ABSTRACT
Community architecture has attracted support from all parts of the political spectrum. Politicians from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Parties-when in power at local level —have supported and promoted various community-based initiatives. As a result community architecture is sometimes presented as a universal panacea, transcending politics and party. At the same time, it has encountered almost equally widespread resistance from the professional and local government establishment, and from entrenched political attitudes. This apparent paradox can be explained only by a recognition that the political nature of community politics, and the architecture it spawned, lies outside the traditional divide between Left and Right. For too long, the world was polarized between the ideological certainties of capitalism and communism, free market and State, individual and society. A political world divided so, could recognize only black and white, “us” and “them”. Any alternative, any attempt at neutrality, was dismissed from the one side as “neo-capitalist” or from the other as “crypto-communist”.
