ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 2014, as I was drawing to a close a book I was writing on architecture, psychoanalysis and social housing, I discovered that my flat in Southwark – and so the very desk at which I had been writing – was in the council’s ‘estate renewal zone’. 1 The property consultants Savills had been advising the council of the need to ‘unearth the potential’ of public land, including ‘brownfield sites’, a term which for them included fully occupied housing estates. 2 This raised for me uncertainties around my home. I had written before about social housing, but writing about the home in which I was living and the site of that writing itself, figured the relation of my life to my writing practice differently.
