Publics and their Problems: Notes on the Remaking of the South Bank, London

an article by Alan Latham (University College London, UK) and Jack Layton (Affiliation unknown) published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 43 Issue 6 (November 2019)

Abstract

Cities are full of disputes about organizing public life. These disputes are important for deciding how spaces get used, and they are integral to how publics form and develop. In all sorts of ways they define the potentialities of urban public life.

This article tells the story of the Southbank Centre's plans to redevelop their central London site, and Long Live Southbank's protest of these plans to save their skateable space.

Through this detailed case study the article develops a distinctive conceptual apparatus for making sense of public disputes.

Drawing links between Deweyan pragmatism and assemblage theory, the article explores how publics were drawn together as assemblages of humans and non‐humans with the capacity to act and argue. It follows the arguments that each side made – and the justifications underpinning them – to explore the different ideas of public‐ness that were at stake in the disagreement.

This also helps highlight the space for cooperation that existed.

The article emphasises the part affect played in shaping the dispute; recognising its role in public reasoning, and in how people get pulled into different publics. This is a story not only of disputation, but of how a corner of London expanded its public‐ness.

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Shared Parental Leave: Exploring Variations in Attitudes, Eligibility, Knowledge and Take-up Intentions of Expectant Mothers in London

an article by Katherine Twamley (University College London, UK) and Pia Schober (University of Tübingen, Germany) published in Journal of Social Policy Volume 48 Issue 2 (April 2019)

Abstract

In April 2015, the UK introduced Shared Parental Leave (SPL), allowing mothers to transfer their maternity leave to their partners from two weeks after the birth or adoption of a child. There has been very limited research conducted on this leave policy to date and knowledge on take-up is poor.

We present findings from an in-depth survey conducted with expectant mothers in two NHS trusts in England on their knowledge, views and plans around leave after the birth of their child and examine variations across educational and ethnic groups.

A total of 575 expectant mothers took part in the survey. Around 7.4 per cent of expectant mothers who were (self-)employed or in education intended to take SPL.

Finances and worries over fathers’ careers were cited as the primary barriers to take up of SPL. Individual entitlement for fathers and knowing others who took SPL increased individuals’ reported intention to take SPL. Applying logistic regression models, we found that knowledge of and access to SPL is correlated with education, ethnicity and home ownership.

Future research and policy design should attend to such issues to ensure equitable access across families.

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The Lived Experience Of Race And Class

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium [via S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily]



Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals. Living in fear of benefit sanctions. A lack of community facilities.

Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.

But here’s the odd thing: people from the working class and minorities are rarely seen as facing the same kinds of issues. Instead, in political debates from Brexit to welfare benefits, minorities and the working class are seen as having conflicting interests and often set against each other. We are Ghosts: Race, Class and Institutional Prejudice, (PDF 56pp) a report published last week by the thinktanks Class and the Runnymede Trust, attempts to address this this issue of common experiences yet conflicting perceived interests. Based on interviews and focus groups, almost entirely in London, the sample may not be statistically valid but the subjective experiences of the interviewees are revealing.

Continue reading

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The Oliver Twist workhouse is becoming a block of luxury flats with a "poor door"

a post by Cory Doctorow for the Boing Boing blog



The incredible human misery on display at the workhouse attached to central London's Middlesex Hospital inspired Charles Dickens to write "Oliver Twist"; now, Camden council has granted a developer permission to develop the site into luxury flats (just in time for the luxury flat crash!), in exchange for a commitment to build some below-market-rent social housing flats, which will be accessible through "poor doors."

Poor doors were the inspiration for my novella "Unauthorized Bread", the lead story in my new book Radicalized: these are separate entrances that developers build for luxury properties that have attained planning permission due to a promise to build below-market units. These separate entrances -- a cross between Jim Crow segregation and a Victorian servant's entrance -- ensure that the full-rate people don't have to ever encounter the subsidy people, but more importantly, they serve as a constant reminder to the subsidy people that they don't really belong there, they are mere charity cases. As I write in Unauthorized Bread: "even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it," or as John Siman paraphrases, "Free markets is a euphemism for fuck you."

Continue reading

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The making of the modern metropolis: evidence from London

a paper by Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm published in CentrePiece Volume 24 Issue 1 (Spring 2019)
Paper No CEPCP548:

Over the last two centuries, transport innovations have drastically changed urban landscapes. Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Daniel Sturm examine how the introduction of steam railways shaped the emerging metropolitan area of London.

Much of the aggregate growth of Greater London can be explained by the new transport technology of the railway

Full text (PDF 4pp) with some amazing illustrations and access to a much longer paper by these authors.

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Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London's Super‐Rich

Rowland Atkinson (University of Sheffield, UK) published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 43 Issue 1 (January 2019)

Abstract

This article problematizes the relationship between the global super‐rich and processes of property development that have generated large volumes of underused residential space.

Evidence is presented to show that much of London's new skyline is underused or lies entirely empty, so that one interpretation of this new landscape of super‐prime residential development is that it is a kind of dead residential space or necrotecture. These relatively lifeless spaces can be interpreted as the particularly wasteful result of continuing rounds of international capital investment in the built environment and the overconsumption of housing and other resources by the super‐rich.

Necrotectural forms, seen in new towers and spectacular homes, appear to index a massive misdirection of development capacity, even as the city experiences a massive social crisis that continues to be played out in the wider housing market.

Full text (PDF 12pp)

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Valuing the bowling alley: Contestations over the preservation of spaces of everyday urban multiculture in London

an article by Emma Jackson (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) published in The Sociological Review Volume 67 Issue 1 (January 2019)

Abstract

This article builds on ‘the convivial, everyday turn’ by approaching the workings of complex urban spaces of multiculture as entangled with processes of urban change that are infused with judgements and contestations about what is of value.

The article explores the competing value claims made for a leisure space, a London bowling alley, used by a diverse group of people (in terms of dis/ability, ethnicity, gender, class and age) that has been threatened with demolition. It examines how arguments about diversity and inclusivity are deployed in these debates and how official discourses are resisted through the mobilisation of other articulations of social value.

The article argues that the combination of the hollowing out of the concept of diversity and the political and economic context results in a paradox whereby multiculturalism is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital while existing physical spaces of everyday urban multiculture are at best unprotected and at worst not recognised, devalued and demolished.

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The ‘other’ London effect: the diversification of London's suburban grammar schools and the rise of hyper‐selective elite state schools

an article by Sol Gamsu (University of Bath, UK) published in The British Journal of Sociology Volume 69 Issue 4 (December 2018)

Abstract

This paper examines the rise of a new elite of ‘super‐state’ schools in London, revealing a growing divide within the state sector which problematizes claims that the capital is a ‘hotspot’ for social mobility (Social Mobility Commission 2016).

Although recent research has revealed a ‘London effect’ in which students in the capital on Free School Meals outperform their peers in other regions (Greaves, Macmillan and Sibieta 2014), inequalities between London's schools in access to elite universities have been overlooked.

Drawing on a case study of a suburban London grammar school, ‘King Henry's School’, I show how ethnic‐minority suburbanization has combined with an institutional strategy to compete with elite private schools. Strategies of selection have been mobilized alongside elements of elite ‘gentlemanly’ educational culture in order to reposition the school within the hierarchy of London's schools.

The result is a hyper‐selective school which provides a conduit to elite universities for upwardly mobile British‐Asian students. I show that this strategy has strong parallels with the school's attempts in the early twentieth century to compete with London's fee‐paying ‘public’ schools.

The continuing symbolic value of ‘traditional’ forms of elite educational culture to a school seeking to reposition itself within the field reflects deep structural patterns of inequality in English education. To understand how apparent improvements in social mobility can sit alongside deepening inequalities between state schools, there is a need for a historical sociological approach that takes account of long‐term processes of institutional change (Savage 2009; Inglis 2014).

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Complicity and contestation in the gentrifying urban primary school

an article by Ayo Mansaray (University of East London, UK) published in Urban Studies Volume 55 Issue 14 (November 2018)

Abstract

The transformation of primary schools in gentrifying localities has sometimes been referred to as a form of ‘class colonisation’.

This article draws on ethnographic research with teachers, teaching assistants and parents in two inner-London primary schools to explore the largely unexamined role of school leaders (headteachers) in mediating gentrification processes within urban schools.

It argues that institutional history, contexts of headship and leadership style all play an important role in negotiating and recontextualising middle-class mobilisation and power to re-shape primary schools. Headteachers’ relationship to gentrification is therefore not simply one of complicity, but often of contestation and conflict.

This article therefore challenges understandings of gentrification as a hegemonic process, and contributes to a more nuanced picture of the educational consequences of gentrification, particularly the institutional realities and experiences of urban social change.

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The making of the modern metropolis: Evidence from London

a column by Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Daniel Sturm for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal

Over the last two centuries, transportation innovations have drastically changed urban landscapes.

This column explores how the mid-19th century transport revolution shaped the urban agglomeration of London. The results show Greater London’s population would have been 30% lower in 1921 without the railway network. The findings and the quantitative urban models employed highlight the role of modern transport technologies in sustaining dense concentrations of economic activity.

Continue reading

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Poor productivity and high housing costs are driving a ‘living standards exodus’ from London

a post by Stephen Clarke for the Resolution Foundation blog

As a Londoner it’s fair to say that as a city we’re quite good at giving ourselves a pat on the back (though apparently self-loathing Londoners are a thing too). It’s often suggested that London is an economic powerhouse, productive, innovative and leaving the rest of the country in its wake. However new research by the Resolution Foundation suggests that London could do with a bit of self-examination as well as backslapping.

London’s economy is different, and in a good way. The average worker in London produces a third more per hour than the UK average. As a share of the workforce, twice as many people work in professional, scientific or technical roles than in other major UK cities. London’s economy has grown faster than the UK as a whole since the crisis.

But wait. When it comes to productivity growth – probably the most pressing economic challenge facing the UK – far from racing away, London’s economy is actually holding the country back. Productivity growth in the capital has been negative since the crisis.

Continue reading

There are lots of charts that show the changes very clearly.

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Emerging Cultural Capital in the City: Profiling London and Brussels

an article by Mike Savage (London School of Economics, UK),  Laurie Hanquinet (University of York, UK), Niall Cunningham (University of Durham, UK) and Johs Hjellbrekke (University of Bergen, Norway) published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 42 Issue 1 (January 2018)

Abstract

This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged.

Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital.

This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands.

This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity.

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And then came Brexit: Experiences and future plans of young EU migrants in the London region

an article by Aija Lulle, Laura Moroşanu and Russell King ((University of Sussex, Brighton, UK) published in Population, Space and Place Volume 24 Issue 1 (January 2018)

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential rupture that the United Kingdom's “Brexit” referendum of June 23, 2016, might bring about in intra-European Union youth mobilities, with a specific focus on the London region.

In many respects, and counter-intuitively given the Brexit result, London has already become a “Eurocity”: a magnet for young people, both highly educated and less educated, from all over Europe who, especially since the turn of the millennium, have flocked to the city and its wider region to work, study, and play.

Now, these erstwhile open-ended migration trajectories have been potentially disrupted by a referendum result that few anticipated, and whose consequential results are still unclear. The main theoretical props for our analysis are the notions of “liquid migration”, “tactics of belonging”, “whiteness”, “privilege”, and “affect”. Data are drawn from 60 in-depth interviews with Irish, Italian, and Romanian young-adult students and higher and lower skilled workers, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016, plus 27 reinterviews carried out in late 2016, post-Brexit.

Results indicate participants’ profound and generally negative reaction to Brexit and, as a consequence, a diversity of uncertainties and of plans over their future mobility: either to stay put using “tactics of belonging”, or to return home earlier than planned, or to move on to another country. Finally, we find evidence that new hierarchies and boundaries are drawn between intra-European Union migrants as a result of Brexit.

Full text (PDF 11pp)

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Making the middle classes on shifting ground? Residential status, performativity and middle-class subjectivities in contemporary London

an article by Michaela Benson and Emma Jackson (Goldsmith's College, University of London, UK) published in The British Journal of Sociology Volume 68 Issue 2 (June 2017)

Abstract

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing – both in relation to rental and ownership – disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures.

In this paper, we consider two key questions:

1. What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change?
2. How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this?

Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction.

We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape.

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No more robot wars in London

a post by Torsten Bell published by Resolution Foundation on 2 May 2017

“The robots are coming to take our jobs”, the Evening Standard told Londoners in December 2016. In case that didn’t depress their readers enough, the article went on to spell out the coming doom: “The sheer pace of change in computational power and grinding efficiencies of automation will alter or eliminate many of our jobs, far faster than we anticipate.”

And then, to ensure the anxiety was sufficiently widespread, they reminded their middle-class readers that “many of the relatively fortunate in the professional class in London will face upheavals too”.

Anxiety about the impact of robots on the world of work has been a hot topic across Western countries for several years. You couldn’t move at Davos last year without seeing grown men (it’s always men) with their heads in their hands predicting the end of work. Bill Gates is so worried that he has called for a robots tax.

Continue reading

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The limits of London

an article by Jonathan D. Paul (University College London, UK) published in International Journal of Urban Sciences Volume 21 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

The metropolis of London, UK, can be defined in multiple ways.

The official statistical definition of Greater London is somewhat arbitrary and differs substantially from postal, telephone, political, transport, and many other Londons.

This paper critically compares new methods of defining the limits of London, using census data and railway travel-times, and within the context of political leanings and historical development.

London can be divided into an inner core and outer fringe, the latter often indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. However, there are striking differences within this fringe: while the edge of the city is sometimes sharp, it more often takes the form of a zone up to 10 km wide. This width reflects the wealth of ways in which the city can be defined.

The concept of London’s economic footprint or travel-to-work area has motivated the inclusion a new super-Greater London unit, well beyond traditional city limits. Commuter towns within this area can be considered ‘half-London’. While viewing London’s limits dynamically in relation to its surrounding hinterland is certainly attractive and satisfies multiple datasets, cleaving to the official definition of Greater London is more useful for statistical purposes.

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The hollowing out of London: how poverty patterns are changing

an article by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling published in The News Statesman on 13 March 2015

The largest falls in the proportions of households that are neither wealthy or poor has been in outer boroughs of London.

Today in England over a quarter (27 per cent) of households are poor, meaning that they are unable to take part in the norms of society, they are unable to purchase items which the majority of the population consider to be necessities and, very often, their children are unable to take part in relatively cheap school trips or have a birthday party because of lack of money. In recent years that proportion has been rising. These rises that have been documented in great detail by the UK government funded Economic and Social Research Council’s Poverty and Social Exclusion team.

Continue reading and you will find some very interesting maps

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Neither ‘Deepest, Darkest Peckham’ nor ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ East Dulwich: The Middle Classes and their ‘Others’ in an Inner-London Neighbourhood

an article by Emma Jackson (University of Glasgow, Scotland) and Michaela Benson (Goldsmiths, University of London) published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 38 Issue 4 (July 2014)

Abstract

This article examines how middle-class residents of an inner-London neighbourhood draw up socio-spatial and symbolic boundaries between themselves and their ‘others’. Through a discussion of accounts of two very different boundaries – the boundary of a multi-ethnic high street and a less clearly defined boundary of a neighbouring middle-class area – we argue that the production of middle-class identities is bound up with processes of disaffiliation not only from proximate stigmatised areas, but also from more upmarket areas and the people who populate them.

Against this background it becomes clear that middle-class claims to belonging are made through (1) the asymmetric processes by which the middle classes create and maintain spatial boundaries between themselves and racialized/classed others, and (2) the subtle processes of distinction that go on within the middle classes.

Nevertheless, relationships to place remain ambivalent, and as neighbourhoods undergo change, physical boundaries separating one area from another refuse to stay put. We argue that the re-inscription of such boundaries in the accounts of middle-class respondents are attempts to create a stable identity on the shifting ground of the contemporary global city.

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ESF in London blog

A new “ESF in London” blog has been set up by Greater London Enterprise (GLE) to provide news

of ESF activities and opportunities across the many London ESF programmes. GLE is running a
Technical Assistance project to help local authorities in London influence, plan and engage in the
delivery of ESF. The blog includes an article about a recent London Councils event to look at how
boroughs can shape the priorities of the 2014-2020 ‘EU Structural and Investment Fund Growth
Programme’.

ESF in London
London Councils holds 2014-2020 programme event for boroughs

via ESF Newsletter no 27

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Mixed-Tenure Neighbourhoods in London: Policy Myth or Effective Device to Alleviate Deprivation?

an article by Sonia Arbaci (Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, UK) and Ian Rae (London Borough of Redbridge, Ilford, UK) published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 37 Issue 2 (March 2013)

Abstract

Social and tenure-mixing policies are recurrently deployed as a means to tackle urban deprivation and reduce social inequalities on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit without sound evidence, with policies often resulting in gentrification, social polarisation or dispersal towards peripheral areas.

This article explores whether housing-tenure diversification is a device for alleviating deprivation in terms of increasing socioeconomic opportunities (production) and access to resources (consumption), and empirically contributes to wider debates on inequality, segregation and neighbourhood effects.

Quantitative and qualitative longitudinal analyses examine the extent to which, in Greater London, there are greater opportunities and access to resources amongst social tenants in mixed-tenure neighbourhoods than amongst those in concentrations of social housing.

Changes in deprivation levels according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) are contrasted and unpacked, and correlations between tenure, ethnicity, income, location, neighbourhood affordability and deprivation are investigated.

The research demonstrates that social tenants do experience differing opportunities and access to resources, but these are not dependent on, or improved by, the level of tenure mix within the neighbourhood.

Instead, integration of area-based and people-based policy, as well as decommodified access to welfare services (such as education, training and employment opportunities), is crucial.

Furthermore, the IMD as an evidence base for policy formulation is contested and the neighbourhood effects are challenged.

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