ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with what has become the biggest growth area in the syntax of UK housing since the late 1960s, a time when designers still assumed that everything that was not completely private could be shared equally by everyone else. The chaos that followed, exacerbated as densities increased and echoed in many post-industrial North American cities, was first captured in the public imagination early in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Not even the vast growth in CCTV and other electronic security systems has prevented shared facilities, from car parks to useful things like laundries, storage and roof gardens, from being comprehensively vandalised or closed down because their security was too expensive to manage.
