ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the usefulness of the ‘material turn’ to the study of urban governance through a case study of interwar state housing in Britain. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, materiality practitioners have increasingly reminded historians that ‘the social’, and its operation through the body, was negotiated not just by formal institutions and experts but the networks and technologies they managed as well. Housing construction was one meeting point for the knowledge and agencies that made up this network: the voluntary association, which published housing surveys and pushed for reform; architectural and planning experts, who designed dwellings and estates; central and local government, who financed and built housing; and professionals, who managed tenants and their properties. Material environments, of course, were never totally assured; systems of governance could break, be misused, or become new sites of politics and contestation. By studying the lived experience of public housing in Manchester, this chapter thus provides an example of both the benefits—and limits—of urban materialities and the governing of the body.
