Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-century Britain
by Sam Wetherell
(Princeton University Press, £30)

CITY planning may seem a distant and theoretical topic and it often presents itself thus to stay aloof from the masses. But this book is the opposite — compelling and lucid, extremely readable and persuasive, each page is a revelation.

In the face of conditions that render people helpless, it provides a convincing narrative, a rich historical context and suggests grounds for new thinking and action.

Wetherell examines the home, the shop and the workplace as evolving environments that have changed dramatically in the past century. Employing particular examples such as Park Hill in Sheffield, Trafford Park in Manchester or the Merry Hill shopping mall in Birmingham, he demonstrates historical changes in attitude that apply to the country as a whole.

One strand of the book examines the thinking behind the construction of council estates from the 1950s to the 1970s. Beginning with the slum conditions that Engels encountered in the 1840s, when toilets were shared, central heating unheard of and proximity meant the denial of privacy, he traces the utopian schemes of high-density mass housing that were common in capitalist and socialist countries alike.

The opportunity to create rational solutions was shared globally and led to ingenious large-scale schemes that collectivised the use of heating and electricity, often using the by-product of giant industry to save on bills.

The author points out that this was a well-intentioned attempt to “create communities out of proximity” and “streets in the sky,” with designed shared spaces  for communities to meet and children to play.

In the British case, these desirable communities were figured as white and, like the welfare state itself, based on sexist assumptions about gender roles and a homogenous family unit. To be black, single or non-heteronormative sent you to the bottom of the housing list.

The collective logic that improved living standards also reflected the bias of both the designers and the municipal authorities responsible for them.

The same selective criteria applied to housing estates but the towers, unlike the houses, were inherently more difficult to privatise as they relied upon so many shared amenities. The gestation and creation of mass housing took a century to evolve but destruction of the idea of collective responsibility came about very quickly.

The 1980 Housing Act — Thatcher’s “right to buy” wrecking ball —  introduced property speculation as a substitute for the human right to a home. Collective bills and municipal responsibility were replaced with a blizzard of petty disputes. The unprivatisable blocks were first neglected, then flattened.

Wetherell’s investigation of the changing attitude to crime is very telling. Where once crime had been attributed to poverty and regarded as a problem to address through the redistribution of wealth, suddenly it became an unsolvable social given and something to defend yourself against. This change in thinking and political rhetoric gave rise to the hyper-securitised gated community and the ubiquity of surveillance.

The author’s analysis of housing is the centrepiece of a symmetrical argument about the postwar environment and its subsequent mutilation by the right. With forensic clarity, he shows how the municipal shopping precinct became the private pleasure dome of the shopping mall and how the industrial estate assumed the anodyne neutrality of the business park.

We live, he demonstrates, amid the leftovers of repurposed city spaces that have had to accommodate this ideological about-turn.

Wetherell charts the history not to revive it but to be rid of it. In conclusion, he appeals for a new kind of thinking about city space that is owned “neither by distant capital not conservative state technocrats... spaces that are democratic and open to all ways that can begin to redress the inequalities produced by empire, capital and patriarchy.”

In its trenchant examination and rejection of both past and present, this book sets down new foundations. It holds fast to the ambition of not repeating mistakes and of building a better future.

Essential reading.