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Imagining the street in post-war Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

JOE MORAN
JOE MORAN*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University, Dean Walters Building, Liverpool, L1 7BR, UK
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Abstract:

This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagined in post-war Britain. From the ethnographers and street photographers who emerged in Bethnal Green in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the planning concept of ‘streets in the air’, to modern geodemographics, the street has been a way of thinking through shifting ideas about civil society and collective social life. Imagined as a space of spontaneous community when set against the rational, contractual operations of both the market and the state, the street has been a means of articulating hopes for and anxieties about social change.

Type
Indian suburbs
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 166 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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