Cities, health and well-being: methodology for an international analysis

This research project is part of a wider research strand underway at LSE Cities that seeks to explore the relationships between the design of the built environment, health and well-being in cities with a particular focus on how urban density affects the experiences of different population groups. This theme will form the basis of the 11th Urban Age conference in Hong Kong on 16-17 November 2011. This particular aspect of the research strand is focused on the international comparison of cities in terms of health, wider socioeconomic data and density. Other aspects exist which are focussing on intra-urban spatial analysis of the same issues, design analysis, and qualitative research into the subjective experiences of living at high densities in Hong Kong

A politics of regulation: Haussmann’s planning practice and Badiou’s philosophy

This thesis is concerned with empirically determining whether a particular political sequence can be interpreted through Badiou’s philosophy. It focuses on the public works that transformed Paris in the middle of the 19th century, and more specifically on Haussmann’s planning practice. From an epistolary exchange between property owners, Haussmann and the Minister of the Interior during Haussmann’s first years as Prefect of the Seine, the thesis draws out a political event: the playing out in a singular context of an opposition over a political practice predicated on equality. In this case, the opposition is in the field of planning as regulation: the sanctity of property rights against a planner’s efforts to break the complacency of the planning apparatus towards property owners. The thesis argues that Haussmann was a Saint-Simonian state revolutionary that sought to make property owners contribute to the public works in equal relation to the benefits they extracted from them. In the face of sustained opposition, this planning practice was ultimately sacrificed by the imperial regime. Haussmann’s first years as Prefect are shown to have taken place in the temporality of Badiou’s events, while the commonly invoked process of Haussmannisation best describes the situation that followed the demise of Haussmann’s planning practice. Badiou’s notion of the state revolutionary gives us a way to think through the difficulty and evanescence of regulation. It can help us understand those fleeting moments when political will was used to break hierarchies of power and capital. Badiou’s philosophy is shown to be compatible with a social science that is concerned with isolating and singularising particular political sequences, of which early Haussmann is one

Buy-to-let gentrification: extending social change through tenure shifts

Recent discussions of gentrification in the UK have centred on new builds and on the influence of particular public programmes. This paper focuses on a form of gentrification that has cut across both of these: buy-to-let, broadly defined as the purchase and transfer of a dwelling to the private rental market. Initiated in response to a favourable legislative and financial context, this form of property investment has not usually been considered as gentrification, likely because it is at odds with the historical link between gentrification and ownership in the UK, poses problems with consumption side explanations and is not seen as displacing low-income residents. The paper uses a detailed comparison of small-area social and tenure data from the 2001 and 2011 UK Censuses to show that buy-to-let has become a prominent tenure trajectory in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This prominence emerges from the opportunity it affords to use the general value gap created by the deregulation of the private rental sector to close rent gaps in the most urban, central and disadvantaged areas of England. This tenure shift, shown to be intrinsically linked to gentrification, creates vast opportunities for asset appreciation but also initiates long term trajectories of displacement in surrounding areas

Planning law, power, and practice: Haussmann in Paris (1853–1870)

The transformation of Paris by Haussmann (1853–1870) is presented as a classic case of state-led modernization. What most accounts do not take into consideration is that Haussmann faced formidable opposition from property owners in his attempts to realize the emperor's ambitions for Paris, an opposition that centred on competing interpretations and uses of planning law. Based on heretofore unstudied archival material, this paper traces Haussmann's attempts to establish his (at times) creative use of planning law as legitimate in a context where planning was firmly in the hands of property owners. Haussmann's strategic use of the law, or planning practice, was able to lay bare the fact that planning law has no legitimacy in itself – only particular uses of the law can gain or lose legitimacy. Planning power can thus be defined as the possession of legitimacy in the use of planning law; and since the legal framework is a site of contest rather than a source of legitimacy, planning power depends on external legitimation. In the Haussmann case it is clear that state backing was central, even though (implicit) early support from the Parisian population cannot be ruled out until more research has been conducted

Badiou, Haussmann and Saint-Simon: opening spaces for the state and planning between ‘post-politics’ and urban insurgencies

The post-political literature – which equates ‘the political’ with insurgencies directed against the state – has only limited relevance for planning, focused as it is on the ways in which conflict is displaced from the functioning of the state apparatus. The post-political literature has however neglected a significant change in Alain Badiou’s conceptualisation of the relation between the political and the state: the introduction of a political subject which acts from the within the state – what he calls the state revolutionary. This figure, which makes ‘evental’ planning possible, is fleshed out through a Saint-Simonian reading of Haussmann’s planning practice in his first years as Prefect of the Seine

Comparing the health and wealth performance of metropolitan regions

This paper presents a methodology to construct comparable estimates of health and wealth performance for 126 metropolitan regions globally that puts spatial comparability on an equal footing with data comparability. It will be used to investigate the relationship between health and wealth performance at the metropolitan level. The point of departure is the construction of a new spatial unit, the Extended Metropolitan Region (EMR), based on sub-national administrative units that proxy the maximum spatial extent of the city under consideration. A standardised ratio of EMR to national performance is then computed in the health and wealth dimensions based on available data in each national context and applied to internationally comparable national-level indicators to obtain an estimate of EMR performance in the health and wealth dimensions. EMRs are then divided into two main types: those which over or underperformed their national contexts to an equal degree, and those which did not.The hypothesis that will be tested is that EMRs where the percentage of private expenditure in total health expenditure is high can have a health performance that matches their wealth performance only if the level of national inequality is low

Accelerating housing inequality: property investors and the changing structure of property ownership in Luxembourg

This paper tracks the arrival of investors in the housing market of Dudelange, Luxembourg. In so doing, it focuses on the socio-economic changes accompanying the transformation of homes into assets, since the first apartment was built in the city in the mid-1960s until 2018. Drawing on complete land registry data, we chart the structure of apartment ownership in the context of the city’s transition from an industrial to a financialised economy, with particular attention to three characteristics of buyers: age at purchase, country of birth and occupation. We investigate how homeowner characteristics have shifted over time in a context where housing policies have incentivised investor activity and demand. We highlight how three policies put in place in the early 2000s to encourage real estate investments seem to have strengthened the position of the group already most advantaged on the Luxembourg housing market: those born in Luxembourg and over 45 years of age. Given that this group has on average the highest median incomes and the highest homeownership rates, we argue that these policies that incentivised property investments are likely to have accelerated housing (and wider) inequalities in an overheated housing market

Tenure change in London’s suburbs: spreading gentrification or suburban upscaling?

This article looks at the distribution of social upscaling across London linked to changes in tenure between 2001 and 2011. Against a background of discussions of suburban decline, it shows that there are a number of Outer London areas which have seen upscaling trajectories linked to the Private Rented Sector. The analysis reveals that this particular type of upscaling was made possible by the variegation in the Outer London landscape: within a space dominated by early to mid-20th century semi-detached and terraced (row) housing, areas of distinctive architecture and excellent accessibility offer a diluted version of the metropolitan milieu gentrifiers seek in the inner city. Buy To Let gentrification in Outer London can thus be understood as an overspill by those uninterested in, or unable to access, ownership and priced out of high house price Inner London

The top tail of the property wealth distribution and the production of the residential environment

This article investigates the ways in which the structure of the private ownership of property affects the operation of land and housing markets. It draws on detailed Land Registry data to identify the types of actors found at the top of the property wealth distribution in Dudelange, Luxembourg, and to gauge their respective influence on the production of the residential environment. While the top tail is made up of property developers, landowners and super-landlords, an analysis of the planning and land assembly processes for six large scale residential developments in the city since the 1970s shows that the production of housing is driven by a small group of tightly interconnected private landowners and property developers. The level of property wealth concentration in a given territory is thus not innocuous – it affects the production of the residential environment, especially when multiple property ownership is interlinked with the concentrated control over residential land. The study complements discussions on the relation between property, wealth and the production of housing that focus on homeowners, small-scale private landlords and the super-rich (on the consumption side) and, on the production side, on selected actors such as financialised property developers and public landowners