Housing an Anarchist Approach

by Colin Ward

Collection of essays on housing and the built environment from 20th century British anarchist and town planner, Colin Ward. First published by Freedom Press 1976 in London. COLIN WARD is well-known as an authority on housing and as an anarchist propagandist. How do these two themes combine? This book brings together articles and addresses covering thirty years of advocacy of an anarchist approach to housing. DIRECT ACTION, the first section, includes his now classic account of the post-war squatters' movement and relates it to the current signifancace of the squatters in Britain and elsewhere. HUMAN NEEDS identifies the missing component in public housing dweller involvement; and anticipates today's anxieties about the social effects of imposing official policies on people whose own perception of their housing needs has been systematically ignored. SELF HELP includes account of do-it-yourself housing in Britain and abroad, the remarkable achievements of the squatter settlements in the 'cities the poor build' in the Third World sketches the outlines of an anarchist approach to the city. PROFESSIONALS OR PEOPLE? is the question raised in the fourth section of this book. What went wrong with architecture and planning? Can we transform them from being the concern of a bureaucratic elite into a populist and popular activity? DWELLER CONTROL argues that the only future for the public housing, whether in our decaying cities or on new estates, is the tenant take-over.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics

182 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1976

About the author

Colin Ward was born in Wanstead, Essex. He became an anarchist while in the British Army during World War II. As a subscriber to War Commentary, the war-time equivalent of Freedom, he was called in 1945 from Orkney, where he was serving, to give evidence at the London trial of the editors for publishing an article allegedly intended to seduce soldiers from their duty or allegiance. Ward robustly repudiated any seduction, but the three editors (Philip Sansom, Vernon Richards and John Hewetson) were convicted and sentenced to nine months imprisonment.

He was an editor of the British anarchist newspaper Freedom from 1947 to 1960, and the founder and editor of the monthly libertarian journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970.

From 1952 to 1961, Ward worked as an architect. In 1971, he became the Education Officer for the Town and Country Planning Association. He published widely on education, architecture and town planning. His most influential book was The Child In The City (1978), about children's street culture.

In 2001, Colin Ward was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University.

Most of Ward's works deal with the issue of rural housing and the problems of overpopulation and planning regulations in Britain to which he proposes anarchistic solutions. He is a keen admirer of architect Walter Segal who set up a ‘build it yourself’ system in Lewisham meaning that land that was too small or difficult to build on conventionally was given to people who with Segal’s help would build their own homes. Ward is very keen on the idea of ‘build it yourself’ having said in response to the proposition of removing all planning laws, ‘I don't believe in just letting it rip, the rich get away with murder when that happens. But I do want the planning system to be flexible enough to give homeless people a chance’. In his book Cotters and Squatters, Ward describes the historical development of informal customs to appropriate land for housing which frequently grew up in opposition to legally constituted systems of land ownership. Ward describes folkways in many cultures which parallel the Welsh tradition of the Tŷ unnos or 'one night house' erected on common land.

Ward includes a passage from one of his anarchist forebears, Peter Kropotkin, who said of the empty and overgrown landscape of Surrey and Sussex at the end of the 19th century, ‘in every direction I see abandoned cottages and orchards going to ruin, a whole population has disappeared.’ Ward himself goes on to observe: ‘Precisely a century after this account was written, the fields were empty again. Fifty years of subsidies had made the owners of arable land millionaires through mechanised cultivation and, with a crisis of over-production; the European Community was rewarding them for growing no crops on part of their land. However, opportunities for the homeless poor were fewer than ever in history. The grown-up children of local families can’t get on the housing ladder’. Wards solution is that ‘there should be some place in every parish where it's possible for people to build their own homes, and they should be allowed to do it a bit at a time, starting in a simple way and improving the structure as they go along. The idea that a house should be completed in one go before you can get planning permission and a mortgage is ridiculous. Look at the houses in this village. Many of them have developed their character over centuries - a bit of medieval at the back, with Tudor and Georgian add-ons.’

Ward’s anarchist philosophy is the idea of removing authoritarian forms of social organisation and replacing them with self-managed, non-hierarchical forms of organisation. This form of federalism was put forward in part by Kropotkin and Proudhon and is based upon the principle that as Ward puts it- ‘in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop’

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first bought this book when I was still in High School and would’ve bought anything with the word “anarchism” (or “anarchy”) in the title. I tried reading it, found it boring and incomprehensible, and put it aside. Years later, I tried reading it as an adult, found it more comprehensible but just as boring, and gave up after perhaps thirty pages. Finally, I felt that I needed to either read it or toss it, and put it way at the end of my reading list. And finally read it this year.

So, the problems my younger selves had with this book derives from the fact that the author is a professional architect, addressing the housing problems of another country and historical context, so I suspect for most Americans, and perhaps especially American anarchists, there is no context to make use of his arguments. This is a collection of essays and lectures written from 1948-1976 in the UK, with a 1983 “postscript” to address a few things that were changing. The major difference between the USA then (or now) and the UK at that time is that an increasingly large portion of the population were being housed in publicly-owned housing blocks (or “Council Flats”) and, in short, the State was becoming the landlord for the majority of poor and working class people. He makes very coherent arguments as to why this was a terrible situation, whether the government in question was “socialist” or “capitalist” and takes fellow radicals to task for opposing occupant ownership (even by collectives) on the grounds of fighting “private property.” He makes good use of Proudhon’s famous “Proerty is Theft” and “Property is Freedom” slogans to point out the difference between landlordism and claiming ownership of one’s own immediate needs (he ignores “Property is Impossible,” however).

There is still a lot that I found uninteresting in this book. Some of it was simply too technical, and technical about the building materials of 50+ years ago at that. Some of it was wildly nitpicky, like taking Councils to task for fining people who repainted their windowsills. And little of it could be applied to the housing situation in the US, where government-sponsored housing projects are always run by private companies using grants. I do think he makes some very good points about the history of homeownership; that people in the past would simply set up a shelter on the land they had claimed, not worrying about “standards” like individual rooms for all family members, internal heat and lighting, or plumbing facilities, and then improve over time as their circumstances allowed. He never addresses how letting “shanties” establish themselves in pre-existing cities increases risks of fire, hygiene, pests, etc. or what to do about that. He does talk about the practicality of housing cooperatives, and how they can give people autonomy from State and landlord, but he sort of shrugs off any concern about gentrification.

I would say that for a specialty niche audience of professionals and historians, this book probably has some useful information, but I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone looking for applicable solutions today.

[g]

mwah. ward kan in ieder geval beter schrijven dan turner