Socially mixed communities are good for urban health

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/22/socially-mixed-communities-social-housing

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A few years ago, there were riots in cities all over France. There was even a hint of them returning this month, with disorder in Amiens. At the time, British writers, architects and urban planners sedulously claimed this was all to do with the <em>banlieue</em> syndrome. In Paris, Toulouse or Strasbourg, beautiful and rich historic centres managed to be preserved at the cost of a racialised urban working class being consigned to vast peripheral council estates. The smarter commentators didn't put this down to the nasty concrete and flat roofs, as they'd noticed how similar blocks in the bourgeois centre didn't face the same problems. The siege mentality and sense of abandonment caused by knowing you're being placed in a reservation was considered a far likelier culprit. The more smug pointed out that in London, Manchester or Sheffield we were trying to build "mixed communities", where the barrow-boy and banker would live happily next door to each other.

How far we've come. Policy Exchange's Ending Expensive Social Tendencies report, immediately and unsurprisingly welcomed by Grant Shapps, asserts bullishly what has been sotto voce policy under the coalition. It could be summed up as "I don't see why I should subsidise …" politics, based on provoking the resentment of the poor by the reasonably affluent. It argues that social housing in rich areas should be sold off, to pay for a new generation of <em>banlieue</em>s on the outskirts, because nobody has the right to live in rich areas, except, presumably, the rich.

But many of these rich areas have become rich only within a generation. Paddington, Notting Hill, Islington or Clerkenwell 20 years ago, Shoreditch, Hackney, Peckham and Camberwell over the last decade, all are London areas which only were previously considered irretrievable slums, before the return of middle class "urban safarians" to the inner cities, eagerly sponsored by governments and councils. The centres of Manchester, Leeds and Bristol faced similar transformations. The policy legitimises a sort of militant gentrification, where after a place has its rents hiked by incomers, the lower-income inhabitants are fair game for clearance. And wasn't that unofficial policy under New Labour, with its mass clearances of council estates in the south and Victorian terraces in the north? The rhetoric has changed. Before, the promise was that some of the deserving poor would be "pepper-potted" in the affordable percentages of new inner urban luxury living solutions – now, even that concession is absent.

Imagine then, a time in which the exact opposite policy was actively pursued – when councils and governments actively built working-class housing in upper-class areas, assuming that they could do with "mixing" socially as much as the rest of us. Inconceivable? Hardly. There are dozens of examples, both elsewhere in Europe and in the UK. Vienna, for instance, became the anti-Paris in the 1920s. Rather than consigning the poor to the outskirts, the government of "Red Vienna" built thousands of streetblocks in central, prominent locations in their famously beautiful, bourgeois capital, making them as proud, monumental and grand as any Hapsburg palace. In so doing, they ensured that even now, 60% of the population live in social housing. However in the process, they dispossessed a generation of slum landlords, who formed the backbone of Austro-fascism. When the fascists launched a military coup in 1934, they bombarded "workers' fortresses" such as the Karl Marx-Hof. They would surely have agreed that rich areas are best left for the rich.

In London, there are plenty of examples of a similar move, which haven't inspired the same level of resistance. The (apocryphal) statement by Labour leader of the London county council Herbert Morrison that he wanted to "build the Tories out of London" has often been interpreted as gerrymandering (some in Shirley Porter's Westminster regarded their rather prophetic programme of council estate clearance to be "revenge for Morrison"). But in fact it was often thoroughly establishment bodies such as Peabody and the Cavendish estate that made sure Pimlico or St James were unexpectedly marginal seats. Whether Morrison said that or not, his flat-building programme in the 1930s still occupies much potentially lucrative inner-city land.

Similar ideas were proposed for leafier areas after the war. The Alton estate in Roehampton occupied acres of land in a formerly exceptionally wealthy area of outer London, and it attempted to replicate the abundance of space, air and greenery hitherto enjoyed only by the well-off. Originally, the London county council intended to expand its estates all the way into Richmond park, before being stopped by Harold Macmillan, who had a rather more limited idea of what council housing should be (although he still built far more of it than some subsequent Labour governments).

Most estates after the war were built in areas that would only become rich during 1990s-2000s gentrification – but even then there were exceptions. Camden council's 1970s housing programme meant that the likes of Hampstead and Highgate have some of the finest-quality council flats in the country. This, too, was deliberate – planners and architects such as Neave Brown saw absolutely no reason why working-class tenants shouldn't enjoy the same quality of life as the owners of villas and mansion flats. When Brown built a private block in the same area (which he moved into) it had exactly the same specifications as the council flats.

With all of these projects, from the class war in stone in Vienna to the careful social planning of north London, it was considered that it would be a positive thing to built cheap housing in expensive areas, often with the eventual goal of wiping out the idea of "expensive areas" altogether. It's exactly places like these that are most in danger from the coalition. It's rare, at least, to find them taking their ideas from France.