MA UD Urban Writing
Student Theory Work
This is a selection of essay and thesis extracts from recent years. All MA Urban Design and Diploma students are requested to express their critical thoughts and creative imagination in written form. Each student choses her or his own subject to conduct independent research and writing. Following extracts are taken from works, which have been awarded a distinction.
2009-10 Writing
Darren Lee
Urban Water Life - London’s South Bank Water Walk
“The control we have over water within the urban environment has hidden and discarded the element into our subconscious and respect for its presence and qualities is somewhat lost. Nevertheless, when water is present in an urban environment its qualities are evident, water becomes a destination and we feel the urge to touch, to listen, to watch it and embrace it. Respect for its inherent qualities is probably highest where water is scarce. In arid climates water is extremely valuable to those who live there as rainfall is low, so any form of water is very much appreciated and used to great effect for agriculture and mundane daily tasks. The lack of water creates a longing desire for it and a greater appreciation for it. Its presence in the city disrupts the monotonous urban fabric and provides a crucial resource to humankind, commanding a strong social presence.
There is a more profound effect on human well being that water possess, more so than any other element. There is something captivating about it, it draws on all of the senses, when near it people want to touch it, hear the sound of stillness or the sound of crashing waves provide a sense of serenity or ferocity, reflections animate dull buildings and spaces, there is a smell of the sea and the salty taste of water. Man has an infinite connection to water.”
Urban Water Life - London’s South Bank Water Walk
“The control we have over water within the urban environment has hidden and discarded the element into our subconscious and respect for its presence and qualities is somewhat lost. Nevertheless, when water is present in an urban environment its qualities are evident, water becomes a destination and we feel the urge to touch, to listen, to watch it and embrace it. Respect for its inherent qualities is probably highest where water is scarce. In arid climates water is extremely valuable to those who live there as rainfall is low, so any form of water is very much appreciated and used to great effect for agriculture and mundane daily tasks. The lack of water creates a longing desire for it and a greater appreciation for it. Its presence in the city disrupts the monotonous urban fabric and provides a crucial resource to humankind, commanding a strong social presence.
There is a more profound effect on human well being that water possess, more so than any other element. There is something captivating about it, it draws on all of the senses, when near it people want to touch it, hear the sound of stillness or the sound of crashing waves provide a sense of serenity or ferocity, reflections animate dull buildings and spaces, there is a smell of the sea and the salty taste of water. Man has an infinite connection to water.”
Darren Lee - Urban Water Life, along the Thames' Southbank in London
Shu-Fen Ooi
Cities and Memories - George Town/Malaysia
"I am the second generation born and bred in Penang but grew up in the suburbs. My collective memories of George Town is partially my personal childhood memory and partially an imagined past. It is furthermore fragmented and intertwined with my childhood suburban context. My personal memory of George Town resembles a haunted city. Shophouses were falling apart, rotting, crumbling leaving only clues of loved possessions. I have never seen it as vibrant city but as a tired neglected city. The images of the past and what it once was contradicts what I see today and what I have always remembered. The memories of the city’s past glorious days relies on my parent’s descriptive reconstruction of events. Memory and the city both constitute labyrinthine figures, without beginning or end, in which one may make ‘endless interpolations’. Time is not a linear procession. The past is not left behind as one moves on but, like spaces in a labyrinth, is continually encountered again, returned to, through approached from different directions. Motion in the city and in memory is a persistent going nowhere in particular that constitutes a perpetual rediscovery. The rediscovery of the past lies in the memories passed on by my parents and grandparents. There is no distinctive of the real truth and their own interpretations because they believe their memory is the truth. Stories of the past play a large part on how to perceive own identity and belonging although memory itself is fickle.
During a recent street Chingay festival, my father was disappointed with the decline participation of the traditional pole bearer. The description of what he witness as a little boy was the festival had more elaborate floats; pole bearers were ‘authentic’ masters balancing poles which were longer and heavier. We also visited the shophouse which he grew up in and he showed me the short cuts between alleyways and activities such as illegal gambling which use to take place, where his best friend lived and how they use to play marbles in that corner. All those events no longer take place. What remains is the physical existence of the shophouse and familiar alleyways. His personal memory is conveyed to me in a story telling form and which now overlaps into my personal memory as well. The atmosphere no longer exists but the physical form validates memory and therefore reconfirms the story told. Built form reaffirms as well as reignites memory."
Tendeseco St Francis
London to Marrakech - Urban Pattern Assimilation
"Almost as soon as we arrive in an alien environment we look for clues on how to anchor ourselves. "Many kinds of clues are used; the visual sensations of colour, shape motion or polarisation of light, as well as other senses such as smell, sound, touch...sense of gravity and perhaps of electric and magnetic fields" [Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (London: MIT) p3]. Some of these processes take place on a molecular level. For the purposed of continuity we shall focus on the perceptual processing of input from the five senses.
Schemas are autobiographical. In day to day life their connection to your past barely enters the conscious mind. It is only when we are faced with the unknown that we begin to fully penetrate our awareness. As I took in my first glimpse of Marrakesh, my mind fought to make sense of this new world. The schemas built up over years of London life only loosely connected. As I looked around, I took in the common urban language of cars as a motor powered vehicle for transporting people and tarred roads as manmade tracks for the use of many cars. The difference was quickly filled by schemas created during my childhood in Zimbabwe. The flowers and plants found a name, texture and even taste. The red soil became a permanent tint on my clothes and fire ant mounds. The visual stimulation pushed further still and suddenly I knew the smell of the soil in the rain and how it would ooze between my fingers and toes when wet.
As we travelled closer to the city, I began to read its structure and organisation. The formal planting, manicured green verges and signs making proclamations of unity and justice were very similar to the experience of entering Harare and Accra from the airport. These elements of conceived space are utilised by municipalities of these cities to create the sense of entering a place of importance, a place of power and wealth. Whilst the journey created a sense of a nostalgic return, it also depened the feeling of apprehension. I sensed that, as with previous experiences, beyond these well manicured verges would be far less ordered urban language.
As we entered through Marrakech’s front door, the schemas created in Harare and Accra had already begun to set up expectations of built form, building to street relationships, street life and socio-spatial conduct. My mind jostled between the researched Marrakech and my preformed material and schematic data bank, distorting the perception of the city."
2008-09 Writing
Thomas McCaughan
The Changing Face of South London - An analysis of the causes and impact of Gentrification in Brixton
"From Brixton Station Road, through Pope Road to the famous Electric Avenue, the market is awash with street music, vibrant, alternative shoppers and self-sufficiency. The shop owners take great pride in retaining this sense of spirit; preaching, entertaining and flooding the streets with their favourite music in rebellious defiance of contemporary society’s relentless regulations. The impact of music blazing into the street is something that we have become unaccustomed too and makes the area feel as if a festival or special event is underway, that it is not just ‘another Tuesday afternoon’. The feeling is that the people have taken control of the street, invaded the ground floors of residences along the beautiful curve of Electric Avenue and thrown all that was inside out on to the street. In the exposed shells and beneath the canopies they have hooked meats, rare vegetables, draperies and mobile phones to entice custom. The area is infectious and its draw is clear."
Zehra Abidi
Homelands in the City - Monocultural Territories in Multicultural Britain, Ladypool Road/ Birmingham
"In areas of the city where there are few immigrant residents, one may feel the need to change the style of dress, manner of speaking in order to fit in and maintain the status quo. Overbearing references to a distinctly different culture may be contained within the walls of the house or the trips back to the immigrant neighbourhoods – and care taken not to allow the aroma of overly spiced food stray too far into the privacy of someone else’s home. There can be a sense of tucking away part of ones culture in order to be allowed to exist in a neighbourhood as yet untouched by the immigrant influence.
This action, of suppressing or eradicating a part of one’s cultural identity to be able to fit into and exist within the wider society, is a process which is referred to as ‘Normalization’... (Ed Soja in Postmetropolis, 2000).
Unfortunately this sense of a dual identity necessitates a two-faced existence for individuals living in a city of split spatial decorum. One’s location in the city determines how you act, and your place of residence can come to dictate the relationship you have with the city itself. The city consists of internalised enclaves, of spatial and social barriers, where landmarks rise up and demarcate a territory of unshared values. The city does not embrace itself wholeheartedly, resulting in portions of ‘otherness’, pockets of void, where the city ceases to call itself by the same name."
Jane Clossick
Event Regeneration - A Critical Examination of Manchester’s Property-led Redevelopment Strategy 1980-2002
"In order to create scarcity value in these circumstances, physically limited city centre plots were promoted as glamorous and desirable. The vested interests of speculators in pursuing this led to a reconstructed economy based on ‘boosterism’ (Mellor 2002), where the perceived value of future developments ‘boosts’ present-day rents and property prices. Private capital seeks to make money, so the majority of investment was focussed on potentially lucrative central zones. This has two effects. First, the city centre becomes exponentially wealthier, as more is invested and affluent residents are lured in, at the expense of peripheral zones. Second, because new urban politics calls for private interests to be involved to win public funds, finance capital is able to control both the value and uses of city centre space to maximise its own profits. It is, in effect, deliberate gentrification, as large-scale speculative urban developments quickly rule out low rent uses and users, because such additions reduce property value. [...]
As we have seen, the nature of a market-led regeneration process gives capital too much control over cityspace, with outcomes that have not lead to the achievement of spatial and social justice. Despite the grand claims for the redistributive power of private investment in public regeneration, the rhetoric of ‘trickle-down’, and the aestheticisation of city centre diversity served to mask the reality, in which the poor are being edged out of public life. Despite the regenerative projects, poverty and deprivation are still entrenched in east Manchester. What has been in the past thirty years a process of ‘crisis-generated urban restructuring has become a crisis emanating from the new urbanisation processes themselves‘ (Soja 2000)."
Ashley Seaborne
London, Peripherally - Between Home and Work without Sight
"It is said that the role of the eye is central to our deciphering of a subject, Le Corbusier remarks, "One needs to see clearly in order to understand" (Le Corbusier 1959), but for those who do not have the privilege of sight, then this ‘understanding’ must be arrived at via alternative means. The built environment harbours a wealth of information that our body, our senses respond to and utilise to orchestrate our movements, "We have knowledge of space through the perceptual processual phenomenology..." (Giancarlo Toniutti 1999) For the sighted, the use or reliance upon senses other than sight is seemingly reductive in comparison to those with limited or no capacity to see, this ability to ‘see’ in many respects may serve adversely, "The observer becomes detached from an incarnate relation with the environment through the suppression of the other senses..." (Juhani Pallasma 2005). This then points to an enlightenment of the role played by the remaining senses of smelling, hearing, touch and taste when sight is not possible. The cognitive processing used to concretise the information gathered into a concept of the environment is intensified also, "The mind held in check by a physical limitation like blindness naturally turns inward. It analyses and considers, it constructs and creates. The outside world has been to a certain degree taken away from it, so it makes a world of its own." (Hawke Clarence 1915) The city environment’s primary communicative mode has been through light and imagery, imagery to direct, warn, remind and reassure – for the blind, the environment now must interact in a different way.
Viral Seth
Urbanity and the Collective Mind - Order on the Outside and Chaos Within, Walking in East London
"I enjoy the irregular cracks that quietly disrupt the regular pattern formed by precisely laid paving stones. And again time reveals itself. ... Everyone here is connected in the same manner. The cracks in the pavement are a mirror and I can see reflected, the faces of those with whom I share this street and the sky. Sometimes I have to thank the city for our subconscious and wait patiently for that latent moment when we become conscious of it. But every time I have to pretend it will never happen.
A young boy walks by, a man with a turban and a beard and says "Hi!" The cloud on this street is not so densely jammed with imagined tensions, and there is air for unnecessary speech. For casual smiles. For an accidental conversation. The automation that devoured our behaviour some short moments ago on Commercial Street is at rest, re-fuelling itself, waiting to pounce at the slightest smell of the sweat, the agitated vibrations of mindless bodies – the mass."
The Changing Face of South London - An analysis of the causes and impact of Gentrification in Brixton
"From Brixton Station Road, through Pope Road to the famous Electric Avenue, the market is awash with street music, vibrant, alternative shoppers and self-sufficiency. The shop owners take great pride in retaining this sense of spirit; preaching, entertaining and flooding the streets with their favourite music in rebellious defiance of contemporary society’s relentless regulations. The impact of music blazing into the street is something that we have become unaccustomed too and makes the area feel as if a festival or special event is underway, that it is not just ‘another Tuesday afternoon’. The feeling is that the people have taken control of the street, invaded the ground floors of residences along the beautiful curve of Electric Avenue and thrown all that was inside out on to the street. In the exposed shells and beneath the canopies they have hooked meats, rare vegetables, draperies and mobile phones to entice custom. The area is infectious and its draw is clear."
Zehra Abidi
Homelands in the City - Monocultural Territories in Multicultural Britain, Ladypool Road/ Birmingham
"In areas of the city where there are few immigrant residents, one may feel the need to change the style of dress, manner of speaking in order to fit in and maintain the status quo. Overbearing references to a distinctly different culture may be contained within the walls of the house or the trips back to the immigrant neighbourhoods – and care taken not to allow the aroma of overly spiced food stray too far into the privacy of someone else’s home. There can be a sense of tucking away part of ones culture in order to be allowed to exist in a neighbourhood as yet untouched by the immigrant influence.
This action, of suppressing or eradicating a part of one’s cultural identity to be able to fit into and exist within the wider society, is a process which is referred to as ‘Normalization’... (Ed Soja in Postmetropolis, 2000).
Unfortunately this sense of a dual identity necessitates a two-faced existence for individuals living in a city of split spatial decorum. One’s location in the city determines how you act, and your place of residence can come to dictate the relationship you have with the city itself. The city consists of internalised enclaves, of spatial and social barriers, where landmarks rise up and demarcate a territory of unshared values. The city does not embrace itself wholeheartedly, resulting in portions of ‘otherness’, pockets of void, where the city ceases to call itself by the same name."
Jane Clossick
Event Regeneration - A Critical Examination of Manchester’s Property-led Redevelopment Strategy 1980-2002
"In order to create scarcity value in these circumstances, physically limited city centre plots were promoted as glamorous and desirable. The vested interests of speculators in pursuing this led to a reconstructed economy based on ‘boosterism’ (Mellor 2002), where the perceived value of future developments ‘boosts’ present-day rents and property prices. Private capital seeks to make money, so the majority of investment was focussed on potentially lucrative central zones. This has two effects. First, the city centre becomes exponentially wealthier, as more is invested and affluent residents are lured in, at the expense of peripheral zones. Second, because new urban politics calls for private interests to be involved to win public funds, finance capital is able to control both the value and uses of city centre space to maximise its own profits. It is, in effect, deliberate gentrification, as large-scale speculative urban developments quickly rule out low rent uses and users, because such additions reduce property value. [...]
As we have seen, the nature of a market-led regeneration process gives capital too much control over cityspace, with outcomes that have not lead to the achievement of spatial and social justice. Despite the grand claims for the redistributive power of private investment in public regeneration, the rhetoric of ‘trickle-down’, and the aestheticisation of city centre diversity served to mask the reality, in which the poor are being edged out of public life. Despite the regenerative projects, poverty and deprivation are still entrenched in east Manchester. What has been in the past thirty years a process of ‘crisis-generated urban restructuring has become a crisis emanating from the new urbanisation processes themselves‘ (Soja 2000)."
Ashley Seaborne
London, Peripherally - Between Home and Work without Sight
"It is said that the role of the eye is central to our deciphering of a subject, Le Corbusier remarks, "One needs to see clearly in order to understand" (Le Corbusier 1959), but for those who do not have the privilege of sight, then this ‘understanding’ must be arrived at via alternative means. The built environment harbours a wealth of information that our body, our senses respond to and utilise to orchestrate our movements, "We have knowledge of space through the perceptual processual phenomenology..." (Giancarlo Toniutti 1999) For the sighted, the use or reliance upon senses other than sight is seemingly reductive in comparison to those with limited or no capacity to see, this ability to ‘see’ in many respects may serve adversely, "The observer becomes detached from an incarnate relation with the environment through the suppression of the other senses..." (Juhani Pallasma 2005). This then points to an enlightenment of the role played by the remaining senses of smelling, hearing, touch and taste when sight is not possible. The cognitive processing used to concretise the information gathered into a concept of the environment is intensified also, "The mind held in check by a physical limitation like blindness naturally turns inward. It analyses and considers, it constructs and creates. The outside world has been to a certain degree taken away from it, so it makes a world of its own." (Hawke Clarence 1915) The city environment’s primary communicative mode has been through light and imagery, imagery to direct, warn, remind and reassure – for the blind, the environment now must interact in a different way.
Viral Seth
Urbanity and the Collective Mind - Order on the Outside and Chaos Within, Walking in East London
"I enjoy the irregular cracks that quietly disrupt the regular pattern formed by precisely laid paving stones. And again time reveals itself. ... Everyone here is connected in the same manner. The cracks in the pavement are a mirror and I can see reflected, the faces of those with whom I share this street and the sky. Sometimes I have to thank the city for our subconscious and wait patiently for that latent moment when we become conscious of it. But every time I have to pretend it will never happen.
A young boy walks by, a man with a turban and a beard and says "Hi!" The cloud on this street is not so densely jammed with imagined tensions, and there is air for unnecessary speech. For casual smiles. For an accidental conversation. The automation that devoured our behaviour some short moments ago on Commercial Street is at rest, re-fuelling itself, waiting to pounce at the slightest smell of the sweat, the agitated vibrations of mindless bodies – the mass."
2006-07 Writing
Jane Clossick - Distinction in Theory
An Investigation of 19th Century Manchester and Emergence of Planning
The growth of Manchester occurred due to three key forces: industrial Capitalism, innovations in transport, and migration. Industrial capitalism in Manchester was born 1779 when Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, enabling fast, continuous spinning of strong yarn powered by water and latterly driven by Watt’s steam engine. In 1782, there were just two water-powered cotton mills in Manchester, the first constructed by Richard Arkwright on Miller Street, in Shudehill.[4] By 1792 there were fifty two, and a hundred by 1830, clustered around the Ir and Irkwell rivers.[5] Before industrialisation, individuals manufactured goods for trade and they were both the owners and the operators of the means of production. Once mechanisation occurred, individuals instead had to work for the owner of the means of production, therefore dividing society into the capitalists and the workers. According to Jane Jacobs, initially home industry moved to the vicinity of cities but the cost and scale of the machinery required for spinning and weaving cotton dictated that it could no longer occur in small villages or towns. Therefore the process of mechanisation fundamentally linked industrial Capitalism to urban space.[6]
Developing concurrently with, and enabling, the steam powered mechanisation of production, the second force which created Manchester was the canal system, constructed from 1759. It allowed goods produced and traded in Manchester to be distributed efficiently all over the UK and to be taken to Liverpool for overseas export.[7] Manchester became the centre of a vast hinterland of satellite towns and a much wider national and international network of trade, imports and exports, or what Lewis Mumford would later describe as a ‘geographic plexus’.[8]
The third force was population migration. A series of interrelated events caused a massive shift in the nature of the population of the UK, from 80% rural in 1780 to 80% urban in 1900.[9] Spurred by industrial mechanisation and transport innovations, hand spinners and weavers in Lancashire were rapidly forced to migrate to the city, as were agricultural workers.[10] The potato crops in Ireland also failed successively from 1848-51, forcing Irish people to flee to England, sailing to Liverpool and whence to Manchester.[11] In a similar manner to coal, immigration both enabled industrialisation and was caused by it in a reciprocal system.
The urban space which resulted from these forces rejected the capitalist polarisation of the classes. It was zoned concentrically, with the architecture of industry at its centre. Mills were built primarily around the Ancoats area and near the Medlock in the south of the city.[12] Warehouses sprung up in vast numbers with the key areas of warehousing in Cannon Street, High Street and the area behind Picadilly.[13]
Surrounding the central district of smoke-laden mills and warehouses were the areas housing Manchester mill workers. As migration exploded and the population increased, there were insuf. cient buildings. The result was one of the most densely populated cities in history. Cheap ‘jerry built’ back-to-back houses were thrown up which were severely overcrowded, like weavers’ houses in Back Irk Street, Irk Town, one of which contained 22 people [14]. ...
The cellars of dwellings were almost always rented to lodgers, and the Manchester statistical Society’s15 survey found in 1835 that 3,500 cellar dwellings contained 12% of the population, or 15,000 people. The worst conditions existed near the Medlock, south of the present Oxford Road station between Gloucester Street and Great Marlborough Street in what came to be known as ‘Little Ireland’; where there lived one group of Irish immigrants, the poorest, most desperate sector of the population. The sanitary conditions were horrific and, in 1831, less than half of the population of Manchester had access to clean water.[16] Poorly ventilated, overcrowded houses were breeding grounds for typhus, smallpox, TB, scarlet fever and cholera, which killed 32,000 people across the country in 1832 and 62,000 in 1848. In 1841, working class average life expectancy was 26.6 years, a . gure which had actually reduced significantly since the late eighteenth century.[17] Even more shocking was the 1842 report of the Poor Law Commissioners that 57% of working class children died before reaching their fifth birthday.[18]
In 1788, when Manchester’s centre contained no mechanised industry, there was a thriving trader’s region around Market Street, and the wealthy merchants dwelled in the fashionable streets around St Ann’s Square in close proximity to their place of employment.[19] As a result of the foul aromas and pollution of city-centre living, the merchants abandoned the central district leaving their once prestigious houses to be converted into warehousing, in the start of what Fishman would describe in 1987 as the suburbanisation of the bourgeoisie.[20] As a result of industrialisation, zonation, which has always been present in urban space, was in Manchester flipped in terms of prestige. The outskirts of town became the prestigious locations, with suburbanisation enabled by regular transport links to the business district in the city centre.[21] This forced the edges of the urban space outwards,[22] and changed the nature of bourgeois urban life as people had to travel to reach work. This served to further polarise the divisions between rich and poor, since travelling costs money and the working man, even if he could scrape together the rent for an out-of-town dwelling could afford neither the cost nor the time to travel to work.
In the The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels explored polarised social relations of industrial capitalism in Manchester and their effect on cityspace. Engels’ exposed the true horror of working class living conditions. He described a disorderly jumble of unventilated ‘courts’ and lanes without water pumps or sufficient privies. Above Dulcie Bridge on the Irk, Engels noted that "In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement." [23]
Engels also noted the concentric zonation of Manchester, and pointed out that there were avenues of shops connecting the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie areas with the central business zone, slicing through the slums. Thus the true nature of working class poverty was effectively concealed from middle class eyes.[24]These terrible conditions occurred, in part, due to lack of governance. The prevailing ideology during the early to mid nineteenth century was that selfgovernment and power devolved from London to regional centres was the source of British political stability and creativity.[25] Cities were responsible for their own government, laws, controls and municipality. In Manchester, the sudden rapid growth of population and urban space was not matched by an increase in the size and scope of its local government. The other reason for the poverty was the economic approach of laissez-faire , a doctrine of utilitarianism that market forces would prevail and create maximum public benefit. Therefore, the physical organic growth of Manchester, and the growth of the populous, was allowed to occur unchecked in all respects. The poverty of the working classes served capitalism, since there was a large pool of pauperised labourers to feed the factories and labour was cheap. The placing of the worst slums nearest to the factories also served as a warning to slightly better-off workers of the dire fate which would befall them should they attempt to upset the status quo. Thus the oligarchy of merchants who presided over the city did nothing, in the early part of the nineteenth century, to ameliorate the situation.
Social Conceptions of City: Liberal Reformism, Marxism and the Berlin School
Two schools of thought emerged from the industrial metropolis of nineteenth century Manchester in the search of the reasons behind, and the solutions to, the polarisation of classes, extreme poverty and segregation.
The characteristics these approaches share is their social analysis of Capitalism, social divisions, class polarisation and poverty as structural (resulting from economic or political metastractures) or as individual (psychological or religious individual action shapes society). Thus they provide social, economic, political or religious reasons for social divisions. The first school is liberalreformism, founded on the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau [27], and the classical liberaltradition of Adam Smith and John Stewart Mill. It is a liberaland establishmentarian approach framed within a modernist narrative of capitalism as constant growth, accumulation and change for the better. Based on the ideas of the French and American revolutions (liberaldemocracy, fraternity, equality and citizenship) liberalreformists argued that liberalreforms, moral betterment, public health and technological innovation combined with minimal state intervention and competitive markets would co-ordinate people and control the worst excesses of capitalism for the common good.[28]
A series of legislative measures occurred in Manchester through the latter part of the nineteenth century as a result of liberalreformist doctrine. For example, in 1830, the Manchester Act set the minimum street width at 24ft (7,3m ), and in 1844 the Borough Police Act stipulated that no houses should be built without running water and a toilet in the yard, which effectively meant no new back-to-backs were constructed in Manchester proper.[29] Similarly, the 1848 Public Health Act gave local authorities the power to supply water, pave streets, to collect refuse and to whitewash and purify slum houses.[30] Such legislation aimed to improve conditions for city-centre dwellers but was mostly adoptive, not compulsory, and applied to small tectonic aspects of the city fabric, without addressing the notion of the spatial nature of poverty and inequality of the city as a whole. There was a lack of understanding of the structural nature of poverty and poor living conditions when, in 1853 a local act prohibited cellar dwellings, closing 454 cellars between 1854 and 1861 without rehousing the occupants. Again in 1867 Manchester Improvement Act allowed the Corporation to close houses deemed unfit for human habitation without compensation to the landlords. In practice, £15 was paid to the owner per house demolished, but the people who had lived there had to find new homes, without any form of compensation or assistance. People were forced from the slums and by 1900 only 30,000 people lived in the town centre, as compared to 90,000 people in 1851. The Bishop of Manchester noted in 1879 ‘the centre of the city at night is a mass of unoccupied tenements’31, but yet the squalor, jumble of streets, disorganisation and lack of sanitation still remained. The problem with these reforms, although well intentioned, is that they did nothing to address the economic and structural inequalities between owners and workers which had created the spatial division and destructive social relations. The liberalreformists viewed poverty essentially as an individual pursuit, and shared the Victorian ideology of poverty as indicative of lack of morality. The lack of appreciation of the structure of city space as a creator of society is reflected in the relatively minor and fragmented nature of the legislation.
The second emergent school of thought was that of revolutionary scientific socialism, based on the writings of Comte and developed in Germany by Engels and Karl Marx after Engels’ 1844 examination of the working class. Marx and Engels’ approach is structural; an attempt to understand the way capitalist society is structured and explain the resulting division of classes. Marxists argued the only solution to poverty was a completely new social order brought about by proletariat revolution, and saw the liberalreformist approach as purely a treatment of symptoms of deeper insoluble problems which would continue to exist while the status quo and the capitalist system was maintained. They saw that polarisation of the classes and pauperisation of the working classes as inherent to the workings of industrial capitalism.[32] According to Marxism, all institutions in a capitalist society are controlled by those who own the means of production and therefore will always promote the interests of those who own capital. Therefore effectively the state is an instrument of the ruling class, promoting the interests of capital but disguised and legitimised by the ideology of liberal democracy, which portrays the state as neutrally serving all members of society.[33] Equity cannot occur under Capitalism, because by its very nature it is divisive, and a conflict of interest between workers and owners of Capital is unavoidable.
Where liberal reformism tends to ignore industrial relations as a basis of poor living conditions and assume individual action and reaction is the cause, Marx argued that fundamentally power imbalance is always economic. Marx and Engel’s writing is couched in structural and economic terms, and although Engels examined the spatial effects of economic division, he did not propose that the spatial divisions were in fact contributing to class distinctions and conflict of interest in Manchester.
Thus both the liberal reformist and Marxist schools of thought are fundamentally social in nature and the spatial element of inequality, wealth polarisation and poor living conditions is ignored by both. Jane Jacobs points out that Capitalism is seen as intrinsically urban, which is perhaps why socialism is thought to be anti-urban.[34] However, as we have seen, the nature of mechanized industry is that it requires an urbanised society. The economic revolution proposed by Marx does not refer to a new shared city space of equality, and perhaps in the context of an inevitably industrialised society this is one of its downfalls. Marxism failed to acknowledge the pivotal role of spatiality in preventing individuals moving between classes and the maintenance of the economic division, described by Engels as occurring in the huge thoroughfares of Manchester, surrounded by working class jumbled streets. Similarly, liberal reformists addressed the symptoms of severe structural, economic and spatial inequalities without trying to reform the root causes. Liberal reforms which intended to improve individual homes and sanitation while remaining in the framework of industrial Capitalism did improve life expectancy and reduce disease, but did not address the fundamental power imbalance brought about by the spatial control of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat enabled by spatial separation. [...]
It seems incredible now that although Manchester did have a leading role in improving working class housing conditions, it was not until 1909 with the Housing and Town Planning etc. Act town that planning was proposed as a potential solution to improve social conditions. We view this, however, from a time and place where town planning as an idea is commonplace; although not perhaps, the idea of town planning as shaping the nature of social relations.
References
[4, 7] Parkinson-Bailey, J.J., Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) p 19 and 14-17.
[5] Soja, E.W., Postmetropolis, Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p 76.
[6] J. Jacobs, cited in Soja, p 76.
[8] J. Allen, D. Massey & S. Pile (eds), City Worlds (London: Routledge, 1999) pp 15.
[9] Soja, Postmetropolis, p 76.
[10] C. Aspin, Lancashire: The First Industrial Society (Helmshore: Helmshore Local History Society, 1969), pp 1-3.
[11] accessed 05.04.2007
[12] C. Hartwell, M. Hyde, & N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp 46-47.
[13, 14] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, pp 31-34.
[15] Manchester Statistical Society was formed in 1835 and published perhaps the first social survey in the country.
[16] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, p 35.
[17] T. Hunt, Building Jerusalem, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Phoenix, 2005), pp 36-38.
[18, 19] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, p. 41 and p. 4.
[20] Robert Fishman, (1987), cited in Soja, p 79.
[21] Friedrich Engels, ‘The Great Towns’ from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) in R. LeGates & Frederick Stout (eds), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996) pp 46-56.
[22] Soja, Postmetropolis, p 81.
[23, 24] Engels in LeGates & Stout, The City Reader, pp 46 - 56.
[25] Hunt, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, pp 265-270.
[26] viewed 07/04/2007
[27] accessed 31.03.2007
[28] R.E. Klosterman, "Arguments For and Against Planning" in S. Campbell & S.S. Fainstein (eds), Readings in Planning Theory (Oxford: Blackwell 1998, . rst pub. 1996), pp 151-152.
[29] Although they continued to be built in the satellite towns of Bradford and Openshaw until the 1890s.
[30, 31] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, p 40-42.
[32] Soja, Postmetropolis, p 83-84.
[33] R.E. Klosterman, Readings in Planning Theory, pp 150 169.
[34] Jane Jacobs, cited in Soja, Postmetropolis, p 76.
An Investigation of 19th Century Manchester and Emergence of Planning
The growth of Manchester occurred due to three key forces: industrial Capitalism, innovations in transport, and migration. Industrial capitalism in Manchester was born 1779 when Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, enabling fast, continuous spinning of strong yarn powered by water and latterly driven by Watt’s steam engine. In 1782, there were just two water-powered cotton mills in Manchester, the first constructed by Richard Arkwright on Miller Street, in Shudehill.[4] By 1792 there were fifty two, and a hundred by 1830, clustered around the Ir and Irkwell rivers.[5] Before industrialisation, individuals manufactured goods for trade and they were both the owners and the operators of the means of production. Once mechanisation occurred, individuals instead had to work for the owner of the means of production, therefore dividing society into the capitalists and the workers. According to Jane Jacobs, initially home industry moved to the vicinity of cities but the cost and scale of the machinery required for spinning and weaving cotton dictated that it could no longer occur in small villages or towns. Therefore the process of mechanisation fundamentally linked industrial Capitalism to urban space.[6]
Developing concurrently with, and enabling, the steam powered mechanisation of production, the second force which created Manchester was the canal system, constructed from 1759. It allowed goods produced and traded in Manchester to be distributed efficiently all over the UK and to be taken to Liverpool for overseas export.[7] Manchester became the centre of a vast hinterland of satellite towns and a much wider national and international network of trade, imports and exports, or what Lewis Mumford would later describe as a ‘geographic plexus’.[8]
The third force was population migration. A series of interrelated events caused a massive shift in the nature of the population of the UK, from 80% rural in 1780 to 80% urban in 1900.[9] Spurred by industrial mechanisation and transport innovations, hand spinners and weavers in Lancashire were rapidly forced to migrate to the city, as were agricultural workers.[10] The potato crops in Ireland also failed successively from 1848-51, forcing Irish people to flee to England, sailing to Liverpool and whence to Manchester.[11] In a similar manner to coal, immigration both enabled industrialisation and was caused by it in a reciprocal system.
The urban space which resulted from these forces rejected the capitalist polarisation of the classes. It was zoned concentrically, with the architecture of industry at its centre. Mills were built primarily around the Ancoats area and near the Medlock in the south of the city.[12] Warehouses sprung up in vast numbers with the key areas of warehousing in Cannon Street, High Street and the area behind Picadilly.[13]
Surrounding the central district of smoke-laden mills and warehouses were the areas housing Manchester mill workers. As migration exploded and the population increased, there were insuf. cient buildings. The result was one of the most densely populated cities in history. Cheap ‘jerry built’ back-to-back houses were thrown up which were severely overcrowded, like weavers’ houses in Back Irk Street, Irk Town, one of which contained 22 people [14]. ...
The cellars of dwellings were almost always rented to lodgers, and the Manchester statistical Society’s15 survey found in 1835 that 3,500 cellar dwellings contained 12% of the population, or 15,000 people. The worst conditions existed near the Medlock, south of the present Oxford Road station between Gloucester Street and Great Marlborough Street in what came to be known as ‘Little Ireland’; where there lived one group of Irish immigrants, the poorest, most desperate sector of the population. The sanitary conditions were horrific and, in 1831, less than half of the population of Manchester had access to clean water.[16] Poorly ventilated, overcrowded houses were breeding grounds for typhus, smallpox, TB, scarlet fever and cholera, which killed 32,000 people across the country in 1832 and 62,000 in 1848. In 1841, working class average life expectancy was 26.6 years, a . gure which had actually reduced significantly since the late eighteenth century.[17] Even more shocking was the 1842 report of the Poor Law Commissioners that 57% of working class children died before reaching their fifth birthday.[18]
In 1788, when Manchester’s centre contained no mechanised industry, there was a thriving trader’s region around Market Street, and the wealthy merchants dwelled in the fashionable streets around St Ann’s Square in close proximity to their place of employment.[19] As a result of the foul aromas and pollution of city-centre living, the merchants abandoned the central district leaving their once prestigious houses to be converted into warehousing, in the start of what Fishman would describe in 1987 as the suburbanisation of the bourgeoisie.[20] As a result of industrialisation, zonation, which has always been present in urban space, was in Manchester flipped in terms of prestige. The outskirts of town became the prestigious locations, with suburbanisation enabled by regular transport links to the business district in the city centre.[21] This forced the edges of the urban space outwards,[22] and changed the nature of bourgeois urban life as people had to travel to reach work. This served to further polarise the divisions between rich and poor, since travelling costs money and the working man, even if he could scrape together the rent for an out-of-town dwelling could afford neither the cost nor the time to travel to work.
In the The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels explored polarised social relations of industrial capitalism in Manchester and their effect on cityspace. Engels’ exposed the true horror of working class living conditions. He described a disorderly jumble of unventilated ‘courts’ and lanes without water pumps or sufficient privies. Above Dulcie Bridge on the Irk, Engels noted that "In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement." [23]
Engels also noted the concentric zonation of Manchester, and pointed out that there were avenues of shops connecting the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie areas with the central business zone, slicing through the slums. Thus the true nature of working class poverty was effectively concealed from middle class eyes.[24]These terrible conditions occurred, in part, due to lack of governance. The prevailing ideology during the early to mid nineteenth century was that selfgovernment and power devolved from London to regional centres was the source of British political stability and creativity.[25] Cities were responsible for their own government, laws, controls and municipality. In Manchester, the sudden rapid growth of population and urban space was not matched by an increase in the size and scope of its local government. The other reason for the poverty was the economic approach of laissez-faire , a doctrine of utilitarianism that market forces would prevail and create maximum public benefit. Therefore, the physical organic growth of Manchester, and the growth of the populous, was allowed to occur unchecked in all respects. The poverty of the working classes served capitalism, since there was a large pool of pauperised labourers to feed the factories and labour was cheap. The placing of the worst slums nearest to the factories also served as a warning to slightly better-off workers of the dire fate which would befall them should they attempt to upset the status quo. Thus the oligarchy of merchants who presided over the city did nothing, in the early part of the nineteenth century, to ameliorate the situation.
Social Conceptions of City: Liberal Reformism, Marxism and the Berlin School
Two schools of thought emerged from the industrial metropolis of nineteenth century Manchester in the search of the reasons behind, and the solutions to, the polarisation of classes, extreme poverty and segregation.
The characteristics these approaches share is their social analysis of Capitalism, social divisions, class polarisation and poverty as structural (resulting from economic or political metastractures) or as individual (psychological or religious individual action shapes society). Thus they provide social, economic, political or religious reasons for social divisions. The first school is liberalreformism, founded on the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau [27], and the classical liberaltradition of Adam Smith and John Stewart Mill. It is a liberaland establishmentarian approach framed within a modernist narrative of capitalism as constant growth, accumulation and change for the better. Based on the ideas of the French and American revolutions (liberaldemocracy, fraternity, equality and citizenship) liberalreformists argued that liberalreforms, moral betterment, public health and technological innovation combined with minimal state intervention and competitive markets would co-ordinate people and control the worst excesses of capitalism for the common good.[28]
A series of legislative measures occurred in Manchester through the latter part of the nineteenth century as a result of liberalreformist doctrine. For example, in 1830, the Manchester Act set the minimum street width at 24ft (7,3m ), and in 1844 the Borough Police Act stipulated that no houses should be built without running water and a toilet in the yard, which effectively meant no new back-to-backs were constructed in Manchester proper.[29] Similarly, the 1848 Public Health Act gave local authorities the power to supply water, pave streets, to collect refuse and to whitewash and purify slum houses.[30] Such legislation aimed to improve conditions for city-centre dwellers but was mostly adoptive, not compulsory, and applied to small tectonic aspects of the city fabric, without addressing the notion of the spatial nature of poverty and inequality of the city as a whole. There was a lack of understanding of the structural nature of poverty and poor living conditions when, in 1853 a local act prohibited cellar dwellings, closing 454 cellars between 1854 and 1861 without rehousing the occupants. Again in 1867 Manchester Improvement Act allowed the Corporation to close houses deemed unfit for human habitation without compensation to the landlords. In practice, £15 was paid to the owner per house demolished, but the people who had lived there had to find new homes, without any form of compensation or assistance. People were forced from the slums and by 1900 only 30,000 people lived in the town centre, as compared to 90,000 people in 1851. The Bishop of Manchester noted in 1879 ‘the centre of the city at night is a mass of unoccupied tenements’31, but yet the squalor, jumble of streets, disorganisation and lack of sanitation still remained. The problem with these reforms, although well intentioned, is that they did nothing to address the economic and structural inequalities between owners and workers which had created the spatial division and destructive social relations. The liberalreformists viewed poverty essentially as an individual pursuit, and shared the Victorian ideology of poverty as indicative of lack of morality. The lack of appreciation of the structure of city space as a creator of society is reflected in the relatively minor and fragmented nature of the legislation.
The second emergent school of thought was that of revolutionary scientific socialism, based on the writings of Comte and developed in Germany by Engels and Karl Marx after Engels’ 1844 examination of the working class. Marx and Engels’ approach is structural; an attempt to understand the way capitalist society is structured and explain the resulting division of classes. Marxists argued the only solution to poverty was a completely new social order brought about by proletariat revolution, and saw the liberalreformist approach as purely a treatment of symptoms of deeper insoluble problems which would continue to exist while the status quo and the capitalist system was maintained. They saw that polarisation of the classes and pauperisation of the working classes as inherent to the workings of industrial capitalism.[32] According to Marxism, all institutions in a capitalist society are controlled by those who own the means of production and therefore will always promote the interests of those who own capital. Therefore effectively the state is an instrument of the ruling class, promoting the interests of capital but disguised and legitimised by the ideology of liberal democracy, which portrays the state as neutrally serving all members of society.[33] Equity cannot occur under Capitalism, because by its very nature it is divisive, and a conflict of interest between workers and owners of Capital is unavoidable.
Where liberal reformism tends to ignore industrial relations as a basis of poor living conditions and assume individual action and reaction is the cause, Marx argued that fundamentally power imbalance is always economic. Marx and Engel’s writing is couched in structural and economic terms, and although Engels examined the spatial effects of economic division, he did not propose that the spatial divisions were in fact contributing to class distinctions and conflict of interest in Manchester.
Thus both the liberal reformist and Marxist schools of thought are fundamentally social in nature and the spatial element of inequality, wealth polarisation and poor living conditions is ignored by both. Jane Jacobs points out that Capitalism is seen as intrinsically urban, which is perhaps why socialism is thought to be anti-urban.[34] However, as we have seen, the nature of mechanized industry is that it requires an urbanised society. The economic revolution proposed by Marx does not refer to a new shared city space of equality, and perhaps in the context of an inevitably industrialised society this is one of its downfalls. Marxism failed to acknowledge the pivotal role of spatiality in preventing individuals moving between classes and the maintenance of the economic division, described by Engels as occurring in the huge thoroughfares of Manchester, surrounded by working class jumbled streets. Similarly, liberal reformists addressed the symptoms of severe structural, economic and spatial inequalities without trying to reform the root causes. Liberal reforms which intended to improve individual homes and sanitation while remaining in the framework of industrial Capitalism did improve life expectancy and reduce disease, but did not address the fundamental power imbalance brought about by the spatial control of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat enabled by spatial separation. [...]
It seems incredible now that although Manchester did have a leading role in improving working class housing conditions, it was not until 1909 with the Housing and Town Planning etc. Act town that planning was proposed as a potential solution to improve social conditions. We view this, however, from a time and place where town planning as an idea is commonplace; although not perhaps, the idea of town planning as shaping the nature of social relations.
References
[4, 7] Parkinson-Bailey, J.J., Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) p 19 and 14-17.
[5] Soja, E.W., Postmetropolis, Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p 76.
[6] J. Jacobs, cited in Soja, p 76.
[8] J. Allen, D. Massey & S. Pile (eds), City Worlds (London: Routledge, 1999) pp 15.
[9] Soja, Postmetropolis, p 76.
[10] C. Aspin, Lancashire: The First Industrial Society (Helmshore: Helmshore Local History Society, 1969), pp 1-3.
[11] accessed 05.04.2007
[12] C. Hartwell, M. Hyde, & N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Lancashire: Manchester and the South-East (London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp 46-47.
[13, 14] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, pp 31-34.
[15] Manchester Statistical Society was formed in 1835 and published perhaps the first social survey in the country.
[16] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, p 35.
[17] T. Hunt, Building Jerusalem, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Phoenix, 2005), pp 36-38.
[18, 19] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, p. 41 and p. 4.
[20] Robert Fishman, (1987), cited in Soja, p 79.
[21] Friedrich Engels, ‘The Great Towns’ from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) in R. LeGates & Frederick Stout (eds), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996) pp 46-56.
[22] Soja, Postmetropolis, p 81.
[23, 24] Engels in LeGates & Stout, The City Reader, pp 46 - 56.
[25] Hunt, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, pp 265-270.
[26] viewed 07/04/2007
[27] accessed 31.03.2007
[28] R.E. Klosterman, "Arguments For and Against Planning" in S. Campbell & S.S. Fainstein (eds), Readings in Planning Theory (Oxford: Blackwell 1998, . rst pub. 1996), pp 151-152.
[29] Although they continued to be built in the satellite towns of Bradford and Openshaw until the 1890s.
[30, 31] Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History, p 40-42.
[32] Soja, Postmetropolis, p 83-84.
[33] R.E. Klosterman, Readings in Planning Theory, pp 150 169.
[34] Jane Jacobs, cited in Soja, Postmetropolis, p 76.