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Woodberry Down: new builds next to the old flats.
Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
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Woodberry Park, the new development taking the place of the
Woodberry Down council estate in Hackney, east London. Photograph: Alamy
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The truth about gentrification: regeneration or con
trick?
Woodberry Down is a vast
north-east London council estate undergoing an ambitious transformation. But
while eager developers court foreign buy-to-let investors, are they casting
aside long-term residents like 'social rubbish'? We spent six months on site to
hear the locals' stories
Aditya Chakrabortty and Sophie Robinson-Tillett
Sunday 18 May 2014 16.00 BST/ The Guardian /
Google Tony Pidgley, chairman of one of Britain’s biggest
housebuilders, and you’ll find a video in which he shows off his latest toy.
The plaything in question is a giant council estate that his firm, Berkeley
Homes, is smashing up and building over.
A squat, punchy figure, he shows a reporter around the new
towers – and the gashed old blocks that, we’re informed, were used in
Schindler’s List as a stand-in for the Warsaw Ghetto.
“You can understand why they used it in the film,” begins
Pidgley in a reasonable tone. “It looks like a concentration camp.”
Forget for a moment that the Warsaw Ghetto was not a
concentration camp, or that practically every large inner-London estate has
featured in some film in the role of Ominous Backdrop. Ignore the crassness of
a man who, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is worth £160m casually
rubbishing the homes of thousands of families poorer than him. Concentrate
instead on the rare sight presented in that clip: a businessman at the height
of his powers.
Pidgley is one of the most lavishly paid executives in his
industry. The firm he helms is enjoying bumper profits, thanks to a
taxpayer-funded housing boom in Berkeley’s key market of London and the
south-east. And the building site where he’s playing the tour guide – Woodberry
Down in Manor House, north-east London – is one of the largest housing-estate
redevelopments in Britain.
By 2031, around 2,000 council or former council homes will
have been demolished and replaced with more than 5,500 units on the estate:
some social housing; some for “key workers”, the euphemism now used for
low-paid public servants, and the majority to be sold on the open market. The
flagship private block in Woodberry Down, looking on to a lovely reservoir, has
been sold largely to foreign investors, with one flat going for a million
pounds (tell a Londoner that flats in Manor House are going for a million quid
and see how low their jaw drops).
Pidgley began touting Woodberry Down as a “blueprint for
regeneration and all the new development Britain needs to beat the housing
crisis” in February. Although it has only just got going on a job that will
last 25 years, Berkeley Homes published a scientific-looking survey that neatly
showed residents to be delighted with the results so far. At a corporate
meeting this February to publicise the poll, coalition planning minister Nick
Boles gave a warm keynote speech and the Times led the media applause:
“Schindler’s estate is now a blueprint for urban happiness”.
Within the grasp of Pidgley’s team is a tantalisingly large
prize. If Berkeley can establish itself as the pre-eminent name in
regeneration, it will put itself front of the queue for what is a roaring
business. It will also have even greater sway with local authorities, London
city hall and Westminster.
Executives at the FTSE-250 company estimate that, of every
four houses they build, one is on a former council estate somewhere in the
capital. But the potential business is much larger: 1.69 million people in
England were waiting for local authority accommodation last year; over 344,000
in London alone. Unprecedented cuts have left town halls up and down the
country less cash to maintain their existing housing stock – giving them little
choice but to turn to Pidgely and co.
These public-private partnerships are relatively recent and
haven’t come under much serious scrutiny, either in the press or in parliament.
Yet they are widespread. The Guardian asked London’s local authorities about
their schemes to redevelop public housing with a private builder, in which at
least some of the dwellings would be sold on the open market. Our map shows the
results: of the capital’s 32 councils, 18 are in such partnerships with the
private sector, many across multiple estates.
As the financial crisis recedes into the middle distance,
London has been colonised by builders’ hoardings and cement mixers. Hospitals
are being transformed into luxury flats; school fields littered with concrete
boxes, and public housing turned into not-so-public housing. With politicians
of all stripes looking for ways to drum up millions of new homes, Berkeley and
its rivals will become ever more important to Britain’s future.
By the time Pidgley began his Woodberry Down PR push, we had
spent many hours talking to its residents. Our interest was aroused by the
claims being made for it: Hackney council officials described it privately as
its “greatest success”; the commitment to making 40% of the new development
affordable homes.
To critics, regeneration is simply code for gentrification,
which is often a fancy term to describe how poor people are cleared from
valuable land to make way for the rich. But here was a scheme promising
regeneration with a conscience, creating a genuinely mixed community. Council
and the builders sang the same song: Woodberry Down represented private-led redevelopment
at its best – a model to be followed.
Except the residents on the estate consistently demonstrated
that the claims about its transformation were untrue. Berkeley’s survey – the
subject of laudatory column inches – turned out to be about as methodologically
robust as the science part of a L’Oreal advert: it was massively skewed towards
those settling into the new towers, when the vast majority still live in the
old blocks, and will do for years. And it omitted entirely the number of
residents who were moved off the estate.
Among the more than 50 interviewees we spoke to over six
months, there was naturally a range of views about what benefits had been
brought by regeneration. But the majority talked of pensioners offered
inadequate sums for their leaseholdings, and being forced to move far from
their families; of business owners promised a place in the new development only
to be turfed out later, losing small fortunes in the process.
Their neighbourhood was an endangered species: a patch of
inner London belonging to the elderly, the working poor, the unemployed. Now it
was being broken up to suit an international company selling homes to the
well-off. The fact their council was leading this dismemberment made some
especially angry.
Even tenants in the new social housing reported how they or
neighbours had been plunged into debt because of the higher bills incurred
through having a private housing association as a landlord. Despite Berkeley’s
promise to “bring together all people in Woodberry Down”, social tenants
reported that those living in the expensive private blocks “cross the road to
avoid us”. They had been made to feel like second-class citizens in their own
home.
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Woodberry Down estate in Manor House, London. Photograph:
Martin Godwin
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What follows are stories of the people best placed to tell
you about what regeneration does to a community: the ones who come from it.
Some have lived on Woodberry Down for more than six decades; others are in
their 20s. Their photos don’t feature in the civic-centre case studies or
corporate press releases. They haven’t got local elections to win, or a profit
target to chase. They’ve just got to live with the results.
In all her 65 years on Woodberry Down, Jane Frost has never
had to deal with anything like this. Around six or seven on most evenings, a
mystery man comes to her flat and pees against the balcony outside. Jane’s the
only resident left on the entire floor; and there’s no neighbor, no security
guard to pop out and see who the pest is. The 71-year-old cleans up the puddles
herself.
All five storeys of Jane’s council block have been emptied.
Almost everyone else has been rehoused, either in the new blocks opposite or in
a different area. But Jane is disabled and, even after years, the council has
yet to find her suitable accommodation. Which leaves her stuck here, with so
few neighbours that she finds it “creepy”. Too creepy for her friends, who
don’t visit after dark for fear of muggers – or worse.
“When I come up the stairs late at night my heart’s going
boom-boom-boom-boom,” she says. “If I’m taken bad I no longer have anyone’s
door I can knock on.”
The afternoon light streams into Jane’s lounge, playing on a
lifetime’s worth of ornaments and porcelain. But outside her front door, “it’s
absolutely horrible. I’m a nervous wreck.” Since the regeneration began she’s
been diagnosed with depression.
One night she went out for a loaf, got chatting to a woman
selling the Big Issue and let slip where she lived. The homeless woman was so
worried for Jane’s safety that she walked her home – and wouldn’t even take
anything for the trouble.
Out on the pensioner’s deserted balcony you see the thing
she blames most for leaving her “abandoned”. It’s the towers springing up
opposite, and the changes they’ve ushered in.
All that activity on the other side of the road – the
cranes, the 400-plus builders charging around in white hard hats – could be
described as rejuvenation: bringing new life to decades-old dereliction. “A
Place in the Making,” Berkeley Homes calls it. They’ve slapped the phrase on hoardings
everywhere, and rechristened the area Woodberry Park.
Visitors to the 64-acre estate now have two maps to navigate. On one is the old council layout of Woodberry Down, each block assigned a starchily municipal name: Bayhurst, Delamere, Whittlebury. On the other is a Technicolor guide to Woodberry Park and its landmarks: Residence, Watersreach and, less dreamily, Berkeley Homes Marketing Suite.
Yet marketing won’t totally obliterate history as long as
people such as Jane and her childhood friend Sheila Coxon are knocking around.
They met on this estate in 1949, the year after it opened. “You’d have parties
in the courtyards,” remembers Jane. Sheila chimes in: “You had a community.”
You also had heroic public investment. Woodberry Down was
the brainchild of Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, Labour MP Herbert Morrison,
who wanted to rehouse working-class Londoners living in inner-city squalor –
even if it meant compulsorily buying up the homes of the well-to-do residents
of Manor House. “Morrison drives out mansion owners,” thundered the North
London Recorder in November 1938 under the headline: “£1,000,000 slum dwellers’
paradise”. It ran a photo of a resident standing pensively by the reservoir and
warned, “Hundreds of shouting children will take the place of this solitary
silent man.”
But soon “everybody wanted to be here,” says Jane. She tells
a family legend about how her mum lobbied the then-MP for Westminster Abbey:
“He said: ‘What do you want? A flat in Westminster?’ And she said: ‘No … on the
Woodberry Down estate.’ He told her she was asking the world, the absolute
world. That’s how good this estate was.”
Council housing is now synonymous with cheap boxes, built
grudgingly, and piled up to the sky. But, however rundown, the low-rise
redbrick blocks of Woodberry Down still look solid – reminders of their
prideful days as an “estate of the future”, toured by policy-makers in order to
glean lessons. With a health centre opening in 1952 and Britain’s first
purpose-built comprehensive soon afterwards, it was also a showcase for the
cradle-to-grave welfare state.
“The estate was the estate and everybody had it the same,”
says Sheila. Then she nods towards the building works: “It’s segregation, isn’t
it?” She’s referring to the way the different classes of resident live in
different blocks: social tenants on subsidised rent in one, part-owners of
“affordable” homes in another, and the private residents in their own flagship
tower. “The private properties are being built around the reservoir, with just
a few token flats for council residents. The private buyers have got the best
part of the estate.”
Gentrification
The term “gentrification” was coined just down the road from
Woodberry Down, about 15 years after Jane and Sheila moved into their new
homes. Living in Islington, north London, sociologist Ruth Glass noticed a
rapid change among her neighbours.
“One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London
have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower,” she wrote in an
article published in 1964. “Shabby, modest mews and cottages … have been taken
over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive
residences … Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts … it goes on rapidly
until … the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the social
character of the district is changed.”
This is gentrification as we still discuss it: the invisible
hand of the market moving inexorably but gently (it waits until the leases
expire) to gentrify an area. The squatters beget artists, who beget the
public-sector middle-class, who beget banker families, who just stay put in
their stucco-fronted Georgian houses, endlessly decorating and redecorating. A
doleful bugle sounds for the demise of the family-run cobbler, soon drowned out
by buzz over the gelato parlour that’s replaced it.
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Jane Frost in her flat in Woodberry Down. Photograph: Martin
Godwin for the Guardian
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This long, slow process of gentrification does not describe
what’s happening in Woodberry Down, or on mammoth estates from Greenwich’s
Ferrier (which, in Berkeley’s hands, is being remoulded into Kidbrooke Village)
to the Heygate in Elephant and Castle. Many of the made-up “villages” and
“parks” mushrooming across the capital owe nothing to age-old market forces and
everything to councils eager to upgrade their housing stock without eating into
already-stretched budgets. They pass control of their inventory to a private housing
association (Genesis, in the case of Woodberry Down) and lease the land for a
few centuries to big developers. The builders put up new “affordable” homes to
be sold or rented at below market rates, and cross-subsidise them by
constructing expensive private homes. This planned poshification has been given
a name by Paul Watt at London’s Birkbeck: state-led gentrification.
This is the unwinding of the process that created Woodberry
Down. Herbert Morrison built municipal housing to shield Londoners from a
broken market; his successors in local government are exposing their
constituents to market forces in a manner not seen in postwar Britain. In 1981,
57.5% of homes in Hackney were rented from the council; by the last census in
2011, that had more than halved to 23.8%. Over that same period, the proportion
of homes in the borough rented privately leapt from 17.8% to 29%. The same
trend applies across inner London. By Watt’s rule of thumb, if a London tenant
pays weekly rent of £100 to the council, their counterpart in the private
sector will typically give £400 to a landlord or landlady. And they will have
much less protection.
“It makes me want to cry, to be honest,” says Maxwell
O’Hajah, thumbing through Berkeley Homes’ sales brochure for Woodberry Park.
His cracked white fingertips are a tell-tale sign of 20 years in construction.
“I’m looking through this and all the amenities that we had
already, they’re bragging about. The reservoir, the sailing club, the parks,
the local markets: they’ve always been there. I don’t know what they’re
actually adding.”
Now 46, Maxwell moved to Woodberry Down in his teens. He
joined the residents’ regeneration committee after finding out his flat would
be one of the first to be demolished. At that point, early last decade, he
became an eyewitness to the state-led gentrification of Woodberry Down.
When putting the development out to tender, Hackney council
created footage to show developers. “They made it look like a hell hole. They
played the theme music from a horror film and made Woodberry Down out to be
some kind of project in America.” Experts note that this is a common tactic
used by local councils: running down the existing area to whip up support among
tenants for a private-led regeneration.
As a tenant rep, Maxwell saw Berkeley Homes present its bid
for the project. “There were a few residents, a few people from the council,
and 11 of them. They felt really heavy handed. Every single one was in a blue
suit. Every single one had a tie on. They were all men.”
Then began negotiations with tenants. “Residents were like:
‘A sports centre – that would be nice … Ooh, and a swimming pool, yeah.’ They
were asking for things like kids in a sweet shop. They thought this
regeneration was for them. But Berkeley Homes are hard-nosed business people.
We were never going to get our way.” The gym on the estate is only for those in
the private block; the same will go for the swimming pool featured on builders’
hoardings.
When Maxwell realised how much his living costs would
increase in the new flats, with a housing association as landlord rather than
the council, he moved off Woodberry Down.
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Maxwell outside at the new regeneration site at Woodberry
Park. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
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“I’m glad. This is a regeneration if you’re coming from the
outside. If you’re already on the inside it’s just destruction. It’s blatantly
obvious that they don’t want us to live there any more. It’s just ghettoisation
– that’s what this model of regeneration is.”
Gina O’Raegan can give you a tour of what’s wrong with where
she lives. Tugging along her staffie, Shumba, the itinerary is a litany of
horrors: the corner flat with such bad subsidence that it’s now uninhabitable;
the courtyard where dealers were hanging out last summer, since they could no longer
ply drugs over by the new-builds, and the boarded-up properties whose residents
have left.
She lives up the road from Jane, in what locals call the
Seven Blocks (although she’d rather you didn’t use that nickname: “It sounds
like a prison”). These are the most dilapidated buildings on the estate, so bad
that Gina never lets on to workmates or acquaintances her address in case they
work out where she lives. Her home makes her ashamed.
Gina and her 20-year-old son James live in “limbo”, in the
gulf between regeneration-speak and practice. In 2006, the council laid out key
principles for which parts of the estate would be replaced first. Top of the
list was: “Replacing the worst first”. Residents were led to understand that
this meant those living in the Seven Blocks would be first into the new flats,
and their old buildings demolished. Then plans changed. All of a sudden, the
most marketable land around the reservoir was first in line for new flats.
Other residents say they’ve heard Berkeley executives admit in meetings:
“There’s no revenue in knocking them [the Seven Blocks] down.”
Now Gina and James will have to wait until at least 2020,
possibly 2021, to move. “We don’t look over the reservoir so we’re being
punished. Simple as.”
Inside her flat, long, wide cracks snake across the ceiling.
The old metal toilet cistern drips water, but the council won’t replace it –
because that counts as a major repair, unnecessary on a estate due for
rebuilding. “I’ve got to live with this dripping on me for the next seven
years.”
Her bedroom has splotches of brilliant white paint, to cover
up the mould. “I’ve had black mould on my bedding.” She keeps clothes in
plastic laundry bags for protection. The curtains are rotten with damp from
condensation: “They rip like paper.” Council officials say the blocks were not
so long ago fitted with double-glazing; residents say that that has made the
condensation worse.
On Gina’s bedside table is a damp trap, which after a month
has collected over two inches of water. She has had a chest infection for the
past couple of years: whatever the doctor tries doesn’t shift it. Among all
this wreckage, the usual domestic touches – children’s photos, embroidered
cushions reading Stay Calm and Smile – seem forced.
A Hackney surveyor came round last year to look at the
mould. On being told that Gina paid her full rent and deserved a proper
service, he replied, “Some people may argue that you pay subsidised rent
because you live in a council property” (Hackney acknowledges such language is
“unacceptable”).
“They think: “You’re poor, be grateful.” Like many others
here, Gina chafes against the stereotypes hung round her neck by others. She
wants you to know that she works two jobs and “isn’t on Benefits Street”. Jane
stresses that before becoming a pensioner, she never took any welfare. One
Turkish shopkeeper introduces himself with: “I’m not a refugee – I work and pay
tax.”
Gina looks around the flat where she and James have their
stress-fuelled arguments; where her 20-year-old hates bringing a girlfriend
home. “This regeneration isn’t about decent homes,” she says. “If it was about
decent homes then I wouldn’t be living here. Yes or no?”
The town hall
You won’t find in Woodberry Down the usual stories of epic
bungling and back-scratching that mark so many land deals between town halls
and big developers. There aren’t any tales of a council spending so much on
evicting its own residents to make way for developers that they lose millions
on the entire deal (as is reportedly the case with Southwark council and the
Heygate). Or of officials flogging public land to big companies and not even
getting any affordable homes in return (as Haringey council has done with the
new £400m Spurs development.
As Hackney officials like to boast, they have armwrestled a
good deal out of their builders. Just over 40% of the new estate will be
affordable homes. Not only that, tenants will be moved (“decanted” in
regeneration-speak) only once, and the flats they move into will be guaranteed
a certain size. Put all that together with the state Woodberry Down had reached
by the 90s – and if private-led renewal is going to work anywhere, it’s here.
But stripping away the usual gaffes shows up the underlying
problems of the model. Take the most basic step, the tendering of a building
contract, which Maxwell witnessed. Hackney councillor Karen Alcock acknowledges
that there aren’t many developers qualified to take on a project such as
Woodberry Down.
And developers demand fat returns for doing such work. The
usual profit target is 21%, says Duncan Bowie, a former member of the Mayor of
London’s planning team – any slippage leads to the kind of language heard by
Gina. Put those two factors together and you have the potential for major
compromises: for some blocks being put back in the project, even if that means
people live in squalor for years; for the builder to eat up courtyards and
recreational areas in order to cram in more flats. And ultimately, building the
wrong homes for the residents.
Before Woodberry Down began its metamorphosis into Woodberry
Park, it had 1,555 social rented homes: 78.5% of the entire estate. By the time
it finishes, it will have only 1,088 socially rented homes. That is a huge drop
in a borough that already has more than 15,000 applicants on its housing
waiting list – many with a family. True, there will be another 1,177
“affordable” homes – although many leaseholders on the estate told us they
couldn’t afford them. Nearly 60% of the overhauled site will be private homes.
The showroom
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Woodberry Down regeneration project in Manor House, London.
New builds near the reservoir and old flats nearer Seven Sisters Road.
Photograph: Martin Godwin
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On a bright Saturday morning, Naoufal Dhimi parks his SUV
outside Woodberry Down’s marketing suite. The camel-coated property agent buys
and sells London homes, primarily for investors in Asia and the Middle East.
Although sceptical about the investment value of paying nearly £400,000 for a
two-bed flat in what remains a deprived patch of inner London, he’s scouting
out the development for a client in Singapore.
Hearing his explanation, the white-shirted saleswoman points
through the windows to the reservoir: “That water outside: very attractive to
Asian buyers. We’ve had families from Singapore who take a unit here to rent
out, but really keep it to send their children when they’re old enough to go to
the LSE [London School of Economics] or wherever.”
When marketing began, Berkeley concentrated its efforts on
east Asia and ended up selling around 55% of the first phase of buildings to
overseas investors. That’s unusually high for this area. Going through Land
Registry records, estate agents Knight Frank calculated that overseas residents
bought 49% of all newly built property in the plushest parts of central London
in the year to June 2013; that proportion dropped to 20% across inner London
and to less than 7% in outer London. This estate sits slap-bang on the divide
between inner and outer London, yet its towers have lured a greater proportion
of foreign buyers than those in Kensington and Westminster.
How did Berkeley manage that? Expert marketing. The firm has
sales offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and, as of last autumn, Beijing. To flog
Woodberry Park, it hired out ballrooms and conference suites in hotels
thousands of miles away and talked to small Asian families about the profit to
be made from letting apartments in London. According to the British Property
Federation, 61% of all new homes sold in the capital last year were bought not
to live in but solely as an investment. The vast majority of them would have
been rented out; 5% were flipped back onto the market.
The saleswoman hands over goodybags with brochures that
resemble coffee table books. They paint the area in terms no local would ever
recognise. Expertly shot panoramas of the estate and the London skyline make it
seem a mere jog from the City. Distances to airports are listed, along with
cafes “on your doorstep” that are in nicer areas at least 20 minutes schlep
away. This isn’t Manor House at all, but an invented place wrenched away from
terra firma and now hovering somewhere between a street of chichi cafes and the
financial district.
At Berkeley, Matt Bell defends the marketing: “If you go
‘it’s 20 minutes from Knightsbridge’, people go online and … you look a
complete monkey.” He obviously hasn’t read his own brochure, which claims
Woodberry Down is just “23 minutes” from Knightsbridge.
Later, Dhimi recounts how a client bought an apartment here
off-plan from one of those hotel suites a world away. When it was finished, he
drove her directly from Heathrow to have a look. “As we got closer, the
surroundings got rougher and she went quiet. And when we arrived she said:
‘Dhimi, I can’t stay here: put me in a hotel.’ The next morning she wanted to
sell up. Immediately.”
As the saleswoman shows us around the two-bed showflat, she
admits that, on turning up at the marketing suits in this still-gritty part of
North London: “I thought head office were punishing me!” By the architects’
model of the estate, she explains to us, her prospective buyers, how any unit
we’d buy would be safely away from the social tenants. This development “is
going to end up like an island”, insulated from the surrounding deprivation.
Leafing through the hardback, one other thing jumps out: all
the models in it – sleek young couples sipping rose – are white. According to
the 2011 census, Hackney’s population is 45% black and minority ethnic; yet
Berkeley’s dream community is as multicultural as a Boden catalogue. This is in
a brochure whose primary readership is east Asian.
As we drive past the doner places and charity shops that go
unmentioned in the marketing, Dhimi is surprisingly agitated. The real-estate
dealer says he was raised in a council house and was “shocked” at the language
used by the saleswoman. “What kind of city are we becoming: like Paris, where
we chuck all the ‘social rubbish’ on the edges out of sight?”
Veronica and Nanette
It takes two buses, one train and two and a half hours for
Veronica Mensah to get from her new home to her old one on Woodberry Down; and
it costs her £22.95 – almost a third of her weekly state pension. “I’m worried
the fares will keep going up, but there are some things you can’t put a price
on: my family and friends, they’re all here. So I’ll just have to sacrifice
things to be able to afford it. I have built my world here.”
This time she has come down for a prayer meeting of the
Franciscan order to which she has belonged for over a decade. After, she
catches up with two other members, Elizabeth and Betty, who she met while on
the estate. Veronica asks who wants tea. Softly spoken, she wears a long grey
skirt and a lavender scarf.
Have they known each other long? “Oh yes!” they chorus,
before a flurry of anecdotes begin, overlapping and hard to make out –
organising church bazaars, living in the same blocks, having children grow up
together. Elizabeth looks up and laughs: “We’ve known each other for ever.”
Veronica moved to Woodberry Down in 1979 with her
then-husband to start a family. After their third child, their two-bedroom flat
was no longer big enough and they registered to be transferred. They remained
on the council’s transfer list for 17 years.
In that time Veronica became a respected figure on the
estate and beyond. She worked in health and childcare, volunteered for two
charities and got heavily involved in her local church. Her parents – now in
their 80s – live 15 minutes up the road from Woodberry Down, and she would
often take them to hospital appointments and look after them when they were
ill.
As Veronica’s three children turned into teens, they needed
more space. “They had nowhere to do their homework.” So in 2000, now-divorced
Veronica bought her flat under right-to-buy. The plan was to sell it after the
stipulated minimum ownership period of three years and buy a bigger place for
her family elsewhere on the estate.
“It wasn’t really something I could afford to do. But I just
had to find a way to get more space for my family.” Six months later, Hackney
council announced the regeneration and Veronica could no longer sell up. She
and her two adult children had lost all the rights they had as longstanding
tenants. Those renting from Hackney were guaranteed a home; leaseholders only
got a compensatory offer on their homes, and a shot at the new affordable
units.
To stay on the estate, Veronica would have to wait over a
decade until her flat was due for demolition. The alternative was to sell her
home back to the council and leave. “I took the decision not to live somewhere
until my 70s and then move. It would be a big upheaval, whereas if I left while
still mobile and relatively fit, it wouldn’t be as bad.”
After over two years of back and forth, Hackney offered
Veronica £220,000 for her two-bedroom flat. Allowing for mortgage and service
charges, and giving her children, who still lived with her, some money to help
them move elsewhere, Veronica had a budget nearer £150,000. On state pension
and so ineligible for a mortgage, she had to buy outright. She couldn’t find
anything nearby: even the one-bedroom ex-council flat next door to the prison
was way above her price limit. “I would have had to move so far out of London
it would have been the same travel-time back to my family as moving away
completely.”
Last summer she bought a house on a similar housing estate –
this time in Ipswich, 80 miles away from her the place she still calls
"home". “The most stressful part was leaving my parents behind. It
took me a while to accept that I was going to have to do that.” She’s not alone
in being displaced. Around one in five of Woodberry Down residents are
leaseholders, and we met a number who were moving to the outskirts of London
and the home counties.
Life in Ipswich is “unsettled”. The new house is bigger than
her old flat, but it needs major work so she hasn’t been able to move all her
things in. Her busy life in London is now limited to monthly visits, hectic
long weekends crammed with friends and family. It’s the opposite in Ipswich.
“My day-to-day now is just going to the shops for a
newspaper. I don’t go out as much now, at all – to the extent that I still
regularly phone people back on the estate to talk, and it’s costing me quite a
lot of money. But I haven’t made any friends there. Things are not the same as
in London.
“And leaving two of my children was a wrench. They wanted to
be in London for work. My main worry is that they won’t be able to stay because
they’re not rich. Our teachers, our nurses, our carers – they’re being priced
out like I was. And we need them. Nobody’s dealing with that.”
Run Veronica’s story by those pushing through the
regeneration and the responses vary in tone but amount to the same. Hackney
council stresses its commitment to keeping the Woodberry Down residents on the
estate, but councilor Karen Alcock says the pledge doesn’t apply to
leaseholders.
After listening to the story, Piers Clanford, managing
director of Berkeley Homes (Capital), says, “Well, I’d like to live in
Mayfair.”
But the difference is he doesn’t already live in Mayfair;
Veronica has been winched out of her home.
“Hmm.”
Veronica’s daughter Nanette bought a one-bedroom flat in the
new development, through the shared-ownership scheme. Sitting in the Happy Man
estate pub – soon to be demolished to build more flats – the charity worker
says: “I know the area, I’ve grown up here, I know people; so I wanted to stay
here.”
The same goes for her brother (who has asked not to be
named), who slept on Nanette’s sofa for six months because he wanted to find
another home on the estate rather than move away. He now pays a private
landlord £1,400 a month to rent a one-bedroom flat in a new block just across
the road from the one in which he was raised.
“When I was growing up here I would see about five or 10
people to talk to a day. And recognise about 10 or 20,” she says. She’s happy
to have stayed on the estate, but life in the new flat has brought less
tangible encounters: “I know a lot of people in my block by email, now. You
don’t really see people.”
She contrasts the young professionals in the new blocks to
the large population of families and elderly people on the original estate.
“You can definitely tell the difference between the old and the new. There have
been a few tensions,” she says, referring in particular to race. “There’s a
clear segregation of income.”
So why cling to a home that’s disappearing? “Because I want
to claim my land. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? But it’s the estate where my
mum lived and I want to show: you can’t get rid of me that easily”
Mehmet Kerem keeps a photo of himself on his shop wall. It’s
just over a year old, yet customers regularly comment on how different he looks
now. Next to the picture, the 45-year-old looks greyer, thinner. “I thought it
was a photo of his brother,” says one of the regulars.
The family snapshot was taken as Mehmet moved to his new
takeaway in Edmonton, on the outskirts of London. The opening cost him about a
hundred grand in lease, counters and other fixtures, “everything new” – and
he’s struggling to make back his lifesavings and family loans.
For nearly a decade, Mehmet ran a chippie on the little
parade of shops at the heart of Woodberry Down. Over there, he’d take about
£2,500 a week; here, a 45-minute bus ride away, it’s roughly half that –
despite working seven days a week, from eight in the morning till almost
midnight.
When the regeneration began, Mehmet and his fellow
shopkeepers were promised units in the rebuilt estate. Every retailer we’ve
spoken to is clear that the offer was made in meetings with Hackney council
(who ran the leases) and Berkeley. They were shown plans and invited to put in
for their chosen premises.
Then that promise was broken. Now only some businesses were
going to transfer across, and that didn’t include the takeaways (different
reasons are given as to why: the most common is simply that flat-buyers would
find it harder to get big mortgages for flats above a takeaway). Mehmet offered
a compromise: “A nice Turkish restaurant”. But no.
Nor could he agree another suitable site with the council.
In 2012, Hackney gave him £9,000 and told him to leave.
Some of the teatime trade have been listening in. At the
end, one mutters, “Nine grand and they throw him away like rubbish.”
 |
|
Mehmet, who lost his chippie in Woodberry Down and has
opened a new takeaway in Edmonton. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
|
Mehmet counts how much he spent on the shop at Woodberry
Down: £100,000. He borrowed from everyone – friends, brothers and sisters in
Cyprus – to set up his new, now-failing business. Those aren’t the only losses.
Soon after Mehmet was kicked out of Hackney, his father died – he thinks
because of the stress. Money worries led to a breakup with his girlfriend of
six years, also the mother of his daughter. Recounting all this, he tugs at his
polo shirt and begins shouting, “Everything is lost. Ten years of working for
nothing.”
Sitting behind the counter is Mehmet’s mother. “He’s
cracking up, he’s nervous all the time, he’s ageing,” she says. “He was never
angry before.”
Despite the promises, a mere handful of the old businesses
remain on the rebuilt estate. Many of them are badly missed by the residents,
especially the semi-legendary Chinese takeaway. A petition was started to save
the shops. which got over 600 signatures, but ignored.
Mehmet spots racism in these choices; but former off-licence
manager Cigdem Garip puts it more broadly: “We didn’t fit in.” The residents of
Woodberry Down are being provincialised: Veronica has literally been carted off
to the provinces, but some of those who remain feel their tastes are not
rarefied enough for their new home. As Jane’s friend, Sheila says, “We’re not
allowed a Chinese, we’re not allowed a fish and chip shop.”
An adviser to the residents carries around a presentation of
the shops Berkeley suggested as examples for the new development. One is Labour
& Wait in Shoreditch: a homeware store where a “Japanese kettle” costs £86.
But posh boutiques also suit councillors, now running an
increasingly-unequal borough. Hackney is at the same time among the most
deprived in England and also more prosperous than the national average. To
cater for the new wealth, the town hall is creating a £100m “fashion hub”
selling top labels. It also wants to dilute the presence of ethnic-minority
restaurants in the borough. The Guardian has seen a letter from a senior
council officer asking restaurateurs to consider setting up in Dalston. It
states: “The offer at the moment is essentially Turkish and African ... We are
keen to attract a wider offer and a style of restaurants to the area.”
Of the entire parade, the electrical-goods shop was the
oldest. Jonathan Devan inherited it from his father; it finally shut just after
the 59th anniversary. A road on the estate has been named in the family’s
honour: Devan Grove. As Jonathan wanders around the estate he still calls
“home”, old ladies struggling with their grocery shopping stop to say hello. He
tells one: “I’m not my own boss any more, I work for someone else – much less
of a headache.”
He has gone from proprietor to part-time helping hand in a
friend’s shop, but accepts the change as “inevitable”. He gestures at the
just-opened juice bar, selling thimble-sized cupcakes for £1.95 a bite: “I was
never going to fit in with that, was I?”
You can spot Micky’s launch party from 100 metres away. The
rest of the strip is quiet, with businesses yet to move into the empty units,
but the entrance to his barbershop has a bunch of young men in suits tussling
with silver balloons.
Inside, past the toddlers in waistcoats and the young women
in makeup, is Micky Souleiman himself: 26, suited and booted and apparently
relaxed about taking on his first business. That champagne glass must be
helping; but up close there are flecks of white emulsion on his fingers,
proving he was up till 4am doing the finishing touches.
Micky has known Mehmet for years and feels bad about what’s
happened to him. But he’s positioned himself to take advantage of the
opportunities offered by his home moving upmarket. Not for him the trad barbers
up the road, with their big black-and-white photos of men in buzzcuts; here
everything is monochrome and co-ordinated. When the inevitable pictures do go
up, they’ll be of Ali and De Niro.
“This is high-end,” he says, gesturing at the decor. “It’s
gonna be luxury.” How so? “It will be more English-style than other ones around
here.”
Ask Berkeley which local businesses they see prospering and
Micky is one they mention. You can see why: he’s young and has an affable smartness
that deserves a spot of sunshine. “The regeneration is definitely a good
thing,” he says. “Everyone’s getting new flats, the place is being done up.” So
what does it need next? A Turkish restaurant, he says, before correcting
himself: “Mediterranean. A nice Mediterranean.”
Three flat-capped old geezers turn up. One of them peers
around and says in a accent straight out of central-casting East End: “It’s
like a fucking club, not a barber’s.”
Ian and Yvonne
On the top floor of one of the new blocks for those paying
subsidised rents live Ian and Yvonne Kleinberg. If you can peel your eyes away
from their view, Ian will show you the photos of his three kids and reel off
their careers: America, teaching, osteopathy … “I always say that if you want
to, you can make it from Woodberry Down,” he says.
If anyone in this tableau should consider themselves
winners, it’s these two. They have moved from crocked council housing into the
kind of apartment that would go like a hotcake on the open market; the kids
have done well and ahead lie the pleasures of the first phase of retired life.
The couple go along with that story, but then point out a few downsides.
Yvonne: “When we walk outside, the tenants from the private
block actually cross the road to avoid us.”
Ian: “Say you’re social [tenants in subsidised rental
accommodation] around here and you go down like a bacon sandwich at a Jewish
wedding.”
The move also means a different rental arrangement: they no
longer rent from the state, but from a private-sector housing association,
Genesis. They now have fewer rights as tenants but, they say, worse service and
higher bills. “There are pensioners in this block getting themselves in debt
just to afford the heating,” says Ian.
The couple met on this estate, when as a teenager Yvonne
used to hang around watching Ian play football. Public space plays an important
part in Woodberry memories: Sheila and Jane used to run about in apple
orchards; Veronica would call in Nanette from playing in the courtyard. When
the estate was built, 20 of the 64 acres were designated for playgrounds,
tennis courts and a community centre. But the public space is being swallowed
up by concrete as the developers cram in more flats to maximise profit.
The best way to picture what’s going on is by imagining the
patch of grass in the middle of an athletics track, which normally comes to one
hectare. Before regeneration, about 83 homes were on each of those grass
patches. Berkeley planned to more than double that, to 194 dwellings a hectare.
Last summer, it announced that it would build even more homes on the estate.
That patch of grass will now have 224 homes on it.
Paul
Paul O’Neill sits on a cafe terrace in Stoke Newington,
still in Hackney but a quarter of an hour east from Manor House and around
£100,000 north in property prices. Tearing into his croissant, he tells us that
it’s here he really wanted to live. But he and his girlfriend couldn’t afford
the rents nearby, so became some of the first tenants in the flagship tower.
Last September, Paul left a comment on a blog about the
regeneration. Far from being defensive, he was clear-eyed: “It was a big risk
for us moving here … the area was already known for its anti-social behaviour …
but I simply couldn’t afford anywhere else in London.”
That said, Woodberry Park isn’t affordable either: they pay
£300 a week for “a kitchen-cum-living room and a tiny bedroom.”
Young skilled professionals, Paul and his heavily-pregnant
girlfriend are the pandas of London’s housing market: the ones every politician
coos over, while fretting that without a major intervention they may soon die
out in the capital. “David Cameron’s dream” is how Paul ironically refers to
himself. Matt Bell at Berkeley argues that the real gap in the London market is
starter homes for young professionals on £30-40,000 a year. But Woodberry Park
isn’t going to fill that hole: a one-bed flat there can go for up to £400,000 –
and no lender currently offers mortgages worth 12-times salary.
Paul has a mental map of the London he can afford: it
comprises only the edges and even they keep shrinking as prices “gallop away”.
At the moment the budget just about stretches to a home in Walthamstow, on the
northern periphery of London – but he reckons that once the baby comes and the
family’s settled down: “It will probably be too expensive, so we’ll be looking
for the next place out of London, which is … I don’t even know.
“My eventual dream is to live in Italy: your lovely little
house in Tuscany, doing web design, eating Italian food all day. But if I’m
honest, the reality is I’ll end up moving miles out of London, paying
exorbitant train fares, desperately scrambling to find a nice school for the
kids.”
Paul leases his flat from a Singaporean investor who he’s
never met: “All of my neighbours rent from foreign absentee landlords."
This fits the picture drawn in the property pages of the
British press, which often depict would-be London housebuyers as battling an
army of invisible competitors: Russian oligarchs, Saudi sheikhs and, at the
other end of the market, anxious Greek professionals and Asian nuclear
families. Yet the forces that have driven Singaporeans over here are rarely
spelt out. Let us try.
From the Land Registry records, we see that Paul’s landlord
lives near Changi airport in an ochre public housing block, in an area carpeted
with other public blocks. No shame there: about 85% of all Singaporeans live in
Housing and Development Board quarters, or HDBs for short. In the wealthy
entrepot, interest rates are also bumping around record-low levels and property
prices have taken off.
The big difference is that since 2009, Singapore’s
government has chucked bucket after bucket of cold water onto the overheating
housing market. It’s clamped down on loans, jacked up stamp duty, punished
people who sell property they’ve bought only recently – and levied punitive
taxes on foreigners buying homes. In short, almost every policy urged on David
Cameron over the past few years – and left unwrapped – has been deployed by Lee
Hsien Loong. The message is simple: Singapore doesn’t welcome property
speculation. But the island’s dentists and middle managers and other cautious
savers are welcomed by the overseas agents of Berkeley and its competitors,
offering rental units in the no-questions-asked capital of the world.
This new market has brought with it a new speculative
architecture, says Duncan Bowie, now at the University of Westminster.
Developers are responding to the demands of investors wanting one- or two-bed
flats to rent out, rather than family homes to live in. That produces an odd
Animal Farm-ish logic: “Council high-rises are bad; private high-rises
apparently good.”
A few weeks before we went to press, Paul and his girlfriend
became parents to Zara: brown hair, blue eyes and 3.3kg at birth. Around the
same time, their landlord sold the flat, apparently to a cash buyer from
Germany. Paul and family have found another apartment in the same development.
All’s fine now, he reports, but it was a lot of stress at the time.
Urchins
Every building worth a damn sets in concrete (or glass or
Jura limestone) the social tensions of its age. As Herbert Morrison was
dreaming up Woodberry Down, the fundamental argument was over the rights that
should be afforded the only recently enfranchised working class. On hearing the
MP’s plans to stick municipal housing on their doorstep, one Stoke Newington
resident objected to “all these urchins from the East End coming round my
drinking water”. Nimbyism was evidently more plainspoken in 1936.
By the estate’s completion in 1948, the argument had been
won. Britain was entering its high-point as an economic democracy, with
electricity, rail, even the Bank of England put into public hands. Woodberry
Down was part of that: a physical assertion that the capital belonged to its
working classes as much as to anyone else.
Contrast that with the era embodied by Woodberry Park. The
rebuild comes after 30 years in which our major public assets – water, gas,
council housing – have been sold dirt-cheap, to end up in the hands of a small
elite.
More and more parts of London, too, are off limits to
Londoners.
Think of those unaffordable super-rich islands; the
privately-owned finance tracts such as Canary Wharf; the gated communities.
Listen to the constant uptick of house prices, that metronome for commuters in
the capital. Most blatantly, there is the coalition’s cap on housing benefit,
which will expunge the inner city of its privately-renting poor.
Woodberry Park is part of this new culture. Houses as
speculative assets, not homes. Houses as speculative assets, not homes. Paul
will tell you of the human fallout. Financial viability trumping desperate
need? Speak to Gina.
Woodberry Down’s residents were initially told that this
rebuilding was for them. A few years on, it isn’t working out like that.
Veronica and other leaseholders have been hoisted off; social housing on the
site will plunge; remaining tenants will have higher outgoings and less green
space.
Park any cynicism you may have about big builders and accept
for a moment that this is a textbook example of public-private regeneration.
Then look at the stories above and ask if the textbook doesn’t need major
revision.
The tour
In the same spot that Naoufal Dhimi pulled up in his SUV
weeks earlier, eight people bundle out of a minivan, to be greeted by Emma – a
smiling representative from Berkeley Homes. She leads them into a room with a
large model of Woodberry Park at the centre. The famous resident survey booklet
is handed out.
The visitors are from Brixton, south London, sent here by
Lambeth council to draw lessons for their own regeneration.
“Woodberry Down is very much a partnership,” says Emma.
“It’s not just: ‘Hi we’re Berkeley, we’re going to knock everything down, build
and see you later’.” She lists the community assets, including a primary
school, a health centre and a church that have all existed on the estate for
decades. But when a guest asks about the project’s financing, they’re
stonewalled: “In money terms, I couldn’t answer.”
Now comes the grand tour. Pulling out notebooks, the
visitors spill out into the sunshine, ready to be inspired.
 |
|
Dr Paul Watt (Department of Geography, Environment and
Development Studies, Birkbeck, University of London) discusses "It's not
for us": regeneration, the 2012 Olympics and the gentrification of East
London
This paper examines the much-hyped 2012 Olympic Games
‘legacy’ in relation to the displacement experiences of lower-income East
Londoners. The paper begins by sketching recent debates in gentrification
studies before moving onto outline the context of housing-related regeneration
in London including transformations in social housing provision. The paper then
sets out a framework for understanding how state-led gentrification,
displacement and regeneration are intertwined, as well as how such processes
have been contested. The paper examines these issues in depth with reference to
case studies of the inhabitants of two working-class spaces in the London
Borough of Newham, an Olympics host borough. The first study is based on the
Carpenters Estate, a council housing estate in Stratford that is facing
potential demolition, and the second focuses on young people living in a
temporary supported housing unit. These studies illustrate how the 2012
Olympics, alongside other regeneration schemes, is changing the nature of space
and place from the perspective of existing East London residents and how
gentrification is implicated in such transformations. Neither the Carpenters
Estate residents nor the young people think that the Olympics and other
regeneration schemes in Newham are primarily occurring, if at all, for their
benefit – indeed, displacement processes may well mean that they are no longer
able to live in their current neighbourhood. The Olympics legacy is for others,
not for them.
Part of the Cities Seminar Series.
|
Editorial: “It’s not for us…”?
CITY /Analysis / http://www.city-analysis.net/2013/02/21/editorial-%E2%80%9Cits-not-for-us%E2%80%A6%E2%80%9D/
‘It’s not for us and all the
promises of affordable homes and local jobs is nothing but hot air and the real
people benefiting are the large businesses.’
The words of a homeless youth in temporary housing in one of
the boroughs adjacent to the London Olympics site. Nearby some residents of an
estate claim that their proposed displacement/replacement/’development’ is
‘social cleansing in the name of … corporate objectives.’ Do such claims apply
universally to working class and many ‘middle class’ people that find
themselves enmeshed in such development(s)? If so, could it be otherwise?
The latest issue of CITY (Issue 17.1) follows out the
contradictions of these and related developments in six other contexts. In
European borderlands, Henrick Lebuhn notes that not just the nature of border
control but also that of urban citizenship is at issue. In U.S. cities (and
beyond) Joshua Long looks at the counter-claim for respecting and enhancing the
essential ‘weirdness’ of particular cities as contrasted to the marginalizing
uniformities that corporate objectives seek to impose. Looking across the
European and North American experience Margit Mayer seeks to define a way
beyond the proferred alternatives of austerity urbanism or ‘creative city’
politics. Looking into the fast-approaching future, two further and apparently
exclusively paths are sketched out by, on the one hand, Andy Merrifield who
looks towards hopeful vistas of reconceptualised ‘non-work’ beyond the
accelerating progress/regress of planetary urbanization, and, on the other
hand, by Adrian Atkinson, who looks from the emerging evidence of urban and
peri-urban agriculture (UPA), though currently marginalized, towards a future
in which agrarianism will become central as urbanization declines and
collapses. In a final context, the endpiece looks backwards as well as forwards
– from the Renaissance through Romanticism, Marxism, social science, critical
theory and materialisms, old and new – seeking tools for understanding and
surpassing these apparently contradictory presents and futures.
Orbit or obit?
The evidence and analysis set out in these seven contexts,
starting from the London Olympics, contributes to ongoing debates in recent
issues of CITY. The London borough mentioned above is Newham, an Olympic ‘host’
borough that, as Paul Watts reports, contained 60% of the Olympic sites. The
estate which, according to residents, is undergoing ‘social cleansing’ in
return for imposed hospitality, is the Carpenters council estate. The
photograph here shows part of the estate. What can be seen(1) picking up on the
description provided by Watt in the paper, is the terraced housing, in the
foreground on the left. The tower block which dominates the picture, on the
right, is Dennison Point — and the one on the left in the background is Lund
Point. Just visible on the side of Lund, there is the Olympics corporate
advertising which was on the sides of all three towers (shown in Figure 2 of
Watt’s paper). Some residents, tenants and leaseholders, remain in each of
these two towers. As at Sept 2012, there were 19 tenant and 19 leasehold
households remaining at Dennison and 15 tenant and 15 leasehold households
remaining at Lund. The third tower (James Riley Point), not visible in the
photograph, was the one which was decanted first (beginning in 2005) and has
the fewest number of remaining residents – 4 leaseholders at Sept 2012.
In the background is the ArcelorMittal Orbit and just behind
is the Olympic Stadium. The appropriately pretentiously titled ‘Orbit’ was a
starting point (16.4, pp. 439–441) for Andrea Gibbon’s and Nick Wolff’s
four-part series on Cities and the Olympic Games which ends in this issue with
these London sites, re-assembled, so to speak, or perhaps dissembled, in the
grand narrative of the London Olympics. Some in the upper echelons of the art
imperium/emporium hailed it. According to Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate
director, who sat on the board of the Olympic Delivery Authority, it is “a
beautiful and arresting sculpture” that will “provide points of memory and
incident in the landscape.” The notions of ‘memory and incident’ here are suitably
Olympian. In the well-grounded observation of the Guardian’s chief arts writer,
Charlotte Higgins, it is ‘a tangle of scarlet steel 115 metres tall, it looms
down on the modest houses of the Carpenters Estate…’ For Dolores John-Phillip
who lives on the estate, it is, Higgins notes, “just a lump of nothing. It
doesn’t signify anything. What does it say about the area, the community? It’s
just towering over us… It’s looking down on the little people, And we’re
nothing.”(2)
Already these extremes have taken appropriate legendary
form. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, persuaded steel billionaire, Lakshmi
Mittal, so Higgins tells, to provide £19.6m of the £22.7m cost during a chance
encounter in the lavatories at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland.
‘A new phase of neoliberal capitalism’: hedonistic
totalitarianism with austerity?
Beyond the bowels of Davos there is talk of ‘a new phase of
capitalism.’ Central to such discussions h is Margit Mayer’s simultaneously
detailed and wide-ranging ‘First world urban activism: Beyond austerity
urbanism and creative city politics’, to which we return in a forthcoming paper
from Fran Tonkiss, and, in recent issues, Jamie Peck’s ‘Austerity urbanism:
American cities under extreme urbanism’ (16.6), Mark Davidson and Elvin Wyly’s
‘Class-ifying London: Questioning social division and space claims in the
post-industrial city’ (16.4), (3) Andy Merrifield’s two (analytically, not just
chronologically, sequential) pieces on the politics of encounter, non-work and
planetary urbanization (16.3 and this issue), and the ongoing series edited by
Adrian Atkinson’s, ‘Urban and peri-urban agriculture’ (from 16.6). There is the
further context of the Editorials accompanying these papers in each issue that
have provided a preliminary synthesis of this work, and of the supplementary
speculative and experimental endpieces. CITY is a holistic and cumulative
project, not just a periodic and arbitrary collection of possible downloads.
One stage of the discussion was an issue (16.5) entitled
‘Private property. Keep out?” (the words but not the question mark were taken
from the photograph, accompanying the editorial, of a warning notice posted on
the site of an abandoned cement works).(4) The editorial to that issue discussed
a passage from an earlier article by Mayer, ‘Moving beyond “Cities for People,
Not for Profit”(5) in which she had made the observation that ‘a new phase of
neoliberal capitalism appears to be on the horizon’, sought to characterize it,
and draw out the analytical and action implications of this all too material
appearance. The question being posed by this and other recent editorials is
whether the notion of neoliberalism, though admittedly necessary and powerful,
is a sufficient conceptual tool for analyzing late capitalism and,
particularly, its emerging phase. This question had already been addressed in
the editorial to that issue, drawing on and supplementing the interpretation of
that trend put forward in our series on ‘development’ and the Olympics, where
it was suggested in the editorial that the new phase is ‘a complex
socio-economic, psychosocial yet deeply material, and political trend’(p. 392).
In a section headed ‘Naming the trend’ (393) it was further suggested that
though the label ‘neoliberalism’ effectively addresses the first and third
elements (socio-economic and political) of this characterization, it does not
address the third (‘psycho-social but deeply material’) Referring to that
psycho-social yet deeply material dimension, it continued that:
It can be seen as
a form of hedonism in which apparently pure pleasure is extracted, sucked from
the earth, while marginalizing and alienating the aesthetic and ethical
qualities that have mediated the intercourse between the various materialities
that link the human psyche and the planet. (393)
This is the analysis that informs the ongoing series of
speculative and experimental endpieces ‘Towards the Great Transformation’ which
have included the examination of a selection of powerful images and themes,
neglected in the social sciences, ranging from Hegel’s, Marx’s and Keiller’s
mole leading on from Shakespeare – via an imaginary/menagerie/bestiary extended
to include monsters and the monstrous – to Blake’s and Polanyi’s ‘satanic
mills’, the snake/serpent of Blake and Deleuze, Keiller’s web-spinning spider
and Whybrow’s reptilian-mammalian combine.(6) This examination has reached the
stage at which ‘Materialisms, old and new’ are re-conceptualised.
This psycho-social (and, it should be added, bio-social)
dimension, continuing the above characterization, has:
‘A totalizing
agenda whose imperatives are increasingly contradictory and destructive at a
time of imposed and totalizing austerity that seeks to hide the open wounds
that it inflicts. The name for such a project is totalitarianism, an emerging
form that retains the hedonistic pleasures of ‘the affluent society’ while
restricting and sensationalizing these pleasures, and restricting and
undermining the support of this life style provided by ‘the welfare state’ now
controlled in the allied name of austerity.’ (393)
This analysis continues CITY’s debate with Margit Mayer and
her co-editors of Cities for People, Not for Profit which Mayer acknowledges in
an endnote to her paper in this issue. CITY’s critique identified seven
shortcomings in the approach set out in that work: it ‘does not give sufficient
attention to urbanization as an accelerating denial of “the city”, the possible
social/economic/environmental collapse of cities, to the experience of the
global South, to feminist and anarchist/autonomist critiques, to shortcomings
in the way we write social studies, and to praxis.’ Mayer has since referred
humorously to these as ‘the seven deadly sins’.(7) The trouble is that they
could prove to be deadly.
by Bob Catterall, Chief Editor of CITY
Editorial to CITY, Vol. 17 Issue 1; see contents list below.
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