MARGO HUXLEY
Department of Town and Regional Planning
University of Sheffield

In 1909, Raymond Unwin stressed not only the need to reduce residential densities in order to counteract the malign influences of the slums and enable healthy pursuits such as gardening, but also the need to produce aesthetic environments that would uplift the spirits of the ordinary working man and woman.  He suggested that a density of 12 houses to the acre would meet these aims: density was thus both a scientific calculation and a crucial factor in the creation of environments in which to foster the formation of desirable subjects.  However, the problem of bringing together density calculations, actual areas of land, housing types and appropriate bodies/populations was not as simple as Unwin’s ratio suggested.  Over the course of the next half century, English planning regulations struggled with the problem of how to calculate densities: the struggle was not so much over mathematics, as over the governmental rationales that underpinned the desire to ‘spread the people’.  In this paper, I suggest that: 1. density calculations are a spatial or environmental technologies of government that seek to foster different forms of subjectivity; 2. these technologies are not installed as instances of crushing modernist logic, but are cobbled together as solutions to proximate problems out of amalgams of existing practices and discursive ‘truths’; and 3. these considerations have contemporary salience for debates about urban forms and population distributions.