Good Life Now : Leisure and Labour in Cedric Price ’ s Housing Research , 1966 – 1973

The Architecture of Housing after the Neoliberal Turn | Spring / Summer 2019 | 11–30 commodity, compressing its lifetime to twenty-five years, it also poses questions about the duration of the social form it houses, the family. Proposed as a solution to a national housing shortfall yet also concerned with satisfying consumers’ individual visions of ‘the good life,’ the short-life house selfconsciously operates at multiple scales. These encompass the human level of the home – the patterns of daily life, the paths traced by bodies through designed domestic space – and the market level of flows, consumption trends, supply and demand. In fact, the interconnection of the market and the home is fundamental to Price’s vision of housing as a disposable commodity, using consumption patterns as a measure of unmet needs and desires in the population. His writings on the project, as well as the form and intended operation of the house itself, articulate a vision of freedom from constraint, mobility, and a working day that blends into leisure. What is striking, when taking up his ‘short-life housing’ – and its parent projects, Non-Plan and the Potteries Thinkbelt – today, is how clearly his language aligns with what we now consider neoliberal discourse.


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method. The object is to change the heart and soul.' 9  is an ideological economic project -with a series of leaders, institutions, and key texts -but it is also a cultural process that coincided with and appropriated the dramatic shifts occurring in social norms in many parts of the world at the time of its emergence.
Fraser shares this view. For her, neoliberalism is a historical shift in capitalism that reverses the norms of its predecessor: while state-organised capitalism sought to 'use politics to tame markets, proponents of [neoliberalism]… use markets to tame politics'. 6 Connecting neoliberalism to architecture, Douglas Spencer traces a genealogy from May '68 to the depoliticised, iconic architecture produced today. For Spencer, neoliberalism is 'a truth game'; fundamental to neoliberal common sense is the idea that 'individuals can achieve only a narrow and very limited knowledge of the complexities of the world,' which casts the planning of society as an untenable -even dangerous -proposition. Instead, 'the economic market is better able to calculate, process and spontaneously order society' than the state. 7 The implications for architecture emerge in cybernetics and flexible designs, which offer freedom within parameters defined in advance. He connects this to neoliberal freedom, which is 'expressed through choices made within the economic market, but not through any choice or determination over the norms structuring this condition.' 8 These thinkers argue that neoliberal policy initiatives would not have succeeded without a crucial cultural component, which from the beginning addressed subjects on a personal level. The engineers of the neoliberal project understood the link between economic and social forces, seeking to change not only the material conditions of the populace but their very wants, needs, and desires.     As intended, Non-Plan caused controversy at the time of its publication, only magnified in retrospect when the 'experiment' became real in the neoliberal transformation of the London Docklands. 22  Hayek. 15 Hayek claimed that 'social planning for given outcomes … was insufficiently flexible to deal with the myriad needs and desires of a large population'. 16 The Non-Planners posed this same problem to the field of physical planning, an English tradition they despised, equating it with 'the old bourgeois culture'. 17 'Why don't we dare trust the choices that would evolve if we let them? … It's permissible to ask -after the dreariness of much public rebuilding, and after the Ronan Point disaster '. 18 Looking to American experience, they argued that decentralisation of industry would create suburban commutes, drawing people out of cities. They predicted 'colossal pressure for scattered, often small-scale growth in hundreds of villages and small towns,' which Non-Plan would allow. 19 Reacting to the British Planning Acts, they disputed 'the notion that the planner has the right to say what is "right"', calling it 'an extraordinary hangover from the days of collectivism in left-wing thought'. 20 In this context, deregulation, which has since been associated with the free market, appeared as 'a truly radical antiestablishment stance,' to left-leaning thinkers like the Non-Planners. 21       The Thinkbelt accepts the student as an integral part of the local authority housing programme, and the three-to-five-year student cycle is an opportunity for hot-house research into new living patterns and types of housing. The requirements of a student population approximate closely to the future pattern of a literate, skilled and highly mobile society. 30 In later issues of the 'Cedric Price Supplements,' Price returned to this idea with a new subject, asking: what happens when the nuclear family takes on the nomadic lifestyle of a student labourer?

The volatility of dwelling
In a car I would require What in homes is rarely seen The lineaments of a satisfied desire (Price, 1967-71) 31 The 1960s in Britain saw housing in a crisis, suffering from a shortage due to high consumer demand, a rapidly aging existing housing stock, and scarcity of usable and desirable land for building.
The post-war focus on 'slum clearance' in housing policy that had dominated the approach to housing 'blight' -clearing large segments of unsuccessful housing to build anew -had produced long waiting lists for council housing, which neither New Towns nor new towers could immediately satisfy. 32 In 1966, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government published The Deeplish Study, examining the area of Rochdale in Greater Manchester. 33 It was significant for marking a turn from the policy of job society wants them to do, they should be paid for it.' 25 The project sought to repurpose neglected manufacturing infrastructure, both mechanical and human, in a system dynamic enough to accommodate future changes in labour demand.
Spencer has posited, along with others, that neoliberalism is characterised by changes in the form of productive labour in society. 26 Drawing from  choice'. 40 In his words, they championed the breakdown between high and low, valuable and kitsch, navigating 'the entente between the avant-garde and "popularity"' which saw the avant-garde -once considered oppositional to the status quo, begin 'assimilating late capitalism' into its operation. 41 Price was was a regular contributor to Archigram's eponymous publication Archigram, 42 and he benefitted greatly from 'the shift toward informality and pop' they helped initiate in British architecture. 43 Price was also not the first to look to the freedom and pleasure of motor vehicles for inspiration. housing as a social concern -though perhaps the possibilities produced were not imaginative enough for his liking.
One antidote was the high-tech, unbuildable fantasies of Archigram, the group founded in part by three LCC architects. 39 Contemporaries of Price -who were, by contrast, proudly apolitical -Archigram also reacted against the constricting and planned, desired degree of occupancy and performance' only with a structure flexible enough to accommodate 'both "over" and "under" occupation'. 53 For site, he demanded 'maximum separation between the housing product and the land upon which it alights, enabling rapid response to greater mobility'. 54 The sort of home that could provide this, as can be seen in the news clippings and product brochures he collected on the new potential of caravans, would be temporary and easily adapted. 55   The idea was that the parts could be assembled in kits for transport to the site on a single truck.
As Fig. 3 shows, a wide range of fittings created a variety of choices, checked only by a two-level limit imposed by the structure. 63 Two sites were selected to illustrate the bene-          Price points out excitedly that 'vertical external skins of the initial models provide three planes of user activated variation'. 85 The inhabitants can vary their store-bought product as needed'; the autonomy of the individual members of this family is enacted through product selection, with the later purchases of the occupier absorbed by the house. [Fig. 9a  likely to be made in the near future is that for the provision of selfpace educational facilities, which, with the increase of educational radio, TV and postal services, are likely to be based primarily in the home'. 90 Advances in technology will allow intellectual working-from-home, which Price intends to accommodate. 91  Schneider and Till assert that in architecture 'there is a simplistic association of flexibility with progress: something that can move escapes the shackles of tradition, something that can be changed is forever new'. Within this logic, flexibility provides 'a convenient and immediate fix to that common architectural need to be allied with the "progressive" forces of modernity'. 100