Drone’s-eye-view rationality and the demolition of inner city housing estates

A case study of the Holland Estate and why top down approaches to urban planning can only ever offer partial, skewed and arguably irrational solutions to London’s housing crisis.

By Dr Alex Rhys-Taylor

For the past two years the residents of the Holland Estate in Spitalfields, East London have been fighting a campaign to save their estate from demolition. While the residents have had a degree of success (resulting the lifting of a demolition order hanging over their homes being lifted) the residents still face ongoing challenges.

“‘rationally’ speaking, it is those with the financial and cultural capital to buy the right education and right jobs that are granted keys to homes and jobs around The City”

One of the most difficult tasks for residents has been challenging the so-called “rationality” according to which those looking in from the outside saw, and still see, the demolition of the estate as viable. To give an example, on 9th February Paul Wellman wrote an article for the Estates Gazette in which he invoked “rationality” as the driving force behind his call for the demolition of inner city housing estates and the displacement and break up of their communities. Wellman in fact singled out the Holland Estate – a community of around 600 Londoners – as his example. Wellman is not alone in his thinking, but as much as the Holland Estate served his rhetorical purposes, his article is exemplary of the type of thinking that currently threatens a number of healthy communities. Importantly, the vision of London argued for by Wellman is one in which, “rationally” speaking, it is those with the financial and cultural capital to buy the right education and right jobs that are granted keys to homes and jobs around The City.

Opening with a drone’s-eye-view of the Brune, Bernard and Carter Houses of the Holland Estate, the Estates’ Gazette header ran: “To increase density these are the sites that need redeveloping.” Invoking a Benthamite utilitarianism, the article argued that replacing these 90 year-old four and five storey red-brick tenements would be of “benefit” – presumably to the “greater good” – although Wellman’s generic argument does not specify who would really benefit.

Remarking on the campaign that the estate’s residents had put up against the proposed demolition, Wellman opined “[a]lthough having empathy for those who live on the estate it does seem like a waste in my opinion to have so much land given over to cars to sit idly.” Throughout the article – and, indeed, in our discussion with planners and developers – the consistent “rationale” for knocking down the estate is its relative low density. There is, incidentally, no mention of the 600 or so individuals (many of which are families) living there. Backed up with crude metric of the size of the estate and its buildings, and a rough count of the cars in the estate’s car park, the article concurs with Lord Adonis, Zak Goldsmith, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, that knocking down estates such as this, and replacing them with higher density developments, is for the “greater good”.

You can’t really blame Wellman for his conclusion when the “rationality” he has been inculcated with is so clearly at fault. In this “rationality”, the only metrics with which to measure the value of a housing estate are the number of bodies per square foot, the number of cars parked in its car park, transport hubs nearby and the number of people working nearby. It is not unlike the type of thinking that the urban planning computer game “Sim City” engenders. It is also the type of “top-down” “urban thinking” that is increasingly accepted as “common sense” among urban professionals.

Urban density is, of course, not an inherently bad thing. Not least, density enables services to be delivered in more ecologically and economically efficient ways. This was, in part, the “rationale” behind the rush towards brutalist density in the mid twentieth century. We should also remember, however, that as recently as the late 80s, high density urban estates across Britain were being pulled down and replaced with far lower densities. Such demolitions were “rationalised” as part of a backlash against the anomie that vertical living had seemingly precipitated.

The Holland Estate is in fact medium density, not unlike the new build five storey Telford Homes blocks that have been built nearby. Admittedly, the estate’s car park could be put to better use. Apart from once a week when it acts as an al-fresco mosque for hundreds of locals and City workers, and evenings when young men congregate to shoot the breeze, it is a pretty inhospitable patch of concrete. It used to be a large play area for children, an area that shrank year on year until recently, when the last swing was torn down. Perhaps this rare open space in the dense bristles of the city ought to be returned to some more permanent civic function. It certainly ought not to be thought solely as an opportunity for profiteering developers.

“On an estate like the Holland Estate, social capital means that grandparents, parents and children can live within footsteps of each other and take care of each other, from cradle to grave, in ways that state services might otherwise have to”

Importantly, like Cameron, Goldsmith, Adonis and their ilk, Wellman’s rationality is grounded in a very specific and dangerously narrow idea of how to measure an inner-city housing estate’s worth. Even if you accept that decisions about the estate ought to be made according to utilitarian commitment to “the greater good”, there are a whole range of other factors concerning inner city estates that, “rationally” speaking, ought to come into the equation. This is not the space to detail all of them, but as a sociologist, I would suggest that the first of the more significant factors to be considered is the amount of “social capital” that has coalesced on inner-city estates over last few decades.

Social capital is a measure used by sociologists, community workers and, sometimes, local governments to quantify the number of connections between any given group of people and the resources that those connections afford them. Less immediately quantifiable than the density metrics of Wellman’s Google Urbanism, social capital is not unquantifiable as such. Carefully measured, social capital is a quantifiable measure of community. And social capital, like community, has real “benefits” (to borrow the utilitarian language).

PHOTO: Jarrod Sanderson

I don’t have any hard data on the actual degree of social capital on the estate, but I would argue that – anecdotally, having lived on the estate for 13 years (longer than Wellmans cursory Google-glance) – social capital abounds. On an estate like the Holland Estate, social capital means that you have somebody to look after your home for you when you go away on holiday. It means that grandparents, parents and children can live within footsteps of each other and take care of each other, from cradle to grave, in ways that state services might otherwise have to.

Social capital also translates into security. People on the Holland Estate know who lives on the estate. They can spot an interloper, or an Air BnB customer, at 500 yards. Consider for instance, the fact that the burglary rates in the streets around the Holland Estate all flash up with red spots. On the estate, however, no burglaries have been recorded for years. People genuinely still leave their front doors open.

One of the key exponents of measuring social capital, a sociologist called Robert Putnam (with whom I don’t always agree), also notes the importance of what he calls “bridging capital”: the opportunity and ability to meet people across difference. More common to neighbourhoods of high demographic churn, bridging capital – that is, connections across cultural and socio-economic difference – also abound on the estate.

It is also worth noting that, combined, social capital and bridging capital could be taken as a proxy for “community cohesion”, an enduring concern for governments increasingly paranoid of the terrors that, they fear, lurk within inner-city estates. Importantly, although they are less tangible than hard cash, both “bridging” and “social” capital are, nonetheless, integral to the smooth functioning of a diverse global city and a thriving economy. And they inevitably save the state considerable money. It is entirely rational to protect and invest in such invaluable forms of association.

“the Holland Estate houses precisely the thriving, healthy, multicultural, and to a large extent self policing, community that, in any age other than our current flash of insanity, a government would be proud of”

Significantly, on the Holland Estate the design of the medium-density buildings, all of which face into the aforementioned car park and have open walkways leading to each flat, bring residents into regular contact with each other as part of their everyday lives. Coupled with a low demographic churn (great location, nice neighbours) these features combine to strengthen the social ties on the estate. It is one of the reasons that the campaign against East End Home’s proposed demolition was, to Wellman’s chagrin, so strong. In short, the Holland Estate houses precisely the thriving, healthy, multicultural and, to a large extent, self policing community that, in any age other than our current flash of insanity, a government would be proud of.

The “rationales” I offer, of course, are very sociological rationales – but I am a sociologist. Even without recourse to these concepts, Wellman could have stuck to his terrain and considered the quality of the current building stock and the relative costs of replacing it. Recent evidence suggests that replacing this type of stock is far less cost efficient, and ecologically sound, than maintaining it.

Wellman could also have considered taking a closer look at the remarkable economic mobility of those living on the estate. Anecdotally at least, it seems that number of people from the estate, while being from meagre backgrounds, now work in The City or other prestigious institutions, partly by virtue of the estate’s location. Is it not “for the greater good” that, until recently at least, there have been literal pathways for young people in East London’s “council housing” to get these jobs? Wellman does not think so, not least because the rationality he deploys is so short sighted.

A slightly different type of “rationale” for keeping the estate, neatly sidestepped by Wellman, is the argument put forward most consistently in the residents’ campaign to save the estate from demolition: a simple argument for democracy. Following the New Labour handover of council housing to Housing associations, the Holland Estate has been ostensibly managed by board of residents. The board voted unanimously against the proposed demolition of their homes on several occasions. During the bungled “consultation processes” delivered by the housing association, the residents also spoke consistently of their opposition to demolition and demand for much needed refurbishment. Rationally speaking, if we want the publics to have trust in the planning process and consultation exercises, if we want democratic processes of local government, and government in general, to be taken seriously, then the will of the estate’s residents should be taken seriously.

Whichever of these measures of the estate’s value it is that we chose to focus on (and this is far from an exhaustive list), the point is that “rationally speaking” keeping the estate was, and is, the rational thing to do. It is for this reason that we are so glad that Tower Hamlets Council and East End Homes saw the “light of reason”.

•Dr Alex Rhys-Taylor is a sociologist with a specialism in urban studies, and also a resident of the Holland Estate

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