Poverty, Territorial Stigmatisation and Social Insecurities as Social Harms: the Commonwealth Games and the East End of Glasgow

This SJM includes articles that focus the interrelationships between different dimensions of poverty and criminal justice, not least with patterns of offending, convictions and victimisation. This is of course a hotly contested and long debated area of social inquiry and goes to the heart of competing approaches and perspectives as well as to conflicting political values. As others have highlighted in this issue, ongoing welfare ‘reforms' and the impact of various ‘austerity' measures as implemented by the current and previous UK Governments, has had hugely negative impacts on the numbers in or close to poverty in the UK today, and in the proportion of the population who are experiencing, in some form of another, social and economic insecurities and increasing vulnerability and precariousness

Demolishing iconic tower blocks is an attack on whole idea of social housing

First paragraph: Down they came. Glasgow’s Red Road Flats have (mostly) been demolished, having dominated the north-eastern skyline of the city for half a century. Following the destruction of the first two blocks in 2012, the passing of the remaining six is a moment where the whole country should take stock. Access this article on The Conversation website at https://theconversation.com/demolishing-iconic-tower-blocks-is-an-attack-on-whole-idea-of-social-housing-48918

Forgotten Plotlanders: Learning from the survival of lost informal housing in the UK.

Colin Ward’s discourses on the arcadian landscape of ‘plotlander’ housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today the forgotten history of ‘plotlander’ housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This papers observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offers a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernised world

Class, citizenship and regeneration : Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games 2014

Through a focus on “consumer-citizenship” this paper foregrounds the class practices inherent in urban regeneration. Using Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWGs) as an illustrative example of regeneration, it seeks to highlight the market-led processes that underpin state interventions. The paper demonstrates how these processes are implemented to transform “problem people, and problem places” (Damer 1989, From Moorepark to “Wine Alley”) into sites of “active” consumption and “responsible” citizenship. Yet, access to this “consumer citizenship” is stratified. In doing so, we synthesise conceptual insights from the Marxist-influenced gentrification literature and the Foucauldian-inspired housing renewal literature. We forward this to initiate further academic debate and empirical enquiry on the specific issue of mega sporting events.PostprintPeer reviewe

Domicide, Eviction and Repossession

This chapter argues that evictions constitute an everyday form of violence faced by people living in rented accommodation, a form of violence that we describe as ‘domicide’. Evictions involve the forced removal of people from their home and since the financial crash in 2007/08, they have become everyday phenomena in a number of countries, including the USA, Spain, Ireland and Greece. In the UK, evictions have spiked with an estimated 170 evictions carried out each day in 2015. The main drivers of these evictions are rent arrears that are due to recent and direct cuts in household income under austerity and welfare reforms, cuts that directly affect the ability of tenants to pay their rent

It’s the state, stupid: 21st gentrification and state-led evictions

In this paper we show how the form and effects of gentrification have advanced in the post crash, recessionary context. As such, we argue that state-led gentrification contributes to state-led evictions. The cumulative impacts of government cuts and the paradigmatic shift of housing from a social to financialised entity not only increases eviction risk amongst low income households but, through various legal repossession frameworks that prioritise ownership, the state actively endorses it. Given the nature and extent of these changes in housing, we argue that the state-led gentrification has advanced further. Evictions, we argue, are the new urban frontier and this is orchestrated by the state in fundamental ways

Everyday Evictions in the 21st Century

Evictions have become everyday in the UK. There have been surfeit of news headlines outlining the extent and cruelty of eviction processes taking place across the country today. The severity of housing inequality exacerbated under the present climate of austerity and the direction of change in housing and welfare policies cannot be underestimated. In 2015, the Conservative Government made a commitment to advance homeownership, in the very same year in which evictions reached a record high estimated at 115 a day (Ministry of Justice 2015). This chapter draws parallels between the scale of evictions pre-1915 and the present day, with a view to assessing the role that rent strikes might have as a contemporary strategy of resistance to housing inequality in the 21st century. We see this as a meaningful comparison given the main form of housing tenure in the early 20th century was private renting, with no rent regulation. Now, we are seeing a return to this level of private renting, similarly underscored by a lack of rent regulation. Much like the events leading up to the 1915 Rent Strikes, there has been an unprecedented rise in evictions across the UK. Families and communities are being removed from their homes as a result of the growth in the private rented sector (PRS), the subsequent lack of affordable accommodation, and the failure of the state to intervene

The new urban frontier of everyday evictions: Contemporary state practices of revanchism

In this chapter we look critically at the political economic landscape of evictions within the United Kingdom context in relation to austerity. Our principle argument is that the current and unprecedented rise in evictions in the United Kingdom is not an ‘organic’ market-led occurrence, but has instead been actively orchestrated. Today displacement is actively endorsed through state-level involvement via housing and welfare legislation and policy-making ushered in as austerity measures. As such evictions have become daily occurrences in the United Kingdom. Evictions in neoliberal economies are fast becoming the most common form of displacement with over 170 evictions per day in the United Kingdom (Ministry of Justice 2015), as well as an international rise in Ireland, United States, Spain, Germany, and Greece (European Action Coalition 2015, Desmond 2016). Understanding the contemporary effects of gentrification and eviction requires scrutiny of the processes at large. We begin this chapter by detailing the key ways that contemporary state-led gentrification has evolved, contributing to ‘state-led eviction’

Class and Everyday Life

Exploring the issues of class through in-depth studies of housing, sport, art, music and politics in Britain, Class and Everyday Life persuasively demonstrates the pervasive influence of class on everyday life and the need to centre a radical understanding of class within emancipatory political movements. The need for a more expansive understanding of class is politically urgent. There is a disconnect between descriptive and analytical approaches to class and the politics of class and realities around how class is lived. Discourse has been shaped by top-down frameworks of analysis and measurements which have stripped the study of class of its political radicalism. This book makes the case for a sociology of class which is informed by a politics of class, based upon using the everyday as the point of enquiry. It presents a sociology of class from the bottom-up which focuses on everyday life and the point at which class is made and remade. In doing so, it advocates for an attentiveness to class and everyday life through a conjunctural analysis. Using an everyday lens, this book examines how the shifting conjunctures manifest in everyday spaces in classed ways and how such changes are negotiated, resisted and shape the working-class subject and communities. This is based upon an understanding of everyday classed experiences which identifies and challenges inequalities while also recognising value and hope. This perspective aims to offer a recognition of both the opportunities and challenges of class as a way of developing a stronger, more politicised understanding of class which takes solidarity and class community power seriously to resist inequality and develop emancipatory politics. This urgent and impassioned book will be essential reading for students, academics and activists with an interest in the lived experience of class in Britain today

The hidden injuries and hidden rewards of urban restructuring on working-class communities: a case study of gentrification in Partick, Glasgow

This thesis explores the relationship between urban restructuring and working-class communities in the context of post-industrial neoliberalism. While working-class communities were the bedrock of classical sociological analysis in the industrial period, it is thought that class no longer provides a meaningful social identity and increasing individualisation is often said to signify that agency is set free from the confines of structure. In this thesis, I attempt to, first, confront these assertions by reasserting the relationship between urban restructuring working-class communities and, second, represent contemporary working-class lives, through an ethnographic case study of gentrification in working-class neighbourhood, Partick in Glasgow. Substantively, in this thesis I take gentrification as a key process of class restructuring which is spatially articulated and is the leading edge of urban policy both in the UK and globally. While gentrification intimates that urban restructuring and working-class communities are inextricably connected, this relationship is not always fully explicated within research; orthodox definitions separate economic and cultural fields and working-class experiences are underrepresented. Thus theoretically, in this thesis, I attempt to attend to these shortcomings by using hegemony as framework. Hegemony refers to a form of rule relevant to how transformations in social relations are managed whilst the capitalist system is maintained overall. This involves a mix of consent and coercion which combine structural and agential processes, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between material and the phenomenological levels. Within this, gentrification is conceived as a political strategy, which not only seeks to create space for the more affluent user; it seeks to, consensually, create the more affluent user which, in the context of neoliberalism, relates to a moral and financial economy. This new sociological perspective on gentrification combines cultural and material understandings, whilst making working-class communities and their everyday lives the centre point of analysis. This focus is imperative since working-class people and places are the principal targets of policy-led gentrification, yet current representations of and conceptual language used to describe working-class lives have waned within mainstream sociology. I examine how working-class residents receive, negotiate and resist gentrification processes to reveal the ‘hidden injuries’ as well as the ‘hidden rewards’ of urban restructuring. This study aims to do this by collecting ‘locational narratives’ of 49 residents of Partick. These accounts revealed that respondents’ rejection of traditional class identity did not signify the end of class, rather, it demonstrated that there was a material rationale underpinning individualisation and their disassociation with class, which relate to neoliberal ideologies that decontextualise class and promote self-determination. Residents’ place-based attachment is revealed to be a crucial class signifier – on both phenomenological and material levels. Elective fixity describes the choice and control residents’ have over their ability to stay fixed within their neighbourhood. Respondents are shown to have a paradoxical relationship with gentrification whereby they are invited to participate in processes as consumer citizens, through homeownership or consuming privatised neighbourhoods services, yet are not provided with the means to consume. Residents’ experiences of gentrification are characterised by tensions around control and choice and lack thereof. While gentrification brought new rewards whereby working-class respondents could, provided they had the means, act as gentrifiers, they were also confronted with novel forms of displacement, identified as new typologies which relate to the increased privatisation of social housing. Thus, an emergent negotiated culture of contemporary working-class communities is revealed which is set within the confines of structure within a post-industrial neoliberal context. Using a framework of hegemony to understand the political project of gentrification reveals the reciprocal relationship between urban restructuring and the remaking of the working-class subject