‘A city’, Roland Atkinson recently noted, ‘is not a natural occurrence…It evolves…according to the designs of its politicians, builders and planners, the competing interests of the powerful…and the accommodation of…these forces by the powerless.’ It is precisely this process of accommodation that forms the themes of these two books, both of which recognize how far the multiple interests that shape and form our cities go beyond the obvious cohorts of planners, investors and local authorities. ‘Whose city?’ is a question as likely to be voiced by those who are charged with developing the structures that make up our built environments as by those who use – or who wish to use – them on a daily basis. It is now widely recognized that alongside matters such as cost, efficiency and expediency less apparent factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, age or culture are as important in assessing a city’s success.

How urban life might accommodate these competing interests underpins each of these books in different ways. Owen Hatherley’s Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects locates the perimeters of this debate in the 1960s conflict between influential urban planner Robert Moses and author and activist Jane Jacobs, a leading figure in the campaign to save Washington Square and its surroundings from the Lower Manhattan Expressway. While Hatherley finds much to admire in Jacobs’ writings – and especially her insistence that the city is best understood physically by walking its streets and experiencing its sights, sounds and smells – he is less convinced by her overall condemnation of large-scale planned ‘projects’ which to her threatened the messy, organic life of the place.

Hatherley is less fearful of large-scale planning, arguing that its New York forms contain precisely the types of mixed community Jacobs set out to defend. His book takes us on a series of walks across New York (with a brief foray out to Washington DC) to experience its ‘projects’ first-hand from its streets. Here, ‘project’ is not reserved for the housing of less affluent citizens (the UK’s ‘social’ or ‘council’ housing) but takes Jacobs’ use to cover any urban development that has been ‘planned as one large ensemble’ (p. 3). Hence, the walks skirt more familiar New York sights such as the Rockefeller Center and Grand Central Station. But it is in the later chapters where a different New York emerges that the book really gets into its stride as Hatherley shifts to the more common understanding of ‘project’ to walk New York’s varied stock of affordable social housing.

These locations are varied, and less familiar to those acquainted with tourist New York. Hatherley walks us through early experiments such as the Co-Operative Village on the Lower East Side, close to the original clothing district where various co-operative schemes were developed by socialist activists from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union from the 1930s to the 1950s. There were also the ‘Commie Coops’, co-operative housing on the Bronx’s Allerton Avenue built by the United Workers’ Association whose residents retained their political identities long after the Great Depression had forced them into private ownership. He takes in Roosevelt Island, a ‘thin little island between Manhattan and Queens’ that features a rare New York example of Brutalism in Josep Lluís Sert’s 1970s social housing complex for the New York State Urban Development Corporation (p. 79). He also meanders through Queensbridge, the USA’s largest public housing estate whose size – over 3,000 flats – outstrips the entire public housing stock of many large American cities.

Hatherley outlines some of the varied reasons through which New York, the blueprint for many modern capitalist cities, ended up with one of the largest stocks of public housing in the USA. On Roosevelt Island, Rockefeller bankrolled the scheme against a backdrop of urban racial unrest, fearful of what might happen ‘if something wasn’t done to humanise American capitalism’ (p. 85). In the Co-Operative Village, union activist Abraham Kazan persuaded fellow members of the Socialist Party of America that providing decent housing could be one way of winning people over to socialism. Hatherley is no uncritical, sentimental observer. Quality is not uniform, we learn, as the 1937 Housing Act stipulated that public housing should be built to lower standards than private to protect the market for the latter. While much of New York’s public housing stock was desegregated from the 1930s, another requirement that tenants should be on the lowest wages led to the forced eviction of many higher-paid, mainly white, tenants in the more affluent 1950s and 1960s upsetting the racial mix of many schemes. Visiting Queensbridge, the project which came to stand for all that was bad about social housing in the 1980s and 1990s, Hatherley acknowledges that while it may no longer look like Hell on Earth (the title of a 1996 album by Hip Hop duo Mobb Deep whose co-founder Havoc grew up on the estate) the presence of no fewer than 360 CCTV cameras and the fact that he spent only an hour there, in daylight, may have hidden something of its nature from him.

Hatherley notes a recent resurgence in interest in earlier schemes which he attributes to the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) whose young members, enthused by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns, are looking for ‘a useable past’ to inform their activism (p. 189). How much of a blueprint these offer is debatable. Many earlier co-operative schemes are now in private ownership, others that remain public are moving towards what New York sees as a ‘London’ approach, mixing public and private regeneration in schemes which ultimately displace less affluent renters. Ultimately, though, the walking experience has left the author with a sense of ‘optimism for the projects of the future’ despite the current housing crisis.

Hatherley remains critical of attempts to apply Jacobs’ ideas in different national contexts such as in the UK where he feels that ‘public life is more likely to take place in the pub or the park than on the street’ (p. 8). Nonetheless, in Design for Play, Jon Winder finds her to be a useful aide in his broader examination of a century of conflict over how to accommodate children into public urban space in Britain. Jacobs’ views on this, and especially her perplexity at planners’ desire to take children off the streets and into designated play spaces provided some ‘compelling leads’ for Winder at the outset of his research (p. xi). The children under discussion are, of course, almost universally working class, living in the poorest and most overcrowded neighbourhoods (more affluent children are amply provisioned with access to gardens). Winder begins in the mid-nineteenth century when Dickens and Mayhew were suggesting that play areas could be beneficial to children’s health while removing ‘the annoyance’ street play caused to the general public (p. 18). This tension could also be seen in the public parks that opened in large industrial cities in the second part of the nineteenth century. Many had designated play spaces that seemed at odds with broader regulations prohibiting boisterous behaviours. Manchester’s Phillips Park relocated its playground to prevent the enjoyment of factory girls impinging on other park users.

A growing consensus of the need for more organized play spaces for children by the 1920s – in part linked to fears of a rise in juvenile delinquency during World War I – fuelled a demand for playground equipment. The figure of Charles Wicksteed, whose interests in its production were both altruistic and financial, is used to explore this trend. Wicksteed’s playground near Kettering embodied competing contemporary ideas about play. It was progressive to a certain degree, eschewing gender segregation and the older gymnasium type apparatus that curtailed imaginative play and offering more elaborate contraptions, often based on circus rides. But at the same time, its reliance on fixed equipment limited children’s possibilities by controlling their activities to a degree. The playground also proved highly effective in popularizing the firm’s approach to play, showcasing its equipment as a prototype which proved a highly lucrative business.

Competing versions of who – and what – playgrounds were for became more marked after World War II with the advent of Adventure Playgrounds. The radical idea that children might design their own play spaces with minimal adult intervention was imported from Denmark by landscape architect and children’s campaigner Marjory Allen. Her pathbreaking article ‘Why not use our bombsites like this’ showed children ‘building with scrapwood, digging in the mud…and nursing a fire’ in the pioneering ‘Junk Playground’ in Emdrup, outside Copenhagen (p. 138). ‘Adventure Playgrounds’ (Allen preferred this term to ‘junk’, finding the latter too pejorative) required no specialist fixtures and fittings, but were not a cheap alternative as their success relied on the presence of a full-time play leader. Nor were they immune to commercial pressures, as Winder’s chapter demonstrates. By the end of the 1960s, the ideal of a free space shaped by children’s own constructions had been replaced in many areas with static products adopted from earlier playground designs to replicate the forts, dens and stockades that adventure playground advocates hoped children would put together themselves.

The competing discourses that run throughout Winder’s account reach a crescendo in the final chapter that covers the 1970s up to the present century. Advocates for freer play and a growing number of professionalized play workers (who balanced the identities of politicized community activists with diligent municipal employees) faced a growing discourse rooted in concerns for children’s safety. The focus of safety concerns expanded to suggest that children were at constant risk. Traffic, one of the initial concerns prompting a rise in playground provision in the twentieth century, was now threatening allocated space – Quarry Hill flats in Leeds reallocated much of its playground space to parking in the 1960s (p. 209). Other dangers were feared from the infrastructure (with a peak in hospital admissions from playground injuries each school holiday) the environment (dog fouling spreading toxocara canis) and a growing fear of child abductors and molesters. Yet while Winder is able to establish how such concerns are merely the latest in a long tradition of anxiety over playgrounds, it is less clear from his account which way these tensions might resolve in the present day.

Whose city is an underpinning theme in these books, as both speak to how different groups with less access to power have established spaces in modern cities. These spaces have at times been contentious, with competing discourses attempting to shape them and direct their use. Over the past century, both playgrounds and public housing have been challenged for their cost, or criticized for their inability to turn a profit. Yet, as the books describe, they have survived – and been defended – by their users and by a wider community, aware that a successful city will accommodate much more than a single group of residents.