Page 78 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 67

redevelopment on the community, these two phases can be treated as one. No
one is denying that redevelopment brought an improvement in material
conditions for those fortunate enough to be rehoused (there are still thousands on
the housing list). But while this removed the tangible evidence of poverty, it did
nothing to improve the real economic situation of many families, and those with
low incomes may, despite rent-rebate schemes, be worse off.
The first effect of the high-density, high-rise schemes was to destroy the
function of the street, the local pub, the corner shop as articulations of communal
space. Instead there was only the privatized space of family units, stacked one on
top of each other, in total isolation, juxtaposed with the totally public space
which surrounded them and which lacked any of the informal social controls
generated by the neighbourhood. The streets which serviced the new estates
became thoroughfares, their users ‘pedestrians’ and, by analogy, so many bits of
human traffic—and this irrespective of whether or not they were separated from
motorized traffic. It is indicative of how far the planners failed to understand the
human ecology of the working-class neighbourhood that they could actually talk
about building ‘vertical streets’! The people who had to live in them weren’t
fooled. As one put it: they might have running hot water and central heating but
to him they were still prisons in the sky. Inevitably, the physical isolation, the
lack of human scale and the sheer impersonality of the new environment was felt
most keenly by people living in the new tower blocks which have gradually
come to dominate the East End landscape.
The second effect of redevelopment was to destroy what we have called
‘matrilocal residence’. Not only was the new housing designed on the model of
the nuclear family, with little provision for large low-income families (usually
designated ‘problem families’!) and none at all for groups of young single
people, but the actual pattern of distribution of the new housing tended to
disperse the kinship network; families of marriage were separated from their
families of origin, especially during the first phase of the redevelopment. The
isolated family unit could no longer call on the resources of wider kinship
networks or of the neighbourhood, and the family itself became the sole focus of
solidarity. This meant that any problems were bottled up within the immediate
interpersonal context which produced them; and at the same time family
relationships were invested with a new intensity to compensate for the diversity
of relationships previously generated through neighbours and wider kin. The
trouble was that although the traditional kinship system which corresponded to it
had broken down, the traditional patterns of socialization (of communication and
control) continued to reproduce themselves in the interior of the family. The
working-class family was thus not only isolated from the outside but also
undermined from within. There is no better example of what we are talking
about than the plight of the so-called ‘housebound mother’. The street or turning

*This extract is taken from the longer article which appeared in WPCS 2 (1972).