Estates On The Edge

This text recounts the decline and rescue of low income government sponsored housing estates across Northern Europe giving an account of the intense physical, social and organizational problems facing social landlords in five countries. The ownership, management and letting patterns diverge sharply between the Continent, Britain and Ireland, between council landlords, non profit, co-operative and independent landlords. But their community problems reveal similar trends towards poverty, polarization and incipient breakdown. To avert the threat of incipient ghettos the stabilizing pressures need to be stronger than the growing pressures towards chaos. Governments have become directly involved in estate rescue because of the vital social role estates are playing. The text traces the process of decline and renewal and shows how we can learn the lessons of policy failures and successes.

Lynsey Hanley was born and raised just outside of Birmingham on what was then the largest council estate in Europe, and she has lived for years on an estate in London's East End. Writing with passion, humour and a sense of history, she recounts the rise of social housing a century ago, its adoption as a fundamental right by leaders of the social welfare state in the mid-century and its decline - as both idea and reality - in the 1960s and '70s. Throughout, Hanley focuses on how shifting trends in urban planning and changing government policies - from Homes Fit for Heroes to Le Corbusier's concrete tower blocks, to the Right to Buy - affected those so often left out of the argument over council estates: the millions of people who live on them. What emerges is a vivid mix of memoir and social history, an engaging and illuminating book about a corner of society that the rest of Britain has left in the dark.

This book presents an architectural overview of Dublin’s mass-housing building boom from the 1930s to the 1970s. During this period, Dublin Corporation built tens of thousands of two-storey houses, developing whole communities from virgin sites and green fields at the city’s edge, while tentatively building four-storey flat blocks in the city centre. Author Ellen Rowley examines how and why this endeavour occurred. Asking questions around architectural and urban obsolescence, she draws on national political and social histories, as well as looking at international architectural histories and the influence of post-war reconstruction programmes in Britain or the symbolisation of the modern dwelling within the formation of the modern nation. Critically, the book tackles this housing history as an architectural and design narrative. It explores the role of the architectural community in this frenzied provision of housing for the populace. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings and photographs from contemporary journals and the private archives of Dublin-based architectural practices, this book will appeal to academics and researchers interested in the conditions surrounding Dublin’s housing history.

The development of eco-industrial parks and associated ‘ecological industry’ concepts offer progressive integrated approaches to resolve pollution problems from effluents and wastes of all kinds. Most industry however is now located in business parks and industrial estates, with relatively few industries having direct discharges of process effluents to the water environment. But that does not mean no pollution. Many of these estates are very large, with many companies of all kinds spread over extensive areas. All have surface water drainage and stormwater runoff is often contaminated by many diffuse sources. Wealth Creation without Pollution is the culmination of several years of deliberations by academics and regulators, engaging with industrial and commercial sectors to characterise and quantify environmental problems and identify best practice solutions. Equally important have been efforts to explore sufficiently flexible regulatory regimes that offer effective means to prevent pollution and achieve good working environments in which industry and commerce can flourish. This book explores how modern industries are striving towards more sustainable practices, with case studies of impacts and of greener industry practices, as well as philosophical and policy papers. The role of regulators, planners and government in fostering a greener industrial base is also examined. Wealth Creation without Pollution is a valuable text book for environmental science and engineering students, and a useful resource for industrial architects, developers and practitioners.

Britain was the first country in the world to become an essentially urban county. And England is still one of the most urbanized countries in the world. The town and the city is the world that most of us inhabit and know best. But what do we actually know about our urban world - and how it was created? The Making of the English Urban Landscape tells the story of our towns and cities and how they came into being over the last two millennia, from Roman and Anglo-Saxon times, through the Norman Conquest and the later Middle Ages to the 'great rebuilding' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the 'polite townscapes' of the eighteenth, and the commercial and industrial towns and cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The final chapter then takes the story from the end of the Second World War to the present, from the New Towns of the immediate post-war era to the trendy converted warehouses of Shoreditch. This is a book that will make the world you live in come alive. If you are a town or a city-dweller, you are unlikely ever to look at the everyday world around you in quite the same way again.