Architecture: Structuring Segregation?

Poor Doors have hit the headlines are once again aimed at escalating levels of outrage, declaring that modern housing developments promote segregation and social cleansing.

However, we live in a time when cash-strapped councils can’t deliver their own housing programmes and we rely on private developers to provide housing nationwide. With an emphasis on investment returns and the drive to remove all that is deemed to adversely affect market value, certain tenures of housing are considered ‘undesirable’ and something to be reduced through negotiation or worse still, relocated geographically out of sight.

Meanwhile cities remain places of variety, difference and not exclusive to any one group. Across millennia different communities have lived in close proximity to each other where rich and poor live cheek-by-jowl, although instances of cohabitation are extremely rare. Is the current furore over 'poor doors' more in response to the dehumanising term (itself a journalistic construct), rather than the issues behind labelled and separate building entrances, or is it a part of the housing crisis that we feel in the 21st century should be solvable?

As Robert Hughes has stated, historically speaking ‘there was no architecture of the poor, all they had was slums’. Are 'poor doors’ not an example of a need for separation that has always been present in the city, or are they a signal that separation legitimises class bias.

Recent reports of a children’s playground being made inaccessible to particular ‘types’ of children within a mixed tenure development is certainly the canary down the coal mine in any debate about levels of segregation and integration. It raises a spectre; that if someone can think about children in such a way, then should they be a defining force when it comes to housing people and creating the places in which we all live?

We can all agree that we need to build more homes and no one wants to create ghettos with the urban fabric, but in the current climate of free market economics and conservative policy, are separate entrances really a problem and if they are then what other solutions are available that could lead to greater levels of social integration?

Featuring:

Heather Thomas, Sapphire Independent Housing

Dave Hill, On London

Akil Scafe Smith, Resolve Collective

Dinah Bornat, ZCD Architects

amongst others….