Free The View From the Train by Patrick Keiller

outside the market, by philanthropic employers, civic bodies or committed individuals and groups.
    Since the late 1970s, ‘housing’ has been an unfashionable subject for architects and theorists. With a few notable exceptions – the architecture of Walter Segal, for instance – there has been very little house-building of any architectural interest in the UK beyond a few one-off houses, these often for architects themselves. Among theorists and other writers, the very idea of
dwelling
has been recognised as problematic. For example:
    Architects have long been attacking the idea that architecture should be essentially stable, material and anchored to a particular location in space. One of the main targets for those who wouldmake architecture more dynamic is of course that bulwark of inertia and confinement, the outer casing of our dwelling place that we call a house. Which explains why, as early as 1914, the Futurists put their main emphasis – at least in theory – on the complex places of transit:
    ‘We are [the men] of big hotels, railway stations, immense roads, colossal ports, covered markets, brilliantly lit galleries …’
    … We are dissatisfied because we are no longer able to come up with a truly promising form of architecture in which we would like to live. We have become nomads, restlessly wandering about, even if we are sedentary and our wanderings consist of flipping through the television channels. 9
    On the other hand:
    Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. 10
    In a culture in which so much of the space of work and transit is new, modern and professionally produced, but so much home space is old, amateurish and artlessly hand-made, one tends to forget that, like the industrial landscapes that inspired the modernist avant-gardes, the corporate economy only exists because it has been able to develop global markets in the necessities and longings of domestic life.
    The dominant narratives of modernity – as mobility and instant communication – appear to be about
work
and
travel
, not
home
. They are constructions of a work-oriented academic élite about a work-oriented business élite. However, as Saskia Sassen points out, ‘a large share of the jobs involved in finance are lowly paid clerical and manual jobs, many held by women and immigrants’:
    The city concentrates diversity. Its spaces are inscribed with the dominant corporate culture but also with a multiplicity of othercultures and identities. The dominant culture can encompass only part of the city. And while corporate power inscribes non-corporate cultures and identities with ‘otherness’, thereby devaluing them, they are present everywhere. This presence is especially strong in our major cities which also have the largest concentrations of corporate power. We see here an interesting correspondence between great concentrations of corporate power and large concentrations of ‘others’. It invites us to see that globalisation is not only constituted in terms of capital and the new international corporate culture (international finance, telecommunications, information flows) but also in terms of people and non-corporate cultures. There is a whole infrastructure of low-wage, non-professional jobs and activities that constitute a crucial part of the so-called corporate economy. 11
    Dwellings are rarely corporate space (see Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment
). Are dwellings ‘other’? The ‘other’ space in the city centres, where corporate power is concentrated, is usually the dwelling space of ‘other’ cultures and identities. The dwellings of corporate insiders are usually located at a distance, but even they live in homes that represent a level of