Tom Slater

Missing Marcuse: On gentrification and displacement

Peter Marcuses contributions to the study of gentrification and displacement are immense, not just when measured in theoretical development, but in analytical rigour, methodological influence, cross‐disciplinary relevance and intellectual–political commitment to social justice. However, his contributions have been conveniently missed in the disturbing 21st‐century scholarly, journalistic, policy and planning rescripting of gentrification as a collective urban good. This paper charts and exposes the politics of knowledge production on this pivotal urban process by critically engaging with recent arguments that celebrate gentrification and/or deny displacement. I explain that these arguments not only strip gentrification of its historical meaning as the neighbourhood expression of class inequality; they are also analytically defective when considered alongside Marcuses conceptual clarity on the various forms of displacement in gentrifying neighbourhoods. Understanding and absorbing Marcuses crucial arguments could help critical urbanists breach the defensive wall of mainstream urban studies, and reinstate a sense of social justice in gentrification research.

North American gentrification? Revanchist and emancipatory perspectives explored

By offering a response to recent calls for a ‘geography of gentrification’, the author attempts to move on from the intractable theoretical divisions and overgeneralizations that continue to pervade the gentrification literature. The research described in this paper takes the form of a comparative assessment of the gentrifying neighbourhoods of South Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, and Lower Park Slope, New York City, USA. A central part of this research has been an engagement with two contrasting academic discourses on gentrification, the ‘emancipatory city’ (a Canadian construct) and the ‘revanchist city’ (a US construct), to examine how gentrification may or may not have changed since these discourses were produced and articulated. The author combines narratives from in-depth interviews (with a particular focus on displaced tenants) with supplementary data from secondary sources and demonstrates that gentrification is neither emancipatory nor revanchist in either case. This has important implications for how gentrification is understood and evaluated in Canada and the USA. Although one can see crucial broad similarities both in the causes and in the effects of gentrification in each neighbourhood (which would appear to endorse casual references to ‘North American gentrification’), the process is also differentiated according to contextual factors, and the nuances of the gentrification process are illuminated and clarified by international comparison. In sum, the author points to the need to exercise caution in referring to ‘North American gentrification’, especially as a geography of gentrification is only in its infancy.

Activating territorial stigma: gentrifying marginality on Edinburgh’s periphery

This paper reaffirms the importance of politics in theories on gentrification through analysis of a recent ‘regeneration’ project based in Craigmillar, a stigmatised district on the southeastern edge of Edinburgh. It sketches the historical backdrop to the areas stigma as a place ‘outside’ the city, using qualitative research on the Craigmillar Festival Society to highlight how this stigma was produced and intensified as well as contested. By stressing that the main intention of the ‘regeneration’ project was to attract more affluent residents to Craigmillar, we show how territorial stigmatisation and ‘regeneration’ through gentrification form two sides of the same conceptual and policy coin: the “blemish of place” becomes a target and rationale for ‘fixing’ the area, thus obviating and obstructing policies aimed at attacking deprivation, inequality, or the structural problems of advanced marginality. The states role in creating the very stigma it then insists on scrubbing highlights a major contradiction in contemporary urban policy.

Village ghetto land: myth, social conditions and housing policy in Parkdale, Toronto, 1879-2000

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how historical narratives such as wealthy “suburb,” declining “slum,” and resurgent “village” can have little basis in the social conditions of the time they purport to represent, yet be used to justify urban policy and planning decisions. In a case study of Parkdale, Toronto, we show how a history of the neighborhood was constructed in the 1970s by using a selective reading of the historic record, and then show how this mythical narrative has recently been used to legitimize the gentrification of the neighborhood. We also construct an alternative narrative of persistent housing diversity in the face of opposition over 125 years, which might justify a different set of local government policies that recognizes the continuity of inexpensive rental housing options and seeks to preserve and enhance these options.

Unravelling false choice urbanism

Numerous scholarly and journalistic commentaries on gentrification succumb to an analytically defective formula: weigh up the supposed pros and cons of gentrification, throw in a few half-baked worries about threats to ‘diversity’ and housing affordability, and conclude that gentrification is actually ‘good’ on balance because it represents the reinvestment that stops neighbourhoods from dying during a financial crisis. In this paper, I unravel such ‘false choice urbanism’ by arguing that disinvestment and reinvestment do not signify a moral conundrum, with the latter somehow better than the former. It is argued that gentrification and ‘decay’ are not opposites, alternatives or choices, but rather tensions and contradictions in the overall system of capital circulation, amplified and aggravated by the current crisis. Keeping the focus on gentrification as a political question (rather than a moral one), I offer some thoughts on some strategies of revolt concealed by purveyors of false choice urbanism.

Revanchism, Stigma and the Production of Ignorance: Housing Struggles in Austerity Britain

Abstract This paper exposes, analyses, and challenges the revanchism (Smith, 1996) exhibited by ruling elites in austerity Britain. After recapitulating the concept of revanchism in its original form, and discussing some critiques and extensions, it scrutinizes the emergence of revanchist political economy in Britain, with particular reference to the UK housing crisis. In order to explain how revanchism has become so ingrained in British society, the paper analyses the production of ignorance via the activation of class and place stigma, where free market think tanks play a crucial role in deflecting attention away from the causes of housing crisis. It is argued that the production of ignorance carves an economic and political path for gentrification on a scale never before seen in the United Kingdom, where speculation, rentier capitalist extraction, and the global circulation of capital in urban land markets is resulting in staggering fortunes for those expropriating socially created use values.

The Neoliberal State and the 2011 English Riots: A Class Analysis

On 11 August 2011 in Camberwell Green Magistrates Court, a 23-year-old student with no criminal record was sentenced to a prison term of six months for stealing a pack of bottled water worth £3.50. This extraordinarily harsh sentence would normally be cause for widespread denunciation of judicial abuse but, following five nights of fiery rioting across a dozen English cities from 6 to 10 August, the extraordinary turned ordinary for the courts. Whereas the rampant financial criminality at the top of the class structure leading to the near-collapse of the banking system in the autumn of 2008 saw no reactions from criminal justice, even as it sent the UK economy into a tailspin, overturning millions of lives and causing hundreds of billions of pounds in damage, a street fracas at the bottom, estimated to have cost around 300 million pounds, triggered a lightning-fast and brutal response from the penal wing of the state. Those convicted at the Crown Court of robbery (that is, looting, however minor) during these nocturnal disturbances were sentenced with stunning celerity to an average of 29.8 months in prison, nearly treble the usual rate of 10.8 months. Culprits of violent disorder reaped 30.6 months compared with the standard fare of 9.9 months, while those nabbed for theft received sentences nearly twice as long (10.1 months as against 6.6 months). After the riots stopped, the police deployed munificent resources and manifold schemes to track down and round up the looters, mining television footage and web postings, setting up phone lines for snitching, running “Shop A Moron” posters on buses, while politicians promised to cut welfare and housing benefits to the families of the culprits.

Rethinking the sociology of stigma

Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. The conceptual understanding of stigma which underpins most sociological research has its roots in the ground-breaking account penned by Erving Goffman in his best-selling book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). In the 50 years since its publication, Goffman’s account of stigma has proved a productive concept, in terms of furthering research on social stigma and its effects, on widening public understandings of stigma, and in the development of anti-stigma campaigns. However, this introductory article argues that the conceptual understanding of stigma inherited from Goffman, along with the use of micro-sociological and/or psychological research methods in stigma research, often side-lines questions about where stigma is produced, by whom and for what purposes. As Simon Parker and Robert Aggleton argue, what is frequently missing is social and political questions, such as ‘how stigma is used by individuals, communities and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality’. This article expands on Parker and Aggleton’s critique of the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma, through an examination of the anti-stigma campaign Heads Together. This high-profile campaign launched in 2016 seeks to ‘end the stigma around mental health’ and is fronted by members of the British Royal Family. By thinking critically with and about this campaign, this article seeks to both delineate the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma and to begin to develop a supplementary account of how stigma functions as a form of power. We argue that in order to grasp the role and function of stigma in society, scholarship must develop a richer and fuller understanding of stigma as a cultural and political economy. The final part of this introduction details the articles to follow, and the contribution they collectively make to the project of rethinking the sociology of stigma. This collection has been specifically motivated by: (1) how reconceptualising stigma might assist in developing better understandings of pressing contemporary problems of social decomposition, inequality and injustice; (2) a concern to decolonise the discipline of sociology by interrogating its major theorists and concepts; and (3) a desire to put class struggle and racism at the centre of understandings of stigma as a classificatory form of power.

Capitalist Urbanization Affects Your Life Chances: Exorcising the Ghosts of ‘Neighbourhood Effects’

In this chapter Tom Slater explores an alternative narrative for the neighbourhood effects thesis: your life chances affect where you live, and not the other way around. The role that capitalist processes have played in urbanisation and the formation of our cities is examined, and in particular the role of private property rights as a means to exclude low income individuals from central locations is explored. Using Harvey’s Social Justice and the City as a lynch pin, neighbourhood effects become an extension of neo-classical theory promoting private property rights, land rent and exclusion of the poorest groups in society from the places that they need to be the most. The rise and decline of neighbourhoods is inevitable with the mobility of capital identifying and flowing to the greatest returns and leaving neighbourhoods when maintenance becomes costly. Neighbourhood depreciation and disinvestment then closely follow behind. The Chapter concludes by pin-pointing some of the flaws in the current neighbourhood effects literature that occur when the underlying assumptions are not challenged. As a consequence, the literature often appears to blame the most vulnerable in society for their outcomes leading to solutions that require the disadvantaged to learn from the advantaged suggesting that information and education are the only barriers between the groups. The chapter concludes by calling for researchers in the neighbourhood effects literature to pay far more attention to the structural issues that prevent individuals from accessing services or employment, citing the many real and substantial barriers that some individuals have to overcome to enter the labour market.

The invention of the ‘sink estate’: Consequential categorisation and the UK housing crisis

This article explores the history and traces the realisation of a category that was invented by journalists, amplified by free market think tanks and converted into policy doxa (common sense) by politicians in the United Kingdom: the ‘sink estate’. This derogatory designator, signifying social housing estates that supposedly create poverty, family breakdown, worklessness, welfare dependency, antisocial behaviour and personal irresponsibility, has become the symbolic frame justifying current policies towards social housing that have resulted in considerable social suffering and intensified dislocation. The article deploys a conceptual articulation of agnotology (the intentional production of ignorance) with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power to understand the institutional arrangements and cognitive systems structuring deeply unequal social relations. Specifically, the highly influential publications on housing by a free market think tank, Policy Exchange, are dissected in order to demonstrate how the activation of territorial stigma has become an instrument of urban politics. The ‘sink estate’, it is argued, is the semantic battering ram in the ideological assault on social housing, deflecting attention away from social housing not only as urgent necessity during a serious crisis of affordability, but as incubator of community, solidarity, shelter and home.