John Flint (University of Sheffield) a nd Joe Crawford (University of Stirling)

1. Rational fictions and imaginary systems: Cynical ideology and the problem figuration and practice of public housing John Flint (University of Sheffield) and Joe Crawford (University of Stirling) Paper presented at the Housing Studies Association Annual Conference: ‘The Value of Housing’ University of York, 15-17 April 2014

2. The problem figuration of the contemporary housing crisis • Focused on UK and US • Carlen’s concept of imaginary systems and Zizek’s concept of cynical ideology • Embedded in national discourses and localised practice • To mask alternative social realities and deny an explicitly articulated politics of housing • Enhanced understanding of the practice and politics of housing • The public realm, including public housing, and the construction of social reality

3. Painting the housing picture: ‘painting out’ injustice? “States of physical environment serve as a substrate for justifications and rationalizations of the way things are, for the demonstration of problems and their explanation and for accusations of blame” (Hamblin, 1994: 332). President Franklin Roosevelt on the ‘ill housing’ of the United States: “But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope- because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out” (quoted in Heathcott, 2012a: 361).

4. Crisis, governance and naming the world • Catherine Bauer (1934): Modern housing- housing a legitimate arena for public deliberation and governmental action (Heathcott, 2012b) • Reactions to economic and social crisis in late Victorian period and after Great Depression of the 1930s was to establish public housing programmes in private and laissez faire societies • Naming the world (Bourdieu, 1991) • Defining the limits of urban governance (Crook, 2008)

5. Power and problem figurations • Foucault (1977) and Bourdieu (1984): Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks and disguises itself and dissimulates and obfuscates its true nature • Generating an imaginary of uniformity and order from chaotic and changing social reality (Scott, 1998; Carlen, 1991) • The construction of (public) housing problems (Stone, 1989; Jacobs et al., 2003) • Problem figuration (Van Wel, 1992)

6. Rational fictions and imaginary systems • Van Wel (1992): Rational fictions- structure of problem figuration is rational in terms of goals, structures and mechanisms, but assumptions and prioritisations reflect a structure of bias filtered through fictional images and interpretations of the problem and subjects of intervention (e.g. public housing or welfare state obsolescence) • Associative figuration (Rousseau, 1762; Barker, 1960; Anderson, 1983): how the world should be, linked to fairness and decency.

7. Carlen’s imaginary in practice • Carlen (2008): material reality counter to stated objectives of ‘official’ project (resource constraints and opposition) • Appearance of doing something and managing perceptions (Lovering, 2007)- the symbolic and unintended ideological products of governance • Economic and political impetus for imaginary practice: ‘everyone knows’, ‘acting ‘as if’’: rhetoric becomes reality and ‘acquiescence in the absurd’ (Carlen, 2008) • An imaginary order • Opposition, resistance, subversion, fatalism in housing practice (Barnes and Prior, 2009; Casey, 2005; McKee, 2014) • But also cynical ideology (Zizek, 1989)’ ‘they know perfectly well, yet they are still doing it’ • ‘The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things, the ideological distortion is written into its very essence’ (Zizek, 1989: 25)

8. Imaginary housing systems and practice • Priorities for allocation [in French social housing] could be multiple, indecipherable and apparently covert, because of the fiction of universal housing provision (Ball, 2012: 196). • Stock transfers and ‘the banking of myths’ and ‘uncontested’ facts (McCormack, 2009). • Homelessness practice in Scotland (Crawford, 2014) • Contract sales in post-war Chicago, with practice continuing as if causality never existed despite ‘everyone knowing’ the reality (Satter, 2009). • Practice embedded in an imaginary housing system that sustains its fictional as well as rational elements

9. Omnipotent housing systems and impotent housing governance? • The world as an ahistorical, fixed entity, impervious to the will of mankind and governed by the omnipotent, reified forces of ‘destiny’, ‘fate’ and ‘market’ (McCormack, 2009: 396). • David Cameron (2012) ‘growing phenomenon’ of lack of access to affordable housing • Bourdieu (2005): politics of housing as an articulation of the aspiration of home ownership that denied the realities of its possibility and sustainability • Harvey (1975); housing as a form of fictitious capital based on ‘imaginary costs’ and ‘stubborn illusions’ (Schwartz, 2002) • Slater (2012): ‘manufactured ignorance’ of the state

10. Reconfiguring housing realities • Public housing policy reconfigures the actual spatial, architectural and demographic reality of cities (Goetz, 2012): simultaneously a product of preceding rationalisations of the way things are (Hamblin, 1994) and a physical justification and endorsement of the new reality • Radical diminishing of the expectations that certain population groups should have for their housing provision

11. Conclusions • A fantasy linked to imaginary housing systems that sustain a cynical ideology masking social reality and which is essential to housing policy rhetoric and embedded local practice • The construction of the social reality of housing is equally a construction of the imaginary of what government might achieve • Gilroy (quoted in Slater, 2012): the imaginary of poverty in contemporary governmentalities reveals the poverty of the imagination • US society and elite discourse pretended that it did not know about slum tenements, exploitative merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estates, acted as if this reality did not exist, or constucted the fiction that society and government were incapable of addressing these implacable problems (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967; Helgeson, 2011) • Painting our housing injustice in Cameron’s terms is very different to Roosevelt’s painting out of injustice • “The official plan was to have no plan at all” (Platt, 2010: 584)

12. References • Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). • Ball, J. (2012) Housing disadvantaged people? Insiders and outsiders in French social housing (London: Routledge). • Barker, E. (1960) Social Contract (London: Oxford University Press). • Barnes, M. and Prior, D. (Eds.) (2009) Subversive Citizens: Power, agency and resistance in public services (Bristol: Policy Press). • Bauer, C. (1934) Modern Housing (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin). • Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge). • Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press). • Bourdieu, P. (2005) Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press). • Cameron, D. (2012) Welfare speech, Bluewater, Kent, 25 June 2012. • Carlen, P. (Ed.) (2008) Imaginary Penalities (Devon: Willan Publishing). • Carmichael, S. and Hamilton, C. (1967) Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, NY: Pergamon Press Inc.). • Casey, R. (2005) ‘On Becoming a Social Housing Manager: Work Identities in an ‘Invisible’ Profession’, Housing Studies, 23(5), pp. 761-780. • Crawford, J. (2014) ‘Beyond Justification: the role of ‘frames’ in creating imaginary housing systems’. • Crook, T. (2008) ‘Accommodating the outcast: common lodging houses and the limits of urban governance in Victorian and Edwardian London’, Urban History, 35(3), pp. 416-436. • Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin).

13. References (2) • Goetz, E. (2012) ‘Obsolescence and the Transformation of Public Housing Communities in the U.S.’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 12(3), pp. 331-346. • Hamblin, C. (1994) ‘Environmental Sensibility in Edinburgh, 1839-1840: The “Fetid Irrigation” Controversy’, Journal of Urban History, 20, pp. 311-339. • Harvey, D. (1975) Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanisation (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press). • Heathcott, J. (2012a) ‘The Strange Career of Public Housing’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 78(4), pp. 360-375. • Heathcott, J. (2012b)’ Introduction to the Special Issue’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 78(4), pp.357-358. • Helgeson, J. (2011) ‘The State of Blame in American Cities: Race, Wealth, and the Politics of Housing’, Journal of Urban History, 37(6), pp. 992-999. • Jacobs, K. and Manzi, T. (2013) ‘Modernisation, marketization and housing reform: The use of evidence based policy as a rationality discourse’, People, Place and Policy Online, 7(1), pp. 1-13. • Jacobs, K., Kemeny, J. and Manzi, T. (2003) ‘Power, discourse and institutional practices in the construction of housing problems’, Housing Studies, 18(4), pp. 429-446. • Lovering, J. (2007) ‘The relationship between urban regeneration and neoliberalism: Two presumptuous theories and a research agenda’, International Planning Studies, 12, pp. 343-366. • McCormack, J. (2009) ‘’Better the Devil You Know’: Submerged Consciousness and Tenant Participation in Housing Stock Transfers’, Urban Studies, 46(2), pp. 391-411.

14. References (3) • McKee, K. (2014, forthcoming) ‘Community Anchor Housing Associations: illuminating the contested nature of neoliberal governing practices at the local scale’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy • Platt, H.L. (2010) ‘Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago and Mexico City, 1850-2000’, Journal of Urban History, 36(5), pp. 575-593. • Rousseau, J.J. (1762) Of the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). • Satter, B. (2009) Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books). • Schwartz, J. (2002) ‘Tenement Renewal in New York City in the 1930s: The District- Improvement Ideas of Arthur C. Holden’, Journal of Planning History, 1, pp. 290-310. • Scott, J.C. (1998) State Simplifications (New Haven: Yale University Press). • Slater, T. (2012) ‘From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality: Rioting Against a Broken State’, Human Geography, 4(3), pp. 106-115. • Stone, D. (1989) ‘Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas’, Political Science Quarterly, 104(2), pp. 281-300. • Van Wel, F. (1992) ‘A Century of Families under Supervision in the Netherlands’, British Journal of Social Work, 22, pp. 147-166. • Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso: London).