Maintenance as a creative act.

02 Feb, 2025

To dwell is to maintain. To stitch, sweep and sew is to participate in a dynamic feedback loop of evolutionary process, with the attendant choice, chance and circumstance constantly sifting, shifting and shaping the sands of the material environment.

Though it may by definition seem preservative and conservative, maintenance is actually the prime generative act within urban environment, with a cumulative effect beyond all others. In this is an inherent paradox: to maintain is generally to preserve, yet given the constant transformational force brought to bear on all things by the very fact of their existence, even 'preservative' maintenance must involve a constant proactive or reactive transformational force in response - to maintain is to constantly transform. A further paradox is in a generative power such that in its absence is an effect as great as in its presence: without maintenance to counter it, the constant transformational force bearing on all things meets no resistance.

Maintenance encompasses acts ranging from tidying up through replacing the roof to razing the block. It may include acts of expression, and it may include the removal of their results. It may involve conservation, and may involve creation or destruction. It may involve all three in combination. The rights and responsibilities of and for maintenance may be withheld or imposed, seized, granted or surrendered.

Urban character is the quality of any place, whether good or bad, whether acquired or imposed, whether the acquisition or imposition be incidental, accidental or deliberate, incremental, accretional or abrupt. The importance of maintenance as generator of that character exceeds even 'official' acts of construction, with their discrete beginnings, middles and ends. We should of course know better than to treat actual acts of construction as truly discrete, and would contend that the maintenant acts are merely extensions of the constructional ones and vice-versa. The constructional acts are though subject to discrete acts of professional input in a way that the maintenant ones are not, are subject to contractual arrangements of a complexity and monetary value beyond any that would usually pertain with respect to maintenance, and are generally subject to regulatory loads well beyond maintenance. It is not simply taxonomy, legality or semantics then that might divide the two. And yet though they are thus divided, actually all of these acts, those of construction and those of maintenance, exist and occur in continuum.

Maintenance may be preventative, to get ahead of any likely environmental stress the fabric of a building may undergo, or may be remedial, to repair damage done by events. It may be restorative, to address the ravage wrought by time. It may be elective or decorative, for visual improvement or occupant expression.

It might fit loosely into more than one of these categories: such an act as building a new porch to the front of one’s home may be seen as elective and decorative, yet it may too be seen as a remedial act, to address a lack of shelter for visitors, or a preventative one to protect unsheltered fabric from weather.

The remediation of degradation is undoubtedly maintenance, but will usually have aesthetic effect too, as in the replacement of something old and worn with something new and different.

Even when the acts of maintenance wouldn’t generally be considered to have any aesthetic intent, as in the stitch and patch of roadworks, the cumulative effect of such works is to produce an effect of character that the pristine new highway never could.

The elective or decorative may seem to fit somewhat uneasily within a definition of maintenance, with the preservative intent that maintenance suggests and its more typical deployment in response to or anticipation of stress or damage. Applying a coat of protective paint isn’t the same thing as painting a mural on one's gable.

In respect of the elective act of maintenance though, one might argue that it's merely 'maintenance-plus', a belt-and-braces approach - not strictly necessary in response to damage done or imminent threat, but still very much maintenant in character. One might further argue that all maintenance is elective: in its lack is likely degradation, but the degree of degradation that is tolerable is a matter of choice, and as discussed below, the greater degree may be welcomed by some.

In respect of the decorative or expressive act is a less clear and obvious connection with maintenance, but one of an immense and far-reaching value. In maintenance is act and expression of care, and in a decorative act is the same. What is it to maintain something but to care for it, and what is it to care for something but to wish for it to be its best and to work to help to make it so? In that care also is identity, the maintained thing as expression and extension of self or group. If the upkeep of a garden was purely maintenant, we'd hack the weeds back to the tolerable height or concrete it all over and drain it accordingly. Some do but most don't, and a great gift and sight are the various gardens of some street taken together, each an expression of the people behind it. They may individually speak well or otherwise of attitudes to maintenance, and spark reactions from dismay to joy, but taken together will produce some effect of character particular and unique to that one stretch of street.

Ownership will generally imply some collection of rights that enable an owner to act in specific ways in respect of what they own, along with a related collection of responsibilities requiring them to act in specific ways. The fact of legal ownership doesn’t automatically bestow an ability to act in any particular way, nor does the fact of such agency bestow any of the rights or responsibilities of legal ownership. Notwithstanding legal limits to the agency of an owner, such as any restrictions that might be imposed by leases, covenants or planning conditions, the limits to owner agency which are more relevant here are those of an architectural nature, structural, spatial and material. Inherent in any architecture will be the facilitation or hindrance of easy maintenance. With maintenance goes maintainability, and space, structure and material will be capable of being maintained to the degree allowed by its nature.

The tenant, social or private, will have limits to the actions that they can take in respect of their home beyond those of the legal owner. Though in all moral respects it may seem correct that they be considered the owner of that which they occupy, legality with its attendant threat of coercive force always trumps morality.

Notwithstanding the circumstances of any particular situations, these two, legal ownership and agency, will tend to go together. Agency will tend to follow from legal ownership, and will be limited by such arrangements as the occupation of what legally belongs to someone else and the related contractual terms.

The fact of agency is thus of the greatest importance in respect of maintenance, as is the fact of maintenance of the greatest importance in the creation and sustenance of healthy built environments. Put simply, and as above, rights and opportunities to undertake acts of maintenance are not universal, and thus neither are rights and opportunities to participate in the creation and sustenance of built environment. A local community may well avail of an opportunity to carry out some works in their neighbourhood for what they see as the wholely beneficial purpose of community well-being, but without permission from the relevant authority may in return for their well-meant efforts be served with an enforcement notice requiring them to reverse the change or face penalty. This relates to both rights and responsibilities. The owner may for instance have a right to rent their property to a tenant while having a related responsibility to maintain it to a habitable standard. The tenant may have a right to request and expect that maintenance be carried out while having a legal responsibility to refrain from carrying out any such acts of maintenance themselves unless expressly authorised by the owner.

Maintenance of an 'asset' will often result in an increase in its value to the maintenant agent, financial, emotional or both. Logically a lack of maintenance should have, and often will have, the opposite effect, with the general deterioration such a lack of maintenance will bring. There are though circumstances in which the relationship between maintenance and value is not so straightforward, such as when the deterioration of the fabric of an asset actually leads to increase in its monetary value (or more likely the value of the ground upon which it stands), despite social and environmental costs. This seeming inversion generally results from the opportunity afforded to a for-profit developer to make an argument for the removal of the deteriorated asset that the planning system will find politically easier to accept; it is in a sense a self-fulfilling prophecy. That it would be easy to find someone who would willingly maintain the asset given the chance of its beneficial use is a large part of the point - legal ownership protects the rights of maintenance, and the responsibilities are often easily ignored.

What is it for such an asset to gain value within such a value system as exists today anyway, where chunks of the general wealth are squirrelled away by an unscrupulous few furrowing for pennies in the wrinkles of a system long unfit for good purpose, or where the lucky shopkeeper makes enough pennies per sale to send himself to space? Put another way, when the agreed measure of value is so skewed in favour of capital, and of a kind of 'gravitational' wealth, why try to augment the value of anything when that value may well be seized and spent by someone else? What is it for such an asset to gain value within such a system as would demonstrate a willingness to destroy its own legacy of healthy and valued built environments over and over again for the benefit of a very few and to the detriment of so many, within which the hand of bureaucracy can sweep people far from their homes, far from where their own maintenant acts have enriched an environment and community that will shortly be destroyed and be replaced with the dullest of stillborn things to be sold as seats for capital? Why expend energy in preserving or increasing the general and meaningful value of a place when the short-term material interests of a meagre few can sweep it all away in an instant, and with the coercive force of state behind it?

The phenomenon will be familiar to any with an interest in housing in the UK, and likely many other places, of publicly-built housing estates long gone or perennially threatened, so often the built outcomes of the well-meant and considered efforts of humane and socially-minded councils and their architects, sometimes ill-conceived or naive but never ill-intentioned.

Those threatened places are at the sharp end of where agency, value and maintenance meet, and can be where what is made manifest is maintenance withheld. This withholding of maintenance is far from limited to isolated incidents of unscrupulous private owners; rather, a type of 'managed decline' is now in fact a well-established feature of public housing management - withheld maintenance is the prime tool of managed decline. This lack of maintenance can apply also to the social services necessary for the good functioning of housing estates just as it does to the fabric and systems of these buildings.

The Robin Hood Gardens estate in East London is one example of a public housing estate thus destroyed, and one with a true and rare ambitious intent in its conception. A lump of it was salvaged from the demolition to be displayed in the V&A museum, a big rich institution in an expensive part of town. As on the nose metaphors go that alone would already seem a little much, but a TV show on the subject really bludgeoned the point home, inadvertently it appeared but who could tell. An art conservationist was painstakingly cleaning with a toothbrush the concrete of the ex-building, and one could but wonder how many times it had had so much as a power hose pointed at it in the years of its occupation.

Other public housing estates that suffered such lack of maintenance followed other paths. Keeling House, designed by Denys Lasdun to provide for the environmental and social needs of its inhabitants through an imaginative plan-form of stacked and separated maisonettes, firmly “residualised” while under public management, has since its private purchase (and associated refurbishment and installation of concierge) become a popular address for those with the money to spend. All that has really changed is the will to manage and maintain.

Any untended open space will in time become rich in a diversity of life. The graffitied wall can become rich and deep in texture, colour and meaning. Even weeds in pavement cracks bring their own life and character. And all of this richness and depth of life and character can be swept away in one act of maintenance, well-meant or otherwise.

‘Regeneration’ is a term used to describe acts that could similarly be considered destructive maintenance: that these acts do not maintain and are rather more degenerative than regenerative is neither here nor there. It's an updated version of what used to be called slum clearance, and is still, as it has always been, motivated by two interests, private profit and public virtue, though the latter is long since fig-leaf for the former. Criticisms of such regeneration have not been rare for decades, and better ones than I could ever manage are plentiful. Important here is to note what this regeneration so often destroys, along with much else: established community, and the character that will be the product of that community's accumulated maintenant acts.

In respect of the maintenance of built environment then is a combination of legal and moral rights and responsibilities, along with a related but separate set of limits and opportunities imposed and offered by the material nature of that environment. In the interaction of these rights, responsibilities, limits and opportunities, with each other and with its found material nature, lies the particular character of any built environment.

Though most such limits and opportunities are inherent in any place before any new act of design or construction takes place, and most such rights and responsibilities the consequence and circumstance of existing and overlapping regimes of ownership and control, yet it is within the purview of design, and so in the construction it prescribes, buffeted even as it is by the full force of all reality, to identify and augment the benign limits and ameliorate the malign, to identify and augment positive opportunity and to aid the taking of it, to aid the seizure of rights and discharge of responsibilities, and in fact to bridge these two so that right not be exclusionary or hard won and responsibility neither onerous nor grudging.

The designers of environment then, in the broad but accurate definition that follows from this, are very much maintenance operatives, undertaking it as they do, enabling it as they do, are per Habraken ‘cultivators of environments rather than makers of projects’, are rather more gardeners than sculptors, though rather more than gardeners facilitators of those true gardeners and true caretakers, those who would directly tend and care, make good, make do, mend and maintain.