The advent of state-sponsored mass high-rise housing in post-war Britain brought into view a range of issues about the role of technology in everyday life. This paper draws on approaches in the study of science and technology in order to deepen our understanding of the socio-technical aspects of such high-rise housing, past and present. This thinking is elaborated empirically by examining a 1960s high-rise development, Red Road, Glasgow. The paper examines the inaugural phase of development and the most recent phase of 'redevelopment', the first stage of which is demolition. The paper extends existing accounts of residential high-rises generally and Red Road specifically, as well as elaborating an alternate analytical framework for understanding high-rise and supertall dwellings.
This paper summarises the methodological approach taken in an interdisciplinary project involving geographers and architects. The project charted the diverse afterlives of the modernist‐inspired, state‐sponsored, residential high‐rise, and did so drawing on two cases: Red Road Estate in Glasgow and Bukit Ho Swee Estate in Singapore. In offering a specific account of, and reflection upon, the methodologies used in the High‐rise Project, we hope to advance the methodological repertoire of human geography generally and contribute further to the new wave of scholarship on geography and architecture.
This article adds historical and geographical specificity to the link between city building and laboratorization processes. It does so by way of the example of housing in mid‐twentieth‐century Britain. Housing provision at this time saw an intensification of the relationship between architectural design and science by way of the emergent field of building science as well as new social‐science studies of householder satisfaction. The article focuses on two examples of these housing sciences, tracing their role in the production of British modern housing. The first example focuses on a set of experiments conducted on ventilation and heating at Britain's Building Research Station. The second example examines the social science of a post‐occupancy study of multi‐storey flats in Glasgow. The article argues that mid‐twentieth‐century housing construction and provision was structured in and through a laboratory logic that had a complex geography and temporality. In the sciences of housing conducted during this period there is a conflation and hybridization of the space of the laboratory, the site of the house and the action of the experiment.
This paper deals with quantitative geography, adopting the perspective of ethnomethodology. Rather than deliver another definition or critique of quantitative geography, it examines activities through which quantification is locally produced and accomplished as phenomena that can be accounted for as a form of scientific and geographical order. It begins by discussing how geography has examined quantification as a problem of how data move between the field of investigation and a so‐called centre of calculation, thereby overlooking the many practices that contribute to its epistemic configuration. To empirically document instances of quantification as a locally organised accomplishment, it then turns to video‐recorded street interviews that were carried out in the course of a European research project on the sense of well‐being felt by users of urban open spaces. Analysis of interview conduct reveals that the adequacy and relevancy of the questionnaire is not given per se, but is produced in the encounter between the interviewer and the passer‐by respondent.
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