Utopias, Dystopias and the Changing Lawscapes of Social Housing

Authors

  • Helen Carr Kent Law School

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/fal.87

Keywords:

housing law, Spa Green Estate, social housing, utopia, scale, home ownership

Abstract

This paper provides an account of the design and development of the Spa Green Estate in North London. It describes the utopian aspirations for housing the working class of the radical 1930s Finsbury Council and the architect it employed, Berthold Lubetkin. It goes on to examine the  political and popular discrediting of social housing  from the 1970s and the consequent  present day complexity of tenures and regulation on the estate.  The account is placed in the context of the emergence of the claim that home ownership provides the appropriate solution for the housing of the working poor.  It uses concepts of lawscape, utopia and scale to demonstrate how law is implicated in the dismantling of one utopian project and its replacement with another and the difficulties that law has in addressing the inevitable injustices that emerge from this process. Its feminism lies in its acknowledgement of social housing (despite its patriarchal origins) as an important point of access for women to the emancipation of the city and as a critical space for imagining ways to live other than those determined by the market.

Author Biography

Helen Carr, Kent Law School

Reader in Law, Kent Law School, University of Kent

Downloads

Published

25-11-2013

How to Cite

Carr, H. (2013). Utopias, Dystopias and the Changing Lawscapes of Social Housing. Feminists@law, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/fal.87

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2013)

Section

Feminist Jurisprudence and the Question of Home

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
    1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work for any purposs with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

    1. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

  1. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).