Controversies compel other facts to be collected and solutions to be proposed. The organisers of the Red Road meeting sought to initiate a process whereby alternate facts could be collected and around which a vision for Red Road that did not include demolition could be built. To do this work, those gathered at the table had to call upon the residents of Red Road. From the moment the GHA announced their plans to redevelop the Red Road site,  those who opposed demolition of the Red Road highrises argued that residents’ views had been discounted from the decision-making process. Speaking at the time of the demolition announcement, a Red Road housing activist complained that the:

‘consultation process could have been better. A small questionnaire was carried out last year but we wanted a social survey, which never materialised’ [6].

Conducting a social survey became a primary preoccupation of the meeting that night, and the Campaign more generally. The hope of organisers was that a social survey would be the mechanism by which they could assemble a robust set of alternate facts . It was a view grounded in a specific style of housing activism, and which was presented to the residents assembled in the hall as a strategy with a track record of success based on the experience of residents in the neighbouring highrise estate of Sighthill, where ‘their own independent survey’ was understood to have been pivotal in the GHA’s decision to upgrade rather than demolish. That the collection of resident’s views, through the device of the social survey, was the right way to structure a campaign was never questioned during the meeting. As one speaker put it: ‘The survey – you’ve got to get behind it. It is not even a question to get behind it.’ [7]. The only question to be resolved at the meeting, it seemed, was how to best undertake it.

Surveying is a practice that unfolds in between the field and, what Latour [8] has described as, a ‘centre of calculation’. A questionnaire has to be designed by the organisers in a survey centre (here a Campaigner’s home or a community hall), questionnaires have to be dispatched in the field (here through the doors of Red Road flats), interviews have to be carried out (with tenants), forms filled and collected (by volunteers), findings calculated and evaluated a in a centre of calculation (using tables, graphs and diagrams), and a final report produced and publicised. Together these steps constitute a process of ‘translation’, allowing the final report and the ‘centre of calculation’ to speak on behalf of all those interviewed [9].

Determining the details of that translation process, how the survey work was to be done, was a contentious issue for the meeting, not least because conducting a survey in a highrise building like Red Road, with its density and history of residualisation, produces specific socio-technical challenges. There are lots of doors to knock on, people are not always home, and those who are might not co-operate. Whether the survey should be conducted by a face-to-face, door-to-door method using volunteers was questioned by an unlikely source, the Campaign instigator. He spoke from personal experience:

‘We collectors we did get a lot of abuse from people when going door-to-door. So I am still not in favour of this going door-to-door. I am sorry I am saying that right now. We are not going from door to door.’ [10]

Refusing to undertake the survey face-to-face and door-to-door threatened the translation process that the Campaign organisers had already assumed was so essential. Without a ‘proper’ survey (with a good response rate), the ability of the Campaign to generate robust alternate facts about Red Road would be compromised. The meeting desperately canvassed for a solution that would allow the survey to proceed. Finally, it was agreed to designate a place where tenants could drop off completed forms. This strategy sought to stabilise the survey by changing the operators (volunteers collecting) and movements (how they collect) between the centre of calculation (a local office) and the field (the flats). But even this new system was questioned on the grounds that older residents might not be physically capable of returning their forms to a central office. Despite this, the Campaign instigator reiterated why a door-to-door system was not feasible:

‘Can I make my point? It was muggins that delivered survey forms to every flat in this estate: Me, on my own! So that’s one person that delivered all your survey forms. We do not have the amount of [volunteers] that go to the doors even once, never mind two or three times. Forget it!’ [11]

The disagreement about the survey method was not resolved that evening, rather a new problem emerged: how to get enough volunteers. The final call of the organisers was for members of the audience to sign on as volunteers, not to go door-to-door, but to become a member of a committee that could discuss how the survey should be done. Signing on to this list became an urgent matter for it was this inscription that would hold this disparate group together as a Campaign. It was this list that would translate residents into Campaigners, and it was this list that could be taken away from the meeting and used to initiate further action in defence of Red Road.

‘Can I just finishing by saying we are getting the names for the committee and also when the committee meets they can decide how they are going to approach the [survey]. And that’s the way how to do it.’ [12]

At the end of the meeting a group of disparate people that should have been transformed (through the meeting, the list, and the commitment to a survey) into a well-sized and powerful collective supporting Red Road, did not materialise. At the end of the meeting people stood up, not to fight demolition but to leave the building.