ABSTRACT
The work of Octavia Hill as a housing reformer through a tenant management system and her ‘upliftment’ strategies is quite well known and is engaged with here. Her connection to Ruskin and her understanding of the use of compromised space and the compromise it brings to the domesticity of the poor is also pointed to. Hill's connection to the Barnett's and Toynbee Hall is used to illustrate how the ‘settlement’ system of Oxford graduates helped bring a secular missionary zeal of cultural corrections to the East End of London. The emergence of building regulations aimed at housing reform is also pointed to as evidence of a concern for correcting and controlling the urban poor. The chapter switches focus to Cape Town and the admirable ‘Hostels to Homes’ project undertaken by Julian Cooke, Paul Andrew and the hostel dwellers themselves. The conversion of single-sex migrant hostels from the apartheid era to family units brings another sense of how an architecture of care is also driven through genuine upliftment concerns that also require activist skills. The chapter notes the limits of interior domestic space drove the architects to design outside semi-public spaces as the ‘living room’ for the hostels.
