The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  In the UK, housing takes up around 70 per cent of urban land.3 Its housing stock is the oldest in Europe, with an average age estimated at about sixty years. A quarter of the stock was built before the end of the First World War.4 There are about 24 million dwellings in all,5 but in the last twenty years the rate of new house-building has fallen to only 150,000 per year, largely because of the elimination of public-sector house-building.6 In the UK, most new housing is built by developers for sale on completion, and is widely criticised as unsophisticated and overpriced.7 In other developed economies, house production occurs in different ways, but if the UK is taken as the extreme example of a laissez-faire system operating in a built-up landscape with a restricted land supply, one can perhaps discern a general tendency, in that under advanced capitalism it is increasingly difficult to produce and maintain the dwelling. This is especially odd given that dwellings constitute the greater part of the built environment, that they are the spaces where most people spend most of their time, and where what is arguably the real ‘work’ of society is done. Modernity, it seems, is exemplified not so much by the business park or the airport, but by the dilapidated dwelling.

  During the last twenty years or so, domestic life has been transformed in many more or less electronic ways: supermarket distribution, increased unemployment and early retirement, programmable gas heating, computerised banking, new TV, video, audio, telecommunications, the personal computer and the internet. Most of these things make it easier to stay at home, and many of them make it more difficult to go out, but the house itself has changed very little. The supermarkets, with computerised distribution and warehousing, and big trucks on modern roads, have transformed the UK’s food market and shopping habits, creating a mass market in cosmopolitan food and drink that was previously only available in a few parts of London. In the same period, house production has merely declined, though supermarkets now offer mortgages. For the corporate economy, the house seems to exist only as a given, a destination for sales of consumable materials and services.

  There are many reasons why this might be the case. Firstly, houses last a long time. House-building is also by its nature a very local undertaking, even for the largest producers. Wimpey, which claims to be the largest house-builder in the world, only seems to advertise its developments locally. The tendencies in production that have brought Ford to the Mondeo – the world car – have never been widely applied to house production. Despite the best efforts of several generations of architects, houses are still not manufactured off-site, and are not generally susceptible to distribution. When they are available in this way, the purchaser is faced with the problem of finding a site on which to erect a single house, which in the UK is very difficult. IKEA have started to produce prefabricated dwellings, but so far for assembly by the company itself only on its own development sites. There have been many impressive examples of factory-produced houses since the eighteenth century, but never in very large numbers.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, less than 1 per cent of the UK’s national income was spent on house-building.8 Since before the time of Engels, industrial capitalism has been more typically accompanied by the production of large but insufficient numbers of poor-quality houses, palatial workplaces, and a small number of millionaires’ mansions: the Rothschilds’ houses of Mentmore and Waddesdon, for example, or Bill Gates’s $50 million house on the shores of Lake Washington, near Seattle. It seems that, for capitalism, houses are a means of centralising wealth, rather than products to be distributed. In the last hundred years, relative to earnings, food and most manufactured goods have become much cheaper, but houses have become more expensive both to build and to buy. Industrial production has not been very successful at producing houses for the people who are otherwise its consumers: most of the best housing developments of the last century or so seem to have been undertaken outside the market, by philanthropic employers, civic bodies or committed individuals and groups.

  Since the late 1970s, ‘housing’ has been an unfashionable subject for architects and theorists. With a few notable exceptions – the architecture of Walter Segal, for instance – there has been very little house-building of any architectural interest in the UK beyond a few one-off houses, these often for architects themselves. Among theorists and other writers, the very idea of dwelling has been recognised as problematic. For example:

  Architects have long been attacking the idea that architecture should be essentially stable, material and anchored to a particular location in space. One of the main targets for those who would make architecture more dynamic is of course that bulwark of inertia and confinement, the outer casing of our dwelling place that we call a house. Which explains why, as early as 1914, the Futurists put their main emphasis – at least in theory – on the complex places of transit:

  ‘We are [the men] of big hotels, railway stations, immense roads, colossal ports, covered markets, brilliantly lit galleries …’

  … We are dissatisfied because we are no longer able to come up with a truly promising form of architecture in which we would like to live. We have become nomads, restlessly wandering about, even if we are sedentary and our wanderings consist of flipping through the television channels.9

  On the other hand:

  Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place.10

  In a culture in which so much of the space of work and transit is new, modern and professionally produced, but so much home space is old, amateurish and artlessly hand-made, one tends to forget that, like the industrial landscapes that inspired the modernist avant-gardes, the corporate economy only exists because it has been able to develop global markets in the necessities and longings of domestic life.

  The dominant narratives of modernity – as mobility and instant communication – appear to be about work and travel, not home. They are constructions of a work-oriented academic élite about a work-oriented business élite. However, as Saskia Sassen points out, ‘a large share of the jobs involved in finance are lowly paid clerical and manual jobs, many held by women and immigrants’:

  The city concentrates diversity. Its spaces are inscribed with the dominant corporate culture but also with a multiplicity of other cultures and identities. The dominant culture can encompass only part of the city. And while corporate power inscribes non-corporate cultures and identities with ‘otherness’, thereby devaluing them, they are present everywhere. This presence is especially strong in our major cities which also have the largest concentrations of corporate power. We see here an interesting correspondence between great concentrations of corporate power and large concentrations of ‘others’. It invites us to see that globalisation is not only constituted in terms of capital and the new international corporate culture (international finance, telecommunications, information flows) but also in terms of people and non-corporate cultures. There is a whole infrastructure of low-wage, non-professional jobs and activities that constitute a crucial part of the so-called corporate economy.11

  Dwellings are rarely corporate space (see Billy Wilder’s The Apartment). Are dwellings ‘other’? The ‘other’ space in the city centres, where corporate power is concentrated, is usually the dwelling space of ‘other’ cultures and identities. The dwellings of corporate insiders are usually located at a distance, but even they live in homes that represent a level of investment per square metre that is only a fraction of that made in their workplaces. At the same time, domesticity is characterised by intimacy, the ‘nearness’ that Kenneth Frampton noted as increasingly absent from architecture,12 presumably most of all from corporate architecture. Perhaps these qualities of domesticity are ‘other’ to the corporate economy, even in the homes of corporate insiders? Perhaps we are all ‘others’ when we are at home?


  Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolised, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority.13

  Heidegger’s formulation of dwelling certainly sounds unfashionable:

  Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the dead’ – for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum – and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.14

  This was the essay invoked by Kenneth Frampton towards the end of his Modern Architecture: A Critical History as a recognition of a quality of experience that many believed most modern building had lost; this loss being, they said, why many people had rejected modern architecture, and why, perhaps, we have speculative house-builders who build houses for sale that are supposed to resemble the tied cottages of Victorian farm workers.

  Richard Sennett, in a lecture in 1992, pointed out that Heidegger neglected the stupefying nature of dwelling, and that in fact dwelling and thinking are antithetical. The creativity of cities, said Sennett, arises from their being sites of unresolved conflict between thinking and dwelling.

  It is easy to poke fun at Heidegger’s notion of dwelling – so nostalgic, so conservative, so agricultural – so at odds with a quasi-nomadic hunter-gatherer present as to be unhelpful, if not actually undesirable, especially in the context of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism in the 1930s. Although the house he evokes is exemplary as a work of architecture (and has the required longevity), the social fabric – the dwelling – that produced it is almost unattainable, unsupportable, though perhaps not quite. In a letter responding to some questions about house-building, a friend wrote:

  Recently we visited together with students of architecture the small village Halen in Switzerland, designed by Atelier 5, still located in an unspoiled forest. The extremely narrow terraced houses with small private courtyards and a central public place, built more than 30 years ago, were in a perfect state, well kept, partly modernised (insulation of the external walls). The common installations like the shop in the piazza, the petrol station, the swimming pool and the tennis lawn were still working and in good condition. The community, now living in the houses, were to a high percentage the children and grandchildren of the initial owners. They have returned after they first had left the houses of their parents.

  Frampton has described Siedlung Halen as ‘one of the most seminal pieces of land settlement built in Europe since the end of the Second World War … a model for reconciling development with place-creation and with the maintenance of ecological balance’.15 If Halen represents something approaching the modern attainment of Heidegger’s dwelling, as Frampton seems to suggest by his subsequent reference to Heidegger, it is intriguing to learn that many of those who live there occupy the houses of their parents.

  We are more familiar with this kind of dwelling in the context of its loss. In a World Service radio interview, a Bosnian refugee in Mostar longs to return to his house in Stolac, fifty kilometres away, from which he was evicted by his Croat neighbours, even though the town is still under Croat control: ‘My family has lived in Stolac for centuries … I love the smell of the river.’ For most of us, there is another kind of dwelling:

  The purpose of this work is to … bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term ‘consumers’.

  … In our societies, as local stabilities break down, it is as if, no longer fixed by a circumscribed community, tactics wander out of orbit, making consumers into immigrants in a system too vast to be their own, too tightly woven for them to escape from it.

  … Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electro-nicised and computerised megalopolis, the ‘art’ of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days.16

  If we think of ourselves as consumers in this way, perhaps our difficulties with housing are easier to understand. How is housing consumed?

  In the context of the urban home in the UK, de Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’ as a response to the predicament of being a consumer evokes not so much do-it-yourself – currently a bigger market in the UK than new house-building – but the way that the character of the public-sector housing ‘estate’ is changing ‘as local stabilities break down’. In inner London and elsewhere, the system of allocating public-sector housing on a basis which reflected its philanthropic origins in the nineteenth century has been fractured since the 1970s by ideas like the ‘hard-to-let’ flat, by the ‘right to buy’ and by an increase in social mobility generally. Public-sector housing was financed by sixty-year loans, and was often designed by critically respected architects. It aimed to be of far better quality than that produced by the private sector. Often the more architecturally ambitious developments (including some influenced by the model of Halen) were difficult to build and were regarded as problematic early in their history, but some of them have aged well and have gradually accumulated populations who find them attractive as places to live.

  Alexandra Road Estate, London NW8, in 1999, designed by Neave Brown of London Borough of Camden’s Architects Department in 1968, completed in 1978

  Whatever the wider implications, perhaps architects can take some comfort from this. The notion of ‘the everyday’ in architecture offers a welcome relief from conventional interpretations of architectural value, especially in a culture where most ‘everyday’ building is not produced with much architectural intention, but it seems to affirm the spatial quality and detail of architects’ architecture where it exists. Similarly, the subjective transformations of spatial experience characteristic of both the Surrealists and the Situationists might seem to promise a way of transcending assumptions of spatial poverty, of transforming ‘even the most colourless’ localities, as Breton said of Aragon’s ‘spellbinding romantic inventiveness’,17 but in practice both groups were quite selective about the sites they favoured. In the long run, spatial and other architectural qualities seem to survive, though often not in the way that was expected.

  The UK’s new Labour government seems to be prepared to leave house-building to the private sector, even for the showcase Millennium Village development next to the dome at Greenwich. The long-term success of the Lansbury estate in Poplar, which was built as the housing showcase for the 1951 Festival of Britain, has not prompted Labour to recall that its commitment to public-sector housing produced so many internationally acclaimed housing developments between 1945 and the early 1970s. Not long before the 1997 election, Richard, Lord Rogers, newly ennobled in preparation for a Labour victory, presented an edition of the BBC’s Building Sights – in which celebrities present favourite buildings – for which he selected the for
mer London County Council’s Alton Estate at Roehampton in south-west London – the Modern Movement landmark of 1952–59. This timely endorsement of the heroic period of public-sector housing seems not to have awakened any enthusiasms among members of the new government.

  Instead, Labour has said little about housing, but appears to be giving tacit support to various private-sector proposals for ‘supervillages’: 5,200 new houses near Peterborough; 3,000 at Micheldever in Hampshire; between 5,000 and 10,000 houses west of Stevenage, and 3,300 houses in three new villages near Cambridge, ‘masterplanned’ by the architect Terry Farrell for a consortium of Alfred McAlpine, Bryant and Bovis in ‘Cambridgeshire vernacular’, an attempt to create ‘a traditional village, with village greens with cricket pavilions, local shops and pubs’ and a 69,677-square-metre business park. With or without cricket pavilions, none of these developments sound as if they will have much chance of either ‘reconciling development with place-creation and the maintenance of ecological balance’ or attempting to reconfigure the house as something approaching a successful industrial product.