ABSTRACT
This chapter has its origins in a moment when two social projects met. On the one hand it looks to the Adaptable Suburbs Project (ASP) at University College London (2010–2014) and on the other to a group called the ‘Seething Villagers’ who were approached as local enthusiasts to contribute to the ASP. Both groups were and are trying to do the same thing: make better suburbs. In what follows both groups are referred to as ‘social projects’, a term derived from the work of Elizabeth Povinelli (2011, 6) who describes them as ‘the thick subjective background effects of a life as it has been lived; and these thick subjectivities provide the context of moral and political calculation’. This term is preferred over ‘research project’ or ‘local project’ to allude to the ways in which each project has a particular social framing that is a tacit normative position on how making better works. The ASP encompassed the scale of London, considering suburbs as part of a larger spatial network. It had an advisory board indicative of its policy-facing outputs and deployed objective methods to generate and order data in line with its academic purpose. The Villagers, by contrast, work at a local scale, encouraging face-to-face interaction in fun, creative environments to develop their local community and sense of localness. These two projects are not against each other, indeed they are doing the same thing, making better, though in very different ways. It was, however, through their meeting that their mutual epistemological assumptions became revealed as social projects.
