Exploring roles and relationships in the production of the built environment

Given the number of different agencies and the complexity of institutional and professional relationships in the production, management and regulation of the built environment, many students entering built environment professions leave university education to take up work placements or employment without a sufficient understanding of the different actors and the formal and informal interactions and social relationships between them. Furthermore, destructive stereotypes may form during the educational process as students construct their own professional identity, in part learnt from their teachers and peers, and naturalised by the academic and professional institutions that form the context of their education – a process of enculturation termed ‘professional socialization’ by social scientists (Cuff, 1991: 118). These stereotypes may lead ultimately to inter-professional tensions and hostilities. Innovations in practice often involve challenges to established roles or joined-up thinking which breaches institutional structures, for all of which graduates may be ill-prepared

London’s nocturnal queer geographies

There are contradictory pulls in neoliberal cities. On the one hand there has been an acceptance of mainstream Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ+) identities, as celebrated for example through commercially sponsored and officially endorsed Pride rallies. On the other, real estate-led global city competitiveness is affecting our capacity to secure the heritage of queer publics, and for them to keep a foothold in the spaces they have historically occupied. Internationally, researchers are charting the effects of gentrification on neighbourhoods associated with LGBTQ+ communities. In the UK, since LGBTQ+ rights have been won in large part through European Union-led legislation, the trajectory of an increasing liberalisation of attitudes and legal protections is not guaranteed. Recent data shows losses of a wide range of cultural and social spaces, but the provision of LGBTQ+ nightvenues has suffered an even more dramatic fall than has been seen for pubs in the UK overall; and LGBTQ+ night-venues have suffered disproportionately in London’s wider losses of nightclubs and grassroots music venues, as they have been rapidly succumbing to commercial residential and infrastructure-led developments. If pubs, generally, are important to the social life of neighbourhoods, LGBTQ+ venues function as vital infrastructure for these groups, providing spaces of care and community against wider contexts of oppression and violence. In London, as in other cities internationally, increasing attention is being paid to LGBTQ+ heritage alongside that of other minority groups. But are these efforts in vain, given that

"Placing ‘Matter Out of Place’: Purity and Danger as Evidence for Architecture and Urbanism"

This paper revisits Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966). A survey of this theory in architecture in the late-twentieth century reveals how it focused attention on relationships between dirt, cleanliness, and the design and organisation of space – an area previously neglected in architectural thought. Dirt remains an important focus within architectural and urban theory, with implications for practice. Yet, the intersections that scholars of the 1980s and 1990s made between Douglas’ work and critical theory, feminist and psychoanalytic writings elicited problems with her structuralist approach that remain unresolved. These are apparent in considering relationships between dirt and cities – indeed, the aphorism Douglas invokes, ‘dirt is matter out of place’, originates in discussions of nineteenth-century urbanisation. To better understand dirt’s relationships with modern and late-modern capitalist cities, Douglas’ insights can be productively read alongside post-structuralist accounts, including the psychoanalytic notion of the abject and recent neo-Marxian scholarship on the production of urban nature

Community-Led Social Housing Regeneration: From Government-Led Programmes to Community Initiatives

Engaging communities in neighbourhood regeneration processes is vital for achieving inclusive cities, particularly when vulnerable groups belong to these communities. In the UK, different governments have implemented diverse strategies, funding schemes and approaches to social housing estates’ regeneration, which have implied various degrees of involvement of the residents in decision-making processes. This paper explores the approaches to community participation in the regeneration of social housing neighbourhoods since 1997—when the New Labour won the general elections—until today. Within this period, it identifies two models: the government-led regeneration scheme New Deal for Communities implemented by the New Labour Government, which provided funding for intervening in deprived areas and which included representatives of the community in the decision-making board; and the Big Society approach implemented by the Coalition Government in the context of austerity, which advocates for a state-enabling approach and has changed the planning system to involve communities in decision-making. The paper explores how these two models have addressed the participation of residents in social housing regeneration. For doing so, it looks at the policy context and case studies in these two periods. The paper concludes that community participation needs easier processes, which do not require such a strong effort from community groups. It also concludes that both funding and support is needed to promote community engagement in regeneration processes, which can, firstly, serve as an incentive to be more actively involved in the regeneration of their neighbourhood, and secondly, do not rely on private investment for the improvement of council estates

Sold out? The right-to-buy, gentrification and working-class displacements in London

Since the 1990s, the renewal of council housing estates in London has involved widespread ‘decanting’ of resident populations to allow for demolition and redevelopment, primarily by private developers who sell the majority of new housing at market rate. This process of decanting has displaced long-term council tenants and shorter-term ‘temporary’ tenants, with many notable to return to the estate. In contrast, those leaseholders who bought under the ‘right-to-buy’ legislation introduced in the 1980s have a ‘right to remain’ by virtue of the property rights they have. Nonetheless, given the threat that their property will ultimately be subject to compulsory purchase because the redevelopment of the estate is in the ‘public interest’, these leaseholders experience similar displacement pressures to other residents. Describing these pressures, this article argues that the right-to-buy legislation offered these residents the illusion of entering a property-owning middle-class, but that they were never able to escape the labelling of council estates as stigmatised spaces which have ultimately been seized by the state and capital in a moment of ‘accumulation by dispossession’

Managing the Tensions of Essentialism: Purity and Impurity

This article proposes a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu’s writings indicate that through the adjudication of things or people as relatively impure or pure an image is constructed of their essential truth. Building from Bourdieu, we will show how themes of purity and impurity can be used to manage the tensions associated with attempts to impute an essence to human nature or to reality, ensuring that the moral and epistemological significance of complexity is masked. This is the reason why themes of purity and impurity so often attend polarized world views, and why they are frequently mobilized for justifying and operating biopolitical processes of social stratification and regulation

Moving beyond Marcuse: gentrification, displacement and the violence of un-homing

Displacement has become one of the most prominent themes in contemporary geographical debates, used to describe processes of dispossession and forced eviction at a diverse range of scales. Given its frequent deployment in studies describing the consequences of gentrification, this paper seeks to better define and conceptualise displacement as a process of un-homing, noting that while gentrification can prompt processes of eviction, expulsion and exclusion operating at different scales and speeds, it always ruptures the connection between people and place. On this basis – and recognising displacement as a form of violence – this paper concludes that the diverse scales and temporalities of displacement need to be better elucidated so that their negative emotional, psychosocial and material impacts can be more fully documented, and resisted