Activism and Outrage: A celebration of post-war social housing

The increasing rejection of post-war social housing as a political project is embodied in the critique of its high-rise typology, described in the Savills’ report as ‘incomplete streets’.

Located in East London’s Bethnal Green, the social housing area hosts a diversity of residents including of foreign labourers and low-income people. However, in the name of ‘community security’, police routinely directly enter the community; the Cranbrook Community Food Garden is less than 100 metres away (built and cared for by the residents themselves) and demonstrates another side of social housing. Photo: Wanying Li

Savills’ report Completing London’s Streets suggests the need to create ‘complete streets’ in post-war social housing spaces, and functions on the assumption of the need to repair the whole. To enforce the need for ‘completion’, it depicts the system of the estate and the city as having lost connection, the ability to circulate and flow. The occupants of the social housing, who they have or will be, are startlingly absent from the review.

Golden Lane Estate, Photo: Wanying Li

Questioning the role of the designer to intervene within the socio-political condition, this workshop at the Royal College of Art invited students to respond to the Savills’ report, as a legal, spatial, graphic and political document. The workshop questioned the nature and tone of political protest, and developed interdisciplinary responses from students from across the RCA.

“VALUE / VALUE JUDGEMENT” by Wanying Li

This images above come from my project ‘Value/Value Judgement’. This response is a critical evaluation of the Savills’ report addressing the discourse of value latent in the language of developers like Savills, government agencies responsible for housing, and residents within the context of regeneration. In short, the project makes visible the ‘value’ of the benefits behind the report. In the end, how this report flattens human needs and the question of how one feels and understands space comes to the fore, and we are left with: No value, what value, how much value?

Savills’ report showed a total of 274 values, and I extracted these values to reassess the ‘value’ through a vote redressing the often absent democratic impulse in urban regeneration projects in London.

These workshops took place within the Designers in Residence studio at the Design Museum and as part of the AcrossRCA project while studying for the MRes Architecture Programme. The final show will also take place in the Design Museum.

Project Lead: Hester Buck

Team Members: Wanying Li, Chun-Wei Lee, Dongyang Mi, Eleanor Hill, Emily Hartless, and Timothy Chan.