Housing Transformations

Shaping the Space of Twenty-First Century Living

Bridget Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134306633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Drawing together a wide range of literature, this original book combines social theory with elements from the built environment disciplines to provide insight into how and why we build places and dwell in spaces that are at once contradictory, confining, liberating and illuminating.

This groundbreaking book deals with topical issues, which are helpfully divided into two parts. The first presents a conceptual framework examining how the built environment derives from a variety of influences: structural, institutional, textual, and action-orientated.

Using illustrated case study examples, the second part covers new build schemes, including urban villages, gated communities, foyers, retirement homes and televillages, as well as refurbishment projects, such as mental hospitals and tower blocks.

Multidisciplinary in its focus, Housing Transformations will appeal to academics, students and professionals in the fields of housing, planning, architecture and urban design, as well as to social scientists with an interest in housing.

Part I
Theory, concept and practice

1 Towards a contextual approach

In this chapter an overview is provided of some theories and concepts which are deemed to be relevant in developing a contextual approach to the understanding of residential environments. As mentioned in the introduction, this necessitates drawing on a number of disciplinary strands in order to attain sufficient breadth to address the complexities of the nature of housing. The first section of the chapter briefly examines the way in which commentators on built form, anthropologists, and specialists in environment-behaviour studies have analysed the relationship between culture and dwelling, and refers to the limitations of their approaches. The subsequent three sections concern the constitution of society and take a more sociological perspective. First there is a discussion of the structure/agency debate, including a critique of social constructionism and the contributions of Giddens and Bourdieu. Then attention is paid to the different roles of institutions, organisations and individuals in framing agency, and to the importance of discourse in shaping action and meaning. The chapter then moves on to look at how built form too can have meaning, and how spatial organisation is irrevocably implicated in supporting or constraining social action.

The ideas discussed in these sections form the basis of a conceptual framework which shows the interconnectedness of structural, social, institutional, individual and textual factors in creating and interpreting the built form of housing. This is illustrated in the form of a model and then, by way of practical application, in the worked example of the development of a specific housing scheme, that of Quarry Hill in Leeds in the 1930s. The subsequent chapters in Part I build on the elements of the conceptual framework, starting with considerations of structure, then moving on to discussion of institutions, organisations and individuals, and finally ending with ideas about design and the construction of built form.

Culture and dwelling

The housing of every society in the world has a historic distinctiveness; be it located in the deserts of Northern Africa, in the tropical rainforests of South America, on the steppes of Asia, or in the mediaeval towns of Europe. This distinctiveness is a function of the diversity of cultural context, and it is this which helps to determine how any given society shapes, produces and uses the built forms within which its people dwell. The resultant multiplicity of house styles and modes of dwelling has been given little sustained attention in academic discourse. Architecture, as the discipline which studies the built form, might perhaps have been expected to address this issue, but has shown little consistent interest in the cultural diversity of housing. Exceptions include the cross-cultural work of Oliver (1987, 2003) and the somewhat romanticised accounts of vernacular dwelling from around the world. These have been used to promote the virtues of so-called ‘spontaneous’ architecture and its perceived ability to achieve more culturally and socially appropriate design than mass produced housing (see, for example, Hamdi, 1991; Rudofsky, 1964; Turner, 1976). In regard to housing specific to British culture, however, the discipline of architecture has been relatively productive, with a number of works which cover vernacular housing, the history of housing types, and particular periods or styles of housing (see, for example, Brunskill, 1981; Colquhoun, 1999; Edwards, 1981; Glendinning and Muthesius, 1994; Gray, 1994; Scoffham, 1984). Together these works illustrate the heritage and tradition of housing in Britain, revealing also the archetypes which are part of the British psyche.

Social and cultural anthropology, as the disciplines which study the cultures of the world, have been remarkably silent in relation to analytical, as opposed to descriptive, accounts of the built environment. The main exception here derives from within the now outmoded field of structural anthropology, popularised in the work of Lévi-Strauss, and based on the structuralist approach popular in the mid-twentieth century. The central idea behind structuralism is that it is possible to identify mental structures and patterns of cognition that can be shown to be common to all cultures. Particularly prevalent is the notion that the human mind classifies through opposition: nature/culture; sacred/profane; purity/danger; insider/outsider; male/female; high born/low born; night/day; left/right (see Douglas, 1970; Lévi-Strauss, 1968). Such oppositions are reflected in thought, myth, ritual and patterns of living, and can also be identified in the ways in which material objects are organised and arranged. Thus, for example, features of the ordering of settlements and dwellings can be shown symbolically to reflect conceptual categories and aspects of social organisation. This results in housing patterns which are in effect ‘good to think’, since they express a consonance, or homology, between spatial formation and the ordering of social life. Thus the way in which things are arranged in space can assume a metaphorical quality, with particular significance accorded to physical boundaries since they denote the ambiguous and potentially threatening distinction between inside and outside, friend and stranger, culture and nature.

Emerging from the US has been people-environment studies, also known as environment-behaviour studies, which combines aspects of architecture and cultural (but not structural) anthropology. This cross-cultural approach explores the interaction between people and their environments, in terms of identifying the cultural characteristics which influence the shaping of the built environment, and concomitantly, the ways in which the built environment influences people. The most famous exponent of people-environment studies has been Rapoport, whose prodigious output now spans five decades. In his first major work, House Form and Culture (1969), Rapoport examines how people organise and use dwelling space, whilst attempting to devise a conceptual framework to analyse the cultural forces that give rise to them. In later work (1977, 1982, 1985) he advances this conceptual framework to develop his theory of systems of settings and systems of activities – a ‘non-verbal communication approach’, in which housing must be viewed as part of the specific system to which it belongs. This system includes the complete built environment of village and town, monumental buildings, nondomestic spaces, and the links between people and these places. Environments, he states, can be neutral, inhibiting or facilitating for behaviour, with the inhibiting effects becoming acute in times of stress, as, for example, in the case of migrants. Whilst Rapoport has been influential in extending the scope of people-environment studies, he can be criticised both for over-emphasising the determinacy of culture, and for assuming the homogeneity of people within a culture.

The difficulties of providing a conceptual framework sufficient in terms of both rigour and compass may explain why some proponents of people-environment studies have adopted a more focused approach. Thus in a few cases there has been a return to a more structuralist tradition in looking at the significance and symbolic meaning of spaces and places (see, for example, Kent, 1990; Parker-Pearson and Richards, 1994), whilst others have explored place attachment and the meaning and use of home (see, for example, Altman and Werner, 1985; Altman and Low, 1992; Arias, 1993). With their emphasis on identity and the psycho-social, these latter works shift the emphasis from the cultural to the personal, and from society to the individual – in other words to the phenomenological, as encapsulated particularly strongly by Cooper-Marcus (1995). Indeed, whether the emphasis is cultural or phenomenological, people-environment studies can be criticised for the way in which it overlooks the organisations and institutions of society – the political, economic, juridical and administrative framework within which social relations are framed, and the regulations, norms and rules whereby resources are produced and distributed. For an insight into the relationship between these issues and the actions in time and space of individuals, we need to turn to sociology and social theory.

The riddle of society

The question of the relationship between society and the individual strikes at the heart of a fundamental problem in social theory: that of the primacy of the individual or of society; the chicken and egg issue that continues to divide sociologists between those who believe that society is driven by overarching structures external to and independent of individual actions, and those who believe society is constituted by individual action and the meaning given by individuals to those actions. The ‘macro’ perspective, or macrosociology, is concerned primarily with the large scale institutions and organisation of society, as exemplified historically by the structuralist and functionalist schools of thought represented by Durkheim (1964), Merton (1967) and Parsons (1937). More recently social realism has developed a more sophisticated perspective on this tradition, arguing that social life consists of layers of reality, and that these layers exist objectively at a deeper level from everyday action and experiences (see, for example, Layder, 1997; Sayer, 2000; Scott, 1995). The ‘micro’ perspective, or microsociology, avers that such reification of social facts is misguided, and that social life consists only of the minutiae of day to day activities, social interaction and personal experiences, as exemplified by the approaches of phenomenology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism (see, for example, Blumer, 1969; Garfinkel, 1967; Schutz, 1972). These two contrasting perspectives can be criticised for failing on the one hand to take individual actors seriously, reducing them to inert bearers and reproducers of systems, and on the other, for failing to take account of the wider social processes which form the context within which action takes place, thus reducing society to the constructs of knowledgeable actors. This dichotomy, or dualism, between what can be further defined as ‘structure’ (objectivist) and ‘agency’ (subjectivist) approaches, has been somewhat caricatured by Archer (2000) as ‘Society’s Being’ and ‘Modernity’s Man’: the passive dupe and cipher on the one hand, and the active, creative (and rational) thinker on the other.

The central problem of dualism is that each approach represents what many would consider to be a partial and one-sided view of the constitution of society – in one approach individual agency is elided out of existence, and in the other, there is no such thing as society. In recognition of this apparent lacuna, there have been some attempts to make linkages. An early example was the work of Berger and Luckmann (1966), who put forward the theory of social constructionism. For Berger and Luckmann, society has both an objective and a subjective reality, based on interpersonal action and reproduced through knowledge and language. Their contention is that social reality exists in terms of the actions and thoughts, meanings and interpretations of individuals, who thus create the totality of everyday knowledge in a taken for granted environment. This knowledge base equates to the institutions and social rules of society, which are in turn transmitted to the next generation through socialisation. Different forms of knowledge are acquired by different social groups, and are often expressed symbolically through styles of dress, rituals or manners of speaking.

The significance of the contribution of Berger and Luckmann is that it seeks to moderate the extremes of dualism by proposing both that individuals create society, and that society creates individuals. But there remain weaknesses for which social constructionism is criticised, notably that the emphasis is clearly on society as a product of human interaction, with a concomitant neglect of both social and material reality (Gergen, 1994). Furthermore, there is no discussion of conflict and change, of space and place, of the distribution of goods and resources, of power and authority. Despite this, social constructionism has proved influential, and in particular has been central to the development of a more theoretically informed approach in housing studies (see, for example, Clapham, 1997; Franklin, 1998; Franklin and Clapham, 1997; Jacobs and Manzi, 2000; Jacobs et al., 2004).

In the endeavour to develop a more sophisticated and integrated resolution of the structure/agency debate the role of structuration theory has proved influential. The two key thinkers associated with this approach to theorising society are Giddens and Bourdieu, the prolific and scholarly works of whom have been a major force in the social scientific world in both the UK and Europe. One of Giddens’ main contributions has been in overcoming the dualism of the individual and society and reconceptualising it as the duality of agency and structure: ‘By the duality of structure I mean that social structure is both constituted by human agency and yet is at the same time the very medium of this constitution’ (Giddens, 1993: 128–9, original emphases). Giddens makes a distinction between structure, as the rules and resources of social systems, and the system (or society) itself, which consists of reproduced relations between actors situated in time and space. Structures are both the medium and the outcome of human action. Essentially, social structures do not have independent existence, but are reproduced or transformed by actors who experience the rules and resources as either constraining or enabling. Giddens conceptualises rules as having normative, symbolic and legitimising aspects, whilst resources are either authoritative or allocative (concerned with the control of material products). These rules and resources comprise the structural properties of social systems, which often become embodied in institutions. Among these structural properties, a number of structural principles are also significant and account for changes from feudal and traditional institutions to modern, capitalist institutions.

Structure has an abstract and recursive quality, and is not fixed in either time or space. Human action, on the other hand, is necessarily situated in time and space, and thus action helps to fix structures and social systems, both in the here and now, and through constant reproduction as actions are repeated or re-created anew. For this reason, the settings of action are important to Giddens, providing the contextuality of social life in both time and space. In referring to physical settings, Giddens prefers the term ‘locale’ (1984: 118) to place, pointing out that a locale can be at any scale, from a room, through a street corner, to a city or the territory of a nation state. Locales are ‘regionalised’, sub-divided into zones which are of significance for different time-space activities – thus a house can be zoned into spaces used for different activities at different times of day. Regions are generally demarcated by physical or symbolic markers, which help to signal movement between regions and to indicate the need to adopt appropriate types of interaction and behaviour (reminiscent of the ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions of Goffman (1971)). Cities, too, are regionalised into areas which can be conceived of as front and back regions, and such zoning is strongly influenced by the operation of housing markets and the consequent social constitution of neighbourhoods.

Giddens’ contribution to the theorising of society has been influential, but as with any other theory is not above criticism. In particular, it has operated at the level of ‘grand theory’ rather than as something which is demonstrably capable of being employed at the empirical level to explain practical action. There is a tendency to see agents as both homogenous and amorphous, without class, gender, age or ethnic group, and with no account of power, authority, or practices of domination. In his early work personality, affect, emotion, and any sense of interdependence or negotiation between actors are ignored, whilst little justice is done to the realities of time and space (see Bryant and Jary, 1991). More recently, however, Giddens has demonstrated a concern for the social predicaments and existential questionings of humanity, particularly in regard to how identity has fared under so-called late modernity, as will be discussed further below and in Chapter 2.

Bourdieu’s approach to the structure/agency dichotomy overcomes some of the problems associated with Giddens. Bourdieu’s intellectual orientation is towards both philosophy and sociology, but he has been strongly influenced by ethnography and social anthropology and by his fieldwork in Kabylia in Algeria. It was this experience which led him to question both the structuralist ideas of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, and the way in which the anthropologist interprets practical action. He believes there is more to action than the account given by the ‘native’, and hence, like Giddens, takes issue with interpretative and ethnomethodological approaches (Bourdieu, 1977). On the other hand, and again like Giddens, he does not believe that actors are simply passive bearers and reproducers of objective structures. But Bourdieu is less interested in devising a conceptual theory than in attempting to develop a way to analyse practical action at the empirical level, and it is here that his main contribution lies.

Bourdieu’s central concept is that of the habitus as a mediating factor between structure and social practice. The habitus is defined as: ‘a system of durable transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures …’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 72). More simply the habitus: ‘implies a “sense of one’s place” but also a “sense of the place of others”’ (Bourdieu, 1989: 19). It operates as a strategy generating principle, a disposition to act in a certain way, or a ‘feel for the game’, which allows individuals to know how they should act in a given circumstance, and in a way that accords with social norms and institutional precepts (thus reproducing them). But the habitus is neither rigid nor a predeterminant of destiny, since it permits individual (conscious or unconscious) choice and personal interpretation, albeit within a certain range: ‘Habitus is creative, inventive, but within the limits of its structures, which are the embodied sedimentation of the social structures which produced it’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 19). Individuals are socialised from birth into the habitus analogous to their position in society, and thus habitus is operationalised at both individual and group (or class) level. Classes and groups are characterised by their status as the dominated and the dominating, and each tends to choose goods and services which are homologous with their social group. The dominating classes seek ‘distinction’ through the determination, by symbolic means, of what constitutes good ‘taste’ – setting the fashion in house type or clothing, defining which is the ‘right’ newspaper to read, or determining the ‘best’ home furnishing style (Bourdieu, 1984). The dominated then seek to emulate the dominating, thus encouraging the latter to move on to new forms of distinction.

The context of action is referred to by Bourdieu as a ‘field’, with the habitus providing a practical sense of how to act within the field. Fields are characterised by the possession of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital which bestow power and legitimacy – thus the fields of education or the arts possess cultural capital (knowledge, aesthetic taste), the field of banking possesses economic capital, the field of the family possesses social capital, the field of the peerage possesses symbolic capital. But fields can also be the sites of struggle and conflict, with individuals vying with each other for power, through possession or display of forms of capital – the political field is the prime example here (Bourdieu, 1992). His framework helps to account also for examples of ‘disharmony’, when, for example, a solution imposed on one social group by another, such as the spatial organisation of a housing estate, does not accord with the habitus of the dominated group. For space and spatial organisation have social significance in that they govern practices and representations. Thus the estate, the house, even the body, are all forms of physical space and sites which embody or objectify the generative structures of the habitus. This is exemplified by Bourdieu through the example of the Kabyle house in which the categories which underpin the social world are shown to be replicated in the layout and assignment of space within the house – thus the child learns by association how the social world is structured and how to act within it (Bourdieu, 1973).

Bourdieu’s work has always held a lesser appeal in the English speaking world than that of Giddens’, perhaps in part because of its rather obscure style and the opacity of its concepts (see Jenkins, 1992). His insights do, however, have much to recommend them, especially as his approach is more flexible and more grounded in action than Giddens’. However, like Giddens, he remains closer to the objective than the subjective end of the epistemological tradition of sociology. The individual and the group are still largely faceless and undifferentiated, with a somewhat reductive distinction between the dominating and the dominated. There is also a neglect of personality, biography, decision making or negotiation, whilst the capacity and role of institutions and organisations is largely overlooked.

Both Giddens and Bourdieu make mention of place and space, suggesting that structuration can have something to say on these issues, but in essence, there is a failure to elaborate on the variety and reality of place and space, and how place and space in all their manifestations, including built form, both constitute and are constituted by social action. In an attempt to remedy this situation a few authors have subsequently explored the application of structuration in relation to place, environment and housing (see, for example, Donley-Reid, 1990; Dovey, 1999, 2002; Lawrence, 1993; Pred, 1983; and Sarre, 1986). Between them these authors address space in its widest meaning, from ecosystem to geographical area, from localised housing system to actual form. They also demonstrate, with varying degrees of conviction, elaboration and understanding, that structuration theory can provide only a partial elucidation of the connection between the social and the spatial – in terms of how social practices are enacted in space, constrained by space, transformative of space, or deposited in space.

Institutions, organisations and sentient beings

Institutions provide the ongoing framework whereby social, economic, political and juridical...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theory, Concept and Practice
• Part II Issues, Projects and Processes
• Part III Conclusion
• References