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Colin Ward an Anarcnist Approach

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Colin Ward an Anarcnist Approach COLTN W££3 is well-known as an authority on housing and as an anarchist propagandist. Ho w do these two themes combine? Thi s book brings together articles and addresses covering thirty years of advocacy >± an anarchist approach to housing. DIRECT ACTION, the first section, includes his nu*s Colin Ward classic account of the post-war squatters' movement and relates it to the current signii^cance of t'a squatters in Britair an d elsewhere. HUMAN NEEDS identifies the missing component in public housing policies: dweller involvement; and anticipate today*; anxietie s about the sqciai effects of imposing official policies on people ipho^e own percep+ ? nn of cheir housing nee'i s has been, systematical:!y ignored. SELF HELP includes accounts of do-it-yourse]f hous ng in Britain and abroad, the remarkable achievements of the s i uatter settlements in the 'cities the poor build' in the Third World. - ., sketches the outlines f n anarcnxst approach fro C..R city. BH PROFESSIONALS OR PEOPLE? is the question raised in the fourth sec+ion of this book. Wha t went wro.g -# • with architecture and planning? Ca n we transfo"™ them from bein? th© concern of a bureaucratic an anarcnist elite into a populist and popular activity? DWELLER CONTROL argues that the only future foj public housing, whether in our decaying cities OT approach on new estates,, is the tenaiat take-over.* jjrMffiP ftt; FREEDOM PRESS ISISN 0<)003J'l 1 / __A. u. by the same author TENANTS TAKE OVER Housing: London: Architectural Press ANARCHY IN ACTION an anarchis t London: Allen & Unwin New York: Harper & Row (with Anthony Fyson) approach STREETWORK: THE EXPLODING SCHOOL London: Routledge & Kegan Paul COLIN WAR D (edited) VANDALISM London: Architectural Press New York: Van Nostrand KROPOTKIN'S FIELDS FACTORIES & WORKSHOPS London: Allen & Unwin New York: Harper & Row (for children) VIOLENCE WORK UTOPIA Penguin Books Freedom M*resss London 1996 I Contents First published Itilnhluction 7 1976 by FREEDOM PRESS 1, DIRECT ACTION 84B Whitechapel High St. Direct Action for Houses 13 London E.l. l In- People Act: the Post-War Squatters' Movement 19 What Have the Squatters Achieved? 28 @ Colin Ward & Freedom Press 1976 2, HUMAN NEEDS Homing and Human Needs 35 Italhnul Green: a Museum of Housing 45 Human Aspects of High Densities 49 lliph Lire 56 Awkward Questions in Spitalfields 59 » SUM' HELP llriar Patch and Bureaucracy 65 Sell Help Housing in Latin America 72 I oNNon.s from Shanty-Town 80 Anarchist Cities 87 l>rui Mr. Crosland ... 93 I I'lK il 1 SSIONALS OR PEOPLE? Pluming and Designing Things We Can Live With 99 \i< ihe Architects to Blame? 10 3 Hi' Spectre of Planning Education 114 • in. .ilion for Participation 119 rimming and Human Needs 129 Printed at Moving On 138 EXPRESS PRINTERS | DWBLLBR CONTROL London E.l. (••.•in 11v and Power in the Urban Jungle 142 PRINTED IN GT. BRITAIN I'lirlli'lpnlion or Control? 147 II WOn'l Work Without Dweller Control 158 tin • I'rwmls lake Over 168 INTRODUCTION Thin little book is a collection of articles and lectures of mine over a period of thirty years which attempts to present an anarchist • i'i"""li to housing. The criticism is often made of anarchist i>f>l>iiftundists that they are solely concerned with a blanket litii in of existing society, and with postulating a future "free widely", and consequently have nothing sensible or constructive to .sity about alternative solutions to contemporary problems. Wlion F attempted to refute this view in my book Anarchy in Icthn, consciously trying to show that anarchism has something • in I mid useful to offer to people looking for interim solutions (which nrc the only kind of solutions we are likely to see) to !'• problems of today, one reviewer dismissed it as "trendy WHNIH" to which I can only reply that I yearn for the day when iho left catches up with the anarchists. Anarchism (the origin of the word is the Greek phrase meaning Miliary to authority) seeks a self-organising society: a network of autonomous free associations for the satisfaction of human M ••! inevitably this makes anarchists advocates of social revol- n. for the means of satisfying these needs are in the hands •I i ipitalists, bureaucratic, private or governmental monopolies. 111' ii' [( no doubt that Engels was right in seeing the housing pnbltm as a permanent aspect of capitalist society. But it is nlm> a permanent aspect of those societies where the governmental »y*lrm and the production system are alleged to be socialist, • ml NIIICO people have to be housed, whether they live in a ipiviilntor's jungle, a people's democracy, a fascist dictatorship [7] , or an anarchist paradise, there must be some underlying principle Hi that capitalism was not building, and was not going to for an approach to this universal human need. There is, and it is imilil. houses for the underprivileged classes, because that sort an anarchist principle, that of dweller control, enunciated by my • i Investment had simply ceased to be profitable, and then he friend John Turner thus: iin no! to the role of the state: "When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make "The state is the principle of authority—an abstraction masquer- their own contribution to the design, construction or management "iiiig us something real, and can have no real contact with the of their housing, both the process and the environment produced concrete reality—man himself—whom it treats and manipulates stimulate individual and social well-being. When people have no HH though he were just an abstraction. The home is an organism control over, nor responsibility for key decisions in the housing in direct relationship to man. It is his external environment, his process, on the other hand, dwelling environments may instead /tflli million in space. Thus the home cannot have any relationship to become a barrier to personal fulfilment and a burden on the Hi. •.into, which recognises man not as individual but as a number, economy." i 11.n lion of some greater number. Every time that the state has It is the same principle of autonomy and responsibility that i 11 en upon itself these relationships, the results have been disastrous. anarchists apply to industry, education, social welfare and every Wi' could look back into history in order to demonstrate the other sphere of human activity. The anarchist position is at a truth of this, we could describe the city under the ferocious tangent to the normal political continuum. As Turner says, "The UltOCratic states of ancient Egypt, of Imperial Rome, of the common debate is between the conventional left which condemns I i ... i, monarchy, but it suffices to think of any Italian town capitalism and the conventional right which condemns personal today. ." dependency upon state institutions. I agree with both, so nobody In looking for alternative approaches, he examined building committed to either side can agree with me." What the anarchist ((^operatives, tenants' co-operatives, housing strikes (i.e., rent has to attempt is to change the terms of the debate, to change xli Ikes), and the illegal occupation of empty houses, and finally the way in which people perceive the issue, to suggest a different wont on to consider an anarchist attitude to town planning: and libertarian way of stating the problem. The assumption in "It is possible to adopt a hostile attitude: "The plan must necess- the kind of welfare capitalist society we live in, is that the magic nilv i niiinate from authority, therefore it can only be detrimental, of the market will satisfy most ordinary human needs, and that i he • hanges in social life cannot follow the plan—the plan will be govemment^administered welfare bureaucracies will meet the rest. i . on i-(|ucnce of a new way of life.' Or an attitude of participation The ideology of the passive consumer is assumed in both sectors. • mild l>c adopted: 'The plan is the opportunity of liquidating our But the system is collapsing, and people are just beginning to take prONent social order by changing its direction, and this changed heed of the alternative solutions which anarchism offers. is the necessary preliminary for a revolutionary social In 1948 a young anarchist architect, Giancarlo de Carlo, wrote inn lure.' The first attitude is based on two main arguments. an article for the Italian anarchist monthly Volonta, which I i Iritly, that authority cannot be a liberating agent—perfectly true; translated for Freedom (12 and 26 June, 1948), in which after MVUIHIIV, that man can do nothing until he is free—a mistaken view. describing the housing situation in Italy, he remarked that "The Mini cannot be liberated, he must liberate himself, and any progress situation today is no new phenomenon, but it is worse than irds Hint liberation can only be the conscious expression of his ever before, because its effects are more extensive, more dreadful, n will. The investigation of the full extent of the problems of and, in view of the advances in technique which could be iHMo• i . itv and home, is such an activity. To find out the nature of available for us, more absurd. Yet the social organs of today, thl problems and to prepare their solution is a concrete example capitalism and the state, are able to do nothing to resolve i direct action, taking away the powers of authority and giving this desperate crisis. New materials, new constructional processes them back to men. The attitude of hostility that really means are of no avail as long as the principles of privilege and authority 'wnlllng for the revolution to do it', does not take into account prevail." Well, nothing in the experience of his country, or ours, thl fin I thai the social revolution will be accomplished by clear has since invalidated his conclusions.
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