The research boroughs and their estates

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-123
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Housing Tenure ◽  
Open Market ◽  
Ethnic Populations ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Right To Buy ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This chapter summarises the London research boroughs and estates. The research focusses on fourteen council-built housing estates in seven boroughs: Barnet, Hackney, Haringey, Lambeth, Newham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets. Six of these boroughs (except suburban Barnet) have been among the most deprived local authority areas in England for decades, and include high levels of poverty and large Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic populations, although they have also gentrified since the 1980s. The fourteen estates are analysed in terms of their local authority origins, landlords and housing tenure, and also the rationale, progress and effects of their respective regeneration schemes. Reference is made to entrepreneurial borough strategies where relevant. In addition to the seven main boroughs, less extensive research was undertaken at five council estates in four supplementary boroughs: Brent, Camden, Waltham Forest and Westminster. The chapter provides a socio-demographic summary of the estate resident interviewees divided into four housing tenures: social tenants, Right-to-Buy owner-occupiers, temporary non-secure tenants, and owner-occupiers who bought their homes on the open market. The interviewees broadly reflect the dominant multi-ethnic working-class population of London’s social housing estates, albeit weighted towards elderly and long-term residents.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Deprivation Indices ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Urban Marginality ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Comparative Urbanism

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings and suggests policy recommendations. Part I delineated the pernicious impacts of neoliberalism and austerity on public/social housing in London, and analysed the role that estate demolition has played. Part II cast a sociological gaze not only at how working-class housing, lives and spaces are materially deprived and symbolically devalued by powerful external forces (neoliberalism and austerity), but also at how such housing, lives and spaces become valued and valuable. This emphasis on positive values corrects those policy perspectives that view estates through the epistemologically narrow lens of quantitative area-based deprivation indices. In comparative urbanism terms, London social housing estates remain substantially different from the anomic, often dangerous spaces of urban marginality such as US public housing projects (Wacquant). Part III focused on residents’ experiences of living through regeneration. It demonstrated how the valuation/devaluation duality tilts around in terms of place belonging. Comprehensive redevelopment diminishes the valued aspects of estates, while the devalued aspects are heightened and eventually dominate. The book provides several policy recommendations and research agendas. Demolition-based regeneration schemes inevitably result in state-led gentrification, but refurbishment-only schemes have the potential to improve estates and residents’ lives.

scholarly journals Challenging Racist Violence and Racist Hostility in 'Post-Racial' Times: Research and Action in Leeds, UK, 2006–2012

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-20
Author(s):  
Ian Law ◽  
Jenny Simms ◽  
Ala Sirriyeh
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Concerted Action ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Contemporary Climate

Despite increasing understanding of, information about and official commitment to challenge these patterns, racist hostility and violence continue to have an enduring presence in urban and rural life in the UK. This indicates the paradoxical nature of this racial crisis and challenges for antiracism as a political project. This paper charts how these issues play out at the local level through an examination of a five year process from problem identification through to research, response, action and aftermath from 2006 to 2012 in the city of Leeds, UK, with a focus on two predominantly white working class social housing estates in the city. We explore how embedded tensions and antagonisms can begin to be challenged, while examining how the contemporary climate of austerity and cuts in services, together with prevailing post-racial thinking, make the likelihood of such concerted action in the UK increasingly remote.

scholarly journals Sold out? The right-to-buy, gentrification and working-class displacements in London

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 1354-1369
Author(s):  
Adam Elliott Cooper ◽  
Phil Hubbard ◽  
Loretta Lees
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Market Rate ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
Resident Populations ◽  
The Right ◽  
Compulsory Purchase ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Right To Buy

Since the 1990s, the renewal of council housing estates in London has involved widespread ‘decanting’ of resident populations to allow for demolition and redevelopment, primarily by private developers who sell the majority of new housing at market rate. This process of decanting has displaced long-term council tenants and shorter-term ‘temporary’ tenants, with many not able to return to the estate. In contrast, those leaseholders who bought under the ‘right-to-buy’ legislation introduced in the 1980s have a ‘right to remain’ by virtue of the property rights they have. Nonetheless, given the threat that their property will ultimately be subject to compulsory purchase because the redevelopment of the estate is in the ‘public interest’, these leaseholders experience similar displacement pressures to other residents. Describing these pressures, this article argues that the right-to-buy legislation offered these residents the illusion of entering a property-owning middle-class, but that they were never able to escape the labelling of council estates as stigmatised spaces which have ultimately been seized by the state and capital in a moment of ‘accumulation by dispossession’.

Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ reform at 40: a policy feedback analysis of UK social housing policies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanya Naqvi ◽  
Daniel Béland ◽  
Alex Waddan
Keyword(s):  
Social Housing ◽  
Feedback Mechanism ◽  
Policy Feedback ◽  
Feedback Analysis ◽  
Group Feedback ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Right To Buy ◽  
The Welfare State

Focusing on policy feedback, this article examines the influence, four decades after its enactment, of Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 ‘Right to Buy’ (RtB) policy on today’s social housing institutions in the UK. We argue that through interest-group feedback mechanisms, RtB helped expand and reinforce the UK landlord class. Furthermore, we assert that the policy pressures placed on local councils to embody housing within the welfare state contributed to a path-dependent, privatisation feedback mechanism. More generally, an analysis of the UK case is important as it could help us think about housing privatisation in terms of policy feedback and long-term historical legacies.

Poor People, Council Housing and the Right to Buy

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon James ◽  
Bill Jordan ◽  
Helen Kay
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Housing Tenure ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Housing Estate ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right To Buy ◽  
Council Housing

ABSTRACTData from the authors' qualitative study of decision-making in low income households casts new light on council house sales in a least-favoured housing estate. Under pressure from rising rents and rumours of privatisation, poor tenants are deciding to buy their houses as a way of securing their future in the area and controlling their personal environment, rather than as an escape from a residual ‘ghetto’ of welfare housing. This raises a number of issues in relation to current theories about housing tenure, especially those which distinguish sharply between the material and ideological bases of owner occupation and local authority tenancy. The authors argue that their respondents' reasons for wanting to buy do not constitute a rejection of collectivism as much as an attempt to preserve the endangered advantages of their situation on the estate.

scholarly journals A Study of Sustainable Social Housing Community Design in Britain and China

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ke Liu . ◽  
Jiawei Leng
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Housing Tenure ◽  
The Public ◽  
Community Environment ◽  
Low Income Groups ◽  
Sloping Field ◽  
Development Tendency ◽  
Natural Characteristics

BritainandChinahaveexperiencedperiodsofrapidpopulationgrowthandinadequate housing construction. Social housing is a form of housing tenure easing the housing pressure. It solves residential demands of different living patterns in middle to low-income groups. The sustainable strategy lies in three aspects:1. Making the utmost use of the local natural environment;2. Providing reasonable public spaceandsuitabletraffic to revitalize community awareness; and 3. The holistic design of multiple dwelling units for different people and long-term needs. This paper shows two projects – Park Hill in Sheffield, UK and Longnan Garden in Shanghai – as precedents of how to design social housing with sustainable approaches by following the local natural characteristics,by respecting traditions and the different demands of residents and the long-term housing usage. UP TO HERE Compared with China’s 20-year social housing development, that in Britain has a long history and presents complicated multiplicities, could provide significant references. This paper shows that such communities could be design in steps: using the organic gallery apartment building layout, the special corridor system connecting the public function to neighborhoods, SI House theories optimizing the hostile design of dwelling units and components. During the design, the local nature and tradition should be respected. Specifically, the Park Hill is built up along the sloping field, four types of apartment units are based on the traditional terraced house, designed holistically for different families; the deck, which is called “street in the sky”, is not only the traffic but also the active place promoting public and neighborhoods relationships; the renovation design retains the former structure and makesthemaximizationofindoorflexibility.LongnanGardenissurroundedbyexisting resident districts; the organic planning based on the traditional courtyards ensures the enough sunlight and river views in the community; the community environment is improved by the courtyards,which include the ground are and roof gardens;elevated corridors run through courtyards connecting common rooms on the second floor; the 7.6-meter-heightskeletonisinnovatedfromSIhousingandtheexperienceofEuropean social housing. The paper summarizes the development tendency of social housing and provides reference for future.

The spaces of everyday life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Greenhalgh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Housing Estates

Building on the conclusions and individual agency highlighted in the last chapter, this chapter uses examples of the clashes between local government and inhabitants on the social housing estates of Manchester and Hull to show how the practices of everyday life could subvert and challenge the spatial practices of urban governance, shedding light on the lived experience and agency of the inhabitants of mid-twentieth-century social housing. Expectations about how certain spaces should function, what it was appropriate to do in them and the beneficial outcomes they were supposed to produce meant mapping certain expectations about how societies and individuals interacted onto places like parks, grass verges or community centres. Corporations’ and planners’ perceptions of how space should function is thus used here to demonstrate how spatial policies evidenced governmental anxieties over working-class association, concerns about suburban anomie and a growing disquiet about youth and delinquency.

scholarly journals Housing, Personhood and Affect in Gentrifying Garden Villages of Amsterdam

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122199769
Author(s):  
Linda van de Kamp
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Embodied History ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Market Relationship

This article offers insight into how housing, renovation, and gentrification are more than matters of upgrading material dwellings and neighborhoods, but they substantially engage residents’ very notions of who they are and how they are perceived. Using the lens of valuation, gentrification is presented as much more than an exclusionary market relationship but as a process that shows how human perspectives on selves emerge and transform along with housing discourse and relations and informs feelings of socio-spatial (in)justice. The case is the ongoing transformation of the working-class garden villages in postindustrial Amsterdam North, an area that has become subject to active urban redevelopment since the 2000s. The material upgrading of the industrial spaces and social housing makes tangible the long-term active residents’ historically sensorial relations with the built environment, around which their sense of self was shaped. Long-term residents and their children increasingly demand that the ongoing spatial improvement of the area does justice to the deeply embodied history of social emancipation in the garden villages.

scholarly journals Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110347
Author(s):  
Imane Kostet
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

scholarly journals Housing, Affordability, and Community-Based Aging

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 690-691
Author(s):  
Samara Scheckler
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Older Adult ◽  
Long Term Care ◽  
Housing Tenure ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Housing Cost ◽  
Home Equity ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Term Care

Abstract The house acts as both an environment of care and a vehicle to financially potentiate long-term community-based support. While housing can empower a diverse set of options for a person-centered aging process, inadequate housing can also impede healthy aging in the community. This symposium teases out the nodes where housing acts to benefit or limit safe community-based aging. The first paper in this symposium, Homeownership Among Older Adults, describes typologies of older adult homeownership and sensitively highlights trends, disparities and important considerations of homeownership in later life. The next two papers take these older adults and explores situations where their housing acts as an asset or as a burden. Identifying Cost Burdened Older Adults acknowledges that housing cost burdens look different for older adults than younger cohorts. A more precise definition of older adult housing cost burden is proposed to help researchers and policymakers better synthesize the complex relationships between older adult housing and their long-term care decisions. The Long-Term Care Financing Challenge then explores the role of home equity in expanding the community-based long-term care choice set for older adults. This paper demonstrates benefits (both realized and unrealized) in home equity and suggests policy implications moving forward. Finally, Cardiometabolic Risk Among Older Renters and Homeowners disentangles the relationship between housing and health by demonstrating health disparities that are associated with housing tenure, conditions and affordability. Taken together, this symposium explores the complex and multidirectional relationships between housing, long-term care and older adult health.

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