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Displacement is central to the process of gentrification, but the importance of law in both enacting and resisting such displacement is often overlooked. Noting the tensions between existential, embodied meanings of displacement (i.e. being removed from a place called home), and the formal legal definitions of displacement (i.e. the removal of the right to a property), this paper explores how the law is implicated in the struggle for London's remaining council estates, with processes of expropriation providing councils a means of displacing residents from these estates to allow for (private) redevelopment but also an opportunity for residents to assert their ‘right to community’. Here, we focus on the implications of the UK Secretary of State's decision not to overturn the Planning Inspectorate's (2016) recommendation that Southwark Council should not be allowed to compulsory purchase those homes on the Aylesbury Estate which residents had not already vacated via negotiation. This decision was reached on the basis that while tenants would be compensated financially for the loss of property, they would not be adequately compensated for losing their home. This is suggestive of an expanded notion of housing rights that encompasses a right to community—something that raises the possibility of the law actually aligning with the interests of council residents rather than supporting the politics of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a response to Davidson and Wyly. While we agree with them that class and class conflict is an important element of cities, we disagree with many of their claims and assertions regarding our work. In particular, we argue that the growth of the middle class does not mean that we consider the working class unimportant or to have largely disappeared as they suggest. This is to muddle empirical findings and political agendas. The working class is still clearly present, even though it has shrunk. Nor does the growth of the middle class imply that inequality has become unimportant. On the contrary, we argue that the growth of the middle class is one of the key reasons why London has become more unequal. We take issue with their claim that the middle class does not exist, and we argue that their analysis of 2001 census data, while interesting, does not look at the changes which have taken place over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper addresses the research question “Are more stringent exhaust emissions standards, as applied to light vehicle type approval, resulting in reduced vehicle pollution in an urban area?” The exhaust emissions of a sample of over fifty thousand road vehicles operating in London were measured using roadside remote sensing absorption spectroscopy techniques (infrared and ultraviolet), combined with Automatic Number Plate Recognition for vehicle identification. Levels of carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons (HC), nitric oxide (NO), and smoke (particulate) exhaust emissions are reported by vehicle class, fuel type, and Euro emissions standard. Emissions from petrol cars of each pollutant were all observed to display a statistically significant reduction with the introduction of each successive Euro emissions standard from Euro 1 onwards. However, Euro 2 diesel cars were observed to emit statistically higher rates of NO than either Euro 1 or Euro 3 standard diesel cars. The study also confirms the continuing ‘dieselisation’ of the UK passenger car fleet. Mean NO emissions from Euro 4 diesel cars were found to be 6 times higher than Euro 4 petrol cars, highlighting the need to develop a sound understanding of the current and future ‘in-use’ emissions characteristics of diesel vehicles, and their influence on local air quality. Smoke emissions from TXII London taxis (black cabs) were found to be statistically higher than either earlier TX1 or later TX4 model variants, with possible implications for local air quality policy interventions such as maximum age limits for taxis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The politics of identity and difference are often intensely experienced and negotiated in everyday encounters. By examining the experiences of highly skilled Singaporean transmigrants in London and their projects of cosmopolitan self-fashioning, this paper highlights the way in which 'race' and nationality trouble claims to cosmopolitanism. In the analysis I consider the mixing of cultures and selective 'local' norms picked up by this group of migrants. I focus on the oscillating cultural framings that they navigate in their professional and social interactions, particularly in terms of phenotype, cultural discourse and bodily presentations. In so doing, I argue for a more critical view towards popular notions of cosmopolitanism currently in circulation and instead invoke an alternative cosmopolitan urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that a process of super-gentrification, similar to that first identified by Lees (2003 Urban Studies 40 2487–509) in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, is occurring in the already gentrified, inner London neighbourhood of Barnsbury. A new group of super wealthy professionals working in the City of London is slowly imposing its mark on this inner London housing market in a way that differentiates it and them both from traditional gentrifiers and from the traditional urban upper classes. We suggest that there is a close interaction between work in the newly globalizing industries of the financial services economy, elite forms of education, particularly Oxbridge, and residence in Barnsbury which is very different from other areas of gentrified inner London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been remarkable enthusiasm for redesigning and reanimating urban public spaces in recent years. Yet geographical and urban research has tended to interpret these changes through a relatively limited set of concerns related to exclusion, encroachment and claim-making. This paper seeks to extend engagement with the concept of public space. It does so by arguing for the need to attend more closely to the generative capacities of public spaces and to the material and practical affordances they can offer. Following a project of intervention in a public space in West London - where a troubled crime hotspot underwent a programme of transformation - we suggest that there is much to be gained from broadening attention to the ways in which everyday spaces of public life are assembled: to different ways of inhabiting public space, to atmospheres that are produced, and to the ways in which material interventions enable and constrain the potentialities of spaces and their publicness. Our aim in doing so is to foster attention to, and develop an understanding of, the many instances where cities might become more inclusive, more convivial and generally better for the people that inhabit them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]