

…the discovery of an ‘underclass’in the 1990s is like an exhumation of the remains of the working class, the skeleton left behind when all those who could leave have gone, abandoning those who might have been perceived as the undeserving and the helpless, but were sheltered within the old working class, enfolded by the values, the sometimes punishing charity and abrasive protectiveness of the majority.

(Seabrook, 1996: 185).

For Hanley, the stigma of growing up or living on a council estate stays with a person for life as an ‘aura’, a mind-set and something that you cannot step out of. In symbolic terms she sees, in these estates, the British class system ‘written’ into the architecture of British cities as the working-classes, the poor, are contained within the ‘hutches’ or ‘holding cages’ built outside the ring-roads in the outer-urban spaces of the city. (Hanley, 2007:1-2, 4).

34

It’s more a sense you have. A sense that someone, who lives in a proper house, in a proper town, sat on the floor of an office one day with a box of fancy Lego bricks and laid out, with mathematical precision, a way of housing as many people as possible in as small a space as could be got away with. And in doing so, forgot that real people aren’t inanimate yellow shapes with permanent smiles branded on their plastic bodies. That real people might get lost in such a place. (5).

Hanley suggests, echoing Seabrook’s reflection on the renaming of those who live on estates, that you only need to play word association with the term ‘council estate’ to reveal the negative associations linked to these words. Thus, estates mean ‘alcoholism, drug- addiction, relentless petty stupidity, and a kind of stir-craziness induced by chronic poverty’ and for anybody who doesn’t live on one it means ‘hell on earth’(5-7).

Hanley notes how constantly reaffirmed statements and observations about council estates and their residents remain unchallenged. For example, she notes how newspapers’ report that recidivists live on this or that estate as if it is a matter of course that they would. Hanley’s work not only focuses on the political and social paradox that council housing appears to present but also demonstrates the dialectic problematic of this particular policy solution to mass housing needs where the creation of low-cost, social and geographical isolation and long-term neglect impacts negatively on the people who live there and some of this behaviour (and certainly the way in which it is interpreted by the mainstream) becomes definitional of the social, economic and cultural value of all the residents. As Hanley (2007) puts it:

35

Any connection between the physical, economic and social isolation of council estates and the sometimes desperate behaviour of their tenants is ignored, or dismissed, or laughed at, because that’s what they’re there for: to contain the underserving, un-useful poor. If the feckless poor did not exist, neither would council estates (15).

The combination of economic poverty and the poverty of taste, culture and social behaviour all coalesce in the idea of the council estate resident and, once again, become definitional of the ‘quality’of the people who live there:

Poor taste, bad grammar, the betrayal of family history beyond that which is conveniently aspirational: all these traits are now deemed ‘council house behaviour’ (10).

The news reporting of ‘life’ on these estates is often rendered as a short vignette which combines morality, power and humour all to the detriment of those who live there. Hanley notes how:

The collision of pot noodles, wife-beating and council estates on a single news clipping seems almost too funny in that way we now have of laughing at the misfortunes of poor, daft people, because it’s their fault for being stupid. (10).

Hanley's comments highlight the importance of social ’values’, cultural norms and, in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘taste’(Bourdieu, 1984) in both the construction of social groups and in the stratification of society. The observation, perception and interpretation of social and cultural values and the assumed connections that these are perceived to have with actual moral values

36

and behavioural norms have become subject to increased critical interrogation. Skeggs (2004, 2011, Skeggs and Loveday, 2012) has demonstrated the complex inter-play between values, cultural practices and value judgements about people (based on the perception of these values and cultural practices) and class and social justice. And I return to this important set of ideas in Chapters Six, Seven and Eight.

One other key theme permeates Hanley’s work and that is how the physical construction and location of the council estate, reinforced by the perceptions and approaches of others who do not live there, acts as a method of ensuring that social space is physically stratified, bounded and organised through the urban environment as she notes:

A multitude of confusing voices say one thing and then another, but even that chorus cannot drown out a conviction that working-class people are not rabbits, but people, and as such should not be housed in hutches away from the higher, richer orders (21).

Certainly, as will be seen in the data chapters later much of Hanley’s reflections on the ways in which housing estates are seen and their apparent social and symbolic role is reflected in this study of the Leys in Oxford.