Oscar Newman on Defensible Space, 1974

Defensible Space was a book, a TV documentary and a political movement, created by a then newly naturalised American academic, Oscar Newman.

This Horizon documentary 'The Writing on the Wall' featuring Newman was broadcast two years after the Pruitt-Igoe estate in St. Louis, Missouri was demolished. Pruitt-Igoe was the poster boy for urban decay and the failure of modernism, if that was the way you liked it. And that certainly was how Newman liked it. His critique of the public space embodied in so much of postwar planning and architecture would eventually lead to the situation we have today: a political distrust of council housing and modernist design, and a three decades long swing towards the privatisation of public space.

In Britain his arguments were taken up by Margaret Thatcher's pet housing theorist Alice Coleman, whose book Utopia on Trial was a florid retread of Newman's work. More from her here. In both cases it's hard not to find their arguments rather outside-in, blaming architecture for social conditions rather than examining the effects of poverty and deprivation on the residents of estates like Pruitt-Igoe or the Aylesbury Estate in Peckham, the Caledonian Market Estate, or Pollards Hill (the other places Newman visits in this documentary).

With many of the claims made by Newman about projects such as Pruitt-Igoe now debunked, this film remains a fascinating, if disturbing, glimpse into the beginnings of a neoliberal approach to housing: the rise of CCTV, the rejection of social housing as a good thing and eventually the embracing of privatisation of our public space as the solution for all ills.