Annika Eriksson, the contemporary Swedish artist, recently produced a piece of work entitled ‘Maximum happiness’ in which the façade of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield was illuminated by floodlights for one night. Her intention was to highlight the ambiguity of responses that have surrounded this landmark building since its completion.Footnote 1 It is the purpose of this article to consider this ambiguity in greater depth, to question why and how this building, despite being so dominant, has provoked such a range of responses. Built between 1957 and 1960 on hilltops overlooking the city of Sheffield, the Park Hill estate provided 995 flats to re-house over 2,000 people from slum clearance areas.Footnote 2 Its innovative design, consisting of huge snake-like blocks of flats, is perhaps most famous for its elevated gangways, dubbed ‘streets in the sky’, which, to many people's fascination, allowed the milk float access to every home. The flats were designed by architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, under the stewardship of the city architect J.L. Womersley, one of ‘the most fervent advocates of high-density flats’,Footnote 3 who, after visiting a succession of high-rise apartments around Europe, submitted the first plans in 1953. Inspired by the work of Alison and Peter Smithson and the so-called ‘New Brutalism’ movement, the architects sought a style that shunned nostalgic cosiness and brought architecture down to the bare essentials.Footnote 4 Unsurprisingly, such an innovative and large-scale project attracted much national interest and over the years the Park Hill estate has been dissected by an array of different commentators from numerous backgrounds – architectural, political, social, psychological – all attempting to define and evaluate this ambiguous site.Footnote 5 Yet, despite much early praise for this ambitious project,Footnote 6 analysts have subsequently been unable to reach any unanimous decision about what Park Hill represents, whether it succeeded, or what should be done with it. A spokeswoman for Urban Splash, the company currently renovating it, recognizes this impasse, noting that Park Hill ‘certainly polarises opinion, but we love it’.Footnote 7 In contrast to the love felt by her redevelopment company, others have viewed it as symbolic of the failures of utopian schemes to improve the human condition; for some it is an architectural treasure that needs to be preserved,Footnote 8 whilst for many others it is simply an eyesore that looms over Sheffield. Perhaps the most interesting thing to note is that whilst a huge variety of labels have been attached to the estate over the years, the building itself has hardly changed since it was completed in 1960.Footnote 9
Park Hills flats in 1982
Source: Simon Knott, Hyde Park and Park Hill Flats, Sheffield (1982): www.simonknott.com/.
It is, then, somewhat ironic that such a uniform and utilitarian building can produce such an ensemble of responses and emotions, suggesting that to appreciate the ambiguity surrounding the Park Hill estate it is first necessary to consider the ways in which it has been ‘read’.Footnote 10 How does one approach such a structure: from ‘whose perspective and in whose language’?Footnote 11 It is fair to say that many commentators on council housing have been guilty of adopting an assumed position of neutrality, outside discourse, from which to analyse sites that, assumedly, also exist in some natural space outside of the viewer's present.Footnote 12 Some have focused on national and local housing legislation and policy and the clashes that have occurred between architects and councillors,Footnote 13 whilst others have chosen to focus upon the way that ‘structuralist’ pressures exerted upon the building sector and financial market have influenced the type of structure built.Footnote 14 Alternatively, some have investigated the ways in which these sites have been managed, or mismanaged, by local authorities after construction.Footnote 15 More recently, historians and other scholars have taken an increasing interest in the ways in which changing discourses and ideas of housing external to these sites, notably in the media, have influenced popular perceptions.Footnote 16 Yet despite these varying, and often mutually exclusive, approaches, sites such as Park Hill still seem to remain somehow beyond our comprehension. The intention in this article is to try and open up, and then occupy, a different vantage point so that we can get to the root of this ambiguity.
Specifically, then, this article will take inspiration from Michel Foucault's writings on power, particularly those on the subject of ‘governmentality’, by which he means ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population’.Footnote 17 Although it would be both misguided and inappropriate to refer to, or to try and define, a rigid Foucauldian ‘methodology’ – Foucault preferred to think of his pronouncements as ‘propositions’ or ‘game openings’Footnote 18 – his interests in disciplinary practices, surveillance techniques and forms of conduct have the potential to shed new light on sites like Park Hill, which were designed to encourage and regulate the actions of their residents. The distinctive characteristic of Foucault's work is that, unlike the approaches mentioned above, he is able to bridge the divide between ideas and actions by exploring the interplay between ‘practices’ or ‘techniques’ and the ‘truth discourses’ used to justify them, relating a discourse ‘not to a thought, mind or subject which engendered it, but to the practical field in which it is deployed’.Footnote 19 Instead of analysing politics as a set of doctrines or ideals, he tries to understand it as a ‘way of doing things’, a ‘style of thinking quintessentially concerned with the art of governing’.Footnote 20 Accordingly, his work encourages the writer or commentator to adopt a more expansive and holistic approach to the concept of ‘government’, one that covers the ‘whole range of practices that constitute, define, organise, and instrumentalise the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other’.Footnote 21 Thus, for a complex and multi-layered site like Park Hill, which aimed to provide ‘something more than mere accommodation’,Footnote 22 his readings of power offer an approach that has the potential to uncover displacements and contradictions that other methodologies may not have seen.
Biopolitics
One near-constant theme in Foucault's work has been his focus on the various ways in which people's bodily functions have been regulated and controlled, leading him to coin the much used term ‘biopolitics’.Footnote 23 This concept, which refers to the ways in which modern governments have sought to rationalize and manage the problems presented ‘by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as population: health, sanitation, birth-rate, longevity, race’,Footnote 24 offers a useful starting point to begin investigating a site like Park Hill where the object and objective of the scheme was the population to be housed. Bearing this in mind, it comes as little surprise to find that the site Park Hill was built on was previously home to a slum that fell far short of the sanitary standards set forth in the various public health acts of the nineteenth century, with outbreaks of cholera and typhus common, overcrowding and children with ‘intelligence levels’ that fell below the national average.Footnote 25 Portrayed as a ‘worn out area adjacent to the city centre, and with a reputation derived from a crime wave centred there in the 1920’s’, the old Park Hill area was, according to Henry Foster, the city engineer, ‘clearly’ one of the most ‘undesirable features in the city's present living and working conditions’.Footnote 26 Thus, the decision to clear this area was partly driven by the desire to elevate the population's living standards to a specified level in order to ensure their health, well-being and, as Foucault would see it, the need to increase the body's ‘usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’.Footnote 27 Intervention was, thus, legitimized by the need to ‘remove the sources of infection and corruption’,Footnote 28 and construct an environment in which people's capacity to function as citizens could be optimized.
Sketches of the mathematically proportioned accommodation unit that Womersley commissioned: section through the 3 Bay Unit with typical dwellings
We can also see this concern for the subject's biological needs emerging in the design process for Park Hill. The numerous reports produced by both the Ministry of Housing and the Central Housing Advisory Committee (CHAC), which set out minimal standards of accommodation, were designed to regulate externally all plans produced in this period in the hope of standardizing the hygienic quality of the housing produced.Footnote 29 For example, the government manual The Density of Residential Areas (1952) outlined limits to population densities in new buildings, stating that in multi-storey sites the density should be no more than 200 people per acre.Footnote 30 In actuality, Lynn and Smith eventually put forward a plan with a higher density than outlined by the government, which, as a result, had to be personally approved by the minister of health.Footnote 31 Nevertheless it reveals how technocratic criteria formed the basis for governmental regulation of the human condition. Factors such as the distance of each dwelling from the lift and the ratio of dwellings per lift had to be regulated in accordance with government guidelines. Accordingly, Lynn and Smith appointed an engineering firm, Ove Arup and Partners, in 1954 to design a standardized accommodation unit to provide for the physical needs of the inhabitant. Dimensions, light and layout were all measured so as to ensure that each resident received a regulation flat to provide for their basic needs. Moreover, each unit was linked to a complex network of refuge disposal chutes and ventilation shafts, similar to those found at the Pimlico and Roehampton estates.Footnote 32 It is also necessary to take into account the economic rationale behind such a scheme; standardizing units and living conditions allows for the possibility of providing for the minimum human needs at the lowest possible cost. It is this logic of efficiency that Foucault identifies when he refers to ‘political economy’, as the ‘mechanisms of power which. . .are integrated into the productive efficiency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this efficiency and into the use of what it produces’.Footnote 33 The whole system of Park Hill was, therefore, designed so that the minimum possible input was provided to ensure the maximum possible output; in this instance, the efficient and healthy citizen.
On some level, then, the Park Hill estate catered towards the quantifiable and measurable citizen of biological and physical needs. The functionalism and utilitarianism of these aspects of the Park Hill scheme suggest that Womersley, Lynn and Smith believed in the possibility of catering for the needs of humans through management of the physical. It is, at this point, impossible to ignore the influence of modernist thinkers, such as Le Corbusier, with their belief in the power of humans to improve and reshape the environment with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology or practical experimentation.Footnote 34 Much, possibly too much, has been made of the influence that Le Corbusier's work and ideas had on the design of Park Hill, particularly his Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, which similarly deployed ‘streets in the sky’ in its design. Although, as Foucault points out, it is necessary to avoid crudely characterizing Le Corbusier as some sort of megalomaniacal ‘crypto-Stalinist’,Footnote 35 it is clear that much of his work was based upon the assumption that humans functioned in the much the same way as machines and, hence, needed an environment that would allow them to function at their optimum: ‘space and light and order’, he stated, ‘those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep’.Footnote 36 The rejection of ornamentation in architecture as trivial and false similarly reflected his desire to create buildings that would have functionality and efficiency as their core principles, demonstrated in his much-cited maxim, ‘the house is a machine for living in’. His work, plans and visions were, then, ‘extreme but influential, and they were representative in the sense that they celebrated the logic implicit in high modernism’.Footnote 37 In all his schemes it was the planner who measured the population, determined their needs and then applied solutions using a regimented and regulated plan. Similarly in Sheffield, Henry Foster claimed that the needs of the tenants could only be met through detailed research, analysis and forethought carried out by the local council.Footnote 38 The referents in this form of power are the abstract figures, results and statistics that the experts have compiled; decisions are made in relation to the ‘abstract, simplified human subject with certain material and physical requirements’.Footnote 39 In some respects, therefore, Park Hill is symbolic of a discipline of power that takes as its object and objective the quantifiable, biological subject of physical need, and seeks to regulate and discipline the subject's body; a type of power that seeks to ‘increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system’.Footnote 40
Sketches by Womersley demonstrating how the open spaces on the Park Hill estate would encourage sociable behaviour: second design for Park Hill, 1954/55
Social needs
However, set against this regimented form of control and regulation, Womersley's team also sought to construct an environment that would stimulate the conduct of the tenants. Inspired by the work of sociologists like Michael Young and Karen Stephen, who praised the social cohesion found in working-class slums, photographers like Nigel and Judith Henderson, whose evocative images of working-class London were widely publicized by the Smithsons, and the pioneering work of the so-called ‘Team 10’ architects at the 9th Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne conference and their Doorn Manifesto of 1954, which challenged many of the orthodox theories of earlier modernist architects, Lynn and Smith sought to design a building that would preserve and encourage the communal atmosphere of working-class communities.Footnote 41 In contrast to the accommodation units, which were measured and regulated to fulfil specific physical criteria, the elevated walkways, or ‘streets in the sky’, were conceived as malleable spaces in which the residents would be free to perform communal activities. Womersley, in his second report to the council in 1955, emphasized how the decks would ‘fulfil the function of “streets” within the building’, backing up his point by presenting a series of sketches showing women talking, children playing and couples relaxing in the variety of ‘open’ spaces created by the designers.Footnote 42 Combined with a variety of amenities, such as pubs, shops and launderettes,Footnote 43 these enclosed ‘decks’ were meant to replace the unmanageable back-streets and alleys of traditional slums whilst still retaining the sense of community the architects so evidently valued. As Womersley stated, the design of Park Hill would retain as many as possible of the ‘various ancillary activities which grew up naturally in the old area’.Footnote 44 This form of control, then, was subtly different from the kind described above; the design of the accommodation unit was based upon the principle of replacing the conditions of the slum, whereas the logic behind the ‘deck’ system was to retain, but institutionalize, elements of the slum. It was a technique of power designed not to impose a set of regulations upon the tenants but, rather, one designed to encourage them to perform in certain ways.
These aspects of the Park Hill design, therefore, catered not for the mechanical citizen of biological need but for a different kind of subject, the social citizen.Footnote 45 This concern with the social and communal aspects of the tenants’ conduct reflected the growing trend at this time to conceive of, in a Foucauldian sense, the ‘normalized’ subject as the social citizen, ‘the citizen adapted to society, whose pleasures and aspirations were to be realised in society’.Footnote 46 The necessary freedom of the subject was precariously balanced against the necessity of engaging in and contributing to the social. The problem, as one urban ecologist understood it, was that of ‘achieving in the freedom and anonymity of the city a social order and a means of social control equivalent to the family, clan, or tribal life of antiquity’.Footnote 47 Moreover, ‘if all sense of belonging to a community was lost’, a group of urban sociologists warned, ‘then one of the essentials of democracy will also be lost’.Footnote 48 Communities thus became the antidote to the apparent isolation and individualism that so many sociologists believed was at the root of the problems facing British society. This conception of control meant that architects and town planners necessarily formed and applied an ‘expanded science of habitation, which ranged from the technical to the socio-psychological’.Footnote 49 Need could not be satisfied by focusing solely on the biological subject; the social subject needed a new form of expertise.Footnote 50 Problems of isolation and loneliness, and ambitions of promoting satisfaction, required the territory of the mind to be mapped, measured and regulated.Footnote 51 One study of loneliness recognized ‘the dependence of social therapy on social reform and the dependence of social reform on social therapy’, calling for greater levels of sociological expertise in the planning process.Footnote 52 Thus the ‘social’ replaces, or coexists alongside, the physical as the domain that determines the behaviour and action of citizens and, hence, becomes a site to be controlled and managed. It becomes a domain with its own internal logic and governing principles, one that assumes a natural and organic quality; ‘social needs are as significant as physical needs’, claimed one town planner.Footnote 53 In the works of this period the ‘social’ is taken for granted as an area that planners should target, for, as Alison Smithson concluded, ‘a valid social entity can result from architectural decisions’.Footnote 54 Regulating the physical environment was no longer adequate, the social sphere also had to be shaped if authorities were to be able to discipline the conduct of their subjects.
In part this emphasis upon the social life of the subject was in response to the perceived inadequacies of previous modernist planning schemes. Le Corbusier, for example, had rejected local aesthetics and sentiments in favour of universal scientific standards. Yet, by overlooking the importance of communal and social life these planners had, it was argued, contrived to destroy the social fabric of previously cohesive communities. Commenting on one such scheme, Kate Liepmann noted how ‘it is a difficult task now to introduce common consciousness into the existing housing estates after the opportunities of the early formative years have been missed and indifference towards the community allowed to take root’.Footnote 55 Consequently, architects began thinking of ways in which they could encourage community development through their designs. On a basic level, Womersley's team followed the latest advice put forward by the CHAC and outlined plans to transfer whole communities into the new apartments, even retaining previous street names in the new estate.Footnote 56 Similarly, Ivor Smith also claimed that they did not mix up the family sizes on the estate for architectural reasons, but made the decision ‘as amateur sociologists’.Footnote 57 Yet more than this, the planners of Park Hill sought not only to retain the communal aspects of the displaced slum but also to improve upon it and construct a new, better community on the estate. On top of the physical provisions and amenities provided on the site, the city council also employed a sociologist, Mrs J.F. Demers, who became the first resident on the new estate and whose task it was to manage and monitor communal development. As an expert of the social domain, Mrs Demers, like other sociologists, was uniquely able to speak and act in its name, to instruct tenants how to act socially, giving them that ‘bit of encouragement and support at the beginning’.Footnote 58 Equipped with this level of expertise, Mrs Demers, along with the resident engineer and estate manager, provided a kind of internal method of control to complement the regulations imposed from above by the planners. The aim of the plan, as she herself put it, was to produce a ‘thoroughly thought out approach to human needs, integrating both high quality housing and social amenities, as well as the possibility of developing human relationships within this new grouping’.Footnote 59 Despite all the material provisions provided then, the planners believed that the ‘social citizen’ for whom the site was partly designed would also need a certain amount of expert guidance, encouragement and education.
Accountability
It becomes possible therefore to think of Park Hill as an estate created for a subject yet to be realized. The subject envisioned by Lynn and Smith did not pre-exist the estate but was to be created on the estate through techniques and technologies of power. The needs that they catered for were based upon the results of the ‘extraordinary amount of research’ carried out,Footnote 60 all of which had obeyed the rules and methodologies of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Thus, in order to fulfil their role in the Park Hill scheme, the tenants would have to submit themselves to the authority of expertise and conduct themselves in accordance with these regulations. Viewed in this way, it becomes hard to ignore a strand of authoritarian logic inherent in the scheme; tenants were regarded, as Foucault would see it, ‘both as objects and as instruments of its exercise’.Footnote 61 One would assume, therefore, that the Sheffield city council would only be held accountable in relation to the criteria outlined by scientific disciplines of expertise that guided the whole project, yet, somewhat paradoxically, they gave the task of evaluation to the tenants of the estate. In a report to mark the opening of the site, the Sheffield Housing Committee stated: ‘it must be left to others – particularly the occupants – to judge to what extent the Architects have been successful in solving this social problem’.Footnote 62 Thus, the residents, who had previously had others judge their needs for them, suddenly become the ones given responsibility to pass judgment. The rationale behind disciplines of expertise is that experts, thanks to their training and knowledge, are able to know and define the needs of subjects better than the subjects themselves. Hence the decision to pass judgment back to the subject seems somewhat inconsistent with the scientifically buttressed Park Hill scheme. Power, which had previously been imposed upon the subjects, was suddenly given back to them. The meaning of the plan thus becomes somewhat ambiguous as the planners are at once seeking to alter the conduct of the subject whilst simultaneously being controlled by their judgment.
That the issue of accountability should be so pivotal in the Park Hill scheme is in many ways symptomatic of the larger debates occurring at this time. The growing dominance and influence of welfare institutions, and the seemingly unfettered power they afforded to experts, inescapably clashed with the liberal ethos in this art of government, resulting in questions being asked about ‘how the machinery of government could itself be governed’.Footnote 63 For although architects could reiterate that ‘human needs must be the starting point for good architecture and town planning’,Footnote 64 they had somehow to prove the accuracy of their understanding of ‘need’. Put another way, if all power is reliant upon ‘truth discourses’, as Foucault terms it, it has to constantly ‘justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things’.Footnote 65 Thus, at the moment that disciplines of expertise were able to assume control over the liberal subject they became, at once, accountable to, and, hence, controlled by, that subject. It was this issue – how to alter the conduct of the subjects whilst still submitting to their desires – that architects and town planners necessarily faced during the 1950s and 1960s. Wilfred Burns, who was by this point the chief planning officer for Newcastle, was bemused by the fact that in many of the un-hygienic slums facing clearance the occupants ‘seem to be satisfied with their miserable environment and seem to enjoy an extrovert social life in their own locality’.Footnote 66 Similarly, a housing manager wrote how ‘need for better housing may not express itself as demand, there may be people living in slums who do not wish to move’.Footnote 67 A situation arises therefore where architects and town planners, equipped with expert and technical training, were seemingly able to recognize what people needed before the people themselves were able to. Subjects were seen to be incapable of grasping the benefits that planners sought to provide them with; they did ‘not express their ends clearly’, they stated ‘their ends in general terms’, and they ‘confused means and ends’.Footnote 68 Consequently, urban theorists began to elaborate techniques and methods that architects could use to present their plans to people in such a way that the subject would begin to think a bit more like the planner. Practices like holding public meetings, interacting with communities, being visible on proposed sites of redevelopment, and so forth, were recommended as techniques that would encourage subjects to evaluate their needs more rationally, and, thus logically, support the proposed scheme. Architects, then, faced the task of not only producing a suitable plan but also of guiding, educating and informing the citizen of the value of that plan; ‘if people can be persuaded that a need is real and important – that is if they understand the why of the matter – then what to do about it, or the how of activity called for can generally be managed’.Footnote 69 A cyclical relationship therefore develops between the planner and the subject, with the subject being supervised in order to be able to supervise the planner.
As such, Womersley's team sought to win over potential and future tenants to the estate from the outset. Womerseley assumed the responsibility of ‘selling’ the scheme to the public, holding a number of public meetings and exhibitions at which the public were informed of progress on the site as well as providing a steady stream of sketches and plans for the local and national press.Footnote 70 Moreover, as has been described, the appointment of Mrs Demers meant that residents, once they had moved in, could be guided in their conduct and taught how to understand and utilize the site they had just occupied. Aware that in the future these people would judge them, Womersley's team sought to incorporate and indoctrinate them into the planning process from the start. Yet despite these efforts, when surveys were subsequently conducted of residents’ responses to the scheme the interviewers still recognized the apparent limitations of the tenants’ expertise and hence their capacity to evaluate the site accurately and objectively. Visiting the site in 1965, one writer for the Architects’ Journal noted how ‘Sheffield people’ tended to be ‘cautious about expressing enthusiasm’ and had a tendency to utter ‘subjective impressions and random comments’.Footnote 71 A solution proposed by this architect – as these responses clearly did not satisfy his criteria for evaluating the site – was to observe the tenants’ ‘facial expressions’ and the ‘way they move’.Footnote 72 Mrs Demers herself, when conducting a survey in 1962, also expressed doubts about the capability of the tenant to provide an objective answer, noting how she had had to use a ‘number of cross questions’ as some residents had provided inconsistent answers on various issues.Footnote 73 It becomes apparent therefore that residents’ judgments were only valued if they were expressed in terms suitable to the surveyor; if tenants were unable to conduct themselves as judges then they were deprived of the power of judgment. Hence the disciplines of technical and scientific knowledge still dominated the relationships of power as tenants’ opinions could only be heard if they adopted the language and mentality of the planners they were evaluating. Bearing this in mind, it is interesting to note that in a survey carried out in 1967 the questioner noted how many of the housewives interviewed had used ‘the concepts, if not the terms, used by architects in discussing appearance’,Footnote 74 suggesting that at least some of the tenants were trying to fulfil their ‘obligations’ as free subjects in the Park Hill scheme.
A graph of responses to Park Hill, demonstrating how the tenants were unable to provide satisfactory answers; note how nearly half the residents questioned were apparently unable to explain why they were satisfied or unhappy with the site
Inevitably the inability of the residents to adopt the mentality of the architects they were meant to be evaluating ensured that the surveyors were repeatedly left frustrated, unable to produce satisfactory results. As the objective of these surveys was to ascertain which aspects of the building worked and which did not, the residents were obliged to provide answers and pose problems in such a way that they could be dealt with by the architect, estate manager or town planner. As Alison Ravetz notes in her recent study of council housing, ‘there remained a virtually un-crossable barrier between the observer and the observed’.Footnote 75 The specificity of the questions – focusing on measurable criteria such as the size of various rooms, the amount of play space for children or the amount of sunlight rooms received – was clearly intended to facilitate feedback that could be plotted in a statistical manner along a standardized scale or continuum and, hence, be used by planners in the future. Yet, despite these efforts the surveyors were repeatedly thwarted in their efforts, unable to produce coherent results and forced to concede that ‘there was no clear evidence to suggest that some building forms were more satisfactory for some household types than others’.Footnote 76 Womersley concurred with this assessment, remarking how the task of appraisal was made harder by the fact that ‘not everybody liked the same thing’.Footnote 77 Moreover, when the questions became less reductive the responses became more varied and, thus, even less manageable. Many of the responses seemed, to the interviewers, to be incompatible, as when nearly half the housewives said the estate looked like a ‘prison’ whilst most of the rest found it attractive.Footnote 78 Similarly, when questioned about the sociable access on the site, many housewives claimed that they felt lonely but only 8 per cent felt there were not enough social activities at Park Hill.Footnote 79 On a site of such uniform proportions, the variety and apparent inconsistency of responses became even more of an issue to the authorities. As the tenants were unable to provide answers that were compatible with the logic of the architects, their opinions and responses were unable to be mapped and, hence, became essentially valueless to the planning profession. Consequently, appraisals of Park Hill were, and continue to be, conveyed by a variety of professionals, experts and journalists based upon an equally varied assortment of criteria. Thus, without comprehensive or conclusive statistical documentation, the opinions of the tenants were overlooked and the task of evaluation was carried out without the intended referent.
Conclusion
It has been the intention of this study to utilize Foucault's theories on power to unveil the ambiguity that is inherent within the Park Hill estate, as his emphasis on ‘the nature of the practice of government’ allows the tensions, displacements and discontinuities of a site such as this to become visible.Footnote 80 In some ways, then, this approach has shown how Park Hill exists in a kind of grey zone separating past and present, being at once both outmoded and contemporary. On the one hand it is easy to pigeonhole it as an archetypal ‘high modernist’ scheme, due to the faith that Womersley, Lynn and Smith placed in the capacity of ‘positivistic, technocratic, and rationalistic’ knowledge to improve the human condition.Footnote 81 Furthermore, the growing disillusion in some circles with the loosely defined set of institutions known as the welfare state has impacted upon Park Hill, with both journalists and architects criticizing the apparently unregulated megalomania of Womersley's team, noting how the ‘design came from the pure speculations of Le Corbusier’, and satirically recording how in the 1960s they had ‘decreed that these unendurable barracks were the latest ideal homes’.Footnote 82 Yet this, as Foucault writes, ‘widespread and facile tendency. . .to designate that which has just occurred as the primary enemy, as if this were always the principal form of oppression from which one had to liberate oneself’,Footnote 83 crudely ignores and overlooks the complexity of this estate. For example, the street-deck system was not only a space designed to regulate the flow of movement around the site, it was also meant to offer the same level of social freedom that the old slum streets had provided. Likewise, it is misleading to claim that Womersley's team held unregulated power over the residents of the estate as they pledged their accountability to these people, and their needs and opinions. ‘Social theory is all very well’, stated a report by the Sheffield housing department, ‘but the opinions of the people who live there should be the criterion by which the success or failure of Park Hill must be measured.’Footnote 84 Technologies of control, such as public opinion polls and demographic censuses, designed to govern the conduct of those in control were utilized, technologies that are still in use today as ‘liberal governmentality depended, and depends, upon cultivating persons who could, and can, practise freedom’.Footnote 85 Thus, it is evident that the form of governmentality on the Park Hill estate fused together authoritarian and libertarian, or technocratic and democratic, rationalities of government. It is perhaps this paradoxical logic inherent in the Park Hill estate, this contestable meaning, which is behind the ambiguity of responses.
It must not be forgotten that Park Hill is, of course, a unique urban space and, as such, it is advisable to avoid expansive and far-reaching conclusions. ‘If we want to do an analysis of power’, Foucault once told a class, ‘we must speak of powers and try and localize them in their historical and geographical specificity.’Footnote 86 One distinguishing feature was the support that Womersley received from two Sheffield councillors, Harold Lambert and Albert Smith, who granted him a greater level of power and aesthetic freedom than most other city architects had at this time.Footnote 87 Yet despite these specific local factors, the problems that the Park Hill estate throw up still have a certain resonance for wider debates surrounding council housing. Primarily, it is hard not to find parallels between the contradictions in the Park Hill estate and those simultaneous ‘individualizing’ and ‘totalizing’ processes that Foucault has identified as being key components of modern governmental rationality.Footnote 88 The problems associated with trying at once to provide for the needs of both the ‘masses’ and the ‘individual’ are perhaps nowhere better illustrated than on the Park Hill estate. As this article has shown, on sites such as Park Hill where authorities try and promote sociability and freedom, there is an ever-present danger that the needs and liberties of the individual become an ‘indispensable element of governmental rationality itself’, for the tenant is not ‘merely free to choose, but obliged to be free’.Footnote 89 Thus, the ambiguity surrounding the Park Hill estate should perhaps be seen as symptomatic of the fact that Womersley's team tried to provide a certain level of material comfort whilst simultaneously attempting to cultivate the freedom afforded to the individual. As Foucault reminds us: ‘Men have dreamed of liberating machines. But there are no machines of freedom, by definition.’Footnote 90
