Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 12, No.

2, March 2011

A ‘building event’ of fear: thinking through the

geography of architecture

Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter

Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK,
loretta.lees@kcl.ac.uk

This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower
block in inner London. Thinking through this ‘building event’, the paper returns to earlier
work that called for a move towards ‘a critical geography of architecture’ and draws on
the work in so-called new geographies of architecture over the past decade. A series of
arguments related to the human experience of buildings is made. Latourian actor network
theory-type approaches in architectural geography are criticised for having little to say
about emotion. An argument is made that the work on affect in geography needs to
develop a more complex sense of human subjectivity and to take the force of the material
more seriously. More generally new critical geographies of architecture are urged to
attend to the theoretical, conceptual and methodological intricacies of affect/emotion,
materiality, immateriality and human subjectivity.

Key words: geography of architecture, actor network theory, building event, fear,
emotion, affect, high rise/tower block.

Introduction time of night, you know, and to my flat. (interview,

When I was first told I was going to live in a high-
rise block I thought I was going to have a heart
attack. (interview, Corrine, Edrich House, 2005)
And they come in . . . they sleep . . . especially
up here on the higher floors . . . and I’ve been asking
for someone to do something on my lock. Now
sometimes three o’clock in the morning I can hear
them at the door. You know they’re drunk or
drugged or something and they’re wandering
around. And it frightens the life out of you. You
know, you think—who the heck’s coming in at this
Judith, Taplow House, 2005)
The interviews quoted above are taken from a
recent project on the experience of high-rise
living in inner London1 (see Baxter 2008;
Baxter and Lees 2009); they demonstrate
people’s fears of, in and about the British
council tower block (see Rose, Degen and
Basdas 2010, on feelings of, in and about
buildings). As the quotes demonstrate, Cor-
rine’s fear is a more general fear of, about
council tower blocks, whilst Judith’s fear is
situated in her own council tower block and is

ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/11/020107-16 q 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2011.545138
108 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
related to actual events outside her front door.
As Smith, Davidson, Cameron and Bondi
(2009: 1) state, emotions, like fear, have a
‘culture, history, seasonality, psychology,
biology, economy and so on’. According to
Gifford (2007) high-rise buildings evoke at
least six fears: the high-rise leap (suicide),
being trapped in a fire, the building falling
down, that (post McVeigh and 9/11) the high
rise will be attacked, the spread of commu-
nicable diseases due to the density of people,
and fear due to the fact that the sheer number
of people in a high-rise building are strangers
sharing your dwelling; this fear of strangers
leads to a fear of crime, a felt lack of social
support and the feeling of absence of commu-
nity. Anonymous interactions in the visually
screened-in areas of high rises, like lifts and
stairwells, create the objective possibility of
crime. Gifford makes the important point that
the very fact that high rises have entrances
with keys and guards proves that this
particular fear exists, even if no strangers
manage to enter the building. Indeed, the
design of the high-rise block has long been
criticised for causing social problems, crime
and fear (Coleman 1985; Jephcott and
Robinson 1971; Newman 1972; Rainwater
1966, 1970), whilst against this technological
or design determinism others have pointed to
social factors such as poverty and the
demographic concentration of socially mar-
ginal or excluded tenants in high rises (see
Hillier 1986; Power 1997; Spiker 1987). But
such sociological and demographic expla-
nations can be just as determinist and mono-
causal as the design determinism some of them
have challenged.
Fear of course is situated, affected by local
spaces/places and events, and by wider spatial
settings (Pain 2009: 475). Although the
different scales of feeling (scales of fear) in
the above interview quotes are related (see
Cahill 2006, on ‘jumping scales’), in this paper
we focus on an experience of fear that
occurred in a council tower block. We do so
with the explicit aim of investigating how far
architectural geographies have come over the
past decade or so in moving towards a more
active and embodied engagement with the
lived experience of buildings. In a similar vein
to Lees (2001) we begin by thinking through a
case study. In this case we focus on a particular
incidence of fear that took place in a council
tower block in inner London. The feeling of
fear being experienced is inside the building
but some of the events producing that fear are
external to the tower block (occurring in a
shop and a police station earlier, and in the
subject’s personality and socio-cultural his-
tory, etc.). We analyse this particular ‘building
event’ of fear, drawing on ideas about a critical
geography of architecture (Lees 2001) and on
subsequent geographies of architecture (e.g.
Jacobs 2006; Jacobs, Cairns and Strebel 2006,
2008; Kraftl 2009, Kraftl and Adey 2008;
Llewellyn 2003, 2004), the literature on affect
(e.g. Anderson 2005, 2006; Thrift 2004) and
the new emotional geographies literature (e.g.
Bondi, Davidson and Smith 2005). Like Rose,
Degen and Basdas (2010) we are interested in
building events and feelings and like them we
are interested in the theoretical and methodo-
logical problems that emerge. We make a
series of arguments related to the human
experience of buildings in the paper: first, we
argue that Latourian actor network theory
(ANT)-type approaches in architectural
geography have little to say about emotion;
second, that the work on affect in geography
needs to develop a more complex sense of
human subjectivity and to take the force of the
material much more seriously; and more
generally, that new critical geographies of
architecture need to attend to the theoretical,
conceptual and methodological intricacies of
 A ‘building event’ of fear 109

affect/emotion, materiality, immateriality and

human subjectivity.

A building event of fear in a council tower

block

They waited for me. One night I was coming about

one o’clock in the morning. They followed me from
the bus stop. Very terrible. I don’t know what would
have happened if I had caved in. They really would
have killed me. And they waited until I entered the
lift. There’s one there and one there and one there.
Now we do you. What they didn’t know . . . I had a
knife . . . So they cornered me there and I took it
out. (interview, Kaseko, Totteridge House, 2006)

Kaseko lived in Totteridge House. Built in

1969 it is the tallest tower block on the York
Road Estate in Wandsworth, inner London
(see Figure 1). In interview, when discussing
his experience of high-rise living, he recounted
an incident that had happened some fifteen
years ago when the high rise he lived in was
owned and managed by Wandsworth Council
(it is now a co-op—see later). In a previous
essay on the lived experience of the high rise in
inner London (see Baxter and Lees 2009) we
adopted the ANT of Bruno Latour (1992,
2005) because we questioned any absolute
distinction between the social and technical in
architecture and its lived experience:
In keeping with an ANT theoretical framework our
analysis focuses on interaction and on the ways in
which the quality of life and experience of London’s
high-rise residents are shaped through practical and
material engagements and through the interaction
of factors that cannot be understood as either
exclusively social or technological, but instead as
hybrid assemblages of both. (2009: 157)
At the same time we were critical of Jacobs
(2006) and Jacobs, Cairns and Strebel’s (2006)
Figure 1 Totteridge House, Wandsworth, at
the time of the incident. Source: courtesy
Borough of Wandsworth.
ANT approach to the residential high rise
because it seemed strangely disassociated from
the feelings of the residents in the high rises
under investigation and there was little on
the actual lived experiences of the high-rise
residents. To counter this we sought to merge
aspects of the ‘critical geography of architec-
ture’ (Lees 2001) with the ‘new geographies of
architecture’ (Jacobs 2006) literature. But as
Rose, Degen and Basdas (2010: 337) note, our
account acknowledged ‘the human imbrica-
tion in building events’ but did not give the
human sustained attention nor explore how
‘the relation of human subjectivity to the
materialities of big things might be complex,
multiple or ambiguous’. Partly this is because
we were writing about the lived experience
of forty-three high rises across inner London.
110 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
By way of contrast this paper focuses on a very
specific human subject, building (high rise/
tower block) and event.
So let us begin by exploring this building
event of fear through an ANT approach where
the human (Kaseko) and the building (Totter-
idge House) are hybridised into a ‘building
event’ (see Jacobs 2006) of fear. A Latourian
perspective shows us that neither the building
nor the person experiencing the fear are the
most important components in a ‘building
event of fear’; rather they are both just one of
many components. Following Latour (2005)
this keeps the social and the technical/mater-
ial, the macro and the micro, on the same
explanatory plane. Looking at a ‘building
event of fear’ allows the various human and
non-human allies that create the event to come
into view, and follows, if loosely, Deleuze
(1993). This means that the notion of ‘event’
that we use is not that found in Aldo Rossi’s
(1982) The Architecture of the City, where he
argues that architecture is the ‘fixed stage for
human events’ (1982: 22). Rather, for Deleuze,
an event arises from a set of particular forces
and every event is a unique instant in a
continual flow of changes (and becoming)
(see Deleuze 1993). This Deleuzian theory of
event also forces the researcher away from the
building per se towards other forces. In so
doing it pushes Lees (2001) further beyond the
materiality of architectural form towards
immaterial forces, although as we argue
later—not too far! For the ‘event’ considers
the immense complexity of an experience—
from a sensation (of fear) to the presence of
architectural form.
As the interview with Kaseko unfolded it
became apparent that six factors played their
part in this building event of fear. There were
three broad factors, which could be found in
some of the other high rises investigated in the
project too, which interacted with three other
factors that were more specific to this
particular fear event. As Thrift states:
[p]articular affects such as anger, fear, happiness and
joy are continually on the boil, rising here, subsiding
there, and these affects continually manifest
themselves in events which take place either at a
grand scale or simply as part of continuing everyday
life. (2004: 57)
The grand scale: broad or macro factors
The first was the design of the building.
Totteridge House rested on stilts (Le Corbu-
sier’s pilotis) and the ground floor was open
and accessible to all and also dark (because of
the shadow of the building above) and lacking
clear sight lines (because of the stilts). The
lifts were accessed from this open space (see
Figure 2). The lifts under the pilotis were the
space/place where this incidence or moment of
fear occurred.
This is a classic indefensible design because
it is not overlooked by windows and does not
encourage resident territoriality. Drawing
on Jane Jacobs’ (1961) scathing critique of
the Radiant City idea and Oscar Newman’s
(1972) Defensible Space: People and Design in
a Violent City, British geographer Alice Cole-
man’s (1985) Utopia on Trial: Vision and
Reality in Planned Housing launched a savage
critique of the high rise as an ideal public
housing type in the UK (see Jacobs and Lee,
under review). According to Coleman, the
most problematic indefensible spaces in the
council tower block, spaces which increased
the probability of anti-social behaviour, crime
and fear, were common areas such as internal
corridors, stairwells, lift lobbies and entrance
halls.2 Here the tower block design causes
affect (see Kraftl and Adey 2008 on the role of
affect in architectural design), people are more

Figure 2 Open access to the lifts at Totteridge House. Source: Richard Baxter.
fearful if they cannot be seen and criminals are
more likely to act out if they feel they cannot
be seen. Coleman’s design determinism argued
that the design of high-rise public housing
estates directly affected human behaviour—
causing crime and fear of crime or anti-social
behaviour. But the case for design or techno
determinism was unproven (Wassenberg,
Turkington and van Kempen 2004: 11) and
Dicken (1994: 127) scolded Alice Coleman
(and Oscar Newman) for ‘engaging in the very
type of architectural determinism which they
took modernist architects to task for’. Yet
residents of this (Totteridge House) and other
stilted buildings surveyed frequently reported
that they felt unsafe because they feared
muggers could hide behind the stilts (pilotis)
A ‘building event’ of fear 111
and lurk under the high rise. Kaseko com-
mented:
The stilts . . . it didn’t help, because from my
experience I saw muggers and people with evil
intent hiding behind the stilts. You could come out
of the lift and take a short cut to the road like that.
All of this was open. (interview, Kaseko, Totteridge
House, 2006)
Following the advice of advocates of design-led
crime prevention (see Warwick and Lees 2008),
local authorities and particularly the housing
associations who have taken over from them in
the UK began to invest in retrofitting high rises
with perimeter fencing to secure the open areas
around them and prevent intruders from
gaining access. In keeping with the doctrine of
112 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
defensible space, these fences are often see-
through iron bars to allow for surveillance and
create security (see Figure 3). These new gated
communities do not house the middle classes
but public housing tenants. But Kaseko’s
‘building event of fear’ occurred before
Totteridge House was gated.
Second, Totteridge House also lacked a
functioning security system to control access
to the premises. As such Kaseko’s assailants
were able to follow him into the high-rise
grounds and corner him in the lift, where they
could not be seen. But only in the worst high
rises in our sample, e.g. those with serious
social problems, were lifts mentioned as a site
of anxiety and fear for tenants because they
were enclosed spaces that were not under
surveillance. By way of contrast the lifts in the
successful high rises in our sample did not cause
anxiety and fear (see Baxter and Lees 2009).
Lack of entry control and security systems is
Figure 3 New secure access today at Totterridge House. Source: Richard Baxter.
another building design flaw highlighted by
advocates of design-led crime prevention that
local authorities have tried to address, invest-
ing heavily in CCTV, buzzer control systems,
and in some cases, doormen/concierges. Tot-
teridge House is now managed as a co-op, a
perimeter fence, CCTV, an audio/visual inter-
com, and a covered walkway have now been
installed (see Figure 3).
The relative effectiveness of these different
security measures has been the subject of
extensive applied policy research, often based
on correlation analysis between resident
satisfaction and the presence or absence of
particular security features (Office of the
Deputy Prime Minister 1997). The problem
with that tradition of work is that it misses the
Latourian insight about security systems as
hybrid technical assemblages of human and
non-human elements—or more simply that
both human and technical modes of security

can fail or succeed under particular circum-
stances. In our research we found that while
some of the most successful high rises with the
most satisfied residents had twenty-four-hour
concierge services, there were other buildings
where the concierge systems were not effec-
tive. Residents complained that the doormen
were unreliable, often sleeping on the job, or
not showing up at all. With long hours and
low wages, staff turn-over was high, under-
mining their role as a secure presence and ‘eye-
on-the-street’ (Baxter and Lees 2009).
One solution to that problem is to
redistribute and delegate the doorman’s
responsibility to technology and to residents
themselves. Thus, local authorities and hous-
ing associations have invested heavily in
installing CCTV controlled entry phones that
enable residents to perform the role of the
doorman themselves. For cash-strapped public
housing bodies this solution has the added
attraction of cutting the annual wage bill, but
as Latour shows us, this kind of delegation
depends upon a wider assemblage of elements,
both human and non-human alike. In our
research we found that some high-rise
residents complained that CCTV worked
only intermittently, either because of vandal-
ism, poor maintenance or both. To function
effectively, technology and design depend
upon their social context and enactment/man-
agement. None of this was present during
Kaseko’s building event of fear.
The third factor in Kaseko’s story, neigh-
bourhood context, is one that design determi-
nists tend to ignore altogether. Policy-makers
likewise prefer design-led solutions because
these are more amenable to immediate policy
intervention than the more complex issues of
neighbourhood poverty and social exclusion
(an argument made in Lees 2008). In the 1980s
and 1990s Kaseko’s neighbourhood was
deprived and had a reputation for deviance
A ‘building event’ of fear 113
and criminality. It was ACORN classification
type 55—a multi-ethnic purpose-built estate—
in which only 1.1 per cent of the UK population
live. Residents of his building discussed how
trouble makers from nearby estates used to
come to Totteridge House to burgle flats and
many tenants had installed metal cages over
their front doors to deter burglars. The criminal
behaviour was such a problem that a fearful
Kaseko discussed how he had bought a large
Alsatian dog. As recently as 2004 anyone could
enter the block and ascend to the top floor
(see The Independent 2004). But things at
Totteridge House have improved lately—of
the forty-three high rises we studied Totteridge
House was in the top ten in terms of liveability.
This is because it has been transferred from
Council to co-op management made up of the
residents who screen/interview new tenants
and who subsequently lobbied the Council for
the funds for new security measures. The St
Mary’s Park Safer Neighbourhoods Team now
run a drop-in surgery at Totteridge House once
a week and the wider Wandsworth area has
now seen significant gentrification and the
social changes that go with that. Nevertheless,
at the time of Kaseko’s building event of fear,
the concentration of socially marginal groups
in this high-rise estate and surrounding this
estate was a significant factor.
Everyday life: the particular or micro
factors
Kaseko’s fear was experienced as a result of
these three broad factors, but these interacted
with three other particular factors, which were
more specific to this ‘fear event’. The first was a
robbery that had occurred earlier in the week.
Kaseko happened to be looking for vegetables
at a local newsagents owned by a friend of his
called Mr Kavi when three men with baseball
114 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
bats entered the shop. They shouted at the
customers, rounded them up against one of the
walls, and demanded that Mr Kavi open his
till. After he obliged they emptied the till and
then ran out of the door threatening violence if
anyone told the police.
There used to be a shop owned by a very good
friend of mine—Mr Kavi. A West Indian group—
there were three boys. They went in there and used
whatever weapons they had. Put the people on the
wall and ransacked the till. They took whatever
they could and I saw them. (interview, Kaseko,
Totteridge House, 2006)
History plays an important role in the
development of Kaseko’s fear. Memories of
past injustices lead individuals to anticipate
future oppression or violence with a sense
of anxiety and dread as we see in the next
interview quote from Kaseko further down
(see also Rose, Degen and Basdas 2010, on how
memories can produce emotions).
The second concerns agency and the choices
Kaseko made after the robbery. After Mr Kavi
called the police most of the customers left
because, remembering the last words of the
robbers, they did not want to get involved.
However, Kaseko decided to stay because
Mr Kavi was his friend and, later in the day,
even ended up going to the police station to
give a statement. Unfortunately, by the time
he had finished his statement the robbers
had already been arrested and he passed them
as they were being escorted through the
station’s foyer. This unfortunate second meet-
ing meant that the robbers knew exactly who
had ‘grassed them up’.
The third factor involved the nuances of
Kaseko’s personality. Fear is an emotional
response to threats and danger. It is a mental
and physiological state associated with a wide
variety of feelings, thoughts, and behaviour.
Fear is a subjective experience and associated
with mood, temperament, personality, and
disposition. Most people would have told
the police about the dilemma and taken
precautions, for example, not going out late
at night on their own. However, Kaseko had
an attitude whereby you took care of your
own problems and he even refused the help of
his friends. So he kept the problem to himself
and mentally prepared for the impending
attack. He even carried a large knife with him
in his trench coat whenever he went out.
So from the moment I left the police station I knew
what they were going to do. In fact my friends said
when you go co-operating with the police they will
want to do you, so you should get ready. I said
I don’t want anybody to help me, I can do it. But
since then I learnt a lesson even if I see incidents
I don’t see them. (interview, Kaseko, Totteridge
House, 2006)
Moving towards a more affectual and
emotional analysis
This Latourian analysis is very useful in
pulling out the different assemblages, human
and non-human, that make up this ‘building
event of fear’. However, something is missing.
This something was felt during the interview-
ing of Kaseko, even though Kaseko was
recalling an experience of fear that had
happened some fifteen years ago the intensity
of his feelings were very apparent in the way
he spoke and acted in interview. Moreover,
reflecting on what Kaseko said also brings to
the fore the performance of his fear—the
carrying and wielding of a knife. To repeat:
They waited for me. One night I was coming about
one o’clock in the morning. They followed me from
the bus stop. Very terrible. I don’t know what would

have happened if I had caved in. They really would
have killed me. And they waited until I entered the
lift. There’s one there and one there and one there.
Now we do you. What they didn’t know . . . I had a
knife . . . So they cornered me there and I took it out
[says in an intense way ]. (interview, Kaseko,
Totteridge House, 2006)
A Latourian analysis tells us something about
fear as affect but hardly anything about fear as
emotion. But both the affectual and emotional
geographies literatures (see, for example,
Bondi 2005; Bondi, Davidson and Smith
2005; Thrift 2004) attend to the represen-
tational issues around emotions such as fear.
As such it is worth turning to these literatures
for some guidance as to where we might take
this ANT-inspired study of fear in a council
tower block.
Affect and emotion are often used inter-
changeably but Thrift (2009: 81) views them
apart and asserts that ‘emotions are everyday
understandings of affects, constructed by
cultures over many centuries’ (see Pile 2010
on the separate theoretical and conceptual
histories of affectual and emotional geogra-
phies). They are the how of emotion, they
describe the motion of emotion both literally
and communicatively (Thien 2005). As Clough
with Halley (2007: 2) state: ‘Affect constitutes
a nonlinear complexity out of which the
narration of conscious states such as emotion
are subtracted, but always with “a never-to-be
conscious remainder”’. If we turn to the
literature on affect that has developed in
geography since Nigel Thrift highlighted the
issues around what he calls non-represen-
tational theory (see Thrift 2007), we can
think about the performance of fear in the
above ‘building event of fear’. As Wood and
Smith (2004: 535) state: ‘performance is a
non-representational geography; an active,
practical, sensory engagement with the making
A ‘building event’ of fear 115
of the “now”’. Just reflect on Kaseko’s knife
carrying as part of the performance of his fear.
What this tells us is that fear is not a singular
emotion but is linked to other emotions, such as
in this case, boldness. But as stated earlier
Kaseko was carrying a knife because of earlier
memories (in the shop and in the police
station). His fear is not just occurring ‘now’ at
the moment of the attack, it may have climaxed
in the ‘now’ when his attackers followed him
into the lift under his tower block but the fear
had been percolating in Kaseko for some time.
For Thien (2005) affect flits over everyday
life and emotional subjectivities and precludes
the ways in which bodily memory plays out
(see Pain 2009: 479). One way to broach this
preclusion is to develop an account that builds
on both emotional and affective geographies,
for emotions like fear are neither actions
nor passions, they are both (see Pain 2009;
Simonsen 2007).
In addition, Tolia-Kelly (2006: 214 – 215)
argues that the literature on affect tends to
occlude the issues of power and difference
‘that reverberate through the materiality,
through which affective capacities are figured,
shaped and felt’. In Kaseko’s ‘building event of
fear’, and indeed in the performativity of his
fear, there are issues of race, class and personal
history that need to be attended to. These
are issues that the emotional geographies
literature might guide us through, for this
literature teaches us to think plurally about
the capacities for affecting and being affected.
The emotional geographies literature tells us
how the power geometries of our present are
linked to our pasts and that fear, as an emotion,
is intrinsically fluid, embodied and relational
(Bondi 2005: 437; Bondi, Davidson and
Smith 2005). The methodological challenge
is to tap more readily into human sub-
jectivity (Rose, Degen and Basdas 2010) and,
as Pile (2010) argues, it is certainly worth
116 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
looking again at the psycho-analytical geogra-
phy literature. This is something that the recent
literature on fear (see Pain and Smith 2008)
needs to attend to, for fear in this collection
remains abstract, strangely representational,
inscriptive and discursive, the analysis needs to
be much more emotional and psycho-analyti-
cal (see Pile 1996).
But, having moved from a Latourian
analysis towards the literature on affect/emo-
tion, maybe we have gone too far from the
material (the built environment in which the
fear was experienced) towards the immaterial
(the individual subjective experience of fear)?
We have moved fully from reading space as a
noun to space as a verb, from the represen-
tational to the relational. A number of
geographers writing about affect have been
critical of the excesses of the cultural turn’s
move towards the immaterial and have voiced
calls to rematerialise geography (e.g. Jackson
2000; Lees 2002; Philo 2000). Criticising the
fallacy of what they see to be misplaced
concreteness in these calls to rematerialise
geography, Latham and McCormack (2004),
however, manoeuvre to be even more abstract
in order to grasp the corporeality of the
material by taking seriously the real force of
the immaterial. Following Massumi (2002)
they argue that the materiality of the city is
something processually emergent. Buildings,
more often cities, for them are not some kind
of solid background stage on to which social
life projects itself, rather the material (the
building, the built environment) is emergent
(see also Jacobs, Cairns and Strebel 2008):
invoking materiality does not necessarily offer a
‘solid’, or ‘concrete’, foundation to which the
immaterializing tendencies of the cultural turn
might be tethered. Indeed, the tendancy to demand,
for instance, that theory justify itself in relation to
something more concrete is actually a tactic that
postpones a fuller understanding of the material.
This is not least because concrete itself, or indeed
any other building material, is not a ‘brute matter’.
It is a particular aggregate organization of process
and energy. It is no more (or less) ‘real’ than
apparently ‘immaterial’ phenomena like emotion,
mood and affect. (Latham and McCormack 2004:
705, emphasis added)
Latham and McCormack (2004; see also
Anderson and Wylie 2009) push their lens
right into Amin and Thrift’s (2002) world of
prepersonal, transpersonal intensities, rela-
tionalities and pushes, and these organise the
specific encounters of bodies and cities (build-
ings) as particular assemblages. Here the space
of a building is so saturated by affect that it
and affect become coincident. But surely this
takes the equation too far away from the
person/individual, away from singular bodies
and histories. Indeed Thrift is concerned about
such a situation—the bent towards being after
or beyond human—in his own theorising:
I would not like to take this agenda to its limits.
I believe that singular bodies can make an inventive
difference which is sometimes of a different order
from other hybrids. (2009: 81)
Likewise Rose, Degen and Basdas have voiced
similar concerns:
the relentlessly presentist performative account
of human subjectivity found in the work of
geographers of affect is not a fully adequate
conceptualisation of subjectivity . . . The persistent
spontaneism of affect theory in geography makes it
hard . . . to grasp the obduracy of past experiences
. . . In their focus on the ‘here and now . . . [and]
that which is not yet’ (Anderson 2005: 649),
affect theorists have little to say about that which
has been, or will have been, and its relationship to the
present. (2010: 345)

In relation to the human experience of
buildings the work on affect in geography
then needs to develop a more complex sense
of human subjectivity but at the same time
I would also argue that it needs to take more
seriously the force of the material.
The ‘brutalist’ concrete modernist architec-
ture of the council tower block is material, and
indeed this specific design (and indeed its
cultural history) is a significant factor in this
‘building event of fear’! At the same time as
developing a more complex sense of human
subjectivity, by moving more readily towards
the emotional geographies literature, I would
like to keep the tower block within the
explanatory frame as a solid, concrete material
space that co-produces the fear that Kaseko
experiences, for the high rise adds to Kaseko’s
experience, redefining his vulnerability in light
of tower block stereotypes and cultural
histories and in real terms in light of the
tower block’s design (and the affect this
causes). Keeping the material and the imma-
terial in balance, to get to the sensual world of
materiality and emotion, to combine the
functional and the emotional, however, calls
for a conceptual juggle that informs our
understanding of the relationship between
‘the self and the places of our (en)actions’
(Thien 2005: 453). Emotions are an important
part of this interface:
They are a vital element of the connections we have
to the world. They are between, in motion and
animated by the movements and contacts the body
has with its surroundings. But emotions also
encompass other times and places as they
negotiate an engagement with the world. (Saville
2007: 897)
Adey (2008), Amin and Thrift (2002) and
Thrift (2004) argue that architecture is a
technology increasingly being used to engineer
A ‘building event’ of fear 117
affect, that architecture itself is key to the
production of affect (see also Kraftl 2007;
Kraftl and Adey 2008). But the production of
affect is not always that desired. This is obvious
in Kaseko’s ‘building event of fear’—because
the design of the pilotis and the lack of
defensible space engenders and sets the scene
(if not the stage!), not for a utopian experience
like Le Corbusier and other modernist archi-
tects envisaged, but rather for the sense of fear
experienced and indeed for the actual event.
Here we do not see architecture (the materiality
of the built environment) as a fixed stage (like
design determinists) rather it is a fluid scene.
Conclusion
We would concur with Rose, Degen and
Basdas’s recent criticism that ‘the experiencing
of buildings by their human inhabitants . . . has
been poorly theorised’ (2010: 334) in the
literature on the geography of architecture.
Kraftl and Adey have gone some way towards
theorising and conceptualising how architec-
ture can invoke affects among human users of a
building ‘through a combination of architec-
tural forms that . . . direct the active dwelling
and performance of inhabitants, memory and
emotion’ (2008: 218). Yet there remains a
relative lack of attention to human subjectivity
in new architectural geographies, for example,
as Rose, Degen and Basdas (2010: 337)
argue—the work of Jacobs (2006) and her co-
authors (Jacobs, Cairns and Strebel 2006,
2008) gives little attention to how feelings
might hold ‘big things’ together, this neglect,
they argue, parallels the uninterest in human
subjectivity found in much of the science
and technology literature. Architectural
geographers must turn more fully towards
human subjectivity in their analyses of the lived
experiences of buildings/architecture. As this
118 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
paper argues, we could learn from the new
emotional geographies literature.
Steve Pile (2010:17) is rightly critical of the
ever-expanding list of emotions that geogra-
phers are now shopping for. He asserts that
emotional geography must know why
emotions are important and interesting and
must extend its repertoire of geographies.
In this case of a ‘building event of fear’ in a
council tower block, the emotion of fear is
important and interesting because of the vast
literature on the high rise that asserts that
fear is related to bad design, to indefensible
spaces—to the materiality of the tower
block—and because of the residual attraction
of design-determinist ideas in contemporary
British urban policy (see Bell and Jayne 2003).
It is also important and interesting because
others argue that fears in high rises are more
associated with the fact that they house the
socially marginal, urban outcasts (see Wac-
quant 1993, 2008). Gifford (2007) in his
review of the social and psychological effects
(fear is one of them) that high rises have on
their occupants concludes that, moderators
aside, the literature suggests that social
relations are more impersonal and helping
behaviour is less in high rises than in other
housing forms, and that crime and fear of
crime is greater. Only detailed analyses of the
lived experiences in tower blocks can throw
light on these different and problematic
readings of high-rise public housing.
Rose, Degen and Basdas (2010) have
recently attempted to theorise building events
and feelings but where they focus on generic
feelings, in this paper we focus on a particular
emotion—fear. Yet like them we are inter-
ested in a more nuanced account than the new
geographies of architecture, and the litera-
tures on affect and emotion, have presented
thus far. This paper represents an attempt
to re-read and extend Lees’s (2001) ‘critical
geography of architecture’, to elicit a more
active and embodied lived experience of the
building (of architecture) than design-deter-
minist literature, the sociological literature, or
the new geographies of architecture literature
have done thus far. Kaseko’s ‘building event
of fear’ outlined here is not a nuanced
account by any means, it was not meant to
be, rather we use it here as a vehicle through
which to drive through the geography of
architecture towards more of a focus on
human subjectivity.
A ‘building event of fear’ is complex, for
sure when experiencing fear in the council
tower block Kaseko’s embodied experience of
the architecture (or design) is important (Lees
2001) as his comments on the stilts and tower
block design reveal. But fear, as an emotion, is
fluid. It is an experience that is at once inside,
yet outside of the building and the person
experiencing it. Fear is as an emotion—an
embodied subjectivity and a situated self-
feeling which locates people in a network of
human and non-human relations (Wood and
Smith 2004: 534). Tapping into the ‘emotional
topographies’ of the lived experience of
architecture, whether of fear or some other
emotion or feeling is the way forward for new
geographies of architecture. This means a
sideways move from studying the affective
geographies of buildings/architecture towards
the emotional geographies literature (and the
human subject). Of course, as Pile (2010)
states, in focusing on subjectivity we distance
ourselves somewhat from affect theorists,
given their suspicions of the psychological
subject. But we do not want to move as far
away from affect as we feel Rose, Degen and
Basdas (2010) want to. Instead, we can learn
much from Simonsen’s (2007) outline of a
geography of practice which challenges the
tendency to distinguish between affect and
emotion, as Pain states:

she emphasizes the contextual, relational and
multiscalar relation of emotions . . . She seeks to link
social practices from bodily to transnational scales, by
understanding how they ‘meet up with moving and
fixed materialities and form configurations that are
continuously under transformation and negotiation’
in particular places (p. 179). Her account builds on
both emotional and affectual geographies, providing
a more promising conceptualization. (2009: 479)
In this way both human subjectivity and
moving/fixed materialities are well within the
explanatory frame and we properly enter the
world of lived experiences and emotions in
architecture. We focus then on embodiment
and spatiality, affectivity and emotion, sub-
jectivity and identity to develop a much more
sensuous architectural geography. This move
towards a geography of practice can be related
to arguments made in Lees (2001) about
considering the everyday social practices of the
consumers/users of architecture, identity for-
mation, and the idea that architectural
geographers should link up more readily
with urban practitioners. It also stands aside
from Rose, Degen and Basdas (2010) who
prefer to follow Berlant’s (2008: 4) assertion
that ‘the structure of an affect has no
inevitable relation to the penumbra of
emotions that may cluster in the wake of its
activity’.
Of course the move to combine affect and
emotion in architectural geography has theor-
etical, but also methodological implications.
How useful are ethnographies, the in-depth
interview (like that with Kaseko in this paper),
observations, the walk along method, photo-
diaries, etc. How can we access methodologi-
cally the lived experience of architecture in a
meaningful way? Theorising how humans
experience buildings and thinking about the
best methods available to access these experi-
ences is important not just for architectural
A ‘building event’ of fear 119
geographies but also for providing much
needed evidence for policy-makers committed
to reinventing the high rise or tower block as a
sustainable, liveable urban form (see Baxter
and Lees 2009).
Acknowledgements
Loretta Lees would like to thank the partici-
pants at the ‘Fear, the City and Political
Mobilization: An International Workshop’,
INRS-UCS Montreal, April 2007, where an
earlier version of this paper was presented. In
addition we would both like to thank our two
anonymous referees.
Notes
1 ‘The experience of high rise living in inner London’
funded by ESRC-ODPM; research design and funding:
Loretta Lees; research student: Richard Baxter. The
sample frame was made up of forty-three residential
high rises of different tenures throughout inner London.
The research methods included a questionnaire survey,
photo-diaries and in-depth interviews undertaken in
2005 and 2006 (the interviewees gave consent for their
real names to be used). For detail on the methods see
Baxter and Lees (2009).
2 See http://www.liveleak.com/view?i ¼ e6b_1199533914
for disturbing CCTV footage of a stairwell in an eighteen-
storey tower block in Leicester, UK.
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Abstract translations
‘Événement à bâtir’ de la peur: en réfléchissant au
travers de la géographie de l’architecture
Cet article examine une survenance de la peur qu’un
résident a éprouvée dans une tour d’habitation du
logement social dans le centre ville de Londres. En
réfléchissant au sujet de cet ‘événement à bâtir’, cet
article revient au travail ancien qui a appelé à un
changement vers une ‘géographie critique de
l’architecture’ et tire du travail des ainsi nommées
géographies nouvelles de l’architecture pendant la
derniére décennie. On argument pour une série des
raisonnements liée à l’expérience humaine des
bâtiments. Des approches Latouriennes du genre
ANT dans la géographie architecturelle sont
critiquées pour en avoir peu à dire sur l’émotion.
On soutient que le travail sur l’affect en géographie
a besoin de développer un sens plus complexe de la
subjectivité humaine et de prendre plus sérieuse-
ment la force du matériel. Plus généralement des
géographies critiques nouvelles de l’architecture
sont exhortées à s’occuper des complexités théori-
ques, conceptuelles et méthodologiques d’affect/
122 Loretta Lees & Richard Baxter
émotion, de la matérialité, de l’immatérialité et de la
subjectivité humaine.
Mots-clefs: géographie de l’architecture, théorie de
l’acteur-réseau, événement à bétir, émotion, affect,
tour/tour d’habitation
Un ‘Edificio Evento’ de Miedo: pensando la
geografı́a de arquitectura
Este articulo se examina una experiencia de temor
que un residente tuvo en una torre residencial de
Londres. Pensando en este ‘edificio evento’ el
articulo se utiliza el trabajo de las nuevas geograı́as
de arquitectura de la última década y se responde a
la llamada por un movimiento hacia ‘una geografı́a
critica de arquitectura’. Se hace una serie de
argumentos relacionados a la experiencia humana
de edificios. Se critican los enfoques estilo Latour y
ANT de geografı́a arquitectónica por tener pocos
comentarios sobre la emoción. Se discute que el
trabajo de ‘afecto’ en geografı́a se necesita
desarrollar un sentido màs complejo de la
subjetividad humana y tomar en cuenta el esfuerzo
de la material. Se urge que las nuevas geografı́as de
arquitectura se atienden a las complejidades
teoréticas, conceptuales y metodológicas de afec-
to/emoción, materialidad, inmaterialidad y subjeti-
vidad humana.
Palabras claves: geografı́a de arquitectura, teorı́a de
actor-red, edificio evento, temor, emoción, afecto,
torre residencial
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