central government housing resources to estate refurbishment: from £45million in 1986-7 to £373 million in 1994-5 (Lund, 1996: 128). In DICE a team led by Coleman was to work closely with architects and embed her ‘corrective measures’ for design disadvantagement into the physical fabric of seven selected estates in London (see Coleman et al., 1988, Coleman; 1992). The first estate to undergo design improvement was the Mozart Estate in Westminster, where four overhead walkways were removed in order to break up a string of 23 linked blocks. According to DICE, the local beat police reported that this change ‘resulted in a sudden 55% drop in the burglary rate’ (Stage 111 Design Improvement proposals, 1992, DICE Consultancy, King’s College London, Alice Coleman’s team, see ). The emergence of DICE marked an irrefutable institutional and material instantiation of Coleman’s translation of Newman’s urban design methods. Yet this happened in a sceptical, even resistant, bureaucratic context and most certainly against the advice of the then Secretary of State (George Younger) who, one academic commentator suggests, got ‘handbagged’ by Thatcher (excerpted from interview undertaken by Elanor Warwick, 2011, with Paul Wiles, Professor of Criminology at Sheffield University at the time). Certainly, the final sum to come to Coleman was somewhat short of initial promises suggesting that Whitehall had some moderating effect. Furthermore, although Thatcher had promised Coleman access to crime statistics, so that her science could better replicate that of Newman’s, these were never forthcoming from the Police. As
cope with the maintenance and management of existing public sector housing stock. Alice Coleman’s critique of council estates fitted well with the Thatcher project of privatization, her rejection of (socialist) modernist architecture, and her ideas about responsibilisation through ownership. In many respects when these two women recognised each other through the graph in the air, what they saw was a commonly held conservativism. Peter King (2010: 17), the conservative 'housing philosopher' and long-time associate of the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, has recently argued, that Right to Buy policy was grounded in small ‘c’ conservativism, ‘which places at its centre the desire to keep things close and maintain control over our immediate environment’ and so ‘accords with human nature’. Certainly, this interpretation reiterates the essentialist assumptions about human territorial instincts that underscored Newman’s work and Coleman’s translation of it. But equally Coleman’s science was grounded in other conservative principles, those of entrepreneurialism and responsibilism. For example, in an earlier work on inner city decline, Coleman (1980: 4) argued that crime is a perverse expression of ‘self-interest’ in an era marked by ‘the decline of entrepreneurship… that harmonises with the common good’. It seems then that the aspiration of Coleman’s efforts to have her science serve society, was not merely to eradicate design disadvantagement, but to prepare the way for a more responsible and entrepreneurial future. Indeed, many of the physical interventions she made to estates with respect to shared entrances and common spaces, quite literally privatized the fabric and territory of multi-unit estates (and made them the responsibility of tenants) in order to create the space for Right to Buy. It is