IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

The estate became the model for public housing development in the UK during the late C19th and C20th as a response to poor living conditions and housing shortages. To match the scale of the problem, responses generally involved the comprehensive construction or reconstruction of neighbourhoods, and whilst estates were often built within urban areas they were typically designed as discrete and self-contained landscapes with their own social amenities, distinct from the surrounding context. In 2018 17% of the population of the UK lived in social rented housing- in urban areas typically within housing estates. This paper argues that the conceptual origins of the housing estate lie in earlier models of estate developed for the control of managed agrarian landscapes as a bodies of landed wealth and that these ideas because municipalised during the C20th. The work traces the history of country estates near London bought up and transformed into model housing estates. The research methodology draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus to examine the history of the idea of estate, including management practices; concepts of distinction, and the shifting definition of capital from financial to social, and in the current context, back to the estate as a primarily monetary asset. The research demonstrates that enduring ideas of belonging; inclusion and exclusion; boundary and patriarchal oversight of territory can be traced through the history of the estate and that underlying regeneration, densification, and gentrification lie enduring cultural practices.