ABSTRACT
The final chapter deals with the intellectual (rather than medico-political) legacy of the Peckham Experiment. It examines its influence on British anarchists such as Herbert Read and Colin Ward, and on architectural and urban-planning theorists like Christopher Alexander, one of the most outspoken proponents of advocacy planning in the 1960s. It also points to the appreciation of the experiment by public intellectual Aldous Huxley and designer László Moholy-Nagy, who praised it in his acclaimed 1948 study Vision in Motion. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how such appropriations of the Peckham Experiment would pick rather selectively from the wealth of interpretations of its findings. Finally, the chapter discusses the place “Peckham” holds amongst and the influence it had upon other experiments of its time, such as the Northfield, Hawkspur and Hawthorne experiments. Introducing the notion of the “experimentalization of the social”, the chapter argues that during the second half of the twentieth century, not only biologists but sociologists and psychologists as well began looking upon social experimentation as a practice that could unleash the emancipatory powers of individuals. Thus, the final chapter also serves as a concluding contextualization of the Peckham Experiment, discussing its relevance against the background of Foucauldian theories of contemporary governmentality, which, as the chapter argues, rests on the concept of the self-as-experiment.
