Streets-in-the-sky : The rise and fall of modern architecural urban utopia.

Streets-in-the sky is a form of multi-storey working class housing
which is important in today's society for two reasons.
Firstly, because street-deck housing became especially popular during
the post-war rebuilding of British cities following the inter-war
introduction of the idea and the successful development of the Park Hill
scheme in Sheffield in the 1950s. In the 1960s, especially in the second
half of the decade, the design professions, several leading local authorities,
and central government undertook the development of street-deck housing
throughout the United Kingdom. It proved to be especially popular, outside
London, in the economically declining or static regions of England; relatively
little being built in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Hence streets-in-the-sky tended to be developed in those English regions where the basic
export industries of coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and textiles were
subject to the most comprehensive state-controlled restructuring. The large scale public investment and labour resistance to change associated with
industrial restructuring were therefore often partnered by a form of high
density housing more acceptable to the financially overburdened local
authority and the 'anti-flats' culture of the English than the economically
and socially unpopular tower block.
Following the building programme there was a decline in the fortunes
of modern architecture, the labour movement and the United Kingdom economy.
With that decline came a pronounced reduction in the quantity and quality of
this type of urban housing. In the 1970s, the poor construction, difficult
access, anti-social use of the 'street' and the stigma attached to living
on the estates usually led to the schemes becoming especially difficult-to-let.
Thus, in a quarter of a century, this particular housing form had changed
from being a central element in the modern architectural urban utopia to its
opposite - a microcosm of the problems facing British cities in their decline.
Secondly street-deck housing is important because its history brings
to light the contradictions between different ideas and different political
and economic interests, and reveals how these contradictions can be
temporarily overcome by the development of a particular form of urban housing.
These patterns of conflict and consensus are not fully comprehended by
existing "counter-revolutionary" and "revolutionary" theories of urban form
and change. In the former case we have tried to show how the assumptions of
so called 'postmodernism' are incorrect. And in the latter, how a far broader
interpretation of the totality (base and superstructure) is necessary as a
basis to knowledge and action.