Back to the street

“THE street wears us out; it is altogether disgusting!” wrote Le Corbusier, a modernist architect, in 1929. “Why, then, does it still exist?” His question set the tone for much post-war British planning, resulting in the construction of housing estates detached from streets and surrounding communities. They have often been accused of incubating social problems. Now David Cameron has weighed in to the debate, announcing that 100 of them could be demolished to attack poverty and crime.

In a Sunday Times article on January 10th he denounced the “brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers”, and pledged £140m ($200m) towards replacing them with lower-rise, better-integrated estates that would help improve social order. Rioters in several English cities in 2011 “came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates”, he wrote.

Research by Bill Hillier, a professor of architecture at University College London, suggests that the design of housing estates can contribute to social problems. He says there can be too many walkways, resulting in empty spaces where criminals can lurk. In a paper with Ozlem Sahbaz, based on five years of crime data in one London borough, he concludes that a higher density of people helps to deter crime (high-rises are often not as densely populated as medium-rise blocks built closer together), and that integration with streets, even full of strangers, is safer.

Jeremy Till, another architect at the University of the Arts London believes the opposite is true: that “space arises out of...the social”. He calls Professor Hillier’s conclusions a “cul-de-sac of architectural determinism”, by which social malaise is too conveniently attributed to spatial, not political, causes. A forthcoming report by Create Streets, a research institute, agrees with Professor Hillier’s research, however, using regression analysis to link general well-being with connection to the street and community.

“If you get the architecture right, you create a virtuous upward cycle that is good for community, for health and for economic vitality,” says Tim Stonor of Space Syntax, a consultancy that helped redesign Heygate, a notorious London estate that has been demolished and replaced with lower-rise housing.

A report by Savills, an estate agent, suggests the space could be more efficiently used: there is room for up to 500,000 new homes on existing estate land, in addition to the rebuilt social housing, it says. The bigger problem for Mr Cameron may be how the process is funded and managed. In Heygate, residents like the new design, but former social tenants are angry that many of the new flats are being sold to pay for the regeneration. You can reconnect to the street, but it may then be put up for sale.