Careful what you wish for

Last week, myself and several others enjoyed an extremely rare screening of Patrick Keiller's The Dilapidated Dwelling, alternately described by the director as his 'naughty film' or his 'New Labour film'. Regardless, it's quite brilliant (and surely in urgent need of a DVD release, given its extreme topicality), and given a typically incisive analysis by Entschwindet und Vergeht, who rightly notes that one of the central questions someone watching the film today might have is: 'be careful what you demand of capitalism, for it may grant your wish, but never in the way it was asked. In short, The Dilapidated Dwelling asks the question: why does the production of housing never get modernised? (with the linked question, why is construction so backward?) It seems to derive from the successful search for 'new space' in Robinson in Space, where the novel, if unnerving, spaces of containerisation, big sheds, security, espionage and imprisonment almost entirely exclude housing, which is only seen in glimpses, usually of neo-Georgian executive estates. Housing, when this film was made in 1999, was not new space. Watching it now (extract here) leads to certain ironies.

There's a desperately sad yearning in Keiller's Robinson films for a true metropolitanism, a Baudelairean modernity worthy of the first country in history to urbanise itself - in London the capital and its infrastructure is strangled by a 'suburban government', and in Robinson in Space ports like Southampton, Liverpool and Middlesborough are weird, depopulated, with the enormous turnover of imports and exports never leading to any attendant cosmopolitanism or glamour, the internationalism confined to the automated space of the container port. So it's interesting to consider these films after the Urban Task Force, after the palpable failure of Richard Rogers and Ricky Burdett's urban renaissance, the death of which was arguably heralded by Boris Johnson's 'Zone 5 strategy'. The Urban Renaissance was the very definition of good ideas badly thought-out and (mostly) appallingly applied. The expansion of public spaces and mixed uses merely led to pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee; the rise in city living, while having had some achievements like the repopulation of central Manchester, has led to brownfield sites and any space next to a waterway, from the Thames' most majestic expanses to the slurry of Deptford Creek, sprouting more-or-less egregious yuppiedromes and dovecots. Meanwhile, the film's central suggestion - that not only should new housing be on brownfield or greenfield, but replacing the eminently crap housing of 1870-1940 that dominates the country; a fantastic idea, and I'd gladly put my flat first on the list for demolition and reconstruction - arguably found fruit in the truly criminal Pathfinder scheme, the demolition of (frequently, council) housing not to replace it with something better, but for the purposes of 'housing market renewal' in northern towns previously untouched by a southern property boom.

Most of these don't really fit the terms of Keiller's alternatives in The Dilapidated Dwelling, which are mainly focused on the steel-and-glass-and-neoprene gaskets continuum that goes from Bucky Fuller to the Eameses to Rogers and Foster, rather than the wet trades of Brutalism. When you see a yuppiedrome go up, it usually involves a concrete frame, which is then dressed with render, terracotta, wood, anodised aluminium, corten steel, frequently all at once. So it isn't as high-tech as it might seem, but it is a modernisation of a sort, a legacy of New Labour's early years when it looked like it might, at least, have Europeanised Britain rather than dragged it even closer to the collapsing American imperium. As mean as the meanest existenzminimum, most of these blocks are now fit only for the annals of Bad British Architecture, and will almost undoubtedly be looked at by future generations with much the same contempt with which we hold the more genuinely prefabricated Ronan Points of the '60s. The real epicentre of the crash was never the tower in Salford anyway, but the semi in the exurbs, and here there has only been one major attempt at mass housing constructed using truly modern methods, which, rather neatly, came from Richard Rogers - the Oxley Woods houses in Milton Keynes, which I found really very pretty and a genuine, serious effort, although in their context they're quarantined behind a wall of traditionalist whatnot. One possible reason for this failure, other than the shoddy and overpriced nature of New.Urban.Living, is something rather weird which Keiller drew attention to in the Q&A that followed the film screening - a sort of labour theory of value for housing.

Although their ornamentation was usually cast rather than sculpted, and a reading of Robert Tressell might be a good corrective here, people do still think, with some justification, that more labour and craft was expended on your average dilapidated Victorian dwelling than on the most impressive, high-tech and gorgeously functional modernist machine a habiter - so in that sense, the Barratt box is as much a simulation of labour and craft as it is of solidity and permanence. The difficulty, then, in the unlikely event we find ourselves again in the position we were in in 1997, with a huge amount of public goodwill for modernisation, might be to convince people that the intellectual labour behind engineering something like Lloyds or its lesser derivatives was as worthwhile as the apparently obsolete labour behind the Victorian terrace.