The balance wheel turns: Colin Ward, and the ‘everyday anarchism’ of decentralised systems
How Colin Ward’s ideas are more relevant than ever, with implications for architecture, technology, places and politics—plus some words on ‘Unrueh’ (2022) directed by Cyril Schäublin
Over the last decade or so, the ideas of the British writer and thinker Colin Ward had become a key influence on my work, and so it was a great pleasure when, in 2022, Andrew Kelly kindly asked me, and many others, to contribute short reflections on Ward’s work as part of a book to mark the centenary of Ward’s birth.
Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy: Essays on Colin Ward (Five Leaves Publishing) was published in late 2024, and features my essay alongside others from the likes of Catherine Burke, Gillian Darley, Paul Dobraszczyk, David Knight, Roman Krznaric, Sheila Rowbotham, Sophie Scott-Brown, Ken Worpole, and many more. The book unfolds numerous different angles on Ward’s life and work, and also anarchism itself, that most deliberately misconstrued of ideas.
As usual, I wrote a longer piece to figure out what I thought in the first place. I’m sharing that Extended Mix below. It folds in reflections on the 2022 Swiss film ‘Unrueh’ (which translates as ‘Unrest’), directed by Cyril Schäublin. The film was deservedly winning awards at festivals at the time of writing, but the primary reasons for its inclusion here will become clear. (I also mentioned Unrueh in a more recent piece on a Japanese ‘slowdown’). The shorter published version of this essay forms a chapter in Kelly’s book entitled ‘Reworking ‘the relations between people and their environment’: Colin Ward’s quietly radical urbanism’. The inclusion of Unrueh shifts this original draft on its axis, hence the different title.
Those interested in Ward might want to click through to all of his works linked in the text below — they are all worth reading. You could also read Ken Worpole’s obituary for Ward, from 2010 alongside the philosopher Roman Krznaric’s, or pair the introduction to plotlands at the indispensable Spatial Agency database with Shumi Bose’s lovely reflection on Ward’s The Child in the City for RIBA Journal. You might also read both partners of DK-CM about Ward: Christina Monteiro’s article for Architect’s Journal or David Knight’s 2016 speech for the Architecture Foundation. Or indeed Sophie Scott-Brown’s recent book on Ward. Equally, as Ward had been education officer for the Town & Country Planning Association throughout the 1970s — and can you imagine a former editor of Anarchy magazine doing that role today? — a special issue of Town & Country Planning (#207, August 2024) was dedicated to his work, and this article by the TCPA’s Charlotte Llewelyn links through to a few examples of Ward’s People & Ideas column, from 1971 to 1985. And, of course, pick up Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy: Essays on Colin Ward.
Like many others in that 1970s-1980s stretch, Ward’s ideas have become more pertinent recently. His ‘everyday anarchism’ could, in the end, simply mean forms of self-organisation, of commons-based ownership, of local freedom made social, cooperative, deliberative and engaged. True participation, at least as per Sherry Arnstein’s canonical 1969 diagram, must imply this form of organisation, ownership and politics. The question is how far it can run. Ward could even find a role for the state (see the note on Switzerland below)— just for the things it makes sense to organise at that scale, and this insight became the organising principle for my place layers thinking.
Contemporary approaches to technologies, from hi-tech to Lo-TEK, could support many of the participative, distributed, decentralised and diverse, super-local networked possibilities he repeatedly explored, whether systems of energy, mobility, housing, craft, agriculture, learning or other shared infrastructures. A few years ago, I called some of the more digitally-enabled patterns Non-Grid, eliding off-grid with Non-Plan, and we can find forms of them everywhere from Seattle to Shanghai. Ward would’ve found a more approachable, more everyday descriptor, whilst ensuring that social justice would suffuse the sensibility for individual empowerment, and that a quiet, quotidian dignity would repel the worst tendencies of California Ideology Big Tech.
For there’s a particularly British sensibility in Ward’s work, in seeing the mundane — vegetable allotments and adventure playgrounds, bicycles and house-boats, sheds and friendly societies — as genuinely meaningful practices of resistance, a kind of collective tinkering towards equitable and empowered futures. There was also a distinctly un-British clear-eyed revolutionary spirit at work.
The seeds of all of this can be found in Ward’s writing of some decades previous. He sensed the coming neoliberal agenda emerging towards the end of the 1970s, fearing how that might land on the all-too-fallow ground of the Britain’s relative conservatism, and then witnessed the havoc unleashed through the 1980s and beyond. This early warning system of his would imbue his ideas and activities with an increasing relevance over time. Unlike most, though, he was also able to play these arguments out within the infrastructures of everyday life, dignifying ideas, people and places in equal measure. His ideas read as if written today. And sadly, given that London has just counted the highest number of rough sleepers since records began, during the hottest year on record, we have an even greater imperative to pursue them today. Yet we now have the tools to realise them too, and so it falls to us to honour Ward’s life and work by doing so. Here’s the essay.
The balance wheel turns: Colin Ward, and the reimagining of everyday anarchism
Our library at Melbourne School of Design, one of the few dedicated architecture and design academic libraries left in Australia, contains several well-thumbed copies of Colin Ward’s books: Freedom to Go: After the Motor Age, Talking Houses, Talking To Architects, Housing: An Anarchist Approach, Sociable Cities, amongst others. The patinas of their shiny library-edition hardback covers, and the margins full of pencil marks, quietly commemorate the thousands of students who must have turned to them to better understand the politics of community organisation, housing, planning and architecture from the mid- to late-20th century.
However, another slew of more recent books sit alongside: Architecture and Anarchism: Building without Authority (2021), Walters Way and Segal Close: The Architect Walter Segal and London’s Self-Build Communities (2017), The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm: Eco-Anarchism, Architecture and Alternative Technology in the 1970s (2014), the 2022 reissue of Matrix’s groundbreaking 1984 book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (2022), Dovey et al’s Atlas of Informal Settlement (2023), Kristin Ross’s ‘Communal Luxury’ (2015), David Graeber’s last works, numerous books on European cooperative housing or digitally-enabled self-build architecture, Casey Mack’s story of Japanese metabolist architecture’s late left turn into cooperativism and self-build, in his excellent Digesting Metabolism (2022) …
This recent array, growing continually, is not due to an Australian curator with a secret affinity for an anarchist thinker and writer from the other side of the world—although I confess to ordering a couple of them for the library—but indicates that the ideas that Colin Ward stood for, both radical and approachable, are not at all stuck in mid-20th century Britain. In fact, they seem more prescient now than ever.
The school in the street
Like many, I would imagine, I first discovered Colin Ward’s work through 1978’s The Child in the City. I drew heavily from it when writing ‘The Dispersed School’ with Catherine Burke, a chapter in Urban Schools: Designing for high-density (2020) edited by the architect Helen Taylor.
I placed Ward’s notion of ‘the city as a resource’ alongside that of little-known Sheffield teacher AHT Glover, who wrote New Teaching for A New Age (1946), a book I love dearly, though you won’t find much about it online (an article on ‘Modern Views in Education’ in Nature from 1946 dedicated a paragraph to the book, concluding that, “This may be one escape from chalk and talk education for which teachers have so long been seeking.”) Glover’s liberated classroom methods later produced the city’s legendary industrial designer David Mellor, creator of much of the UK’s streetscapes through the late twentieth century, alongside many other inspired school children no doubt.
I drew on the wonderful The School That I’d Like series, in which The Observer newspaper asked schoolchildren directly about their ideals for schooling, published by the subversive and sharply intelligent Penguin Education imprint in 1969, for whom Ward would later produce the slim yet extraordinary volume Human Space Utopia in 1974. (And see this earlier note of mine on the radical 1972 Fiat advert reproduced within that book).
I complemented those imperatives to ‘flip the school inside-out into the streets’ with the domestic architecture of Ryue Nishizawa, whose Moriyama House is similarly ‘decentralised’, and I flavoured the whole piece with distributed potential of digital technology for urban systems.
Yet the table for all of that was set by Ward.
Ward’s work tied together participative communities, bottom-up urbanism, self-organised housing and infrastructure, with everyday activities like learning and playing and art and gardening, exemplifying the potential of decentralised cultures of organisation, distributed decision-making, imagining and making together. Ward humbly summarised his rich body of work as “an exploration of the relations between people and their environment”. It is that, but it is also a revelation.
In my draft for the piece on schools, I quoted Ward:
“The city, before the motorcar drove them off the streets, was full of street characters, who provided the young with incidental amusement and instruction.”—Colin Ward, The Child in the City (1978)
This idea of a street as if urban theatre, closer to those glimpsed in Edo-era woodblock prints than the dulled monotonous crawl of the Euston Road, was lodged deep in my mind. Within a couple of years I’d be giving public talks featuring a 1930s Swedish newsreel of similarly vibrant, diverse and playful streets in Stockholm, which starts with unforgettable scenes of children playing in a city centre street as the emergent ‘Big Tech’ of its day, the motorcar, glides ominously by, no more than a metre away. (You can watch the film for yourself, here.)
Those newsreels were filmed two decades before Sweden became the most car-dense country in Europe. That is, two decades before Sweden similarly drove such diversity away from its largest shared public spaces, its streets.
The street is the school
I was using these old films to unlock assumptions about what streets were actually for, and who decides that. Working at the Swedish government’s innovation agency Vinnova, we had initiated a mission to ‘retrofit’ all Swedish streets such that they are healthy, sustainable and full of life. Following Ward, transforming these streets would require participation rather than ‘capital-P Planning’. Although there are deep traditions of participative politics within Sweden, which I drew from as best as I could as invandrare, my own input was heavily informed by Ward’s words and actions. I wondered whether we could reimagine streets as small pools of intimate, engaged, immediate and self-organised urban environments, dubbing them the ‘One Minute City’ in response to Paris’s benevolent and highly effective precedent of the ‘15 Minute City’.
Drawing from the tropes of tactical urbanism, yet working as an unrestricted consortium across all levels of Swedish governance and industry, we envisaged a loose-fit ‘kit of parts’ that could dislodge motor vehicle-dominated spaces, instead offering a platform for biodiverse and socially diverse places, in a way that could slowly spread across the country, led by locals. We called the project Street Moves, and it emerged from loam that included not only Ward’s ideas, but ‘civic tech’ conditions such as interoperability, agile development, open source codebases, as well as adaptive design principles, suggesting broadly ‘hackable’ systems like Lego and Ikea, or the Open Building movement.
The first Stockholm variants of the Street Moves kit were designed by six-year old schoolchildren from the schools on the streets we selected for the initial prototypes. In a deliberate reversal of power structures, as if drawn directly from Ward’s The Child in the City, we put the architects’ pens in the children’s hands, recognising that these people are the true experts in their street—not the transport planner at city hall several kilometres away. The role of designers working on the project was to facilitate these sketching sessions and then translate the kids’ ideas into modular systems, each representing diverse and desirable ‘applications’ for the streetscape, sitting atop a repeatable extensible boardwalk platform, akin to an open source operating system. These applications might be things like ‘seating to encourage informal social activity’, or more simply ‘play’. They could provide scooter and bike parking, or planter boxes for greenery and growing food. They might be sandpits, tool and toy sheds, chalkboards, barbecues, football goals, charge-points, stages, and so on.
Whilst I never saw references to ‘open source operating systems’ in Ward’s work, understandably enough, such systems share a similar backdrop. Indeed, the core design principles for Street Moves can be located precisely in Ward’s Talking to Architects (1996), where he describes “an aesthetic of a variable, manipulable, malleable environment: the aesthetic of loose parts … the politics of participation, of user control and of self-managing, self-regulating communities.” This evokes the intent and spirit of Street Moves to the letter. In effect, by emphasising the malleability of the street, the prototypes were a platform for asking questions in public, for collective learning, a vehicle for self-organising the street of the future as an ongoing, adapting fixture of the street itself. The street designs the street.
The kit-of-parts was designed and fabricated in local timber, cut precisely to street edges but capable of being adapted or recycled over time. I asked the artist and musician Brian Eno for some ‘design principles’ for the Street Moves pilots, and Eno’s contributions were typically generative (More on those design principles here).
They also had a touch of Eno’s puckish wit that I hoped would counterpoint the narrow conservatism and risk aversion of transport planning. In Freedom to Go (1991), Ward had noted how planners generally must “bend to the prevailing wind, that of the highway engineers”. Sadly, we have not moved on much since Ward wrote that over three decades ago.
Whether admitted to or not, the first order object of the street remains a private motor vehicle. We need only look at the Swedish municipality’s organisation chart, and find the name of the unit that effectively runs the street: trafikkontoret (‘traffic department’).
If we give the street to the traffic department, we get traffic. The clue is in the name. Give the street to gardeners and we’d get gardens.
Indeed, Eno’s principles started with the imperative “Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings”. But Ward’s words still ring true, in Sweden as much as anywhere else—the street has indeed been given over to the “highway engineers”. Eno’s suggestion not only shifts the street’s imaginative terrain to that of the diverse, complex, organic and interdependent ‘garden’ rather than ‘highway’, but also changes the way we might engage with it. Any gardener knows that a plan for a garden is only that — a plan. What happens next is gardening, and that active, ongoing mode of engagement involves seeding, nurturing, tending, pruning, tilling, and a thousand other lovely verbs, each of which suggests a more meaningful way of engaging with the urban design of a street.
Ken Worpole, in his recent reflection on Ward’s life, work and influence, writes that:
“Ward realised, in the battle between the child and the car for territorial control of the street, the car would win. Today this conflict is being revisited: strategies for LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods) and “15-minute cities” — intended to reduce car use and encourage walking, cycling and playing out — are back on the urban agenda.” (Worpole)
These small projects in Sweden are part of that broader return to this ‘conflict’ for ‘territorial control’, a chance to question that primacy of car over child, by pulling focus on the one-minute city of neighbourhoods, as well as the broader 15-minute city of the districts they sit within.
Eno’s principles continued with the Ward-like inclusivity of “Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too” . Equally, Ward’s emphasis on adaptive design, self-build and true participation is reinforced by Eno’s “Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete).”
Hence our project’s choice of timber, a relatively unusual material for street furniture and componentry. This was not only for circular material or aesthetic reasons — though what could be lovelier? — but because it enables a form of everyday approachability and adaptation that concrete, asphalt and steel, the intransigent materiality of the typical street, simply do not. It not only allows for self-organisation, but in fact demands a form of care, or mutual aid even, that Ward would no doubt recognise. Wood evokes a reciprocal call-and-response relationship with those around it, and handsomely rewards ongoing care with its lustre and long-life — or the purposes it serves after it has completed its tour as street object.
Timber softens the streetscape, and cultivates a silvery patina that will tell the story of its use by the street, and how the street is taking care of it in return, brokered as a shared responsibility between citizens and the fabric of the city they live in. Timber allows streets to learn.
The streets become a vivid flowering of possibility, in stark contrast to the narrow definition of street as either inert empty parking lot or stunted slow-moving river of metal. Street systems implicitly provoke questions about the true value of such places, in terms of health, culture, play, learning, exchange, the interaction of cultural diversity and biodiversity. In fact, they become a shared platform for asking questions in public. And so, the street becomes a place of learning, about ourselves, each other, and our environment — another insight drawn from Ward’s Child in the City. And as streets are the basic unit of cities, we are not only speculating about what streets are for, but what cities are about, what we are about.
These different ideas of value tend to be intimate, idiosyncratic, and everyday complex. As Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust, “the magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany”. That ‘epiphany’ counteracts the gravitational pull of the ‘errand’ for planners, just as the input of the Street Moves schoolchildren — as sensible as they were inventive, but often drawn towards the epiphany end of the spectrum — would counterbalance the architects.
When speaking of such holistic value, Ward would often quote the relatively little-known Arts and Crafts architect WR Lethaby, who wrote that “I woke up to know that what I meant by riches was learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes; perhaps in the coming days of poverty we may get more of these …” Riches indeed. Ward repeatedly used the quote in his own writing — as do I, now — as it so effortlessly and instantly distills the true meaning of a place, both humble and higher-order at once. In his 1981 introduction to the Future Communities exhibition at the ICA, Ward shared Lethaby’s definition, and his hope for more of these shared riches, following it with, “If this is not our aspiration too, what is the point of discussing our hopes for future communities?”
(Note the light shining in Ward’s eyes as he remembers Lethaby, and his work as the principal of the the Central School of Arts and Crafts, in this discussion with the filmmaker Roger Deakin filmed by Mike Dibb in 2003—about 3’ 30" onwards.)
Now well into the second phase of Street Moves, Vinnova’s partner ArkDes (the Swedish national centre for architecture and design) reports a queue of almost 25 municipalities of different scales and locations, each keen to understand, trial, adapt, and localise the ever-evolving street-kits. They follow the first wave of prototypes deployed, which produced strong approval ratings from residents and users, and a four-fold increase in activity, on the streets in question. It remains to be seen how the Swedish government will pursue the project, and the broader aspiration for a different kind of prosperity for future communities that was woven into its DNA.
The counterweight
Sherry Arnstein’s canonical 1969 diagram, the ladder of citizen participation (which I introduced to the Swedish Government’s innovation playbook) was described by Ward as a “very useful measuring rod.” It foregrounds the question of truly participative cultures of decision-making, suggesting something akin to what Graham Smith has described as “deliberative mini-publics” (physically, perhaps like the sketch prototype Garden of Ideas.)
Yet the corollary of creating small self-organised prototypes as mini-publics is the potential for their inadvertent separation from other cultures, values, and systems in the city. All these clusters of streets are spatially, socially and environmentally interconnected with each other, but without taking care to actively connect these new activities, there is little possibility that insights from one prototype will inherently spread to another. So, strategic design must suture across the gaps between these experiments.
Within a Nordic context, where forms of collectivity and representation are clinging on as powerful themes within the contemporary welfare state, we sought to find a balancing act, whereby ‘Wardian’ self-organisation works within broader municipal and regional systems, under a lightweight umbrella of public policy. Ward also pointed to this necessary balance in the introduction to Welcome, Thinner City (1989), noting that “city dwellers … should be enabled to create their own solutions, but that, inevitably, this enabling has to be a matter of public policy” .
Nordic governance does not simply support or enable individuals. This it does too — and many fail to recognise the very particular forms of strong individualism at the heart of Nordic cultures — but they also work to spread insights and ideas from those practices across a city equally, such that everyone benefits. Municipalities can be the largest organisations around, directly responsible for drawing taxes and delivering housing, mobility, healthcare, education, and economic development, and from a public policy perspective, their task is to strive for equitable outcomes across an entire city. Street Moves presented an opportunity to enhance these ‘Nordic Model’ approaches for 21st century challenges, whilst also exploring how to soften the hardened carapace of traditional bureaucratic behaviours, recognising 21st century expectations of such systems and cultures.
From well outside of Sweden, I was equally drawing from Michael Sorkin’s 2011 ‘Sidewalks of New York’, code-like principles for self-organising streets which start with the Wardian imperative “The Streets belong to the people!” but which also spelt out the district- and municipal-scale overlays and oversights to handle the joins between those streets ‘owned’ and organised by the streets themselves. Here we might glimpse the seeds of a very different form of engaged, agile, and responsive new municipalisation, as a counterweight to self-organisation, capable of extending to more than streets.
This balance between super-local and regional recalls Ward’s aside in Freedom to Go, where he eulogised about the working relationships that power and maintain the exemplary services of the Swiss railways. In Talking to Architects (1996), he proposed that this model should take root more broadly, as “the Switzerisation of Europe, not through admiration of Switzerland, but because I believe that regionalism and localism is the necessary concomitant of federalism.” Ward dug further into the idea of Learning from Switzerland, in one of the small but powerful Counterpress pamphlets Undermining the Central Line, which, rather brilliantly, he wrote with the hugely successful crime fiction writer Ruth Rendell. They conclude that:
“Switzerland … is a welfare society rather than a welfare state, and its communities behave responsibly because they and no central directing authority are responsible.”
From this remove, and given how the Swiss have usually been portrayed in the insular British imagination, it’s sometimes hard to see the attraction of Switzerland’s governance systems to radicals of the time (although given Kropotkin’s formative time there, it’s not hard to see why Ward was exploring its history.) Rendell and Ward described Switzerland’s highly-engaged decentralised governance, with its meaningful local powers and highly distributed industry and economy, in stark contrast with the UK’s careless concentrations. Bringing planning and policy together, societal fabric is laced together with a clockwork railway network, which defies lazy orthodoxies about the necessary relationship between density and public transport. (The Swiss simply decided to change the model underpinning it.)
I was also inspired by my experience in Finland, and particularly the distributed model of governance and organisation, of craft and care, that underpins the country’s world-leading education system. As Pasi Sahlberg’s Finnish Lessons books explain in rich detail, significant autonomy at the school level allows local teachers to tune their curriculum, environment and activities precisely to their local context. By way of comparison with other Global North nations, there is little in the way of standardised tests of students or staff, constraining national curricula, or visits of the school inspector—simply the belief, which has been repeatedly proven, that well-trained, secure, supported and respected teachers should have the freedom to do their job well. A warm blanket of trust envelops the whole system, and it’s not hard to see the red thread from The Child in the City to Finnish Lessons. As Sahlberg’s other books illustrate, these approaches have the potential to work beyond education.
Whilst some fragile, trace-element version of this local governance and municipal sensibility was part of the British systems of planning and governance that Ward in and worked around, it has been surgically excised from the UK in recent decades, with any meaningful local power utterly suppressed or dismantled. In Talking Houses (1990), Ward would accurately nail the broader problem in the context of public housing, describing Britain’s “grotesque centralisation of policy”, leading only to “unwilling imposition of central policy by local councils”.
The shift he was writing about was profound, severe, and would only pick up speed with the systemic surgery on councils that was carried out throughout the 1980s and 1990s, leaving the UK as one of the most centralised governance systems in the OECD.
It also shed capability, almost rendering British councils like Manchester or Birmingham a completely different type of entity to a Helsinki, Stockholm or Oslo. In 1976, 49% of all UK architects worked for the public sector; by 2017, the proportion working for the public sector was 0.7% in England, and just 0.2% in London. This has left a public sector largely without design intelligence or delivery capability onboard. The mediocre results largely speak for themselves.
However, having reduced about as far as one could go and hit the wall accordingly, the wheel is finally slowly turning in the other direction, crunching through the rusty gears of making housing rather than houses. Local councils in the UK have started building actual council houses again for the first time in decades, and often brilliantly so, learning much from the mistakes of the past. British practices such as Peter Barber Architects, Mikhail Riches, Karakusevic Carson, Ash Sakula and Mae, amongst others, are producing public housing of the highest order, including retrofit of earlier eras, complementing public sector leadership from councils like Camden, Enfield and Hackney.
We must recognise that some of Ward’s position on housing was informed by the sometimes brutish strength of the large public housing departments of the time. Yet he was also able to manoeuvre his thinking across a far more varied, better resourced landscape of architecture and planning, with capability all-around. He could play connector within this, as well as radical voice, working at the Town & Country Planning Association. Ward crops up briefly in John Boughton’s book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates (2022) as part of the scene that produced Walter Segal’s self-build methods in Lewisham in the 1980s.
I visited Walter’s Way on a cold January morning in 2017, furtively if respectfully stalking the place with my camera and delighting in the various extrusions and exaptations that residents had added to their homes over the years. (If you’re wondering about the long-term value, or architectural quality, of such self-build approaches, note that The Modern House does a tidy business in selling houses on Walters Way and Segal Close, a half-century later.)
These simple, seamful wooden frameworks — each exemplars of the adaptive design theory that I’d absorbed from IBM’s Tom Moran years before (in 2002!) I discovered Simon Nicholson’s Theory of Loose Parts via Ward — would be another influence on Street Moves.
Ward’s role at Walters Way was quiet, but significant. In football, there is recognition of creative players that make ‘the assist’ for the goal—or even ‘the assist for the assist’ , the humble yet decisive move that is one step back from the final assist, and two steps away from the more obvious glory of the goal. This is what Ward was doing here, the unheralded background work of connecting Walter Segal with Brian Richardson, Assistant Borough Architect at Lewisham Council, and stimulating an informed conversation about self-organised housing. This kind of subtle coordination suggests the sensibility of the wrangler of dark matter that I’ve become so interested in: the idea of a designer who focuses less on creating singular things as discrete one-offs, and instead looks to create the conditions from which enduring complexity can emerge.
Ward’s background indicates some of the traits required of this form of designer. (As usual, I’m using ‘designer’ in a broad sense as well as quite specifically.) It’s an atypical background for someone of influence in England, growing up in a non-privileged background in a class-suffused society either side of the 1939–45 war. But of course it is highly typical of most, which is perhaps part of the reason he was able to connect ideas to places and communities so well. Ward left school at 15, and was able to learn on the job and some later vocational education, developing the craft skills and sensibilities of a draughtsman in architects’ offices — perhaps a product of the last great wave of British technical apprenticeships — combined with the diverse communication and collaboration skills required of editors and educators. This auto-didactic sensibility produced some versatile and well-rounded polymathic combination of architect, planner, teacher, social commentator, editor, writer, and philosopher.
Roman Krznaric opens the closing contribution to Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy with a lovely tribute to that intellectual versatility:
“It is sometimes said that Goethe was the last person in the world who knew everything. No, it was Colin Ward. By my desk I have a full shelf of his books on an extraordinary range of subjects, from allotments, rural childhood and holiday camps to urban design, the history of work and anarchist theory.”—Roman Krznaric, in Kelly (ed.), Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy (2024)
I have a similar shelf!
Ward’s words endure wonderfully, continuing to be adaptable, to be valuable, just as with the houses at Walter’s Way. He understood that sustainability and inequality are entwined, well before anyone muttered the phrase ‘just transition’, and he repeatedly returned to themes that have hardly gone away: affordable housing, suburbs and regional towns, green cities and gardens, sustainable transport, locally-owned renewable energies, ways of curbing land valuation, transforming education, or encouraging small enterprises with tools, technologies and training.
As a former editor, Ward was particularly good at spotting patterns and playing them off against each other. He would foreground emerging ideas to knock assumptions askew, suggesting that the reader thinks through on their own terms. In Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976), he would bring together many strands that are still loose threads today, waiting to be woven together in place. He quotes Murray Bookchin, on the sense of possibility in the “new, decentralised communities based on an ecological outlook that unites the most advanced features of urban and rural life” , and highlights his notion that working with the “small packets” of renewable solar and wind energy must inevitably lead to a dispersal of the “giant city”. (Note that ‘small packets’ is a concept that would change everything from about two decades later.)
Yet Ward would counter that dispersed drift outwards with insights from Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder (1970), with its imperative to bring not only densities but diversities of people together, “forced to confront each other.” Sennett saw the possibility in urban environments for “common community action, or, even more importantly through direct, nonviolent conflict in the city itself”. Ward would carefully pitch these two positions against each other, without taking an obvious side, finding value in both. The paragraph on Bookchin faced the paragraph on Sennett across a single spread. Indeed, these debates still play out today, half a century of research later. Yet most architectural and urbanism education and practice is still ill-equipped, or uninterested, in finding ways of resolving the creative tension that Ward thoughtfully set up across those pages.
Ward’s own response to this conundrum might be to plan and design the city in such a way that it lets the city figure it out for itself. He foregrounded participation, inclusion, and learning, alongside the occasional homeostatic nurturing from professional and institutional guidance and policy. In his collection Talking To Architects,Ward would would foreground the technical design strategies of Alex Gordon’s ‘Low Energy, Long Life, Loose Fit’ as well as Nicholson’s ‘Loose Parts’and the open building systems of Herzberger and Habrakan, whilst pointing to fundamental importance of the participative cultures created by Patrick Geddes, Ralph Erskine and Hassan Fathy, backed by the broader research of John Turner, Stewart Brand and Bernard Rudofsky. Borrowing Giancarlo Di Carlo’s description of how residents would “attack” his buildings to make them their own — an action Di Carlo essentially approved of — Ward generally suggests a form of design which enables adaptation; an adaptive design:
“The architect’s task is both ubiquitous and humble; he has to use his (sic) skill to transform the environment in order that people may attack it to make it theirs.” —From Ward, Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976)
In this sense, Ward’s advocacy for self-organised housing seems particularly relevant once again. It informs current work here at Melbourne School of Design in and around the key regional Victorian town of Shepparton, which is facing the front line of the climate crisis armed only with the endemically unsustainable yet largely homogenous privatised housing that the Australian market specialises in.
The typologies we’re sketching out suggest the possibility in both cooperatively-organised and self-build strategies at varying scales. Each are retrofit or new-build, prioritising biomaterials from regenerative local sources, put together by locally-owned social enterprises. This would enable a balance of self-build, shared/social, and public housing, set in social, cultural and natural infrastructures. Each strategy is designed to sidestep the essentially extractive ‘business-as-usual’ property developer model.
Inspiration is drawn from Ward, but also directly from contemporary examples which seem to embody his ideas, unwittingly or otherwise, in being diverse variations on coöperation — people housing themselves. Examples include Bristol’s WeCanMake, which brings together community land trusts, fabrication equipment, skills development, and a participative dynamic from within the local community; the global Wikihouse open building system which aligns contemporary technologies with self-build open systems; VUILD’s Nesting platform with their Ivan Illich and EF Schumacher-inspired blend of Shopbot fabricators, user-friendly config software and community-led crafting; the work of Material Cultures generally, but particularly their Growing Place community-led building and gardening project at Pasteur Gardens in North London; the Accessory Dwelling Units cropping up in backyards and vacant garages in Los Angeles, particularly those led by community organisation LA Más; the exemplary in-situ ‘Holes in the House’ retrofit led by Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku; muf’s numerous projects across London and Assemble’s Granby Four Streets in Liverpool both transforming architecture such that practice foregrounds how, as Ward put it, “people make their own cities”; the recent renaissance in European cooperative housing constructed essentially without property developers and with residents-as-co-owners working directly with architects (who are sometimes also co-owners) in highly participative design processes. The role of architect within this is more akin to the local ‘GP’ or physiotherapist: listening, learning, diagnosing and fine-tuning through small moves and subtle adjustments, and avoiding damaging surgery or addictive prescriptions wherever possible.
“I would totally discount the concept of the architect as master designer…I would concentrate on the role of the architect as wheeler-dealer, fixer and adapter, which ought to have been a familiar role from John Nash onwards…”—Ward, from Talking To Architects: Ten Lectures
Each of the above examples are forms of enlightened and equitable self-build that might occupy the widening gaps left behind by the traditional housing market in places like Shepparton. Or equally, they might provide sustainable, careful retrofit-led models for the likes of Sheffield, Detroit, Turku, or Kagoshima, as the tide of population growth slowly withdraws to reveal the scattered flotsam left behind by the previous era’s housing policies.
In his 1984 talk Direct Action for Working Class Housing (reproduced in Talking to Architects), Ward noted that:
“Everyone today is so completely dependent on housing supply system… that we find it hard to believe that people can house themselves.”
These words could have been written today here in Australia, four decades on, where a narrowly defined, almost completely private and financialised housing market, deliberately created by policymaking, has hit the wall. As in the UK and USA, an entire system is out of balance, constantly veering towards new forms of damaging instability.
The only solution we hear from policymakers, in blunt words spoonfed for them by the volume builders of the construction sector, is a heavily supply-side ‘build, build, build’, usually associated with a request to remove ‘red tape’, like the most basic environmental regulations, in order to do so. This messaging is as easy to spin as it is entirely wrong. Unaffordable unsustainable housing is the outcome of deliberate policy design — the purpose of a system is what it does, after all — and so supply, without reimagining how housing happens, will reinforce those outcomes, not address them. Asking the construction industry what to do about housing is a little like asking a hairdresser whether you need a haircut.
(Ed. ‘Modern Housing: An environmental common good’, co-written with Mariana Mazzucato a few months after this essay, collates much research on these matters. That is, we cannot afford to build at all in most countries, due to the vast amounts of embodied carbon implicated in construction’s supply chains. Fortunately, in so-called ‘developed’ countries like the UK and Australia, there are many more empty homes than homeless people, and much more existing housing space than housing demand. We need a different imagination of housing as a common good infrastructure.)
Much of that imaginative thinking can be found in Ward, and those writing around him. In Talking Houses (1990), he closed a lecture with the following passage:
“Bluff, realistic chaps will pose for the photographers, wearing yellow hard hats with Wimpey or Barrett stencilled on top, and will tell the TV interviewers, “What the homeless need is a roof over their heads, and we are going all out to provide it. All the resources of modern high-tech industry are being brought to bear on the problem.” They will peddle a mass solution, just as they always have in the past. What I want to see is not a mass solution, but a mass of small, local, small-scale solutions that draw upon the involvement, the ability and the ingenuity of people themselves.” (Emphasis added)
Ward was taking issue with the ‘mass’ in ‘mass solution’ for housing, whether it was ‘delivered’ by the private or public sector, although perhaps not even he could imagine that the public sector’s wings would be clipped for another thirty years after his speech. Yet the idea of “a mass of small, local, small-scale solutions” is indeed far more interesting, and it inspired the spreading-over-scaling approach in the Swedish work. This approach must trusts communities, supporting them such that they might find inventive ways to work with what we already have, and modify, adapt, share, retrofit.
This ‘mass of small’ is what we can also call a small pieces, loosely joined strategy. That concept was hugely inspiring and influential for many of us designers working on the early days of the Internet. It was neatly encapsulated for us by philosopher David Weinberger, whose mind was drawn to libraries and information theory as much as neighbourhoods. But to me it was immediately redolent of a certain kind of urbanism as well as a design strategy, and I have repeatedly borrowed and translated the concept, in order to organise built and living environments, or otherwise design-led projects and ideas—as described in this Slowdown Paper.
For Ward, writing well before the Web, this ‘mass (movement) of small and local’ speaks to the possibility of places continually renovating themselves — physically and socially — and so also to a different idea of housing, and ‘housing industry’, accordingly. Earlier, in his introduction to the ICA’s Future Communities exhibition in 1981, Ward had already distilled this thinking:
“Our most hopeful aspirations for the future are those which revolve around the need to convert a mass society into a mass of societies.”
If only this could have been a more widely-recognised preemptive strike on Thatcher, and her warped ideology: not only is there such a thing as a society; in fact, there ought to be a mass of societies!
(Ed. See related post, where I share images of the ICA’s Future Communities exhibition catalogue.)
The balance wheel
As noted at the start of this article, these variations on self-organisation and participation, mutualism and cooperativism, and the wider circles of municipalisation and regionalism, are back in vogue, at least to some degree. So it is perhaps not that surprising that a repeated award winner on 2022’s film festival circuit was a delicately-crafted film dramatising the visit of anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin to the Swiss watchmaking cooperatives in late-nineteenth century Jura.
That film, Unrueh (which translates as ‘Unrest’) directed by Cyril Schäublin, could be considered another ‘weak signal’ of a burgeoning valorisation of mutualism and coöperativism. In an urban context, this renewed emphasis on self-organisation now plays out in self-build, shared spaces and infrastructures, such as renewable energy microgrids, bike sharing networks, repair cultures, makerspaces and workshops, open digital systems for sharing ‘libraries of things’, prefabricated ‘kit’ housing systems, or simply the long waiting lists for community gardens. It sits behind the ‘new communal’, pop-ups, incomplete cities and non-grids, and European and Latin American cooperative housing projects—putting the social into social democratic cities. Yet these highly contemporary, distributed forms of infrastructures can be traced back, as unlikely as it may seem, via Ward to Kropotkin.
Kropotkin’s experiences in the Jura’s communities, and the relationship between what he saw as their “high degree of relative well-being” and the decentralised technology and organisation of those Swiss workshops, informed his subsequent writings, and particularly Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899), which in turn hugely influenced Ward. (Ward edited the 1974 edition, with additional material, retitled Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow).
(Ed. The recent interest in Unrueh, Ward, Illich, and related is mirrored by the increasing influence of Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, with his emphasis on ‘the commons’, in the context of degrowth and declining population growth across East Asia. My research into that aspect of Japanese urbanism developed after this essay — more to come.)
Unrueh describes a world in flux before the machinery of the 20th century is installed. The film quietly lingers over the mild bemusement, occasional frustration, and pragmatic ‘making-do’ of the politely jostling between capitalists, anarchists, co-operatives and municipalities, where few aspects of everyday life appear settled. Distant rumbles of strikes and revolutions can be heard on the horizon, bulletins and donations delivered via telegraph and the post train, but closer to home the infrastructures of everyday life themselves are constantly shifting: there are multiple timezones, languages, currencies, nationalities and identities in play at once. Everything is also something else at the same time. The players of Unrueh are constantly mapping, measuring, and photographing, as if trying to capture and settle the fleeting evanescent patterns and systems of the everyday as it changes before their eyes.
“With this film, I really try to show the construction of this machine. The four different time (zones the watchmakers had to keep track of) were real, but it’s absurd from an outsider’s point of view. I think if that is a construction, other capitalist mythologies are also constructions. And I think it’s important not to forget that, that we live in a made (world) and not an ultimate finished truth or anything.” — Cyril Schäublin, director of Unrueh.
Perhaps Ward was also trying to capture a world as it changed radically around him, constantly writing and speaking in public, particularly as the noose tightened horribly around the political imagination from the 1980s onwards. After many years of that destructive narrowing, it is a delicious irony — or perhaps a case of imagining a symphony from what is currently little more than a faint echo — that we might delicately trace a thin line of possibility between Unrueh, which dwells in the multi-layered edgelands that help forge these complex Swiss commons, and Ward’s evocation of the possibility inherent within a ‘Switzerisation of Europe’: that balance of meaningful, strong, and difference-making localism as a nested counterpoint within a binding, cohesive federalism. This is ‘Switzerland’ as metaphor, perhaps, rather than reality. And yet we out of the corner of our eye, we note that Swiss cities like Zürich have amongst the most fertile and systematically supported cooperative housing scenes in Europe.
The reason we might see possibility in all this is that the world is in flux once again, not least due to the urgency and scale of our contemporary shared challenges which require radical change. But we also recognise that these challenges can also generate hope, in the spirit of another self-declared anarchist, the late David Graeber, and his much-repeated line: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
This sense of endless possibility, also recognisable in Schäublin’s reference to a “made world”, is common to designers too — sometimes frustratingly so — but it captures the radically hopeful dynamic that is woven through much of Ward’s work: the potential of constant invention, everyday play, rich cultural diversity, and mutual support seen in the complex social histories of self-built housing, shared infrastructures, local factories and farms, and community-led organisation that he was involved in, researched and recorded. Ward’s ideas now seem remarkably prescient, alive, latent with potential once again.
The ability for people to redesign the ‘made world’ around them, when supported and enabled by the shared capabilities to do so, shifts the notion of ‘unrest’. Such unrest here is akin to Richard Sennett’s idea of ‘disorder’, perhaps, or the ‘entropy’ described in systems science — not a negative as such, but in fact the opposite of stasis, describing a capability of systems for transformation, via a deliberate acceptance of disorder and uncertainty. Perhaps ‘unrest’ need not underscore a nagging sense of a society unravelling, but instead describe and enable a constructive sensibility of diverse and alternative possible futures.
Schäublin’s ‘Unrueh’ dwells several times on a precise moment of the watch’s construction, the camera discreetly hovering over the quivering ‘balance wheels’ being delicately pinned at the heart of the intricate mechanisms, as if we are watching over the watchmakers’ shoulders. In the watch, the balance wheel’s role is to produce equilibrium through constant movement, its trembling a form of productive unrest. Pulling focus on this particular moment also pins the film’s mechanisms to these complex, shifting questions of value, labour, local industry, ownership, shared craft traditions and collective endeavour, as well as Kropotkin, Swiss cooperatives, and historical social movements. I suspect Ward would’ve loved it.
Indeed, perhaps Ward is allowing himself a wry smile generally, in seeing the ideas of the early 1970s and 1980s being dusted off and reimagined by a new generation, prompting this rebalancing act of local council-led invention counterpointed by self-build technologies enabling ‘people to house themselves’, or seeing the numerous diverse variations on cooperativism and mutal aid emerging elsewhere. Having been stuck for decades, these most fundamental ‘relations between people and their environment’ are weaving themselves together in different ways once again, and the slim volumes containing Ward’s quietly radical ideas suddenly do not feel decades-old. Rather, they increasingly feel like pattern-books for possible futures.
- To cite the published version of this essay in the book:
Hill, Dan. 2024. Reworking ‘the relations between people and their environment’: Colin Ward’s quietly radical urbanism. In Kelly, A, 2024. Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy: Essays on Colin Ward, Five Leaves Publishing.
Further reading: Many of the examples relating to housing above are developed further in the paper I wrote with Mariana Mazzucato, Modern Housing: An environmental common good (2024, Council on Urban Initiatives). The paper includes background research on today’s housing markets, many further examples and case studies, and a framework for common good housing.
