There is currently some discussion of the idea — nay, even importance — of the value of ‘community’ within UK housing. This post ultimately targets a discussion about the importance of ‘community’ within social housing. Its potential value extends beyond the UK and beyond subsidized housing for people with low incomes.
Let’s begin briefly then, from a North American perspective, in a private rental unit in a 20 storey high rise. This writer has occupied such accommodation with its great 10th-floor balcony views. But a ‘sense of community’? Pretty pathetic! A few nods and grunts in the elevators, exchanges of AWOL socks in the laundry room, and occasionally a passing hand smack in the lap pool.
All the potential for a life-enriching sense of community was available, just not acted upon. By contrast, consider much neglected, much maligned public housing in North America. Over the last few decades there has been an an embarrassing by-product of tearing it all down in order to build ‘something better.’ Its residents by and large don’t live up to their general billing as criminally degenerate drug addicts and/or incorrigible petty criminals. Most were, and still are, low-income, cash-strapped folks trying to get by. And one way they achieved this was in public housing communities.
In still-surviving public housing, that benefit continues, even as developers and complicit city governments search for lucrative ways to repurpose the land and the buildings — individual humanity ignored and, if necessary, damned.
Moving to the United Kingdom it’s possible to find similar kinds of publicly maligned and supposedly undeserving tenants. Building developers and small governments are deeply attached to these concepts. As well, council (public) housing architecture also takes a hit.
Enter the ‘deck.’ The deck is an architectural feature that allows tenants to enter their homes flats from the great outdoors. You get the idea if you envision an apartment building where residents clear the snow away from their front door, which opens on an exterior walkway — one walkway, or deck, per floor.
At least the deck in UK social housing architecture gives common, garden-variety ‘evil’ tenants a break. Decks have been evaluated and dismissed as one of the worst features ever. Not that the tenants themselves are off the hook. As one of the headlines below describes, this form of housing is reviled as being for ‘dirty people.’
Except . . . deck access is today being recognized as a valuable support in the evolution of community. Read more in this recent article in Architecture Today: Deck access returns to British housing
. . . and this one from earlier this year in dezeen: “‘Housing for dirty people’ is back and I welcome it”
Housing crises are forcing the world to reconsider decades-long disdain for social housing. Perhaps the importance of community, as well as deck access, can contribute to a new generation of housing in North America and elsewhere.
