Practising in the Margins: HighTurnover, Low Unit Cost

摘要

For those who believe that spatial thinking has a major role to play in addressing the various issues that face individuals, collectives and communities, this is an enthralling, even thrilling issue of Why so?The dismal prospects for a return of 20th-century institutionally backed welfare state architecture form the grey background with clouds of bleak statistics revealing the paucity of opportunity and of gender diversity in the profession.2 Flashing through this gloom, however, come from every contributor bolts of illuminating light(e)ning, giving glimpses of how practices that play closer to user clients than is usual can thrive.My generation were educated in the afterglow of the Second World War reconstruction programmes, of new towns, new universities, of system-built schools. We believed in these big projects, but we were also aware of the idea of the 'descent into the street', a democratisation of practice that sought ways to shift agency from the professional into the hands of individuals and collectives. We admired the work of JohnTurner in the informal settlements of Latin America,3 and we pondered the 'platforms for living' proposed by John Habraken,4 in which people were provided with serviced slabs that they could infill as they wished or were able.This idea had a whimsical foreshadowing in the ironic Shell Guides to the country that stacked houses up on open bookshelves as a critique of strip development. Some of us were aware that the interwar years in Britain and Ireland managed to produce hundreds of thousands of houses, even if they were semidetached. Archigram's Peter Cook was making celebratory drawings of these.