Make public: performing public housing in Ernő Goldfinger's Balfron Tower

Roberts, David

doi:10.1080/13602365.2016.1276096

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Our work adds to a small number of studies which have turned to explore residents’ experiences of modernist or high-rise buildings and estates (Baxter, 2017; Glendinning, 2008; Jacobs et al, 2008; Roberts, 2017; Thoburn, 2018). In dominant media accounts, such post-war housing has been labelled a ‘failure’ and associated with fragmented communities, antisocial behaviour and urban decline.…”

Section: The Background To This Article: the Project Methods And Appmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A growing body of work within the social sciences draws attention to processes by which those who live in social housing are subject to stigmatisation (Baxter, 2017; Palmer et al, 2004; Roberts, 2017; Thoburn, 2018). These studies highlight the destructive effects of practices which denigrate estates and their residents and reveal how, within neoliberal policies of ‘austerity’, disinvestment in the welfare state has been obscured by moralising discourses about poorer people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Hicks

Lewis

2020

The Sociological Review

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This article examines how residents experience and account for stigma at Claremont Court, a modernist social housing scheme built in Edinburgh in the early 1960s. Although listed as having special architectural interest, the building has been subject to disinvestment and has a mix of residents, including council and private renters as well as owner-occupiers. This article explores micro-distinctions between residents, showing how the categories ‘stigmatiser’ and ‘stigmatised’ are not as rigid as we might expect. It then considers stigma associated not with residents but, rather, the building itself, and argues that closer attention to the relationship between the material and social is required in order to understand residents’ complex articulations of belonging. Finally, residents’ views on dirt and rubbish are explored, showing how they use these signifiers of stigma to reveal concerns about shame and respectability. Responding to the call from this journal for more sociological understandings of stigma, this article argues that interactionist approaches offer an important alternative, one that highlights how stigma is negotiated, resisted and apportioned in everyday life. This perspective reveals residents’ practices in interaction with the material environment, as well as the ways in which stigmatisation processes work simultaneously in upward and downward directions, rather than in a unidirectional way.

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Section: The Background To This Article: the Project Methods And Appmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Hicks

Lewis

2020

The Sociological Review

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“…This approach is also found in the work of artist-architect David Roberts, who from 2013 to 2014 hosted a number of participatory workshops at Balfron Tower in East London as part of a wider research project on the proposed 'regeneration' of this brutalist icon (Roberts 2017). These workshops included performative encounters in a two bed flat with actors playing Ernö and Ursula Goldfinger -the architect of Balfron Tower and his wife -who famously lived in the building shortly after it was opened in 1968.…”

Section: Critical Heritage Experiencesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…How might critical, ' agonistic' (Deufel 2017) dialogue emerge in response to less spectacular sites? A brutalist tower block, for example (Roberts 2017), or a field in South Yorkshire (Deller 2002)? As I explore below, such settings are just as open to the 'higherorder' interpretive coding Perry describes (2019: 361), even if their ' enchantment' is less immediately apparent.…”

Section: Enchantment and Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing ‘Critical’ Heritage Experiences: Immersion, Enchantment and Autonomy

Sterling

2020

Archaeology International

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This article investigates the critical potential of newly emerging approaches to heritage experience design. Moving away from a familiar critique of heritage experiences as inauthentic or overly commercial, I consider three aspects of the experiential that might (re)shape critical engagements with the past in the present. Building on the work of Kidd ( 2018 ), the first engages with the growing trend for ‘immersive’ experiences in museums and heritage sites. The second draws on Perry’s notion of archaeological ‘enchantment’ (2019) as a new ‘moral model’ for the field. The third applies Bishop’s ( 2012 ) reading of artistic ‘autonomy’ to specially designed heritage experiences. These concepts are then explored in relation to Critical Heritage Studies and tested against four micro case studies that engage in different ways with the experience of heritage. The theorisation put forward here serves as a point of departure for the two-year research project New Trajectories in Curatorial Experience Design (Feb 19–Jan 21), which aims to document and analyse emerging trends in experiential design within the heritage sector. In particular, this position paper highlights specific points of intervention where new forms of critical-creative practice might open up heritage interpretation to alternative experiential strategies and outcomes.

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“…Indeed, as Edensor (2017) has noted in his study of lighting practices, modernist architectural styles drew upon "possibilities for deploying daylight, which was subsequently reconceptualised as an integral building material" (44). Claremont Court's horizontal windows (visible in Figure 1) were a feature of many examples of modernist estates, and the increased light was something frequently commented upon by residents (Roberts, 2017). Alastair's account, for example, recognises both the beneficial aspects of light -the "consolation in daylight" (Hauge, 2015: 79) -as well as its role in the production of atmosphere, something that changes across a single day.…”

Section: The Feel Of the Placementioning

confidence: 99%

“The feel of the place”: Investigating atmosphere with the residents of a modernist housing estate

Hicks

2020

Qualitative Social Work

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Atmosphere is a neglected topic in social work, and so this article considers the production of atmospheres amongst the residents of an extant 1960s housing scheme in Edinburgh (UK). This is in order to address not only the complexity of feelings about living on such an estate but also to consider what consequences the paying of attention to atmosphere’s production and effects might have for a social work concern with welfare and wellbeing. The article is based upon semi-structured and walking interviews with 17 residents – council or private renters and home-owners – of Claremont Court, a mixed, low-rise estate and analyses their description and crafting of atmosphere as a way to understand questions of belonging, welfare and community in situ. After reviewing some existing research on atmosphere and outlining methodological issues relating to the Claremont Court project, the article goes on to consider how residents described their feelings about or sense of the estate and its design before discussing the emergence of contradictory narratives about home. The production of narratives about those needing welfare support is particularly pertinent to atmospheric accounts of the housing scheme, and so the article addresses this before finally making an argument for the relevance of immersive and emplaced accounts of space and place for both social work practice and research.

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Make public: performing public housing in Ernő Goldfinger's Balfron Tower

Cited by 15 publications

References 5 publications

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Nobody becomes stigmatised ‘all at once’: An interactionist account of stigma on a modernist council estate

Designing ‘Critical’ Heritage Experiences: Immersion, Enchantment and Autonomy

“The feel of the place”: Investigating atmosphere with the residents of a modernist housing estate

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