Reconstructing public housing

Reconstructing public housing
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- 9781789621082 (Paperback)
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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
Reconstructing Public Housing unearths Liverpool’s hidden history of radical alternatives to municipal housing development and builds a vision of how we might reconstruct public housing on more democratic and cooperative foundations. In this critical urban history, Matthew Thompson brings to light how and why this remarkable city became host to two pioneering social movements in collective housing and urban regeneration experimentation. In the 1970s, Liverpool produced one of Britain’s largest, most democratic and socially innovative housing co-op movements, including the country’s first new-build co-op to be designed, developed and owned by its member-residents. Four decades later, in some of the very same neighbourhoods, several campaigns for urban community land trusts are growing from the grassroots – including the first ever architectural or housing project to be nominated for and win, in 2015, the artworld’s coveted Turner Prize. Thompson traces the connections between these movements; how they were shaped by, and in turn transformed, the politics, economics, culture and urbanism of Liverpool. Drawing on theories of capitalism and cooperativism, property and the commons, institutional change and urban transformation, Thompson reconsiders Engels’ housing question, reflecting on how collective alternatives work in, against and beyond the state and capital, in often surprising and contradictory ways.
'This book makes a very significant contribution to housing and urban studies. Extremely readable, making complex theory understandable, and theorists accessible, it is articulate and well-written - a pleasure to read.' Dr Quintin Bradley, Leeds Beckett University
'The author successfully combines a visionary idealism with a realistic assessment of limits, conditions and barriers that have confined us to a few glimpses of how utopian collectivism and commons could provide a real alternative to the historic statist tradition of public housing.' Professor David Mullins, Emeritus Professor of Housing Policy, University of Birmingham
Author Information
Table of Contents
Section Title | Page | Price |
---|---|---|
Cover | 1 | |
Contents | 5 | |
List of Figures | 9 | |
Abbreviations | 10 | |
Acknowledgements | 11 | |
Prologue | 15 | |
Part I. Introduction | 21 | |
1. Introducing Collective Housing Alternatives | 23 | |
Why Collective Housing Alternatives? | 29 | |
Articulating Our Housing Commons | 34 | |
Bringing the State Back In | 41 | |
2. Why Liverpool of All Places? | 47 | |
A City of Radicals and Reformists | 49 | |
A City on (the) Edge? | 54 | |
A City Playing the Urban Regeneration Game | 56 | |
Structure of the Book | 59 | |
Part II. The Housing Question | 63 | |
3. Revisiting the Housing Question | 65 | |
Nouns and Verbs: On the Nature of Value | 68 | |
Exploitation and Alienation: On the Contradictions of Capitalism | 70 | |
Ends and Means: The Point Is to Change It! | 75 | |
4. Liverpool’s Co-operative Revolution | 80 | |
Rehabilitating Housing in a SNAP | 85 | |
You Hold the Pen, We’ll Tell You What to Draw! | 96 | |
Competition: The Counterintuitive Component of Cooperativism | 105 | |
5. Liberal Compromises: Diluting the Cooperative Revolution? | 109 | |
You Can Have Any House You Like So Long as It’s a New-Build Co-op | 112 | |
Utalitarianism (Utilitarian plus Totalitarian): On Form Following Function | 117 | |
Contradictions of Choice: Defensive Urbanism or (Extra)Ordinary Sub-urbanism? | 119 | |
6. Municipalisation: A Militant Response to the Housing Question | 123 | |
A Tory–Liberal Plot: The Gravedigger of Municipal Housing? | 127 | |
Defensible Principles and (Policy) Design Disadvantagement | 130 | |
Keeping the Cooperative Spirit Alive: The Movement Migrates to Knowsley | 134 | |
Part III. The Neighbourhood Question | 141 | |
7. Locating the Neighbourhood Question | 143 | |
Liverpool’s Second Blitz | 144 | |
How to Make Water Flow Uphill | 148 | |
Can Collective Housing Save the City? | 155 | |
8. The Eldonians: From Parish Politics to Global Exemplar | 160 | |
Militant Tactics, Boss Politics, Tribal Loyalties, Friends in High Places | 164 | |
We Do It Better Together: Towards a Self-Regenerating Community | 167 | |
Eldonia: An Independent Micro-State? | 171 | |
9. Cooperative by Name If Not by Nature | 178 | |
Singing the Post-Development Blues: On Revolutionaries Retiring | 180 | |
Third Sector Empire-Building | 181 | |
The Story So Far: How Self-Regenerating, Really? | 187 | |
Part IV. The Urban Question | 195 | |
10. Grappling with the Urban Question | 197 | |
Weapons Wielded against Enclosure of the Commons | 198 | |
Grounding Capitalism in the Land Question | 205 | |
Housing Market Renewal, Neo-Haussmannisation and the New Urban Enclosures | 209 | |
11. Growing Granby from the Grassroots: A (Plant) Potted History | 221 | |
Living through Hell: On the Violence of Managed Decline | 228 | |
Putting the T into CLT; Finishing the Work that SNAP Started | 233 | |
From Success to Failure: A Great British Property Scandal | 248 | |
12. Technocratic Experiment or Experimental Utopia? | 252 | |
Dereliction-by-Design and Transatlantic Knowledge Transfer | 257 | |
Homebaked: Brick by Brick, Loaf by Loaf, We Build Ourselves | 262 | |
Seeing Liverpool’s Housing History through a Bifocal Verb–Noun Lens | 271 | |
Part V. Conclusion | 281 | |
13. Reconstructing Public Housing (History) | 283 | |
In, Against and Beyond Public Housing | 288 | |
How to Answer the Housing, Neighbourhood and Urban Questions? | 295 | |
Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House | 305 | |
14. On (Myth) Making History | 309 | |
From Heroic Event to Boring Bureaucratic Process | 314 | |
The Myth of Liverpool Exceptionalism | 320 | |
Recipes for Revolution: From Cultivating Local Delicacies to Sourcing Essential Ingredients | 323 | |
15. Building a Bureaucracy from Below | 331 | |
Dormant, Not Defunct: Self-Funding the Next Co-Op Spring | 333 | |
Realising Municipal Dreams | 338 | |
Recoding the DNA of Collective Alternatives | 343 | |
Epilogue: Translating Between Inward, Upward and Outward Languages | 347 | |
Artificial Hells, Social Practice and Artistic Spectacle: Who (or What) Is All This For? | 355 | |
Bibliography | 365 | |
Index | 383 |