Centre for Social Change and Justice
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Centre for Social Change and Justice
The Centre for Social Change and Justice addresses what social justice looks like in any given moment and how it is communicated. The centre is a forum for critical social praxis and social action. We consolidate UEL's comprehensive work on the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals within the UK and the global context while identifying emerging critical social issues through policy relevant research, critical social theory and creative intervention.
We focus on:
- The UN's SDGs on reduced inequalities, gender, poverty, hunger, economy, climate, cities, communities, institutions, justice and peace (SDGs: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16)
- locating where and when social change or its possibility can be advocated and how this is socially recognised
- articulating emerging forms of restricted opportunities
- theorising contemporary modes of social justice.
In making questions of social change and justice visible, the Centre uses multi-disciplinary perspectives, gathering academics across social sciences, performance, cultural studies, architecture, health and law to share diverse methodological approaches to the critical concerns of the contemporary moment.
We do this by:
- engaging widely with community organisations, policy makers, students, activists and local government
- gathering a network of researchers, thematically and collaboratively working through social change in areas of racial justice, climate justice, health, social, and economic justice, cultural justice, political justice and justice and the city
- research training: upskilling members in interdisciplinary methodologies and SDGs, including PhD students through workshops, capacity building and mentoring
- advancing research-informed teaching and the involvement of students in live research enquiries.
Exploring the Transformative Potential of Social Value' with Carys Hughes (ACI), Carsten Jungfer (ACE), Fernanda Palmieri (ACE)
Wednesday 27 November, 4-5.30pm
Exploring the transformative potential of Social Value
Since the 2013 Social Value Act, local authorities, along with all public sector organisations in the UK, have been legally obliged to take ‘social value’ into account when commissioning and procuring goods and services. Social value – defined as the benefits of a contract to the community, economy, and environment – is now commonly incorporated into all areas of strategic decision making within local authorities. And an entire industry now exists to help organisations measure and evidence their ‘social value’. However, there are lots of problems with the current system. The dominant frameworks used by councils tend to encourage a ‘gamification’ of social value, with providers making big claims that would not stand up to scrutiny and are never followed up on. The system tends to advantage bigger, slicker corporate entities with the resources to play the game, at the expense of charities, smaller organisations and social enterprises. There are many examples of mature public benefit organisations with inherent social value losing social service contracts to large, for-profit organisations on the basis of the social value offered in tenders. But can social value be turned into a transformative policy tool? The talks in this seminar explore this challenge.
More information
Building a new bureaucracy: exploring an effort to turn ‘Social Value’ into a transformative policy tool
Carys Hughes
Research into the rise of neoliberalism has suggested that it owed less to the discursive success of free-market ideology, and more to a lesser-known, earlier, bureaucratic transformation in the structures, practices and processes of the state (Dutta et al., 2018). Decades before neoliberalism’s celebrated political victories and ideological hegemony, the techniques of neoliberal rule were first rolled out in 1960s America. Auditing, extensive accountability mechanisms, outsourcing, performance related pay, and the other tools and techniques which would later comprise New Public Management, ‘encoded neoliberalism into contemporary life’ (ibid., p.168). The researchers conclude that: ‘The social shift was less significant than the technical one’. ‘It was not that voters gradually gave up on one established economic model and embraced something new’ (ibid., p. 175): they had been shaped to do so.
So, what would it look like to do this in the opposite political direction? What kind of bureaucracy would underpin a more egalitarian and democratic politics? And can such mechanisms be initiated from within the neoliberal state?
This talk explores these questions through discussion of a particular case study. Funded by the Cooperative Councils Innovation Network, a Working Group of councils, public service providers, lawyers, and academics from across the country is developing a ‘Social Value Toolkit’. This is intended to empower councils to use Social Value in the context of Community Wealth Building to justify purposeful, policy-driven procurement, commissioning and other decision-making, towards a new kind of economy and new social relations. The talk considers what this project might tell us about the potential, the challenges, and the limits to building a new kind of bureaucracy.
Artists in the City
What is the cultural and social value of keeping artists' studios in the city?
Carsten Jungfer and Fernanda Palmieri
Since the adoption of the Social Value Act in 2013, and its implementation with the Social Value Model in 2020, a series of frameworks to measure social value have emerged and are quickly becoming recognised tools of measurement and evaluation. Based on the principle of additionality, these frameworks disregard existing and/or inherent social impact and, their metric approach to evaluation, make any attempt to capture intangible or indirect social benefits a reductionist and flawed task.
While the economic value of the arts and creative sector is widely recognised as one of the biggest industries in London, its social impact is inherent, indirect and intangible, and cannot be captured by the mainstream models. This is the case of SPACE, the biggest affordable artists’ studio provider in London.
This research project, a collaboration with SPACE, proposes to adopt an alternative and relational approach to Social Value evaluation, whereby the artists’ relationships and interdependencies with the city, such as exchanges with galleries, venues, communities, schools and other organisations, are understood as ‘flows’ which produce direct and indirect benefits to society. It then uses relational mapping as a tool to investigate, translate and analyse the web of relationships of a sample of 32 artists based in London, as a way to give tangibility to their social and cultural impact, and understand their transformative capacity and significance to London’s creative and cultural life.
The UK housing crisis sits within a global epidemic of housing supply shortage. While the regional causes differ, the fallout of globally networked neoliberal policies undermine secure, liveable, affordable and available dwellings.
The Housing Knowledge Exchange Unit is an initiative supported by the Centre for Social Change and Justice at the University of East London. The Unit aims to promote dialogue, understanding and knowledge exchange between academics, policy makers, politicians and key stakeholders on key issues and debates relevant to housing and housing justice at local, regional and national levels. We host a series of seminars across the year; undertake consultancy work for local authorities keen to grapple with key policy issues and are networked into a range of relevant bodies and organisations.
Our research and expertise cover housing supply such as land ownership, planning, finance, rentierism, social housing, nomadism, evictions and housing design through to the more qualitative lived experience impacts of the housing crisis on places and people. The unit addresses the social and financial effects of policy leading towards this crisis, articulating what housing justice could look like. We respond to how the crisis is felt locally where issues such as overcrowding and safety standards are at stake alongside progressive council-led asset transfers and Community Land Trusts. The approach of the housing knowledge exchange unit takes as a starting point the financialisation of housing and focuses on research that investigates the role of global finance systems and their effects on the global and local housing crisis.
Members
- Anna Minton
- Penny Bernstock (visiting professor)
- Jeremy Gilbert
- Debra Benita Shaw
- Lynne McCarthy
Events
Caring Cities Series
Who Owns the City? - a research seminar with Nick Bano and Issac Rose, 2 May 2024,17:00-18:30
Nick Bano is a lawyer and writer specialising in housing. His book Against Landlords is a Marxist account of the housing crisis. It argues that rent, rather than speculation or shortage, is ultimately at the heart of the crisis. It examines how laws and economics work in combination to ensure that rents constantly rise, and the conditions and affordability of housing have declined as a result.
Isaac Rose is a writer and editor, and works as an organiser for the Greater Manchester Tenants Union. His book The Rentier City is a study of the space and politics of Manchester seen through the lens of housing and land. It takes a longue durée approach, examining the city from the city’s 19th century political battlegrounds to the present frontiers of gentrification.
Series organisers: Penny Bernstock, Jeremy Gilbert, Lynne McCarthy, Anna Minton and Debra Benita Shaw
The seminar is FREE and will take place online. Please sign up on Eventbrite.
Caring Cities Seminar, 13 November 2023, 14:00-15:30
Making Home: Architecture and Comfortable Bodies
Debra Benita Shaw
Housing is very high on contemporary political agendas but what gets lost in debates about the cost, location and appearance of houses is the cultural significance of houses as ‘home’ and the classed, gendered and raced discourses with which the idea of home is associated and that determine, in Susan Schweik’s words, ‘whose comfort matters’ (2009: 184).
This presentation is based on a sample chapter prepared for my next book which offers thoughts about the relationship between comfort and the home, drawing on architectural theory and critical posthumanism as a means to think about the house as the machine that Le Corbusier wanted it to be. Leaving aside, for the moment, smart homes and adaptations to new ecological imperatives, my concern will be with what I have called elsewhere ‘Vitruvian mantology’ (Shaw, 2021); a term that I introduced to think through the connections between design, everyday life and modernist conceptions of what it means to be human. It thus functions as a starting point to interrogate the centrality of the house in what I am calling ‘the politics of comfort’; the set of ideas that inform debates about where bodies belong and that are inseparable from concepts of human ontology based in divisive philosophies inherited from the past and called upon, too readily, to mandate the future.
Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Women, Science & Fiction (2000), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2009), Posthuman Urbanism (2018) and Women, Science & Fiction Revisited (2023). She is also co-editor of the edited collection Radical Space (2016) and founding editor of the Radical Cultural Studies series (Lexington Books). She is a member of the advisory board for the Centre for Social Change and Justice at UEL and, with Jeremy Gilbert, organises the Culture, Power & Politics lecture series.
Shaping Infrastructures of Care: design thinking and spatial arrangement in contemporary housing
Juliet Davis, Cardiff
Housing has been conceptualised as an ‘infrastructure of care’ that, as Power and Mee (2019) put it ‘patterns the organization of care at a household and social scale.’ While housing often acts as a locus for care activities, they argue, it also has the potential to either support or hinder the capacity of households, housing collectives and/or communities to practice care. My research has explored how this potential is formed in the context of design thinking, shaping governance arrangements, spatial arrangements, environmental qualities, ambiences and materialities of housing projects. This talk draws on research for my book ‘The Caring City’ (2022) focussing on two case studies of housing design involving close attention to caring practices of different kinds – an intergenerational co-housing project in Vienna and an almshouse in London structured to enable ageing-in-place. I will show how ideas of care and understandings of care labour, care relations and routines materialised within each project leading to specific innovations in housing development and design. I will also offer insights into what these ideas/ understandings mean for everyday life and open up in terms of possibilities for use, personal development and social relations for those that inhabit these caring infrastructures.
Juliet Davis is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Head of the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Her teaching and research span the fields of Architecture and Urban Design. She is the author of two books and numerous other publications across these areas reflecting interests in exploring the potentials and issues of design related to urban change and regeneration, megaevents, urban heritage and practices of care. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD at the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme in 2011 focussed on critically exploring the role of urban design in shaping the trajectories of long-term regeneration in East London connected to the 2012 Olympic Games. She practiced architecture and urban design in London for ten years in London before entering academia in 2007, contributing to Eric Parry Architects’ regeneration of St. Martin in the Fields and Stanton William’s Millenium Seedbank amongst other projects. She studied Architecture at Cambridge University, graduating with a First-class degree in Architecture in 1995 and the Edward S. Prior Prize for design excellence, and with a Commendation for the Diploma in Architecture in 1999.
Politics of Housing Conference, 6-7 July 2023
Abstracts
Panel 1: Tenancies
David Madden - The Return of the Tenant as a Political Subject
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.
David Madden is Associate Professor in Sociology and Co-Director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. He is co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of In Defense of Housing: The politics of crisis(Verso, 2016). His writing has been translated into ten languages and has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Jacobin. David can be found on X: @davidjmadden.
Mara Ferreri - 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, turistification, 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 of 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.
Mara Ferreri is a Senior Researcher of the Inhabiting Radical Housing ERC-founded project, based at DIST, Polytechnic of Turin. She is a Core Team Member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and a co-founder and editor of the Radical Housing Journal. She has held research and teaching positions at the London School of Economics, Durham University and Northumbria University, in UK, and at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, in Spain. She is the author of The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism: Normalising Precarity in Austerity London (Amsterdam University Press).
Keir Milburn - Assets, Ownership and Generational Justice
What are the political implications of the increasing generation disparity in asset-wealth, and how might new models of social ownership and governance contribute to building a more progressive and empowering housing sector? How has asset inequality driven changing attitudes to a range of issues across the political spectrum, and what are the implications for activists, policy-makers and reformers? Can new models of ‘community wealth’ and ‘public-common partnership’ offer ways of retaining social asset ownership, and how far are they applicable in a culture so heavily shaped by the preferences of private home-owners and landowners.
Keir Milburn is the author of Generation Left and the co-director of Abundance.
Panel 2: Agency
Mark Sustr: Self-Help Housing as a Pathway to Personal Agency
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 identify 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.
Mark Sustr is an architect with a background in educational, community and urban regeneration projects. His is interested in urban tactics that grow the agency of marginalised communities. He is currently researching the potential of Self-Help Housing as a pathway out of homelessness.
Paul Watt - 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 fieldwork, 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.
Paul Watt is Professor of Urban Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and also Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Paul has published widely on social housing, urban regeneration, gentrification, homelessness, housing activism, suburbanisation, and the 2012 London Olympic Games. He is co-editor with Phil Cohen of London 2012 and the Post-Olympics City: A Hollow Legacy? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and his most recent book is Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press, 2021)
Andrew Lee - 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 defunct. The presentation will be delivered as a practice-as-research enquiry involving ‘performative’ elements.
Panel 3: Representations
Katie Beswick - 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, ‘housing 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 (and 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, advocating for the right to a fullness of life on one's own terms, in refusal of this imposition, and the implication that simply being oneself in a certain location - often desired by developers - is problematic.
As someone who has emerged into a cultural profile from the societal margins and their all-too-ignored traumatic registers, as someone who lives and works with still marginalised and traumatised individuals and communities (and who still lives as one of them in many ways), I am often required to challenge mediated, ‘naturalised’ and even ‘asserted’ ways of looking at others. Notions of 'giving voice to' others erases (lives and environments) and, crucially, masks this process, and hence tethers these lives into trope moulds.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose multi layered practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology.
Anna Robinson - Social Housing and working class story telling
The tenants on the former social housing estate that I 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, I have used this term to describe them. Because they are, of course, 'the God's 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.
Anna Robinson is a published poet, playwright and non-fiction author. She is the author of 'Whatsname Street' (Smokestack Books), 'The Night Library' (Stone Wood Press), 'Into the Woods' (Enitharmon), 'The Finders of London' (Enitharmon) and 'Songs From the Flats' (Hearing Eye). Her play 'Marsh' was performed online in 2020. Anna edited the Lambeth Pamphlet history series for Lambeth Archives, is poetry editor for Not Shut Up magazine and founding editor for The Long Poem magazine. She is also a Hawthornden fellow and works as a partner with Pen to Print for Barking and Dagenham Library Service.
Panel 4: Where now for the property-wwning democracies?
Eoin O’Broin T.D. in conversation with Owen Hatherley
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 (Zer0, 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: Gentrification and counter strategies
Loretta Lees - 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 I 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. I also argue that we must build new affordable, preferably council/social/public housing and now, we must make sure empty homes do not remain empty, we must control the touristification of homes, and create policies that ensure the honest social mixity of cities.
Loretta Lees is Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University in the US. She is a university professor, urbanist, author, and scholar-activist, who now resides in both Boston and London. She served as Chair of the London Housing Panel working with the Mayor of London and Trust for London 2020-2022. She was awarded the 2022 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association. Her most recent books include The Planetary Gentrification Reader (2023, Routledge) and Defensible Space: mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice (2022, Wiley). She recently completed a 3 year ESRC funded project on the gentrification of council estates in London – the results of which are on the co-produced (with the London Tenant’s Federation and Just Space) website estatewatch.london
Mike Edwards - 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 in mortality, 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 to maximise total housing output at almost any price will result in a further paucity of low rent social/council housing and undersupply 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 but 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.
Michael Edwards trained in economics and planning, worked on new towns in the 1960s and 70s, then combined university teaching at UCL’s Bartlett School with London activism, supporting communities at King’s Cross for 20 years and then the London-wide Just Space network of activist groups and the International Network for Urban Research and Action INURA.org
Panel 6: Dispossessions and reclamations
Sharda Rozena - Gentrification in North Kensington today
Sociologist Ruth Glass, who coined the term gentrification in 1964, 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 and their occupation of one of the richest boroughs in the UK. Using the voices of residents, I discuss what gentrification might mean for North Kensington residents today.
Sharda Rozena is an urban geographer. Her research to date has focused on social injusticies in respect to housing, facadism, gentrification and displacement in her home borough of Kensington and Chelsea. From January 2024 she is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield researching the last regulated tenants and the implications of security of tenure in the UK.
Shade Abdul - How regeneration intersects with race in Peckha
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 its future.
Shade Abdul is an architect, educator and researcher. She leads an interdisciplinary practice called Deft.Space, which works across architecture, research and participation. Her work focuses on participatory action research and advocating for inclusive regeneration that addresses socio-economic inequality. She is driven by design that is led by an in-depth understanding of not only the physical fabric, but also the social and economic conditions.
Shade currently teaches BA Architecture at Central Saint Martins. She is a member of Southwark Council’s Land Commission, the first of its kind in London and only the second in England. She is also a member of Newham Council’s Design Review Panel and a member of the Urban Design London’s Environmental Design Review Panel.
Panel 7: Building and adapting
Arman Hashemi - 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 IAQ, 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.
Arman Hashemi is a Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader, and the co-leader of two multidisciplinary research groups at UEL. He has been involved in numerous award-winning research, design and construction projects, and is currently the PI on several funded research projects on subjects relevant to Building Performance Evaluation, Indoor Air Quality, Thermal Comfort, Retrofit, and Modern Methods of Construction, with a value of over £430K. He is the Regional Director of the ZEMCH Network in England, has served as an Expert Panel Member on the UKRI/ NERC Strategic Priorities Fund on Clean Air, and is also a panel member of the CIAT Climate Change Group
Lunchtime film screening - 7 July
Pooja Pottenkulam – People We Know
The People We Know project attempts to chronicle the extraordinary things that ordinary people from East London do in their day-to-day lives, through animated documentaries that celebrate stories of their lives. By showcasing those stories from within the immediate community in East London, the project seeks to engage new and under-represented audiences.
The project aims to strengthen the connection between UEL Animation students and the local community in East London. Its aims to bolster student learning with real-life experience, attempting to creating a community of learners who are able to make a difference in society with the skills that they learn. By creating a platform through the university, the project aims to build hope for those disadvantaged communities to have their voices heard and listened to, using the medium of the animated short film. Animation films have the great ability to communicate to large and varied audiences, and would provide an ideal platform for this purpose. This practice-based research project evaluates collaborative learning methods and content, which is then fed forward to develop the delivery methods of the project every year. The documentation of the project and excerpts from a selection of these films can be viewed here.
Pooja Pottenkulam is an animation filmmaker and illustrator. She was trained in Animation at the National Institute of Design in India and at the Royal College of Art in London. Her animation films have been broadcast on MTV, Channel 4 and Nickelodeon and at various international film festivals. She is a regular illustrator for Scholastic and has illustrated over 40 books. She lives in London and is a Senior Lecturer in Animation and Illustration at the University of East London
Publications
Bernstock, P; Poynter, G, (2012) ‘The housing Crisis’ in Poynter G., Calcutt A., MacRury (eds) London after Recession, a fictitious capital? Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bernstock, P. (2016) Olympic Housing: A critical review of London 2012's legacy, Oxon: Routledge.
Bernstock, P. (2020) ‘Evaluating the contribution of planning gain to an inclusive housing legacy: a case study of London 2012’, Planning Perspectives, 35 (6), pp.927-953.
Davis, J. and Bernstock, P. (2023) ‘From inclusive legacy promises to exclusive realities: Planning, design and displacement in post-Olympic East London’ in Kaminer, T., Ma, L. and Runting, H. eds. Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City. Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, pp. 212-235.
McCarthy, L. (2014) ‘Domicide and the Olympics’ in ‘Comment: Sochi 2014,’ Interventions: Contemporary Theatre Review, 24.2.
McCarthy, L. (2015) ‘Aesthetics at the Impasse: The Unresolved Property of Dale Farm’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 20 (1), pp. 74–86.
McCarthy, L. (2019) ‘Nomadic Contagions and the Performance of Infrastructure in Dale Farm’s post-eviction scene’, in Walsh, F. (ed.) Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance, Bloomsbury: London and New York.
McCarthy, L. (2020) ‘Focus E15: Performing nuisance as a feminist narrative of Property,’ Studies in Theatre and Performance, a special issue on ‘Housing, Activism and Performance,’ 40 (1), pp. 21-34.
Minton, A & Watt, P. (2016) London’s Housing Crisis and its Activisms in (ed.) City, 20 (2)
Minton, A. (2012[2009]) Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City. Great Britain: Penguin.
Minton, A. (2017) Big Capital: Who is London for? Great Britain: Penguin.
Minton, A. (2022) ‘Coda: reflections on public and private space in a post-Covid world’, Urban Geography Special Issue on Public Space, 43 (6).
Minton, A. (2022) ‘From Gentrification to Sterlization: Building on Big Capital’, Architecture & Culture, 10(2).
Minton, A. (2022) ‘Policy Paralysis, Financialisation and the Politics of Facadism: Housing policy post-Grenfell’, The Journal of Architecture, 27(1).
Shaw, D. B (2018) Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space. London & New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Watt, P. and Bernstock, P. (2017) ‘Legacy for whom: Housing in Post Olympics East London’ in Watt, P, Cohen, P (eds.) A Hollow Crown, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 91-138.
Reports
Bernstock, P., Holt, A. Humphrey, D. et al (2024) The Impact of Inadequate Housing on Educational Experience: a pilot study in Newham, Citizens UK
Edited journals
Minton, A. (2016) (ed) ‘London’s Housing Crisis and its Activisms’, City, 20 (2). Special feature on the housing crisis.
Co-directors
- Meera Tiwari examines multi-disciplinary poverty in both the Global North and the South, using the Capability Approach focusing on actor engagement and collective agency at the grassroots. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in rural and urban India, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Brazil and Lebanon. Her ongoing research includes localising the SDGs in East London, health inequalities and women's empowerment in Bihar, India, and dignity and menstrual health in rural India and UK.
- Lynne McCarthy is a cultural worker whose practice inspects ways to initiate justice claims with performance as method. She researches people-property relations and the performativity of use rights through scenes of eviction, nomadism, and unstable tenancies, and has undertaken solidarity projects in the UK on questions of shelter. Additionally she has been involved in collaborative projects on reproductive rights in Ireland, working for five years to widen debate on the 8th amendment.
Members
- Anna Minton investigates the interface between architecture, democracy and spatial justice in the city, focusing on the housing crisis and the privatisation of public space.
- Susannah Pickering-Saqqa explores the changing shape and spaces of development, the domestic programmes of international NGOs, faith-based development, menstrual health and dignity in India and UK and localising the SDGs. She is course leader for the BA International Development with NGO Management.
- Andrew Branch is invested in making sense of the workings of the creative industries, held up as drivers of progressive social and economic change by successive governments intent on superintending them. He co-founded, along with his colleagues, Dr Tony Sampson (Essex) and Giles Tofield (Cultural Engine), the Cultural Engine Research Group.
- Andrew Ravenscroft undertakes research into critical and inclusive education, that typically realises and evaluates social innovations. He has been principal or co-investigator on collaborative and interdisciplinary research and development projects that have attracted £6.34 million in funding and authored or co-authored over 160 publications.
- Angie Voela is a reader in social sciences. With Michael O'Loughlin she is the co-editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She has published on psychoanalysis and mental health; gender and feminism; psychoanalysis and philosophy; psychoanalytic approaches to politics, pedagogy and space; and psychoanalysis and contemporary culture.
- Carsten Jungfer's research is rooted in critical analysis of social-spatial conditions of existing inner-city communities, that are increasingly impacted by urban transformation in contexts of de-regulation, globalisation and impacts of climate breakdown.
- Fernanda Palmieri is interested in the complexities and processes of transformation of urban environments and in how these processes reproduce socio-spatial inequalities. She is interested in exploring how design thinking can promote alternative ways of space production and help us move towards a more equitable and sustainable urban living.
- Claudia Brazzale's work centres on constructions of corporeality and the gendered body in relation to mobility, through writing, choreography, and video. She approaches the moving body as a productive avenue for rethinking the politics of gender, labour and globalisation, not only in performance but also in domestic and entrepreneurial spaces.
- Liselle Terret conducts performance research collaboratively with disabled and neuro-divergent artists, co-constructing radical and political questions about continued exclusion and discriminatory assumptions around binaries of 'ability/disability'. They disrupt theatrical norms through a radical Crip, queer, collaborative and feminist approaches.
- Carys Hughes is a research fellow in the School of Arts and Creative Industries. Her research is cross-disciplinary, drawing on political theory, cultural studies, and critical legal studies. Core research interests include participatory and communal democracy, transformative constitutionalism, and progressive technologies of governance.
- Jill Daniels is a film practitioner and theorist whose research spans political history and memory, place and the autoethnographic. She unpacks narratives that still haunt the present that may facilitate alternative frameworks in audio-visual practice in dealing with history and legacies of the past and inspire political action in the present.
- Anna Robinson is a poet, playwright and academic. Her research involves exploring and presenting working class London women's voices, stories and histories. She was the founder and poetry editor of Not Shut Up, a creative arts magazine that published work by and for serving prisoners.
- Silhouette Bushay is Vice-Chair of UEL Women's Network She is an anti-racist practices professional whose research interests include Black feminist, critical, anti-racist, decolonial, creative and culturally relevant pedagogies within formal and informal learning contexts.
- Gulnar Ali diligently blends ontological and humanistic perspectives to mental health and wellbeing. Her professional background ranges across a wide spectrum of teaching, clinical practice and research experience in mental health, spirituality, existential care, medical anthropology, nursing philosophy and ontology.
- Tom Drayton is concerned with the relationship between contemporary performance, metamodernism and the millennial generation, as well as international activism and political theatre. This research fuses praxis and critical scholarship, encompassing workshops, performances and publications.
- Robert Nicholson's interests include the histories and stories of drag performers and their roles in shifting social change for the LGBTQ+ communities in the UK. He is also interested in research that engages with ethnography, queer theory and queer club culture.
- Robert Ahearne researches perceptions and understandings of development and progress in East Africa with a current focus is on the impact of natural gas extraction on local communities; all of this research has been based on long-term ethnographic studies in the south-east of Tanzania.
- Martin Heaney draws on 30 years' experience as a performer, and facilitator in drama education. He writes and researches, with a special interest in the representation of masculinity and young people. Martin lives with brain cancer and is exploring this experience through research and performance. Listen to Martin's podcast.
- Ratha Perumal is a doctoral researcher exploring factors that contribute to the degree-awarding gap experienced by racially-minoritised students, funded by the LISS-DTP. Through working at a post-1992 university and a Russell Group institution, Ratha sees first-hand how changes in policy discourses in the sector can produce different implementation strategies in individual universities - with a range of outcomes.
- Sarahleigh Castelyn's work focuses on race, gender, sexuality, and nation in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the politics of hybridity, and the use of practice as a research methodology. She serves on several editorial and organisation boards, such as Research in Dance Education and The South African Dance Journal.
- Caroline Griffiths interest lies in the ways theatre performance can operate as a medium that exposes inequity in society, and ultimately seeks to change the traditional views of people, who perhaps unwittingly, uphold a systemically racist society.
- Jo Read's practice-led research focuses on dance, health and wellbeing. Her current project, Dancing with Endo, addresses lived experiences of endometriosis through a choreographic methodology. She is also an Integrative Counsellor and Psychotherapist in training and works as part of a low-cost counselling service at Cherry Tree Therapy Centre.
Advisory Board
- Jeremy Gilbert's research interests cover a broad range of topics in contemporary culture, politics and social change: cultural theory, political theory and their analytical applications; the politics of music, music culture; political philosophy, particularly with reference to questions of collectivity and democratic agency.
- Gargi Bhattacharyya focuses on questions of racial justice, inequality, racial capitalism, militarism, sexuality and state-sanctioned violence. Her books include: Tales of dark-skinned women (Taylor and Francis, 1998); Sexuality and Society (Routledge, 2001); Dangerous Brown Men (Zed, 2008); Crisis, austerity and everyday life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Rethinking racial capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). She is completing a new book with Polity with the working title 'Futures of racial capitalism'.
- Debra Shaw is currently researching the politics of home as a concept that structures subjectivities and material conditions in diverse forms of inhabitation. Recent projects have included a study of the relationship between ontology and urban form and an analysis of visual representations of big data in the context of contemporary subjectivities. She has recently completed a substantial revision of her first book, Women, Science and Fiction which will be published in early 2023.
Postgraduate students
The centre welcomes applications for PhDs and Professional Doctorates. We are interested in cross-disciplinary socially focused projects in the areas of:
- health and social justice
- racial justice
- climate justice
- economic justice
- cultural justice
- political justice
- justice and the city
For information, including bursaries, visit:
Current PhD students
- Shea Donovan
- Abigail Lennox
- Hamda Mohamed
- Patrick Evans
Visiting Scholar
- Ilka Nagel, doctoral candidate at University of Oslo, 20 March - 7 April 2023
Localising the SDGs in Newham and Tower Hamlets
The SDGs are universal global goals that apply to all countries, through a broad framework that can be made to fit specific country contexts and are to be achieved at the local, national and global levels. Evidence from the 2019 Voluntary National Review process indicates that the UK has struggled to capture progress at the local and national levels in many of the goals (UKSSD2019).
Brickfield Newham
Brickfield Newham was a multi-disciplinary research project that drew attention to historical brickfield sites of the borough, their labour histories and their role in shaping our present urban and domestic infrastructures. Communities, students, artists and scholars gathered through performance making and building of a traditional kiln to engender conversations on the contemporary built environment alongside local planners, architects, journalists and ceramic historians.
Contact us
For more information, please contact:
- Lynne McCarthy: l.mccarthy@uel.ac.uk
- Meera Tiwari: m.tiwari@uel.ac.uk