cope with the maintenance and management of existing public sector housing stock. Alice Coleman’s critique of council estates fitted well with the Thatcher project of privatization, her rejection of (socialist) modernist architecture, and her ideas about responsibilisation through ownership. In many respects when these two women recognised each other through the graph in the air, what they saw was a commonly held conservativism. Peter King (2010: 17), the conservative 'housing philosopher' and long-time associate of the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, has recently argued, that Right to Buy policy was grounded in small ‘c’ conservativism, ‘which places at its centre the desire to keep things close and maintain control over our immediate environment’ and so ‘accords with human nature’. Certainly, this interpretation reiterates the essentialist assumptions about human territorial instincts that underscored Newman’s work and Coleman’s translation of it. But equally Coleman’s science was grounded in other conservative principles, those of entrepreneurialism and responsibilism. For example, in an earlier work on inner city decline, Coleman (1980: 4) argued that crime is a perverse expression of ‘self-interest’ in an era marked by ‘the decline of entrepreneurship… that harmonises with the common good’. It seems then that the aspiration of Coleman’s efforts to have her science serve society, was not merely to eradicate design disadvantagement, but to prepare the way for a more responsible and entrepreneurial future. Indeed, many of the physical interventions she made to estates with respect to shared entrances and common spaces, quite literally privatized the fabric and territory of multi-unit estates (and made them the responsibility of tenants) in order to create the space for Right to Buy. It is
cope with the maintenance and management of existing public sector housing stock. Alice Coleman’s critique of council estates fitted well with the Thatcher project of privatization, her rejection of (socialist) modernist architecture, and her ideas about responsibilisation through ownership. In many respects when these two women recognised each other through the graph in the air, what they saw was a commonly held conservativism. Peter King (2010: 17), the conservative 'housing philosopher' and long-time associate of the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, has recently argued, that Right to Buy policy was grounded in small ‘c’ conservativism, ‘which places at its centre the desire to keep things close and maintain control over our immediate environment’ and so ‘accords with human nature’. Certainly, this interpretation reiterates the essentialist assumptions about human territorial instincts that underscored Newman’s work and Coleman’s translation of it. But equally Coleman’s science was grounded in other conservative principles, those of entrepreneurialism and responsibilism. For example, in an earlier work on inner city decline, Coleman (1980: 4) argued that crime is a perverse expression of ‘self-interest’ in an era marked by ‘the decline of entrepreneurship… that harmonises with the common good’. It seems then that the aspiration of Coleman’s efforts to have her science serve society, was not merely to eradicate design disadvantagement, but to prepare the way for a more responsible and entrepreneurial future. Indeed, many of the physical interventions she made to estates with respect to shared entrances and common spaces, quite literally privatized the fabric and territory of multi-unit estates (and made them the responsibility of tenants) in order to create the space for Right to Buy. It is
Final_revised_March_2012_Jacobs_and_Lees_IJURR.docx