The right to community?

Painted Bullet Holes and Broken Promises: Understanding and Challenging Municipal Dispossession in London's Public Housing ‘Decanting’

“…The archive, hosted on different campaigning websites, combined primary and secondary sources, including press coverage from national and local media, interviews, freedom of information requests to the local authority, and planning policy analysis covering a period of over ten years (see Pell, 2015). Participation as objectors and expert witnesses in the Public Inquiry into the Heygate Estate Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) enabled activists to cross‐examine members of the local government and their decision‐making during the ‘decanting’ (Lees and Ferreri, 2016; Ferreri, 2018), setting an important precedent for other housing estates’ CPO Inquiries (Hubbard and Lees, 2018). A significant element in the archive were the counter‐narratives about and by remaining and former residents (see also Mann, 2015), based on interviews and transcriptions of footage shared by documentary filmmakers, the latter used in an effort to minimize research fatigue for residents.…”

“…As early as 2007, the Heygate Tenants and Residents Association had warned that the ‘decanting’ would be particularly traumatic for those residents, mostly in their seventies and eighties ( The Big Issue , 29 October 2007), due to the loss of established lifelong relationships. While ‘not all who dwell on estates form affective ties with other estate residents’ (Hubbard and Lees, 2018: 19), the manufactured ‘villages’ and ‘communities’ imagined by municipal housing planning (Boughton, 2018) became for many the lived everyday of neighbourly support. As explained by an elderly London‐born council tenant, leaving the estate before her long‐term leaseholder neighbours, a first‐generation migrant couple in their eighties, made her feel ‘a little bit like a traitor.…”

“…The Heygate, for instance, was far from an idyllic cohesive community unchanged throughout its 40 years of history; like many other council estates, it was affected by shifts in housing policy and changes in race and class composition (Romyn, 2016), residualization and a disruptively high turnover of temporary residents, as already mentioned. Invoking the notion of ‘community’ as a ‘vector of justice’ against displacement from council estate demolition (Hubbard and Lees, 2018: 20) requires a careful and situated analysis of the difference between ‘community’ as a performative formation of political subject, and as actual, lived experience.…”

Participation and spatial transformation in large housing estates in Poland. Case study of Ursynów Północny

“…It underlines a conflict as a natural element of social life and discussion and consequently creates the opportunity to widen the group of stakeholders allowed and willing to participate (Rogers et al 2017). Consequently, complying with the ideas of 'the right to the city' evoked by grassroots activists (Hubbard & Lees 2018), individual and informal forms of participation are brought back as significant features.…”

Towards a pluralistic understanding of Chinese homeowners: the case of ‘ordinary’ buyers

“…First, despite a long history of understanding the role of 'key workers' in urban studies literatures (see Raco, 2008), current analysis tends to either focus on the bottom end of the market experiencing extreme and aggravated evictions in the name of the development of new homes (see Gillespie et al, 2018) or high-end, ultra-wealthy consumption patterns which cause displacement problems, especially in the context of international property acquisition (Atkinson, 2020). Second, analysis has concentrated on central locations within major cities or zones which immediately surround the central area (see Hubbard and Lees, 2018). We argue that in doing so, research has neglected the investment and buying patterns in non-central or high-end locations and ordinary, diverse neighbourhoods across cities.…”