In the hand, it looks and feels like a novel. The cover  imagery and the typography suggest a specialist  imprint from, say, Penguin Books. The title is promising, too: The Fluid Pavement and Other  Stories, the words set in a staid serif typeface against the front cover’s background image, a rectangle of tarmac seamed with cracks. On the back cover, one finds a declaration that suggests both investigation and sentiment: ‘A semi-fictional journey  through regenerating Newham investigating the  spatiality of ageing, from Plaistow to Canning Town.  Featuring such notable places as the shelves in Poundland, Edie’s porch and that double avenue of  trees in Beckton Park (gone missing).’That  introduction prepares us for Sophie Handler’s research-based novel, which explores older people’s  physical and emotional experiences of ageing, in  relation to public space. The Fluid Pavement is based  on six months of research–lengthy interviews,  observations, and ‘partnered activity’ with older  people in reminiscence clubs, retirement homes,  buses, hospitals and shopping malls. And so it is a book about the small details of daily life; the asides, perceptions and reactions of the elderly in a part of  east London where demographics, community  structures and aspirations are changing rapidly. ‘The  past is a foreign country,’ wrote LP Hartley in The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’  Handler, a freelance urban theorist, is a postmodern  go-between who realises that without the past, and  without shades of urban and social difference, the  future may also become an increasingly unknowable  foreign country. Her novel, part-reportage, part fictional narrative, has created a new kind of  contextual material for architects (and urban planners) to draw on  The Fluid Pavement reminds us of Rem  Koolhaas’ resonant declaration at a CABE  conference in 2005: ‘We have turned the city into a  surface where no square inch is left unspoken for,  within the context of some kind of vision. That eerie abstraction of the generic haunts us… At most we  [architects] write portraits of particular cities in the hope, not of developing a theory of what to do with them, but of understanding how cities exist currently.’

Handler’s strategy is neither didactic, utopian, nor simply a
series of portraits. Its strategy is more than literary: by tapping
the memories and reactions of the elderly in Newham, The
Fluid Pavement develops a series of fantasy scenarios –
Handler calls them ‘spatial propositions’ – that might be used
by older people to reclaim, actually or in spirit, some of those
urban spaces from which they feel excluded. Using shopping
trolleys, mirror-ball, keys to a gated park, a small, demountable
dance-floor and other suitable materiel, Handler and a number
of old people will stage A Last Dance In The Park, which she
describes as a ‘semi-illicit, elderly-only urban action’ in the
Spring of 2008.
Handler’s novel is a quark in the canons of hermeneutics
and phenomenology, a mysterious presence; many architects
would think it a charming, ephemeral oddity. Yet it is just this
kind of unexpected, low-key humanitarian project that reminds
us that urban regeneration carries with it the implicit risk
of cultural erasure. There are no urban visions in The Fluid
Pavement, no eerie abstractions of the generic. But there
are surfaces – of time, place, memory, and the possibility of personal and spatial redemptions.