• Raeto West reviews Alice Coleman on Tower Blocks

Review of Social engineering of housing in Britain Alice Coleman: Utopia on Trial - Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (1985)

Omits several elephants in the tower block, Mar 3, 2013

1985 book published by Hilary Shipman, presumably a small specialist publisher. Possibly the book was taken on by Jews to censor anything suspected on looking Jewish. The work was carried out over five years by a team directed by Professor Alice Coleman, of the geography department at King's College, London. There were five main members of the team, all women.

The title is supposed to include the idea of a trial: the defendants being the vision of planners - not the planners themselves (including architects, council 'officers' and so on), but rather the vision, a compound of the Garden City idea and Le Corbusier's still-futuristic visions as processed by post-1945 'socialists'. Fixed-size gardens, Radiant City, and roads in the sky as interpreted by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. Her alternative, or at least contrast, seems to be a more-or-less free market model, with builders building what they find people want: 1930s semis emerge well from this, partly because the population had been thinned out by WW1 slaughter so houses were cheapish. (£500 for a semi, £550 for a detached, I remember being told). Coleman likes Jane Jacobs ('Death and Life of Great American Cities') and Oscar Newman's 'Defensible Space' (1972; her book resembles this but with fewer illustrations). There's a sex divide here: male architects discuss design and people as fitting in (or not) with their pet structures; women tend to be more aware of things like crowds as crime reducers, and town centres with a variety of shops and businesses. Coleman quotes approvingly from an author on shanty towns.

I'm not certain Coleman knew the meaning of 'utopia' when she wrote this.

In fact the book was a bit late - page 7 has a photo of a controlled demolition of a 10-storey Birkenhead block!

Coleman set out to find weak design points - 'design disadvantagement' features - and listed 15 of these, all architectural and, specifically, spatial - tower and slab blocks, blocks per site, entrance types, corridor positions and whether they were observed, vertical routes such as lifts (elevators), interconnecting exits, and confused as opposed to clearly-delineated outside spaces.

Buildings were assessed by several criteria - litter, faeces ('usually dog'), children taken into care, and others. (Table page 205 lists these, and correlation coefficients). There were interviews, though such issues as feelings of fear, feelings of loneliness, and actual violence weren't factored into the calculations. Blocks in Hackney and Southwark, and, for comparison, Blackbird Leys in Oxford were looked at; 4,099 of these blocks, plus 4,172 houses. And a dozen other parts of Britain, plus Toronto, Puerto Rico and Hong Kong. Thirty or so woman-years in total.

There's a fair amount of statistical work. I have to say I found the 'threshold level' calculations incomprehensible.

The basic idea seems to be pretty simple, in fact: if you have a place to live in, normally there are few ways to get to it, and out of it: a main road, a side road, a front door, maybe several floors; and maybe a back door or fire escape. The number of neighbours is not very great. BUT if there are several big blocks scattered around, and linked by walkways, there may be many ways of getting to several entrances, and many ways of getting to the apartment or maisonette. Corridors may be menacing or unobserved or isolated. So what? Well, IF there are burglars or other criminals or thugs, the living space is threatening and worrying. (This is quite apart from the issue of looking out of windows with precipitous huge drops down). In some societies, this may not matter: '... Japan had a high crime rate ... which fell after the American occupation force departed, and they now assume virtually all crime is due to foreigners. ... the Japanese people are reacting rather like the British but at a much later date, so they have reached only a mild stage as yet' wrote Prof Coleman to me. This sounds to me like a low crime population. She wrote: 'The architects who designed the inferior estates genuinely believed they were superior dwellings, and they certainly cost more than houses would have done.'

The solutions - removing walkways, having external balconies rather than interior corridors, blocking off vertical shafts, would make journeys home longer, of course, but perhaps that couldn't be helped. Houses were to have improved visibility by giving them bay windows, and doors with glass facing out, and fenced gardens.

There are several issues not faced by Coleman, possibly because the project was 'funded' by the Rowntree Foundation, basically a Jewish-controlled quasi-think-tank which had the pro-Jewish policy of damaging British society. There's no mention of such phenomena as Rachmanism. Another plausible Jewish-related possibility is that housing designed to put the goyim in their inferior place, while also benefitting Jews through subsidies, was deliberate but hidden policy. Ernö Goldfinger (1902-1987), a Jew from Hungary, illustrates. [Goldfinger note added 2013-10-06]

In the first place, there's the issue of criminality: if nobody ever attacked or robbed anyone, a completely open-plan architecture would be fine. In fact, crime was rising all the time, and this of course was disproportionately due to immigrants. Possibly the architects preferred not to face such facts.

There's no consideration of the part that could be played by concierges. (The 'caretaker' is the nearest approach).

Another point is that mansion blocks can work perfectly well: the Barbican, Brunswick Centre, and other high-density architectural constructions work well enough. And certainly many blocks now have railings, all round, not too obtrusive, with railed gates opened electrically by buttons out of reach of the other side of the fence. Probably the lessons were learned.

Another very serious missing consideration is the Freemasonry/ Common Purpose effect: if big companies can get big contracts on big sites which use relatively deskilled labour, they're onto a winner, from their point of view. Coleman makes the mistake of viewing demolition as 'financially disastrous'. This is true of income taxpayers and property tax payers, but not of the beneficiaries, who in fact can make much more money from bad schemes than good. Councils were actually offered a cash bonus - the taller the block, the more money. And the density was deliberately kept low.

Note that Alice Coleman teamed up with Mona McNee, and between them they wrote on another money-making disaster, low quality teaching of children to read and write. But again they omitted important parts of the dynamics.