PANEL 1: TENANCIES
David Madden (LSE)
The Return of the Tenant as a Political Subject
in cities and housing systems across the world, owner-occupation
In cities and housing systems across the world, owner-occupation is becoming less
accessible, even as it maintains its prestige, while private renting is becoming more
common. This tenure shift is setting the stage for a political shift, as the figure
of "the tenant" is once again becoming a major subject within urban politics. This
paper considers what sorts of solidarities and challenges are emerging around
the identity of the tenant, and what a tenant-centred politics has to say about the
contemporary urban condition.
Mara Ferreri (Polytechnic and University of Turin)
Politics of housing platforms and 'digital informalisation'
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing
under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. One example is
how short-term letting through platforms such as Airbnb, by promoting tourist stay
over stable residential uses, are exacerbating existing processes of gentrification,
touristification, and transience, and challenging planning and policy processes.
But there are other ways in which platforms are transforming the housing sector.
This presentation builds on interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how digital
platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting
urban dwellers with new theoretical and political blind spots. The emerging
geographies of such platformisation intersects with established urban phenomena,
particularly linked to data extractivism, the heightened temporalities to real estate
investment, deregulation of rental markets, and increased housing precarization.
In what we have called 'digital informalisation' (Ferreri and Sanyal, 2022), new forms
of digital management of risk are entering and shaping market housing globally and
in the UK, to control access and 'filter out' populations. In contrast to progressive
imaginaries of 'smart' technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining,
tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies introduce and
extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. Digital mediation of
housing and its governance thus become significant, and as yet unaddressed,
elements in emerging urban and housing politics.
PANEL 2: AGENCY
Mark Sustr (UEL)
Homelessness has historically been explained as either a housing or welfare
problem, caused by structural issues, individual agency, or a combination of both.
Although the majority of 'homeless careers' are short-lived, there is a significant
minority of people who struggle to transition out of homelessness or who flip
flop between temporary housing and either life on the streets or other forms of
homelessness. This group continue to experience stigmatisation, material poverty
and emotional precarity, living on the margins of society and remaining in the
homeless system or lifestyle. Despite this, numerous research studies identity
homeless people who strive to assert their agency and when afforded the right
circumstances, transform their situations. This presentation will discuss Self-Help
Housing, which comes under the umbrella of community-led housing and involves
groups of local people(often experiencing disadvantage) who bring long-term empty
homes back into either temporary or permanent use for those who struggle to
secure decent rental accommodation. It will focus on the three themes fundamental
to this question, namely, agency, homelessness, and self-help housing. It will explore
if this initiative has the potential to be transformative, by providing secure housing
but also the capacity to empower homeless people, expand their personal agency
and give them the confidence to claim representation within their communities.
It will also give an overview of the proposed doctoral research and methodology
intended for this ongoing study.
Self-Help Housing as a Pathway to Personal Agency
Paul Watt (Birkbeck)
Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and
Inequality in London
This presentation is based on a recently published monograph which provides an
in-depth account of the ways that public/social housing estate regeneration- via
demolition and rebuilding - is reshaping London and fuelling socio-spatial inequalities
via state-led gentrification. The book is based on over a decade of original research
involving field work, interviews with 180 residents (tenants and homeowners), and
over 50 officials and politicians. The presentation briefly sketches out the policy
rationale for estate regeneration, and then moves onto discuss residents' place
attachments to their homes and neighbourhoods prior to regeneration. The main
part of the presentation focuses on residents' experiences of living through estate
regeneration, and demonstrates how regeneration turns into physical, social,
psychosocial and symbolic degeneration. The aftermaths of regeneration are then
discussed in relation to how fragmented rather than mixed communities are being
created. The final part of the presentation examines residents' resistance to
demolition.
Andrew Lee (UEL)
The Comfort of Things and the Performance of Homelessness
The Midnight Florist Collective's performance of The Comfort of Things (2017) was
an autobiographic account of the lead artist's experience of rough sleeping and
housing vulnerability, performed whilst the artist was still living in the situation
on which the performance was built. This performance-presentation will seek
to explore the wider cultural questions raised by the situation of homelessness
through the lens of performed autobiographic experience and will reflect on the
artist's continuing experience of housing precarity.
The performance-presentation, like the performance that inspired it, will draw from
Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things (2008) and Stuff (2010) to explore housing as a
concept of luxury rather than human right, and how, through that lens, capitalism's
modes of production and profit renders the regular social function of the home
detunct. The presentation will be delivered as a practice-as-research enquiry
involving 'performative' elements.
PANEL 3: REPRESENTATIONS
Katie Beswick (Goldsmiths)
Art and Housing: Coping with Neoliberalism's Corrosive Affects
In this presentation, I am concerned with examining how art makes space for what
I term a 'truth affect', and particularly with how artists have used performance as
a medium to 'cope with' the affective consequences of the neoliberal housing crisis,
As Paul Watt argues, '[h]ousing is the most palpable manifestation of London's
inequality', exposing inequities of wealth, health, safety and wellbeing that are,
'disproportionately borne by London's multi-ethnic working-class population, who
reside in the city's social housing estates, or in the insecure private rented sector'
(Watt 2). The perilous state of housing insecurity borne by working class land
increasingly also by middle and upper class) people in London is evidence of wider
systemic failure, exacerbated by policies of austerity that have stripped back the
welfare state since at least 2010 (Arie 2018).
I draw on Adrienne Rich's conception of 'truth' as articulated in her essay 'Women
and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, where she posits truth as a matter of honour,
created in relations between individuals. Truth, for Rich, has an affective quality,
creating a'cold, sea-sharp wash of relief that gives way to the 'possibility of life'. I
apply this conception of truth as affect to map an understanding of neoliberalism
as an affective state of untruth, in which peace and 'the possibility of life' is
compromised. I position the housing crisis as a manifestation of this affective state,
before mapping the ways theatre and performance artists have sought relief from
the corrosive affects of neoliberalism. I explore how artworks have created truths
that cut through the lies and open the possibility of a 'sea-sharp wash of relief" that
might help us, as audiences, bear the painful affects of the contemporary moment.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman
Counter Memories, Porous Personhood and Dwelling Against 'Progress'
In her major recent anthology, published in 2022, writer and poet Eileen Myles
reclaimed pathos from the wretchedness of political rhetoric, all too often
used in conjunction with media portrayals to marginalise vernacular, unruly, and
incomprehensible opposition by those not aligning themselves with an acceptable
image citizenhood in a place such as, say, London. Myles urged a resistance to
despair, advocatingfor the right to a fullness of life on one'sownterms, inrefusal of
this imposition, and the implication that simply being oneself in a certain location -
often desired by developers - is problematic.
As someone whohas emerged into a cultural profile from the societal margins and
theirall-too-ignored traumatic registers, as someone wholives and works with still
marginalised and traumatised individualsand communities (and who still lives as one
of them in many ways), Iam often required to challengemediated, 'naturalised and
even 'asserted' ways of looking at others. Notions of 'giving voice t o others erases
(lives and environments) and, crucially, masks this process, and hence tethers these
lives into trope moulds.
Anna Robinson (UEL)
Social Housing and working class story telling
The tenants on the former social housing estate that live on, tell their stories as
single paragraph 'flash factions'. Flash fictions are extremely short (often only a
paragraph) stories. Our stories are factual; hence 'factions'. Natalie Zemon Davis, in
her book Fiction in the Archives, has argued that fiction is not the opposite of fact in
any case. She points out that fiction comes from the root "fingere", which is about
"the crafting of a narrative" (1987, 3), not its lack of factualness. However, as most
people would understand fiction and fact to be oppositional, have used thist e r m to
describe them. Because they are, of course, 'the Gods' honest truth- no word of a
lie!'
They are often told to an audience who knows something about the story, if not the
narrative, because they were there or because someone else has told them about
it, or because they have heard the story a million times before. In social housing, our
story telling is collective - even though some people are better at it than others.
It is myth making by the witnesses - sometimes layered, sometimes first hand. My
paper will consist of a brief history of the estate as background, the structure of
the stories and a reading of some examples.
PANEL 4: PROPERTY OWNING DEMOCRACIES?
Part 1
Part 2
A wide-ranging discussion of the politics of housing, building and urban space in
the twenty-first century. What is the cause of, and what are the possible solutions
to, the endemic housing crisis that so many countries are now experiencing? Is
the dream of a property-owning democracy still sustainable in the 20th century?
Who gets to decide on the nature of our built environment, and on how change is
managed, initiated or prevented? Who benefits from development, from public
or private housing initiatives, and from the manipulation of supply and demand by
various industry actors? How far do the aesthetics of building and urban space
matter, and who has a voice in shaping them and responding to them? What are the
different experiences that we can draw on in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and
further afield, when looking for creative responses to these issues? And how far is
housing reform on any scale possible outside of a radical programme of state-led
reform and social reconstruction?
Eoin Ó Broin is a Sinn Féin TD (MP) for Dublin Mid-West and the party's
spokesperson on Housing, Local Government and Heritage. He is author of five
books including HOME: Why public housing is the answer (Merrion Press 2019) and
DEFECTS: Living with the legacy of the Celtic Tiger (Merrion Press 2021). He is
currently working on his next book with photographer Mal McCann, Inner city flats
& suburban cottages: Herbert Simms and the housing of Dublins working class
(Merrion Press 2024).
Owen Hatherley writes about aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review,
The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and many others. He received a PhD
in 2011 from Birkbeck College, University of London, for a thesis published as The
Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press, 2016). He is the author of fourteen books, including
Militant Modernism (ZerO, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso,
2010), Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015), Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020),
and most recently Modern Buildings in Britain (Penguin, 2022) and Artificial Islands
(Repeater, 2022). He is the editor of The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs
(Open City, 2020), a commissioning editor at Jacobin and the culture editor of
Tribune.
PANEL 5: CROSS BOROUGH HOUSING POLICY-MAKING WORKSHOP
Rokhsana Fiaz - Mayor of Newham, OBE
Panel Discussion:
Tom Copley - Deputy Mayor for Housing, GLA
Sem Moema - GLA Chair of the Housing Group & Mayoral Advisor on the Private Rented Sector & Affordability
Anthony Okereke - Leader of Greenwich Council
Aydin Dikerdem - Cabinet Lead for Housing, Wandsworth Council
James McAsh - Cabinet Member for the Climate Emergency, Clean Air and Streets, Southwark Council
Panel Discussion
Part 1
Panel Discussion
Part 2
PANEL 6: GENTRIFICATION AND COUNTER STRATEGIES
Loretta Lees (Director of the Initiative on Cities, Boston University)
Gentrification is a key contributor to the housing crisis both in
London and globally - what can we do about it?
We Know what gentrification is, we know about its negative effects, we know it has
mutated, intensified and is global- but the critical question is: What can we do
about it? Gentrification affects affordable housing in cities, it displaces marginalized,
lower income, and minoritized populations from cities, and can cause homelessness.
In this paper look at attempts from around the globe that seek to deal with this
thorny issue. Yet policies and practices introduced to fight gentrification, important
as they are, often only ameliorate the impacts of the process. Ialso arguethat we
must build new affordable, preferably council/social/public housing and now, we must
make sure emptyhomes don o t remainempty, we must control the touristification
of homes, and create policies that ensure the honest social mixity of cities.
Mike Edwards (UCL)
Matching action to the urgency of the problems
The Covid pandemic, in its first year or two, opened our eyes to the extreme
inequality of income security, housing conditions and health risks as poor workers
and especially minoritised people were hit hardest inmortality, damage to
education and further impoverishment. The enduring impacts of long Covid, rental debt & aggravated inequality remain with us. Politicians seem to be looking for Back-
To-Normal but that just prolongs the class war which impoverishes the poor and
enriches the rich. In London this could mean that continuing attempts tomaximise
total housing output at almost any price will result in a further paucity of low r e n t
social/council housing and under supply of affordable family sized homes.
Housing targets and densification everywhere are great for developers and
landowners but divert land from social housing and raise its costs. The central aim
of policy must be to protect and expand the non-market stock of housing not only
by new building out by refurbishing and acquisition; not just by councils but by a
great diversity of co-ops, CLTs and other forms of non-market social organisation,
We know from the pandemic experience how solidarities can develop and we also
know that governments can create money when they need it. A better world Is
possible but it means weaning the economy off housing asset values as its driving
force.
PANEL 7: DISPOSSESSIONS AND RECLAMATIONS
Sharda Rozena (University of Leicester)
Gentrification in North Kensington today
Sociologist Ruth Glass, who coined the term gentrification in 1904, provided an
analysis of housing in North Kensington in the 1960's. She found that as middle-class
people moved into working-class areas, there was an increase in the socio-economic
value of the neighbourhood and consequently, the displacement of the existing
community. Also many working class and ethnic minority groups in North Kensington
suffered from scrupulous landlords, unsanitary private housing conditions and
extortionate rents. I draw on Glass' observations in North Kensington and explore
how closely they resemble the current situation today.
This includes exploring aspects of state-led gentrification (nothing embodies the
displacement of council tenants more horrifically and permanently than the Grenfell
Tower fire) to the slow violence that landlords have used to push out rent-control
tenants, and finally the more recent encroachment of the mega-rich andtheir
occupation of one of the richest boroughs inthe UK. Using the voices of residents, I
discuss what gentrification might mean for North Kensington residents today.
Shade Abdul (DEFT.Space)
How regeneration intersects with race in Peckham
According to the 2021 Census, the largest population in Peckham is of African
descent or Black, whilst White residents make up just less than 30% of the total
population. Regeneration and gentrification threaten to disrupt this ethnicity
makeup with growing private and council-led developments in the area. Residents
and businesses are keen to see greater financial investment, but one which is
inclusive, balanced and offers economic opportunities to existing communities.
However, the concern felt by many is the displacement that will result as racialised
and working class communities are left exposed to the market and the rising rents
that regeneration sets in motion.
I will be presenting a brief overview of Peckham including its history as a home for
immigrants and the type of housing these communities were able to access. I will
cover the early beginnings of regeneration post-2000 symbolised by the Peckham
Library. Bringing us to Peckham today and the changing face of its high street, Rye
Lane, I will present research findings on how businesses are experiencing change,
and in the context of proposed development projects such as the redevelopment of
the Aylesham Centre.
Systemically disempowered, racialised communities, which are the largest
population in the area, are worryingly underrepresented in the decisions and
policies that are shaping the its future
James McAsh (Southwark Council)
The Southwark Land Commission
The Southwark Land Commission is a radical project to
bring together thinkers, community groups and socially-minded land owners to
work out how to free up more land for the public good. By taking an approach
that considers land in all its many facets, the Commission has proposed a series
of initiatives which could transform land use in the borough, and beyond. The
final report is not yet published, so this will be the first opportunity to discuss its
recommendations and consider the impact that Land Commissions could have
across the country.
PANEL 8: BUILDING AND ADAPTING
Georgia Haseldine +
Lynne McCarthy (UEL)
Brickfield Newham
Brickfield Newham (2021) was a multi-disciplinary community research
project that drew local attention to historical brickfield sites of the
borough, their labour histories and their role in shaping our present urban
and domestic infrastructures. The project was a collaboration between
University of East London, Brickfield (Cornwall), and the V&A museum
(VARI and V&A East) encompassing the disciplines of design, performance,
history, traditional crafts and urban space. Communities, university
students, artists and scholars worked together through brick making,
design and performance workshops; the building and hiring of a traditionally
built kiln; and the presentation of performances engendering discussions
on the contemporary built environment with local planners, architects,
journalists and ceramic historians. While making palpable the labour of
home-making through re-stagings of early clay manufacture, a process
that was intensely exploitative, the project also framed the traditional
making of brick as a lost craft. Haseldine will discuss the role of the
museum object in articulating the histories of brick-making. McCarthy will
focus on social relations between brick-making and dwelling.
Arman Hashemi (UEL)
Healthy Energy Efficient Dwellings
As people spend up to 90% of their time indoor; exposure to poor Indoor Air
Quality (IAQ) may negatively affect their health, Moreover, the COVID19 pandemic
has revealed the profound social vulnerability of certain groups in society,
particularly those struggling with poor health conditions. Additionally, the external
air temperatures in the UK are expected to rise by over 5°C by 2070, as a result
of climate change, with the frequency and intensity of heat waves also expected to
increase. Rising external temperatures significantly increase the risk of overheating,
cooling load, energy consumption in buildings and associated carbon emissions,
with the problem being particularly affecting health and wellbeing of vulnerable
populations including children and older occupants of buildings. We are collaborating
with Newham Council and Hyde Housing Association on a few funded research
projects to explore the correlations between lAQ, thermal comfort, occupant
behaviour, and building design, and performance on the occupants' health and
wellbeing. It is aimed to ultimately develop technical-behavioural interventions
that improve people's health, indoor environmental conditions, and reduce energy
consumption and associated carbon emissions. We anticipate positive impacts on
housing design policies, as well as increase public awareness of the necessity for
behaviour change to achieve Net Zero targets, whilst improving occupants' health
and wellbeing.
CLOSING PLENARY
Anna Minton
Lynne McCarthy
Debra Benita Shaw
Jeremy Gilbert
