An Archive of Political Possibilities?

Abstract

I’ve been spending some time in municipal archives and local studies libraries of late, trying to track down details of radical planning initiatives from the 1970s and 1980s. Although they are often under-resourced, it’s reassuring that these important public services have survived the ravages of austerity and remain freely available. I take a quiet pleasure from watching the committed and knowledgeable staff go about their work. Whether helping members of the public uncover family histories or assisting obscure academic research projects, it’s clear they care about connecting people with the past. Despite the dedication of local archivists, however, I’ve also been struck by how elusive a lot of planning history seems to be. While the routine administration of things has regularly been catalogued in triplicate, it quickly becomes apparent that a significant amount of detail on even quite recent events is missing, presumed lost. Key sources remain frustratingly out of reach, leaving you wondering whether they’ve been misfiled or just weren’t kept at all. And, of course, there is always much more that was never printed on paper in the first place. The patchiness of archival records is inevitable, but should it also be a source of concern? More experienced and skilful historians than me are well used to navigating ‘present absences’ and ‘absent presences’ in archives, interpreting surviving sources whilst remaining attentive to all that remains unsaid. I certainly can’t claim any real expertise in this, but recent experiences have left me considering what it means to value the past in the neoliberal present. There are always going to be practical issues to consider when deciding what historical material we choose to preserve. Archiving is both highly skilled and labour intensive. The sheer physical quantity of information generated by organisations over time poses very real challenges. These have been exacerbated by technological change which has brought its own headaches, not least the rapid redundancy of so many digital formats (anyone who thinks the internet will make us immortal clearly hasn’t tried to track down documents posted online in the early 2000s). All of which leads to choices being made, both deliberately and inadvertently, that will have lasting effects on what we remember and what we forget. Various stories have been shared with me recently that suggest organisations often consider the costs of preserving the past to outweigh the benefits, from local authority officers who have faced disciplinary hearings for retrieving material discarded in skips, to the records of entire agencies being binned following restructuring. We in universities are far from immune to such pressures either. Most planning schools in the UK used to maintain subject libraries that were, amongst other things, rich repositories of local planning history. Few, if any, now remain and much of the material they held has probably not survived. The records of more informal planning activities are often at even greater risk. Leonie Sandercock’s (1998, 34) call to develop “insurgent planning histories” remains salutary for its emphasis on extending the planning project to encompass “alternative traditions of planning, existing outside the state and sometimes in opposition to it.” However, the histories of many, often shortlived initiatives and campaign groups are particularly precarious and therefore amongst the most endangered of planning’s patchy archives. Surviving material is often sitting in “personal collections,”