The more observant among you may have noticed that I’ve been banging on quite a bit over the last week about the loss of plot in relation to the relative importance of People and Systems. The main reason I think this to be a central cultural issue – apart from the obvious one that such plot-loss is a sign of madness – concerns the sheer expense in the long run of systemic-preference thinking. While I do think that by far the most deranged expression of this mindset was The Jobless Recovery, I return yet again to my desire for better governance.
The sums wasted by systemic obsession over the last sixty years are truly mind-blowing.
The day that architecture became the triumph of aesthetic ego and building method over social fitness for service was the day local government expenditure started on its long spiral upwards and out into the stratosphere. I bet you didn’t know this, but when the late 40s/early 50s housing opinion-leaders in architecture began looking at vertical environments, not a single citizen was polled or consulted in any way. Like most people too smart for their own good, the ‘designers’ of that era skipped Page One and decided to build up, not out. Thus they threw away the fundamental glue of neighbourly communities: the ability to walk three yards to next door on one level, or seven doors down to the Corner Shop.
Almost no thought was given to materials durability, maintenance costs of lifts, cleaning windows twenty storeys up, individual alienation, and so forth. Every Council had its little railway set-style model in reception: beautifully balanced and art directed, and utterly unfit for purpose. Today, over 70% of all of it has been demolished because either (a) it’s unfit for habitation through decay or (b) nobody wants to live there because of the isolation and violence. All up, it is impossible to audit the cost of this, because it is as much social and criminal as financial. But it was caused by putting a system of building before the occupier’s need.
After 1964, the middle-class intellectuals who eventually ruined the Labour Party embarked on a reconfiguration of the British education system based 100% on polemic rigidity, and 0% on its outstanding record of social mobility and academic success. In doing so, they also ‘streamlined’ the schools building programme into larger and more impersonal units unrelated to communities – and totally unmindful of either the family costs of transporting kids there, or indeed the time starvation of the emerging working mother. One of these was my mum, who met herself coming back day in day out trying to juggle a buyer’s job at JD Williams with tea on’t'table at 6pm, two sets of bus fares, and a husband who expected a newly ironed white shirt every morning.
