The View From the Train (8 page)

The
old space
looks poor, even when it isn't. Much of it is poor, but when it isn't, the dilapidation is still striking.
Old space
appears to be difficult to maintain. A lot of the shops don't look as if they're doing very well. The cybercafé didn't last very long. The public institutions, if they are lucky, manage to maintain their buildings. The public lavatories are in a terrible state, though they are very photogenic. In the street, there is a fair amount of outdoor
drinking, and according to the police who attend burglaries, there is a lot of heroin about. A lot of houses have burglar alarms. Some have cable television or internet access.

At the moment, the residential property market is busy. There are always a lot of builders working, but most of them don't have the skills, the materials or the time to be particularly conscientious about anything beyond short-term performance. The conservationist is, as always, frustrated, and if anyone is responsible for the surfaces of
old space
, it is these builders and their clients.

In
old space
, apart from the smaller branches of banks and supermarket chains, the activities of large corporations are not very visible. A local estate agent, for example, is likely to be a major bank, building society or insurance company in disguise. Dilapidated houses are bought with mortgages from building societies, banks and other large corporations. A lot of small shops are franchises. The utility companies' installations are mostly underground, or in anonymous boxes which one tends not to notice. TV aerials and satellite dishes quickly blend with the domestic scene.

The dilapidation of
old space
seems to have increased, in an Orwellian way, with the centralisation of media and political power – by the disempowerment of local government, for instance. At the same time, experience of dilapidation is tempered by the promise of immediate virtual or imminent actual presence elsewhere, through telecommunications and cheap travel. As I stand at the bus stop with my carrier bags in the rain, I can window shop cheap tickets to Bali, or contemplate Hong Kong, Antarctica or Santa Cruz as webcam images on my Nokia; or I could if I had one – the virtual elsewhere seems, if anything, most effective as mere possibility, as a frisson.

New space
is mostly work space. An increasing proportion of ‘economically active' people work in
new space
. Most of those who are not ‘economically active' visit it fairly frequently, at least for the weekly shop, but they do not spend much time there. A very large number of people are not ‘economically
active' – they are physically or mentally ill, children, non-working parents, ‘voluntary' carers, the unemployed, pop stars in waiting, unpublished novelists, the early or otherwise retired, and other non-employed people. For these people, everyday surroundings are
old space
, and
old space
is mostly residential space – houses and flats. Residential space has a visiting workforce: the window cleaner, the decorator, the meter reader, the washing-machine engineer, the plumber, the small builder; and on-site earners – slaving away at Christmas crackers, clothes, poetry or television research. Despite the talk about corporate home-working and the long-expected ‘death of the office', most of the above are likely to be self-employed, and very few of them at all well paid. The real economic activity of residential space – housework, most of it involved with child-rearing – is not paid at all. It was recently estimated that the real value of housework in the UK is £739 billion, 22 per cent more than the current value of the UK's GDP.
¹
On average, people in the UK spend only 12 per cent of their total time in paid work.
²
Although unpaid, child-rearing is presumably the most significant of all economic activities in that it shapes – though not always directly – the values and attitudes of the next generation of wealth-creators.
New space
, on the other hand, is mostly corporate, company-car territory. There are plenty of women working in
new space
, often in senior roles, but the structures and work patterns in these places do not easily accommodate active parenthood. Most flexible part-time work suited to the child-rearer pays under £4 an hour.

In the UK, housing takes up around 70 per cent of urban land.
³
Its housing stock is the oldest in Europe, with an average age estimated at about sixty years. A quarter of the stock was built before the end of the First World War.
⁴
There are about 24 million dwellings in all,
⁵
but in the last twenty years the rate of new house-building has fallen to only 150,000 per year, largely because of the elimination of public-sector house-building.
⁶
In the UK, most new housing is built by developers for sale on completion, and is widely criticised as unsophisticated and overpriced.
⁷
In other
developed economies, house production occurs in different ways, but if the UK is taken as the extreme example of a laissez-faire system operating in a built-up landscape with a restricted land supply, one can perhaps discern a general tendency, in that under advanced capitalism it is increasingly difficult to produce and maintain the dwelling. This is especially odd given that dwellings constitute the greater part of the built environment, that they are the spaces where most people spend most of their time, and where what is arguably the real ‘work' of society is done. Modernity, it seems, is exemplified not so much by the business park or the airport, but by the dilapidated dwelling.

During the last twenty years or so, domestic life has been transformed in many more or less electronic ways: supermarket distribution, increased unemployment and early retirement, programmable gas heating, computerised banking, new TV, video, audio, telecommunications, the personal computer and the internet. Most of these things make it easier to stay at home, and many of them make it more difficult to go out, but the house itself has changed very little. The supermarkets, with computerised distribution and warehousing, and big trucks on modern roads, have transformed the UK's food market and shopping habits, creating a mass market in cosmopolitan food and drink that was previously only available in a few parts of London. In the same period, house production has merely declined, though supermarkets now offer mortgages. For the corporate economy, the house seems to exist only as a given, a destination for sales of consumable materials and services.

There are many reasons why this might be the case. Firstly, houses last a long time. House-building is also by its nature a very local undertaking, even for the largest producers. Wimpey, which claims to be the largest house-builder in the world, only seems to advertise its developments locally. The tendencies in production that have brought Ford to the Mondeo – the world car – have never been widely applied to house production. Despite the best efforts of several generations of architects, houses are still not manufactured off-site, and are not generally susceptible to
distribution
. When
they are available in this way, the purchaser is faced with the problem of finding a site on which to erect a single house, which in the UK is very difficult. IKEA have started to produce prefabricated dwellings, but so far for assembly by the company itself only on its own development sites. There have been many impressive examples of factory-produced houses since the eighteenth century, but never in very large numbers.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, less than 1 per cent of the UK's national income was spent on house-building.
⁸
Since before the time of Engels, industrial capitalism has been more typically accompanied by the production of large but insufficient numbers of poor-quality houses, palatial workplaces, and a small number of millionaires' mansions: the Rothschilds' houses of Mentmore and Waddesdon, for example, or Bill Gates's $50 million house on the shores of Lake Washington, near Seattle. It seems that, for capitalism, houses are a means of centralising wealth, rather than products to be distributed. In the last hundred years, relative to earnings, food and most manufactured goods have become much cheaper, but houses have become more expensive both to build and to buy. Industrial production has not been very successful at producing houses for the people who are otherwise its consumers: most of the best housing developments of the last century or so seem to have been undertaken outside the market, by philanthropic employers, civic bodies or committed individuals and groups.

Since the late 1970s, ‘housing' has been an unfashionable subject for architects and theorists. With a few notable exceptions – the architecture of Walter Segal, for instance – there has been very little house-building of any architectural interest in the UK beyond a few one-off houses, these often for architects themselves. Among theorists and other writers, the very idea of
dwelling
has been recognised as problematic. For example:

On the other hand:

In a culture in which so much of the space of work and transit is new, modern and professionally produced, but so much home space is old, amateurish and artlessly hand-made, one tends to forget that, like the industrial landscapes that inspired the modernist avant-gardes, the corporate economy only exists because it has been able to develop global markets in the necessities and longings of domestic life.

The dominant narratives of modernity – as mobility and instant communication – appear to be about
work
and
travel
, not
home
. They are constructions of a work-oriented academic élite about a work-oriented business élite. However, as Saskia Sassen points out, ‘a large share of the jobs involved in finance are lowly paid clerical and manual jobs, many held by women and immigrants':

Dwellings are rarely corporate space (see Billy Wilder's
The Apartment
). Are dwellings ‘other'? The ‘other' space in the city centres, where corporate power is concentrated, is usually the dwelling space of ‘other' cultures and identities. The dwellings of corporate insiders are usually located at a distance, but even they live in homes that represent a level of investment per square metre that is only a fraction of that made in their workplaces. At the same time, domesticity is characterised by intimacy, the ‘nearness' that Kenneth Frampton noted as increasingly absent from architecture,
¹²
presumably most of all from corporate architecture. Perhaps these qualities of domesticity are ‘other' to the corporate economy, even in the homes of corporate insiders? Perhaps we are all ‘others' when we are at home?

Heidegger's formulation of
dwelling
certainly sounds unfashionable: