about me – Kinosthetica

More Chronicles of Nairn-ier: Outrage! and Counterattack

A Manifesto for Good Planning in Nairn’s Outrage!, 1955 (Architectural Review)

The aim of the last entry was to introduce Ian Nairn and his ideas, although it went down a rabbit hole of comparing two influential post-war urban theorists, ethnographers and flaneurs – almost centrist-Situtationist psychogeographers of the rising Anglo-American middle class on either side of the Atlantic. The two did have certain traits in common and a similar place in the societies to which they belong either side of the Atlantic. Indeed, they were mutually aware of each other and they did meet in New York in the 1960s where they collaborated briefly following Nairn receiving a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation. Nairn’s work clearly influenced Jacobs and his Outrage! is referenced in “Death and Life” and subsequent essays.

So, now let’s talk about Outrage! and the follow-up, Counterattack. In 1955, Ian Nairn issued the Architectural Review with his critique of the concept he termed as coined Subtopia, or the slow tentacles of suburbia spilling over increasingly into the British countryside. In effect, it is a call to arms to increase urban densification and protect the countryside from a process of urban sprawl. Written in 1955, it is eerily prescient and the dawn of mass ownership of private car certainly accelerated this process in the following decade. As the distances that people could easily travel increased, so did the reach of towns into lower density settlements into the countryside as city dwellers increasingly sought larger homes with bigger gardens and more space without having to compromise city living and access to work.

In essence, Outrage! calls for better town planning strategy in the Dutch style of densely packed cities with clearly demarcated green belt countryside between each. There’s a lot to say for this, and I certainly see huge merit in compact, walkable (or cyclable) cities, particularly from the point of view of minimising carbon footprints and promoting urban cohesion. However, this requires careful land planning strategies and coordination at a national level, which is certainly lacking in the UK with successive governments pushing for more and more planning deregulation. It also requires a significant degree of social cohesion, which is extremely weak in the UK, partially due to a deeply engrained national obsession with individualism and privacy. However this has been significantly exacerbated by past brutal 12 years of Thatcherite razing state institutions to the ground so that the state barely exists anymore, turbo-charging the dismantling of public services and privatisation of any notion of collective space. With that comes extremely weak social ties, and a zombie UK state left completely hollow and in a fragile and weak condition with spiralling levels of inequality and deep-rooted structural problems in economy and society that I cannot see improving in the foreseeable.

Ian Nairn would no doubt be horrified at the condition of Britain today, and in many ways Outrage! was eerily prophetic without ever expressing any political dimension. In fact his politics seem somewhat unclear, much less so than that of Jacobs. He never really articulated the reasons for the march of Subtopia, and Outrage! seems largely an exercise in nostalgia for an golden era where the private car didn’t exist and the countryside consisted of idyllic villages and the rural peasant life.

Outrage! and the follow-up Counterattack! are beautifully illustrated by one of the lead Townscape theorists Gordon Cullen. While Nairn didn’t seem to present any immediate solutions to the rapid, messy and short-term thinking behind the sprawling out of post-war Britain’s urban, the beauty of his two polemics lie in his engaging narration style, and a running commentary of the concerns and fears of those living through the social democratic, state-led reconstruction of a Britain ravaged by the war. In particular, his manifesto at the back of Counterrattack! on what not to do when planning cities, and his case-book of bad practice and examples of ugly bits of town planning in a route he took from Southampton all the way up to the Scottish Highlands.

The short book rich in illustration and photographs offers a window into a time when Britain was re-moulding itself following the bloody first half of the twentieth century. Looking at it from the perspective of someone who has grown up largely under a period where the state has been weakened and diminished into something unrecognisable from the state-led development from 1945 onwards, it’s easy to forget that this was a huge period of significant social change which no doubt led to a degree of upheaval for those living through that time.

The most striking thing about Outrage! and Counterattack is their lightness on theory and political context. They barely make mention of the strong municipal-led politics and social democratic policies of the decades following the end of the two world wars that forged modern Britain and lifted many out of poverty and gave them free access to high-quality healthcare, subsidised and good quality housing, education, and the building up of a strong welfare state that ensured everyone had a decent start and end to life, supported by a consensus that this is what a modern state should look like between both Labour and Tories. This has been brutally dismantled since the 2008 crisis and erased from the collective imagination, to the point where Labour’s manifesto for the 2019 election was deemed as dangerous and insane by the political elite , when it reality what it wanted to do was re-imagine the welfare state of the 1950s and 1960s but updated to suit the needs of the 21^st century. Clearly, the post-war cross-party consensus of caring for every individual from cradle to grave has retreated, and instead replaced with a Labour-Tory consensus of a return to a Victorian age where life was nasty, brutish and short for most, whose sole purpose of existence was to exploit just so that small hoard of landowners and business owners could live in ostentatiousness and eye-watering luxury. We, the left, lost that debate it seems and now we can do little but sit back and watch the horrors unfold.

Anyway: in the absence of social critique rooted in political context, Nairn’s main contribution was his stimulating additions to the debate on the quality and nature of town planning and its aesthetic considerations. He brought to the fore the Townscape theory, which Cullen was an advocate as well as Kevin Lynch, author of “The Image of the City” and wider questions around urban design which perhaps had been lacking in the town planning discipline until that point. His contributions as an outsider to the discipline (certainly he ruffled the feathers of technical experts in the profession such as architects and town planners), and his assertion that the character of place cannot be created in a top-down, technocratic manner but by large teams, including sociologists, cultural theorists, commentators and especially, regular citizens.

The Townscape theorists were concerned with how aesthetics and conservation of rural character of British countryside villages could be combined with the social democratic modernisation of post-war Britain. Nairn railed against “clutter” or man-made necessities of urban living – roundabouts, signage, fences, electricity pylons, lampposts taking over the British landscape, and wanted to see it carefully planned and managed so it could be harmonised with the rural landscape.

In Counterattack! Nairn maps out varying archetypes of lampposts and rates them in terms of their ugliness and lack of harmony with their settings. He also critiques local council’s attempts to manage public spaces, with the characteristic flower beds and hanging baskets that filled high streets and town centres, which I recognise from my upbringing in the suburb of a deindustrialising northern town in the 1980s and 1990s. I wonder today, how Nairn would take the average British northern town battered by over a decade of austerity. Gone are the hanging baskets, much of the lampposts and street lighting, and many councils have even removed trees in a bid to save money, which is a neat illustration of the sheer madness of such deep cuts to public spending as we face increasing challenges due to climate change. Trees are a great way to keep dense urban areas cool in the increasingly warm summers, as well as great for natural drainage as our climate gets wetter and floodrisk becomes a near constant threat each year. Our town centres now are sad places: colourless, joyless, soulless with barely any landscaping left, blighted by boarded-up shops and empty properties as high streets decline at a fairly shocking pace.

The starkest difference now from even 10 years ago and certainly in Nairn’s time is the sharp increase in homelessness as more and more people are forced into poverty by the cruel regime forced upon us since 2010. In any given British city, and increasingly also suburbs and smaller town centres, high street doorways are used to shelter an unforgivingly high homeless population. This is a crisis that shows no sign of abating and the noises made by the latest prime minister indicate that he has no intention of providing any structural solutions. In a country as rich as the UK, this is nothing short of a crime of the government’s making.

Planning departments now have been stripped bare, the only planners left in local authorities are mostly left to handle the consequences of an ineffective and inadequate community consultation process and managing the needs of private developers. The planning system has been deregulated and the idea of a cohesive, European-style state-led overarching planning strategy has been sacrificed to profit gains for private developers leading to fragmentation and competition for profit rather than collaboration over shared social goals. Long gone are the days where the municipal planning teams would count sociologists in their ranks. Nairn would be horrified that the densification and townscape debate have both been well and truly lost. The expanded suburbs, Barrattification, are now are seen as a sanctuary for the middle classes, shielding them in new-build estates with private gardens and a lives moulded around privacy and car use, from the horrors of the social and physical dereliction of provincial inner cities and towns that have been systematically hollowed out and left to rot.

Spatial Planning in England: Act III

Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill: Final judgements

Levelling Up, i.e. bridging the gap between the economic performance of the north and south of the country, was always a vague, ambiguous aim. While I do indeed agree that the northern question must be tackled, thus far I haven’t seen anything to convince me that it’s little more than political appeasement and a potential bargaining chip to dangle in front of northern Tory voters in the so-called imaginary “Red Wall” when election time rolls round. Even as a tool of political manipulation, I haven’t even seen any cash on the table so as far as I’m concerned, it exists in rhetoric and nothing else and I hope that voters see that whenever our next election may be (could be much sooner than we think).

Now that this iteration of Government has collapsed, what happens to Levelling Up remains to be seen but likely it will be shelved once and for all, at least in its current guise. I could write angrily and bitterly about Levelling Up funds being used to fund housing in the stockbroker-infested greenbelts of Surrey instead of improving lives in the most forlorn and impoverished corners of post-industry, but I will desist for now.

But let’s look at what the long-awaited Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill actually means for planning in practice.

1. What does beauty actually mean?

Apparently the new planning system will be based on the principles of “beauty, infrastructure, democracy, environment, and neighbourhood engagement.”

Not sure if this is a citation of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who wrote to Augustus Caesar that good architecture must include “utilitas, firmitas, and venustas” – utility, strength, and beauty – but indeed I have no idea what to a Tory mind, beauty might look like.

Some people (popular among fascists…) think rationalism is beautiful. Others see beauty in brutalism (normally the same British leftists who worship Orwell). Personally I love Bauhaus and some types of modernism but many would argue against it on the grounds of pretentiousness (and they would have a point). Pomo could be beautiful to some. Baroque, especially of the English and German variants make me want to puke but I don’t think that opinion is shared across the board. Beaux-arts, Art Deco, Gothic, English Renaissance all have their merits. And the list goes on.

What I’m trying to say is this: beauty is wholly subjective. How can that be a principle upon which to base a modern planning system? How do we measure beauty? And will National Design Codes actually hamper aesthetically pleasing towns and cities?

2. No mention of the climate crisis
This is particularly astonishing. A government in 2022 should absolutely NOT be allowed to publish something as central to climate change mitigation as planning of the built environment without a clear, and detailed plan about how it aims to phase out fossil fuels and transition to carbon neutrality. What is their problem? The science is there. Other countries around the world are making at least token gestures (very slow and still we face a huge existential threat). But no mention. We should be making massive changes to our cities to reduce manifold public health crises and climate change induced problems with increased flooding events, biodiversity loss, and in the south extreme heating events. Where is the renewables plan? Where are the savings from the construction industry, one of the biggest contributors to the UK’s carbon emissions? Any ideas around biophiic design and expansion of green spaces? Carbon sinks? The time for imaginative ideas and learning from others around the world is now.

But here we just get a wilful radio silence.
These are not serious people.

3. No mention of cost of living crisis.
A toxic combination of Brexit and the war in Ukraine has had a terrifying upward spiral on prices in the UK. Food and heating in particular are impacting households across the country, but also the spiking costs of building materials will lead to a deflation of the building boom soon. The White Paper was published after both of these factors became the top headlines of the day. And still, nothing.

How do we address affordable housing?
How can we combine tackling climate change with the cost of living crisis?
Can we develop land to start cultivate land for urban farming?
How will we feed our people as the crisis deepens?
So many huge and life-threatening questions. So little imagination.

4. Roman Emperor-style dictatorial clauses disguised as “democratic decision-making;”
Street votes?
Nomenclature of streets and statues?
Really?
Granting the Secretary of State more centralised powers over seemingly trivial but local-level affairs while pushing fairly major and significant tasks to resource-strapped local authorities seems a bit backwards. Also, this government have shown time and again that they are out-of-touch and cannot be trusted to implement things effectively and competently so expanding their powers in areas where they really have little to no knowledge is a major risk in my book.

5. Less democratic
No realistic plan for community involvement or participatory planning.

It’s not rocket science. Participatory planning practices have been well implemented in major cities around the world, from Barcelona to
While partipatory planning hasn’t always been perfect and can also present as tokenistic (in Madrid, for example, it’s simply a portal where residents can vote “yes” or “no” on decisions without putting forward any qualitative suggestion.

However the LURB makes no mention of a shift to the post-2010 world. It feels outdated, uncreative and ineffective. One of the few elements of the current planning system that allows the public to make their voices heard is in planning consultations, and these are notoriously ineffective. With a bit of focus and attention, their format could easily be improved, upgraded, and better resourced to allow proper and effective community engagement.

All of this is ignored.

6. Quick-wins galore without addressing structural problems.
Which is indeed this government in a nutshell. This is largely what the design codes and new powers to auction leases for vacant properties on high streets is all about. As always, they prefer to address the symptom than the root cause and then wonders why everything continues to go to hell.

7. Where’s the money?
What I find most staggering is how the austerity agenda continues to permeate.
The new Bill puts so much additional pressure on council planning departments, who have already been decimated and stripped off much of their autonomy. There’s no mention of increasing resource, or training, or funding other than a bit of the new Infrastructure Levy fund which replaces CIL and S106. This is likely to be a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison with 1). The deep cuts and violently suppressed budgets of the past 12 years; 2). Scale and complexity of social, economic, political, and environmental crises facing the country; 3). Levels of responsibility and additional tasks forced on to local authorities.

Without properly taxing the rich and improving public spending to restore some form of adequate state (which currently functions as an outsourcing platform for a wild and unregulated profiteering private sector), we will sink deeper and deeper into the mire.

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TL:DR final words: Too shallow, too light, too vague and more undemocratic than ever before to make any real difference and certainly no antidote to our aged, anachronistic, fragmented and stretched planning system unfit for a modern state.

Spatial Planning: Introduction

This is the introduction to an Act in Three Parts about Planning-related drama in England. These are the last in the series of dry, policy-related commentary and legal stuff. I just need to store them here for future reference.

Then – back to fun urbanist stuff!

Spatial planning sits at the intersection of a broad range of future-oriented policies which determine social, economic, and environmental outcomes for a given area. A successful planning system will seek to harmonise as many of competing actions as possible. So, the main objective of any planning system is therefore to uncover social processes, values, and power relations associated with patterns of land use. A good planning system should act as a counterweight to level power imbalances by providing a framework to manage trade-offs between competing factors.

There are two key strands to an effective spatial planning system:
i). A decision-making framework for handling factors that cannot be treated in isolation and are independent on other factors to contribute towards public good (e.g clear air, reduced noise pollution, green spaces)

ii). Decisions that should seek to maximise collective social good for the greatest number possible (a la Bentham).

Cities in the UK (and this country is far from unique in this) are becoming increasingly complicated: the way they are conceptualised and governed has changed dramatically in recent decades. It was evolved from a more “managerial” system led by the state to an increasingly fragmented array of institutions and organisations by social actors, private sector developers, designers, architects, consultants, planners, third sector and non-government agencies which eclipse the tasks previously undertaken by the state

This fragmented system of urban governance coupled with economic, political, and environmental global instability demands an agility in spatial planning systems not seen anytime since 1945.

Key criteria for an effective spatial planning system

In her 1958 paper, Ruth Glass stated that ideological flexibility was one of the main factors behind the pragmatism of the 1947 system and the cross-party consensus generated by the UK’s Town and Country Planning Act. Planning has to reflect social policy for it to become meaningful.

Integrated, systems-based planning

If spatial planning is a mechanism for shaping urban environments, then planning policy must interact with other policy sectors. The hallmark of an effective integrated spatial planning system should be one that can cross-pollinate with policies that protect the lives of future generations and facilitate equal access. It should provide the conditions for intersectional and just usage of land for everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, health, or class.

2 Inclusive, accessible and democratic

Spatial planning systems involve many actors and stakeholders. So, power structures between different actors must be clear and there must be a mechanism in place to level off power imbalances. This means that a robust, well-resourced, and well-designed stakeholder engagement process is required to ensure that the views of all stakeholders are weighted equally.

An accessible spatial planning system is one that is straightforward to engage with. This might include easily accessible online consultation processes, and well-organised digital resources. If decisions are taken behind closed doors and without any opportunity for public engagement, this is likely to erode trust in public institutions and undermine democratic principles, produce planning outcomes that benefit a small minority and that are unlikely to achieve outcomes for the common good.

3. Proportional, balanced, unbiased

A strong spatial planning system is one which is flexible enough to respond to regional and urban challenges through strong capacity to work across, within, and between policy sectors at both vertical and horizontal levels. This refers to a planning system that works from local scale to global, or national to regional (horizontal) on different policy sectors (for example, national scale climate change mitigation policy with local level transport policy). The more integrated regional or local spatial planning systems are with other policy sectors, the more nuanced and effective the responses to macro challenges at the local level.

4. Agile (within reason)

While there is an argument for a planning system that can rapidly produce results, speed alone is not necessarily an advantage. In terms of hierarchy, striving for an inclusive, democratic and participatory system is more likely to produce high-quality outcomes. Facilitating discussion and creating spaces for as many stakeholder groups as possible to provide their input and shape planning outcomes is a time-consuming process. A speedy planning process would simply not be able to capture in-depth stakeholder perspectives.

5. Progressive

Progressive refers to the political willingness of leaders and owners of the planning process (e.g. local authorities, politicians, national/regional governments) to draw on Hegelian ideas of redistributive wealth to prevent economic inequality from stifling social development.

6. Sustainable

The neoliberal political system places economic development and growth as the driving force of every sectoral policy, and planning has been no exception. The emphasis on GDP as the universal comparator is not really fit for purpose anymore. In light of the climate crisis, there is an opportunity growing for spatial planning system to implement new universal set of metrics related to wellbeing and environmental impact over GDP. There is some talk around wellbeing indicators, but they are not being implemented universally across the country and GDP is still the go-to metric for measuring the health of a country. Which is ridiculous, when it has been demonstrated time and time again that there is obviously no correlation between GDP and social health (the US is the richest country in the world for example, and it’s falling apart at the seams).

Tolyatti: the “poster child” of the Soviet Union.

Michele Cera and Guido Sechi’s ethnographic and photographic study of Tolyatti. Published by the Velvet Cell (2019)

This is a hastily scribbled post covering some massive topics so apologies for the lack of depth and meandering in places. There are a few things that I would like to re-visit in a more focused way later, so consider this an introduction to parts of a wider series of:

1. Lessons from Soviet Union’s experimental urban planning;
2. Deindustrialisation and what happens next;
3. Decarbonising the global economy: we need to do it and it is going to hurt like hell.

Rise and rise of motordom

Detroit. Coventry. Turin. Barcelona. Stuttgart & Wolfsburg. Sochaux. In the Western World, these are all obvious examples of “motor cities,” where the automotive industry employs a significant proportion of the population and forms the backbone of local (or, regional, or even national) economies and organisation of public and social life.

Stuttgart was the original birthplace of the car (late 1800s) where two rival engineers, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler both raced to nail the design of the first horseless carriage. Following WWI, a key engineer at Daimler, Ferdinand Porsche, joined Volkswagen and right after WWII, produced his own design for the first ever Porsche. Although Stuttgart was a key centre of production, from an urban planning point of view Wolfsburg is more interesting. Wolfsburg, home of the Autostadt museum, is one of Germany’s very few new planned towns (unlike in the UK where new towns such as Stevenage, Basildon, Milton Keynes, are a separate genre unto themselves, especially in the South East to mop up overspill in the 1950s from war-ravaged London). It was designed by Viennese-born architect and urban planner Peter Koller, who designed a town to house 90,000 to support the Volkswagen factory. The plan strictly segregated the housing quarters in the south from the factory in the north.

While Detroit is widely recognised as the first Motorcity (Motown), the original concept was exported from Europe. Combined with booming American industrialisation and the post-WWII expansion of global capitalism and American hegemony, in the mid-20th century the US became a global flagship for the automobile industry. This was to the extent that even for us growing up in the 1990s, American culture was synonymous with the car. One of the first things we Europeans learn about the US is that you need a car to get around and Americans drive absolutely everywhere regardless of how short or long the distance.

In other words, urbanisation in the US is inextricably intertwined with the motor industry. The UK, especially the suburban areas which expanded rapidly from 1945 – 1970s at the time when private car ownership exploded, is similarly shaped by access to private car. Luckily for us, we are geographically a much smaller country, so we have ended up like the US in miniature form.

Although, as Canadian urbanist and journalist Charles Montgomery outlines in his book Happy City, there is a big chunk of North American history that has been lost. Dubbed “Motordom” by the writer Peter D. Norton, author of Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, the pro-car lobby in the US was not always the de facto voice. In the 1920s, there was a strong anti-car movement, due to the noise, speed, and danger they produced. The re-arranging of the use of the street, where people could no longer use roads for walking, was an unpopular move. In Cincinnati in 1923, there was a petition to force all cars to install devices to prevent them from exceeding 25mph. As the exact opposite from today, the pro-car group were those who saw the car as progress, while the reactionaries were against expanding the use of the private car. Today, the same demographic of people who were against the car are likely those now who most fiercely advocate the freedom to use their private car and progressives are much more likely to want to see car use reduced in cities, if not abolished all together in favour of public or active transport solutions. At the time, the response of the car industry was to re-frame the priority of the street: the issue was not cars running over pedestrians, but pedestrians walking into cars. This is a very telling response from industry, and the longevity and deep entrenching of this belief in the American (and to be fair, British too) national psyche is astounding.

While Detroit was not the first motor town, it was the first to make a major contribution to the global political economy as the birthplace of Fordism after WWI. The Henry Ford’s factory, producing the Ford car was the first example of technological techniques used for mass production and standardisation, acting as the blueprint for the mass consumption that has defined us as a species for the past half century. At the other side, an important element of Fordism was ensuring that workers were paid enough to consume the products they were producing, the creation of the “aspirational worker.”

The story of Detroit, as we all know, is not a happy one and technological advancements put an end to the neatly organised system of labour from the first half of the 20th century in the 1970s. The 1978 film, Blue Collar, which L and I watched during lockdown last year was a cutting portrayal of a Detroit, and a labour market, and race relations, that had gone completely off-the-rails and was slipping into ruin as a direct consequence of the demise of Fordism. In short, Japan’s rise was the American car industry’s fall, combined with the emergence of neoliberal thought in the 1970s marking the last almost 50 years of assault on workers.

Tolyatti! The background story.

Cera & Sechi, pp. 12 – illustration of the vision for a Soviet Motor-city.

So! How does all of this relate to Tolyatti? As Owen Hatherley beautifully details in Landscapes of Communism his meticulous account outlining the key ingredients of Soviet Union urban planning, city design, and architecture, in the USSR the collective was the main point of everything. Therefore the idea of the private car flew in the face of this. Public transport (the clue is in the name) was excellent, dense networks and well-designed before we even reach the levels of aestheticism afforded to Soviet metro systems (the Moscow Metro, MCM as the flagship which provided a blueprint for other Soviet cities and indeed some of the ideas and engineering expertise were also exported to the West). Much of which was built by prison labour I hasten to add, but that is a different story.

After Stalin’s death and the consequent decline of Stalinism which happened to coincide with the boom of the car industry in the West, there was a period of relative relaxation (the Khruschev Thaw) of the strictest Soviet principles, and demand for private transport rose. This was also the beginning of the mass housebuilding project across the USSR (which is detailed in the Sotsogorod film I’ve referred to in previous entries – I will get to this at a later date).

Demand for car ownership, combined with an economy devastated by war and chronic housing shortages for similar reasons, all came together as a counterpoint for one solution: the construction of the USSR’s very own automotive centre of production.

Company towns built around centres of production, as also seen in the US, the UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere in the West, were certainly not novel in the USSR either. Many

of these, as in my home region in the North East of England, were centred around extractive industries (in my region’s case, coal), copper, lead, coal, and mining for other minerals and metals. However, a car industry and a Soviet version of Detroit-style Fordism was a new concept. As the article on Tolyatti in Jacobin “What a Communist City Can Teach Us About Urban Planning” highlights, this pragmatism of learning from the West to support the modernisation of the USSR was indeed typical of the Soviet Union in terms of applying international technological, architectural, and design trends to their own ends.

While it certainly would have been a jarring move to take pages directly from the USA’s book, to support development of an automobile centre of production in the Soviet Union, Khruschev enlisted the help of Italy’s trusted PCI (Communist Party of Italy)’s leader, Luigi Longo. The chosen city in the Samara region of Western Russia, was a small settlement of barely a couple of thousand inhabitants on the Volga river, Stavropol-na-Volge. With Longo’s support, FIAT factory workers, engineers, and technicians were sent over from Turin to support with training up Soviet counterparts. In 1966, the town was to be renamed Togliatti, or Tolyatti, after Palmiro Togliatti, Il migliore, the great Italian Communist leader who had died a couple of years previously.

The starting point of the urbanisation project was a hydroelectric dam and power plant, and a workers’ district (rayon) was constructed to house the construction workers. Once this was completed, work started to construct the automobile plant AvtoVAZ, the national automotive company which is still the main production plant for Lada cars. Although, with the Russian economy sinking under international sanctions, it is fairly likely that this won’t be much longer. A second rayon was constructed (Komsomol and Tsentralnyy respectively) to house workers. Foreign experts were enlisted mostly from Italy and Germany, and FIAT was in charge of the entire project. In 1967, a housing district around the new factory site was rapidly completed and still stands today (Avtozavodskyy rayon, or the auto-factory district). This was so large and ambitious that it was originally planned as a new town in its own right, and is still celebrated as the most ambitious urban planning project in the entire history of the USSR.

Avtozavodsky rayon – the car factory workers’ living district and seen by many in the USSR as a model Soviet town. Notice the well-spaced blocks of housing interspersed with ample green space and sporting facilities.

What (if anything) can we learn from Soviet experimental urban planning? Two Italian academic urbanists, sociologists and researchers, Michele Cera and Guido Sechi both from Bari undertook an incredible project to document the story of Tolyatti, its history and the aftermath of the demise of AvtoVAZ following the fall of the USSR.

One of the most striking changes after the transition to capitalism was surely the loss of public spaces. In the Microrayon, the workers’ districts, there were spaces for workers to socialise and relax while women could share the burden of domestic labour. There were chess clubs and cultural centres (dry ones as well as ones with bars) for both men and women. Shared kitchens where communal meals would be served were also a feature of the standard microrayon.

Similar things existed in the West of course. L explained to me the system of Italian cultural associations, Arci, which were founded by the Italian Communist Party in Florence and are nowadays linked to the main Italian Trade Unions and is the biggest non-profit organisation not linked to the Catholic Church. In the UK, Working Men’s Clubs were, and to an extent still are, ubiquitous and formed a similar function. In the UK however, they were largely spaces for men to gather and drink outside of work, while women would be expected to stay at home and tend to domestic duties.

Cera & Sechi, pp.62-63. Playing chess in the Microrayon

Nowadays, the Working Men’s Clubs are mostly used by old men who have been retired (or unemployed after the 1980s never to find work again) for decades and have lost their primary function.

In capitalist system there is a lack of public space to meet for the purpose of socialising. We do famously have pubs, or public houses in the UK, but they are increasingly alienating places, riddled with class conflict and increasingly prohibitively expensive for many who would traditionally fall under the banner of working-class. Moreover, they are completely exclusionary for those who do not drink alcohol.

In general, imaginative urban planning system that afforded places to socialise and organise domestic work has long since disappeared. In the UK, urban planning has traditionally felt fearful and defensive, even in the heyday of social democracy in the 1960s. There has always been the sense that workers cannot fully be trusted not to conspire against the ruling classes. Thus, collective space has always been limited and the private sphere and nuclear family has always been emphasised over everything else. The Garden City idea itself was borne out of the ruling class’ fear of the Bolshevism sweeping Europe: give them a garden and a decent place to live and they won’t revolt. Most key to this, make sure they cannot fraternise with each other easily. An Englishman’s home is his castle. We have long been a nation of tiny fortresses.

I think the attitude of our ruling elite has been extremely detrimental and our class system is nothing short of devastating. Our lonely, ageing, alienated society is riddled with social problems that are direct consequences of poor political choices, lack of imagination and understanding of public good, and short-term and uninformed decisions over the past decades is a manifestation of that.

The birth and death of company towns

Mono-industrial towns are clearly a bad idea and the examples around the world of failures following deindustrialisation are far, far too many. Detroit is not unique, for example, in basing almost its entire economy around a handful of companies (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler) in one particular industry. The demise of motor cities in the Anglo-American world (Coventry and Detroit have both seen better days, to put it mildly) are a perfect illustration of what a fragile economic model this is and we should be frantically taking notes as the imperative to decarbonise economies becomes ever more pressing.

The devastation wrought by the Anglo-American model deindustrialisation more broadly has been so deep and so violent that it has been, in the crudest possible way, the root cause of the destabilisation the entire political systems of the Anglo-American world and weakened their democracies. Beyond the Anglo-American world, the marks of mono-industry are rampant across the former Soviet Union, too. Tolyatti is one example but there are countless other shipbuilding, mining, and timber towns that face precisely the same causes of misery as their counterparts in the west. Lack of work leading to breakdown of families, widespread substance misuse, mental health issues, and all of the other symptoms stemming from hopelessness, poverty, and lack of meaning and social coherence and relevance in a brutal world.

From this, there are a few messy questions emerging in my brain to be more clearly defined at a later date. Nobody knows where we are going as a species and to be honest, I don’t see an easy route out of the corner our civilisation is backed into (as usual, all roads lead back to the Mark Fisher thesis then).

1. Are we going backwards, regressing? Did we reach the peak of civilisation in the Global north in the 1960s? We hadn’t yet burned the planet (industrialising countries today cannot boom in prosperity in the environmentally damaged planet and broken economies they cannot inherit) and there was a general understand that society should be collective and there was a broad political agreement and understanding of acting in the public good. Now both the planet and any chance of collective social forms have been hollowed and burned.

2.What extreme event will it take to make things better? Will a transition to a decarbonised economy afford is a new way of organising our lives? Having lived through a global pandemic where there was a lot of talk around glimpses of a better world, but most of that has not materialised and we’ve gone back to precisely how things were before, just sadder, crueller, more brutal and massively destabilised. If something as huge as a global pandemic does not provide an impetus to change, then what will it take? And in a changed world, how do we ensure that the Global North and the Global South benefit equally? If lives in the Global North are organised around utopian ideals but the Global South are still working in dangerous factories producing our goods for starvation wages and near-bonded labour, then is that really freedom?

3. How will we organise and fair, social condensed and decarbonised economy? Will we ever be able to organise society around coherent collective principles again? What would be the catalyst? Organising lives around economic productivity cannot easily be translated to our technologically advanced world. It also begs questions around gender roles – what worked in a heteronormative world perhaps cannot be easily translated today. The nature of the work at the centre of collectively organised societies around economic principles also left much to be desired in terms of public health. Or will we continue to fragment, drift apart in jobs that actually have very little function beyond upholding the principles of late capitalist society.

The Left in the US are looking to Detroit to show us a glimpse of what something better might look like – sure, there are many grassroots initiatives and social organisation to try to build something from the ashes of wrecked capital. However, for me, without real robust structures in place to support real and widespread change, while they are fantastic to see and it’s great that something good is happening, for me it’s not enough. There are hundreds of thousands of Detroits across the world now, and there will be more before this year is out. The problems are structural. While Detroit was indeed an extreme example, it exists on a spectrum.

Personally, I’m more on the Mark Fisher side of things and I cannot imagine a full-scale radical overhaul of economic and social organisation and new logics and hegemony without going through a major catastrophe first (from which we might not even come out the other end as a species intact) but especially during these grim days it’s healthy to dream of better things.

EUR and the Fascist Colosseum

Palace of Italian Civilisation (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

A second and final entry on Rome before we move on to other things. I might squeeze one out at a later date on Italian urban planning more generally, but for now I think this is enough.

Hipster boyfriend long had a quest in mind to track down the abbey which produces the only Italian trappiste beer. He mentioned it a few years back, and we found it online, via a webshop called Holy Art selling among other things priest robes and statues of Mary. We dabbled with the idea of placing an order, but the shipping costs were extortionate, and we felt it would be overly decadent to have them ship from Italy a few bottles of beer since we can easily buy perfectly good Belgian or English trappistes within a 3 mile radius of our house.

When we decided that we must go to Rome, it dawned on us that we could visit the abbey, Tre Fontane, and buy the beer from their shop to bring home. Luckily for us, Tre Fontane is well-connected to Rome city and located close to the blue metro line (Linea B). To get there, we simply had to jump on the metro at Termini and then pass through the EUR district on foot.

We got off the metro at EUR Fermi, the third of the three EUR metro stops (EUR Palasport and EUR Magliana the other two). It was a fairly long walk around administrative buildings, post office and bank headquarters that seem to characterise EUR Fermi, around a somewhat creepy near-deserted funfair, uphill through a surprisingly luscious and verdant park (given it was wedged between dual carriageways) and then back down toward the road. We crossed the busy dual carriageway, and then noticed a brown sign directing us to Tre Fontane behind a high wall. The moment we entered the gates, we found a long, tree-lined avenue leading to the abbey. Although the dual carriageway was right alongside us, the high stone wall and the trees prove surprisingly effective at blocking out traffic noise and it felt strangely still and quiet.

Tre Fontane abbey, Rome. (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

We entered the abbey grounds and the feeling of calm and tranquillity prevailed. The monastery consisted quite simply of a church and crypt, a chapel, and not one but two shops (clearly these monks have their house in order) arranged around a courtyard. Inside one of the shops was a room for chocolate tasting, as well as a small café-bakery and an impressively stocked bar. We succeeded in buying our trappistes, a eucalyptus-flavoured one and a selection of others. After debating whether or not to buy chocolate too (we decided against it as it was already hot outside and we didn’t fancy carrying a dripping bag of melted chocolate around), we boxed up our haul of trappistes and left the calm little oasis to head back up the hill to EUR.

What is EUR?

The architecture of EUR is quite striking, I have to say. It feels imposing, somewhat Orwellian (to use a stereotypically British adjective) and I would imagine it would be the perfect backdrop for a re-make of the film adaptation of 1984.

EUR itself is a rather odd suburb of Rome city. The acronymn EUR stands for Esposizione Universale Roma, and its construction was originally intended for a special Expo in 1940 (in the same vein as the World Expos still taking place now, such as Dubai Expo 2020 and Milan Expo 2015). Obviously, as Italy entered World War II in 1942, this did not turn out as planned and the exhibition never took place.

The concept of the suburb was concocted by Mussolini to celebrate 20 years of fascism. The suburb itself is the biggest example of urban planning and architecture from the fascist period in Italy ,and it is as austere and pompous as one might expect from a projection of fascist vision. The style is highly rationalist, all straight lines, colonnades, marble, and travertine cladding and the idea underpinning the design was to heavily draw upon classical Roman city planning. Piazza Guglielmo Marconi for example is centred around an obelisk typical of the Roman ones you find dotted around the squares of Rome historical city centre. The chief architect and urban planner for EUR was Marcello Piacentini, the official architect of the fascist regime in the typical stripped-down neoclassical style which was also prevalent in Nazi Germany.

The Palace of Italian Civilisation (pictured above), or Squared Colosseum (or as L called it, the Fascist Colosseum) is the marble centrepiece of the district and looks like a mash-up of Roman temples and various administrative buildings from the Roman age. Designed by three architects of the fascist era, Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto La Padula, and Mario Romano, it was supposed to represent Italian history from Roman times and, in true fascist style, connecting this with the superiority of the Italian race. L explained that the inscription at the top was taken from a speech by Mussolini, and referred to Italy as a nation of thinkers, poets, artists, scientists, heroes, and so on. The sculptures on podiums around the structure itself represent these qualities, cared from Carrara marble.

The actual Roman colosseum. (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

Knowing very little about the period of fascism in Italy beyond the basics, I was unsure whether Mussolini drew upon myths of origin as the Nazi Party used as the basis of their disgusting and scary race laws. L explained that there was a weird picking-and-choosing of elements drawn from Roman history, and weaving in elements of Roman culture to justify or strengthen their horrible fascist beliefs. The symbolism and iconography around EUR was in many ways a reflection of this.

The Palace of Civilisation itself I found horrifying and fascinating in equal measure. It was so unbelievably stark, placed atop a hill overlooking the entire district. The white marble juxtaposes sharply with the green treelined avenues and parks dotted around EUR, which despite the austere rationalist architecture, leaves a weirdly pleasant feeling of coolness and airiness in a city that gets extraordinarily hot and humid in summer.

EUR district. Marie Ginette Amirault at Unsplash

EURPalas was also architecturally intriguing. The Palasport is a stadium that was completed later, in 1960 for the Rome Olympics. It has a pleasingly 1960s style aesthetic, spaceship-like and a bit Buckminster Fuller-esque. Although it underwent major renovations in the early 2000s and is nowadays still used as a basketball arena and concert venue, it still retains the typical 1960s form. The artificial lake, also constructed for the 1960 Olympics, is still intact.

In general, the EUR district was a surprising contrast to the historical city centre of Rome. We went there on a Thursday morning, and the area was extremely quiet so we had plenty of time and space to wander around the district. Definitely worth doing, if only to enjoy the contrast with the rest of the city which is absolutely stuffed full of ancient Roman ruins.

Introduction

By way of introduction, I wondered how I should present myself and my blog. I decided then to conduct a little interview with myself. There are so many questions that need putting straight, in my own head as well, that can only be satisfied by answering in the third person. Right? Step forward. Let’s commence this thing…

Q: Why are you starting a blog now? Did I miss something or is it 2005 again…?
A: Good point! The answer is no, it’s not 2005 but alas, let us bathe in the nostalgia from that golden age of internet for a moment. Back in my teens I used to be an avid blogger. This was in common with most of the nerds, and especially female ones I think. Livejournal communities were all the rage at that time. There were a bunch of other communities too that I no longer remember. It was a peculiar time. On the cusp of something huge, before Facebook and Twitter and when there were still multiple search engines to choose from (Altavista, AskJeeves, Lycos, anyone?) and “to google” had not yet verbed its way into every living language (and probably some dead ones too, how do you say “google” in Latin?) under the sun. The internet was still wet and half-formed, full of holes and blank spaces and bad fonts. Looking back, everything on the Old Internet feels embryonic. Forums and blogs were still written in long-form, in the manner with which we wrote emails, and letters before that.

In truth, I miss long form. I love words. And lots of them. I don’t like shortcuts. I don’t trust people who take shortcuts. I don’t endorse the move from words to images and all of the shortcuts encouraged by the format of social media on the New Internet. The condensing of text into a limited number of characters in Twitter is bad enough, but the absence of text entirely in Instagram, and Snapchat, and now TikTok I think makes our brains function differently. It’s like we’re all high on speed, all of the time. It’s draining. Everything has to be instantaneous on the New Internet, and I see that bleed out into real life too. I’m sure the average human attention span and patience thresholds have been dramatically lowered over the past decade.

The Old Internet was full of oddly intimate spaces, real virtual community and solidarity. There were creeps, sure, but people had not yet grasped that the virtual space was any different to real life so could hold their tongue (or, more accurately, typey fingers). The blogosphere, as it was called then, was filled with people spilling their innermost thoughts and feelings to an audience of complete strangers without the restraint that comes with the New Internet and the evolving etiquette and the need for privacy. In some ways, it felt far more private back then. Now the average human’s entire life is laid bare for all to see, or at least some form of virtual replication, controlled and edited to varying degrees. Back then, those of us who had an emergent digital footprint felt like we belonged to some sort of elite club which our parents’ generation were certainly not privy to. Blogs today still exist, of course, but they are mostly bland, heavily censored and depersonalised in today’s external-image-savvy (and, let’s face it, increasingly authoritarian) internet world. They are also tiresomely littered with product placement and are wrapped around the influencer culture for which they helped create the conditions in the first place. After reading most blogs today I feel dirty and manipulated, usually followed by a strange compulsion to buy pointless stuff that I really don’t need.

My activities on the Old Internet revolved mostly around music forums, trading bootleg CDs and cassettes (!) of illegally recorded concerts (I still have them somewhere, must dig out my archive) with an accompanying Geocities website, emailing, instant messaging, and blogging. This feeling of colluding in a secretive and collective liminal world was very vividly portrayed in Jenny Hval’s excellent novel Girls Against God – in reminiscing about this strange between-time, she refers to a downloadable word version of George Batailles’ surrealist erotic novel The Story of the Eye that someone, somewhere, had lovingly typed out, manually, word for word, to share with others for free. Reading Hval’s account of this I was ectastic – I downloaded and read the exact same file! I recognised the moment and the feeling of this time described by Hval. Wonderful. I want to recreate it, but I know that the world is a very different place now.

Q: Ok great. But what does this have to do with housing?
A: So, unlike in 2005 my blog is not about music. It’s about my other love: the space around us. A bit general right? I just told you that my blog is about stuff. Let’s be more specific. It’s about the physical environment which encompasses everything from urban design, architectural style, forms and shapes within the cities we inhabit. It also includes the natural environment. And finally, it will include the social environment, and this will probably be mostly where the housing bits fit in.

Q: Right. Why so?
A: Another good question! I’ve been thinking about undertaking this project for quite some time. The final push was the most recent U-turn in my career. On this I joined millions of others across the world who during the 2020-2021 lockdowns had too much time to think (a fortunate position to be in, I realise this) about the future and what a strange world we inhabit, and one that is becoming stranger by the day. Having studied a bunch of foreign languages and started my career as a translator, and then shifting into public administration supplemented by night school and a Masters degree, and then a stint in the private sector and consultancy, I think I have finally – finally! – found my vocation: Urban design and town planning.

It’s something I’ve skirted around since undergrad days. Following this came a 4-year job in public spatial management in London, then renewable energy related activities including wind farm consents and planning process, and much more deeply through my consultancy work in urban economic development. It was this final stint that persuaded me: I felt like I was circling around experts, but did not possess the dedicated knowledge or ability to devote myself to achieve any level of mastery in a specific field.

Cue starting the journey to a theoretical and then technical training: I signed up for a second Masters in nightschool, this time in Urban and Regional Planning, accredited by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). Armed with student membership, I am reaping the benefits through attending as many events as possible alongside my studies. I am also reading as much as possible on everything I can get my hands on related to planning and urban design. And this is where the blog comes to the fore: I see it as a record of my thoughts and part of the learning process as I acquire more knowledge along my journey. I hope it’s also a space for me to explore concepts and ideas through dialogue with other interested parties. Hello! Please leave a comment if that’s you.

Q. Hmm this is getting boring now. Tell me 3 interesting facts about yourself!
A: Uuuh, I hate these awkward ice-breaker-y questions. Next!

Q: Why does the blog have such a stupid name?
A: As mentioned, I’ve been thinking about undertaking this blog project for a while. Although, originally, my idea was to track the history of old modernist cinemas. They were usually intriguing buildings. I know of three such examples within walking distance from the home in which I grew up. One was a beautiful and angular modernist 1920s building, since turned into a car garage. The second was transformed into a bingo hall at some point in the 1980s and is now a retirement home. And the third was turned into – lo! luxury flats.

The most notable North East example was also the old Odeon in Newcastle City Centre’s Pilgrim Street. This was a gorgeous art deco building which opened in 1931 and was still in use as a cinema up until the early 1990s. I remember going there as a tiny kid, probably my first ever cinema visit was there. It stood derelict until maybe 2015 (?), when it was (clumsily and sooner than planned, but that’s another story) dynamited. I watched the thing come down – unexpectedly, over a cup of coffee in the Tyneside Cinema café directly opposite.

So – this is the kino bit. Kino as in kinematograph, cinema. The sthetica is just a portmanteau (ish) from aesthetic, concerned with beauty or a set of principles in a stylistic movement. While this project is largely focused on the social, political, and environmental context of our urban surroundings, I also document things that I consider objects of beauty.

The whole project was also supposed to be a way to get me out of the house and walking around again, after a year of lockdown and all of the kilos and pent-up mental energy that have built up since our lives got put on hold. Things are starting to bloom again, in strange and uneven ways, so it seems like a good time to start afresh. And so, kinetics, movement – kinosthetica.

Anyone who has tried to find an unclaimed pseudonym, a pen name or a bandname or similar, will understand how cramped and crowded the digital world is these days. Over the decades layers and layers of fleeting ideas, ghosts, failed projects, and some that have even flourished have amassed on the internet, like space junk. Happily, I googled Kinosthetica and just one – one! hit came up. Just a faint trace. The word was included somewhere on a Russian pornsite called Kinkfish. I’ll take that.

Nice to meet you all.