‘A tall storey…but, a fact just the same’: The Red Road highrise as a black box

摘要

The advent of state-sponsored mass highrise housing in the post-war period broughtudinto view a range of issues about the role of technology in everyday life. This paperuddraws on approaches in the study of science and technology in order to deepen ourudunderstanding of the socio-technical aspects of such highrise housing, past andudpresent. We elaborate this thinking empirically by examining a 1960s highriseuddevelopment, Red Road, Glasgow. The paper examines the inaugural phase ofuddevelopment, and the most recent phase of ‘redevelopment’, the first stage of which isuddemolition. The paper extends existing accounts of residential highrises generally,udand Red Road specifically, as well as elaborating an alternate analytical frameworkudfor understanding highrise and supertall dwellings.