Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism

by Owen Hatherley

Overview

How to make a fairer, more just city

From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project.

This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us.

Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839762215
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/22/2021
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal,The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2015) and Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015), Trans-Europe Express (Penguin, 2018). He Lives in London

Table of Contents

Introduction: Two Thousand and Five 1

1 Soundscapes 15

Want to Buy Some Illusions? 17

Hurrah for the Black Box Recorder 23

From Revolution to Revelation: The Politics of the Pet Shop Boys 26

Dancing to Numbers 29

2 The Island 33

The New and Closed Libraries of Britain 35

Edinburgh's Golden Turds 41

False Landscape Syndrome: The Poetry and Propaganda of Andrew Jordan 51

The Shop Signs of Walthamstow High Street 73

3 Elsewhere 79

Arab Villages 81

Socialism and Nationalism on the Danube 98

Fragments of German Expressionism 133

My Kind of Town - Warszawa 161

4 Spaces 165

A High-Performance Contemporary Life Process 167

Strange, Angry Objects 191

Jane Jacobs Says No 221

The Socialist Lavatory League 244

5 Screens 255

Decadent Action: Vera Chytilová's Daisies 257

The Petroleum Sublime 261

And Then the Strangest Thing Happenedé 267

From Boring Dystopia to Acid Communism 278

Acknowledgements 319

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Owen Hatherley:

“Owen Hatherley’s eye is so acute, his architectural expertise so lightly deployed, his sympathies so wide and generous, that reading Landscapes of Communism is like a tour of a whole world of unsuspected curiosities and richnesses conducted by a guide whose wit is as refreshing as his knowledge is profound.”
—Philip Pullman

“A brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies.”
—Will Self

“Demonstrates the qualities of empathy and social conscience, combined with acute judgment, that confirms Owen Hatherley to be the only true heir today of the great architectural critic Ian Nairn.”
—Gavin Stamp

“Owen Hatherley brings to bear a quizzing eye, venomous wit, supple prose, refusal to curry favour, rejection of received ideas, exhaustive knowledge and all-round bolshiness. He travels, selfconsciously, in the famous footsteps of J. B. Priestley and Ian Nairn, and there can be no higher praise than to suggest that he proves himself their peer.”
—Jonathan Meades

“No one else writes so clearly yet with such elegiac intensity about the symbiosis that exists between history and the built environment, or the lives that are caught, mangled and realised in its midst.”
—Lynsey Hanley

“The clear-sighted vision, analysis and optimism of a writer like Hatherley shines through when we need it most.”
—Wallpaper

“An antidote to the market-dominated colonisation of our cities. [Hatherley] celebrates the civic values that drove politicians, civil servants and architects to build good quality affordable homes, well-stocked public libraries, hospitals and schools, where people had universal access to healthcare and education.”
—Eoin Ó Broin, Irish Times

“A valuable exploration of the many modernist projects that have defined our society and politics.”
—Esmond Sage, Morning Star

“Modernism’s most prolific and persuasive contemporary advocate … One of the joys of Hatherley’s writing is that he so often focuses on the unusual and eccentric.”
—William Whyte, Literary Review

From the Publisher