The Politics of Housing Conference 2023
6-7 July 2023, USS Campus
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6-7 July 2023, USS Campus
Programme
Thursday 6 July
| 9.30-10.00 | Conference Opens Jeremy Gilbert, Lynne McCarthy, Anna Minton |
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| 10.00-11.30 | Panel 1 David Madden, Mara Ferreri, Keir Milburn. Chair: Jeremy Gilbert |
| 11.30-11.50 | Coffee Break |
| 11.50-13.50 | Panel 2 Panel 3 |
| 13.50-14.30 | Lunch |
| 14.30-16.00 | Panel 4 Eoin O’Broin, Owen Hatherley. Chair: Jeremy Gilbert |
| 16.00-16.15 | Coffee Break |
| 16.15-17.30 | Housing Inclusion Panel Telco, Focus E15, Citizens UK, London Community Led Housing, Community Led Housing (Rowan Mackay). Chairs: Penny Bernstock & Paul Watt |
Friday 7 July
| 9.30-10.00 | Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz Chairs: Amanda Broderick & Carl Callaghan |
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| 10.00-10.15 | Coffee Break |
| 10.15-12.30 | Cross borough Policymaking workshop Loretta Lees, University of Boston Tom Copley, Sem Moema, GLA Chair of the Housing Group & Mayoral Advisor on the Private Rented Sector & Affordability, Cllr Anthony Okereke, Leader of Greenwich Council, Cllr Aydin Dikerdem, Cabinet Lead for Housing, Wandsworth Council, Cllr James McAsh, Cabinet Member for the Climate Emergency & Sustainable Development, Southwark Council. Chair: Anna Minton |
| 12.30-13.30 | Lunch |
| 13.30-15.00 | Panel 5: ‘Gentrification and counter strategies’ Loretta Lees & Mike Edwards. Chair: Anna Minton |
| 15.00-15.15 | Coffee Break |
| 15.15-16.45 | Panel 6: Dispossessions and reclamations Panel 7 |
| 16.45-17.00 | Coffee Break |
| 17.00-17.30 | Closing Plenary Chairs: Lynne McCarthy, Anna Minton, Debra Shaw |
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 tenant-centred politics has to say about the contemporary urban condition.
David Madden is an 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 the 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 intersect 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 informatisation’ (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 the 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 homeowners 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. He 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 a Professor of Urban Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and also a 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 a 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 effects 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 effects 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 erase (lives and environments) and, crucially, mask this process, and hence tether 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 paragraphs 'flash factions'. Flash fiction is 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 storytelling 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 a 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-owning 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 the 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 Dublin's 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, and 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 and 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 1960s. 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 injustices with 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 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 ethnic 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, 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 their 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 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 indoors; exposure to poor Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) may negatively affect their health. Moreover, the COVID-19 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 particularly affecting the health and well-being 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, building design, and performance on the occupants’ health and wellbeing. It aims to ultimately develop technical-behavioural interventions that improve people’s health, and 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 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. It aims to bolster student learning with real-life experience, attempting to create 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