Page 80 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 69

If someone should ask why the plan to ‘modernize’ the pattern of East End life
should have been such a disaster, perhaps the only honest answer is that given
the macro-social forces acting on it, given the political, ideological and economic
framework within which it operated, the result was inevitable. For example,
many local people wonder why the new environment should be the way it is. The
reasons are complex. They are political in so far as the system does not allow for
any effective participation by a local working-class community in the decision-
making process at any stage or level of planning. The clients of the planners are
simply the local authority or the commercial developer who employs them. They
are ideological in so far as the plans are unconsciously modelled on the structure
of the middleclass environment, which is based on the concept of property and
private ownership, on individual differences of status, wealth and so on, whereas
the structure of the working-class environment is based on the concept of
community or collective identity, common lack of ownership, wealth, etc.
Similarly, needs were assessed on the norms of the middle-class nuclear family
rather than on those of the extended working-class family. But underpinning both
these sets of reasons lie the basic economic factors involved in comprehensive
redevelopment. Quite simply, faced with the task of financing a large housing
programme, local authorities are forced to borrow large amounts of capital and
also to design schemes which would attract capital investment to the area. This
means that they have to borrow at the going interest rates, which in this country
are very high, and that to subsidize housing certain of the best sites have to be
earmarked for commercial developers.
All this means that planners have to reduce the cost of production to a
minimum through the use of capital-intensive techniques—prefabricated and
standardized components which allow for semi-automated processes in
construction. The attraction of high-rise developments (‘tower blocks’, outside
the trade) is that they not only meet these requirements but they also allow for
certain economies of scale, such as the input costs of essential services, which
can be grouped around a central core. As for ‘non-essential’ services, that is,
ones that don’t pay, such as playspace, community centres, youth clubs and
recreational facilities, these often have to be sacrificed to the needs of
commercial developers—who, of course, have quite different priorities.
The situation facing East Enders at present is not new. When the first
tenements went up in the nineteenth century they provoked the same objections
from local people, and for the same very good reasons, as their modern
counterparts, the tower blocks. What is new is that in the nineteenth century the
voice of the community was vigorous and articulate on these issues, whereas
today, just when it needs it most, the community is faced with a crisis of
indigenous leadership.
The reasons for this are already implicit in the analysis above. The labour
aristocracy, the traditional source of leadership, has virtually disappeared, along
with the artisan mode of production. At the same time there has been a split in
consciousness between the spheres of production and consumption. More and