Free The View From the Train by Patrick Keiller Page B

a high percentage the children and grandchildren of the initial owners. They have returned after they first had left the houses of their parents.
    Frampton has described Siedlung Halen as ‘one of the most seminal pieces of land settlement built in Europe since the end of the Second World War … a model for reconciling development with place-creation and with the maintenance of ecological balance’. 15 If Halen represents something approaching the modern attainment of Heidegger’s
dwelling
, as Frampton seems to suggest by his subsequent reference to Heidegger, it is intriguing to learn that many of those who live there occupy the houses of their parents.
    We are more familiar with this kind of
dwelling
in the context of its loss. In a World Service radio interview, a Bosnian refugee in Mostar longs to return to his house in Stolac, fifty kilometres away, from which he was evicted by his Croat neighbours, even though the town is still under Croat control: ‘My family has lived in Stolac for centuries … I love the smell of the river.’ For most of us, there is another kind of
dwelling
:
    The purpose of this work is to … bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term ‘consumers’.
    … In our societies, as local stabilities break down, it is as if, no longer fixed by a circumscribed community, tactics wander out of orbit, making consumers into immigrants in a system too vast to be their own, too tightly woven for them to escape from it.
    … Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electro-nicised and computerised megalopolis, the ‘art’ of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days. 16
    If we think of ourselves as
consumers
in this way, perhaps our difficulties with housing are easier to understand. How is housing
consumed
?
    In the context of the urban home in the UK, de Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’ as a response to the predicament of being a consumer evokes not so much do-it-yourself – currently a bigger market in the UK than new house-building – but the way that the character of the public-sector housing ‘estate’ is changing ‘as local stabilities break down’. In inner London and elsewhere, the system of allocating public-sector housing on a basis which reflected its philanthropic origins in the nineteenth century has been fractured since the 1970s by ideas like the ‘hard-to-let’ flat, by the ‘right to buy’ and by an increase in social mobility generally. Public-sector housing was financed by sixty-year loans, and was often designed by critically respected architects. It aimed to be of far better quality than that produced by the private sector. Often the more architecturally ambitious developments (including some influenced by the model of Halen) were difficult to build and were regarded as problematic early in their history, but some of them have aged well and have gradually accumulated populations who find them attractive as places to live.

    Alexandra Road Estate, London NW8, in 1999, designed by Neave Brown of London Borough of Camden’s Architects Department in 1968, completed in 1978
    Whatever the wider implications, perhaps architects can take some comfort from this. The notion of ‘the everyday’ in architecture offers a welcome relief from conventional interpretations of architectural value, especially in a culture where most ‘everyday’ building is not produced with much architectural intention, but it seems to affirm the spatial quality and detail of architects’ architecture where it exists. Similarly, the subjective transformations of spatial experience characteristic of both the