Housmans are delighted to welcome Owen Hatherley and Laura Grace Ford to the shop to celebrate the publication of Owen’s latest book: ‘Walking The Streets/Walking The Projects.’

These are two of our most beloved, and exciting, writers working at the thresholds of psychogeography, urban theory and radical thought. So we are particularly excited to be able to get them in conversation at Housmans. Advance booking strongly recommended.

About the book:

A walk through the remnants of a social democratic America, and an argument about its future.

In the 1960s, a novel ideology about cities, and what was best for them, emerged in New York. Pushing against the state planning of the time, it held that cities were at their best when they were driven from the bottom-up and when organic, unplanned processes were allowed to run their course, in a spontaneous “ballet of the street”. Cities were at their worst, however, when the state stepped in, demolishing lively old neighbourhoods and erecting giant, sterile, empty “projects”. This book uses the method of this ideology ― walking ― to test how true it actually is about the “capital of the twentieth century”, New York City, with a brief interlude in the capital, Washington DC.

The “projects” that are walked in this book range from cultural complexes in Manhattan to New Deal-era public housing developments in Brooklyn, Harlem and Queens, from the social experiment of Roosevelt Island to Communist housing co-operatives in the Bronx, from the union-driven rebuilding of the Lower East Side to DC’s magnificent Metro. For all their many flaws, they prove that Americans could, in fact, plan and build fragments of a better society, which survive and sometimes thrive today in one of the unequal places on earth. Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects takes a hard look at these enclaves, and asks what a new generation of American socialists might be able to learn from them.

Our Speakers:

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for, among others, the Architectural Review, the Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin, the London Review of Books and New Humanist. He was culture editor at Tribune magazine and is the author of several books.

Laura Grace Ford draws on psychogeography, hauntology and the dérive, her work interrogates the psychic contours of urban space with a particular focus on subcultural scenes, marginal political networks and UK club culture. In 2011 Ford’s zine Savage Messiah, was published Verso and reissued in 2020. Part fragmented novel, part collage, the book is both a polemic against the marginalisation of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space. Ford’s practice spans painting, drawing, installation, sound and publishing, with an eye on the city’s emotional shifts. Ford’s work is held in public collections and is on the UK GCSE and A level syllabus. She has contributed to many publications including The White Review, Frieze, Art Review, Afterall and Dazed, as well as numerous academic journals. She exhibits and teaches internationally, and is currently a Somerset House Studios resident.