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This paper reflects on City's interview with the UK activist group, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), examining their practices of resistance within the broader structural frame of austerity capitalism. This enables an exploration of how capitalism has constructed disability as an exclusionary category over time to support the accumulation of wealth, from urban industrialisation to austerity capitalism. The paper also engages with Gargi Bhattacharyya's argument that austerity is deployed through a post-colonial logic of racialisation, exploring how this notion may be applied to disabled welfare claimants. It also explores her argument that austerity marks a shift towards a post-consent politics but argues that both coercion and consent are key dimensions of state governance that seek to produce public acquiescence to punitive policies that threaten disabled people's livelihoods and lives. Indeed, the multiple struggles against austerity, including those by DPAC, clearly indicate the failure of moves towards a post-consent politics. The paper demonstrates how the city, therefore, is not only a key site for exclusion but also a central site for resistance. DPAC's resistances disrupt and contest austerity's processes and model an alternative prefigurative politics based on collaborative care and the use value of social reproduction. This opens up possibilities for post-capitalist futures and a right to the city based on collective rights and power. DPAC positions itself as both an identity and a class campaign, integrating reformist strategies into a longer-term anti-capitalist agenda and reaching outwards to other urban struggles that are similarly resisting the harms inflicted on bodies and minds by global capitalism. Therefore, building on the work of Mary Jean Hande, this paper argues that disabled people are not simply worthy of inclusion when theorising and constructing anti-capitalist and urban resistance, but are integral to and at the forefront of such struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the gap between people and rule (demos and kratos) in democratic societies by exploring the history and practice of broad-based community organising, as applied by London Citizens, United Kingdom (UK). The paper outlines the origins of this model of politics and how it has been translated from the United States to London and the UK. The paper highlights the power of mobilising the demos to put pressure on the decision-making governance structures that determine the kratos. While London Citizens does this through kratos-at-a-distance, the article goes on to explore how hyper-local, neighbourhood-scaled governance structures—'community councils'—could provide a powerful tool to further connect demos to kratos. Such councils could underpin a democratic revival that combines representation and participation at the scale at which people still live their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the 'smart citizen'. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by analysing nearly sixty interviews with a wide range of actors involved in smart city projects in the UK city of Milton Keynes. Implicit in those interviews are three overlapping but distinct forms of smart sociality, which the paper terms sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic. The paper argues that it is important to engage both empirically and theoretically with these three understandings of the social in relation to smart, because they suggest that the reconfiguration of human activity assumed in smart city discourses is more diverse than most current scholarship acknowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that if this diversity is to become a critical resource, urban scholarship must give more empirical and conceptual attention to cybernetic forms of sociality in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will chart the multiple ways that regulated tenants in my family home of Webb Place, a tenement building in Kensington, London, experience gentrification-induced displacement. I then discuss how community and creativity play a part in their resistance and survival. Landlords and property management companies have subjected regulated tenants, in this specific context, to a long process of 'slow violence' and displacement that has included negligence and harassment intended to stress, harm, anger, and ultimately push out residents. Not only does this 'slow violence' occur behind the closed door of the building but so does resistance to it. Communal interaction and creativity have helped regulated tenants to mock power structures and repurpose space while also trying to survive the gentrification of their home. While this displacement is not unique to regulated tenants, this paper adds to much-needed theoretical work that centres on regulated tenants—indeed, in-depth analysis of gentrification and displacement among this subfield is essentially non-existent in the UK, until now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cityhas, from its inception, paid close attention to London, to the ‘World City’ or ‘Global City’ ideologies underwriting its concentration of wealth and of poverty and to challenges from among its citizens to the prevailing orthodoxy. This paper focuses on London's extreme experience of the housing crisis gripping the UK—itself the European nation with the fastest long-term growth of average house prices and widest regional disparities, both driven by overblown financialisation and the privileging of rent as a means of wealth accumulation, often by dispossession. Londoners’ experiences stem partly from four decades of neo-liberal transformation and partly from accelerated financialisation in the last two decades and are now being accelerated by the imposition of ‘austerity’ on low- and middle-income people. The social relationships of tenancy in social housing, private tenancy and mortgage-financed owner-occupation are, however, divisive and the paper ends by identifying what may be the beginning of a unified social movement, or at least a coalition, for change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon Colin McFarlane's 2011 call inCityfor an ‘assemblage urbanism’ to supplement critical urbanism. It does so by mapping the spatio-political contours of London's 21st-century housing crisis through the geophilosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari'sA Thousand Plateaus([1980] 2013, London: Bloomsbury] and Hardt and Negri's analysis of the metropolis inCommonwealth(2009, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The paper examines the Focus E15 housing campaign based around a group of young mothers in the East London borough of Newham. In 2013, the mothers were living in the Focus E15 foyer supported housing unit for young people in Newham, but they were subsequently threatened with eviction as a result of welfare cuts. After successfully contesting the mothers’ own prospective expulsion from the city, the campaign shifted to the broader struggle for ‘social housing not social cleansing’. The paper draws upon participant observation at campaign events and interviews with key members. The Focus E15 campaign has engaged in a series of actions which form a distinctive way of undertaking housing politics in London, a politics that can be understood using a Deleuzoguattarian framework. Several campaign actions, including temporary occupations, are analysed. It is argued that these actions have created ‘smooth space’ in a manner which is to an extent distinctive from many other London housing campaigns which are rooted in a more sedentary defensive approach based around the protection of existing homes and communities—‘our place’. It is such spatio-political creativity—operating as a ‘nomadic war machine'—which has given rise to the high-profile reputation of the Focus E15 campaigners as inspirational young women who do not ‘know their place’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper argues that gaining an effective perspective on the London housing crisis requires an understanding of what is happening at the highest levels of the real estate market (£2 million+). It is based on data collected over two and a half years (2013–15) of research amongst the London elites through the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) project ‘Life in the Alpha Territories: London's “Super-Rich” Neighbourhoods’. It unpacks terms such as ‘foreign investor’ and frames the specificity of London as a global city, as well as using ethnographic and interview data to understand how actors who impact upon the city understand their role themselves. Distinctions are drawn between those who buy houses in Mayfair to shore up capital and middle-class Chinese investors, who buy flats to rent them out as investments. It differentiates between different types of ‘empty’ houses, and also considers the impact of ‘old’ elite families selling up and moving out who also purchase properties for their children in areas adjacent to traditional ‘elite’ hotspots, creating further ripples of gentrification, price rises and unaffordability. Eschewing the facile conflations of the populist press, this paper shows how capital flows into London, resulting in a mix of misplaced and mismatched investment—fuelling the building of the wrong types of units at the wrong price points. The paper also examines how the underuse of land deeply affects London well beyond its traditionally elite and ‘prime’ areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper presents a case of engaged ethnography developed by a group of geographers from the University of Cagliari focusing on the everyday experience of urban marginality by the residents of Sant’Elia, a low-income district in Cagliari, Italy. Stigmatised for being ‘at the margins’ of the city, the district reveals on the one hand, degraded socio-economic conditions and, on the other hand, a strong sense of identity and belonging among its inhabitants. The main aim of the study is to discuss and contrast the stigma affecting Sant’Elia through the direct involvement of a group of women living in the district in participative fieldwork utilising a mixed set of both quantitative and qualitative tools and aimed at collecting a multilayered reality of ideas, emotions, perceptions, experiences and images of the district as perceived by its own inhabitants. By presenting the different phases, methodologies and results of the study, the paper operates at two different, albeit interconnected, theoretical and methodological levels. From a theoretical standpoint, it deconstructs the concept of marginality, showing what it means to live in a ‘difficult’ district on a daily basis. From a methodological point of view, it proposes a wider reflection on the politics of multimodal ethnography, by focusing on how the different positionalities of researchers and residents have been challenged by the fieldwork activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing is one of the defining social policy issues of our time. There is growing recognition that the housing market is failing and causing widespread damage, but alternatives struggle against deep-rooted capitalist norms and the perceived shortcomings of previous attempts to promote non-market housing. However, despite being a huge concern for millions of people, housing tends to operate below the mainstream political radar, as was demonstrated again by the December 2019 UK general election. This paper argues that a new agenda for public housing is gaining support and can overcome these obstacles, particularly by aligning itself to shifting lifestyle patterns and the urgency of combating climate change, thus enacting a true Right to the City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a critical perspective on practices of construction and consumption of wireless mesh networks in urban environments. It narrates Open Wireless Network (OWN) in Deptford, at a time when this inner borough of London was undergoing an intense gentrification process. Drawing on critical urban theory, the ethnography frames OWN as a socio-technical assemblage deeply entangled with everyday city life. It argues that gentrification poses challenges to a grass-roots wireless network like OWN, because it risks reducing it to an individualised utility and an aesthetic provision. The initial findings suggest the communitarian construction of this wireless network has helped to maintain a commitment to reciprocity, potentially offering—for its users, developers and participants—pockets of resistance against their cultural displacement. Although providing free wireless broadband to many, the paper argues that wireless communication became of secondary importance to the locals who joined the network. For years in fact, OWN contributed to face-to-face interventions, local knowledge exchange and transfer of competences, becoming a relatively known presence in the area. The research operates on a multidisciplinary level evoking hackers, technology and the production of urban space. It wants to stitch back together some of the literature on socio-technical assemblage and on the ‘right to the city’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically ‘performed’, this paper takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change—occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between ‘abstract space-makers’ and ‘social space-makers’—is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liverpool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we shift from conventional academic writing toward something similar to a dialogue, an encounter, a few hours spent in a virtual café where we chat and systematically try to excavate our respective ethnographic endeavours. Such experimentation in format is needed, we argue, in order to re-approach the questions characterising in-depth ethnographic work from a different, possibly fresher, perspective, and to communicate those more directly and freely. Rather than embedding our doubts, fears and wishful thinking in academic formalism, we spell those out aloud, as a composite and unfinished flow that touches upon relevant literature but is still raw and grounded in our current and respective fieldwork. Relying on our differentiated works with Roma people in Italy, France and Romania (2004–ongoing), in our dialogue we talk about the challenges of positioning; the construction of new (self)identities; the building of relationships of trust, care and affect, and their break; the role of ethnographic knowledge in activist work; the risk and the certainty of failure; the difficulties associated with entering and leaving the field. The aim of our dialogue is not to offer answers to questions that have been at the centre of the ethnographic discipline since the start, but to open a space of incremental and reciprocal learning that may serve as an inspiration for other young ethnographers like us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on London’s social class structure at the start of the 21st century. That debate has focused on the use of census metrics to argue the case for whether or not the capital has become more or less middle class in composition between 2001 and 2011. We contend that the definition of the middle class has become confused in the course of this debate and is of less critical importance for an understanding of the city’s contemporary class structure than is a focus on London’s elite. We make use of data from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS) to shed light on the social, cultural and economic resources of this group, in addition to their spatial location. We then return to the census data for 2001 and 2011 and posit that belying the image of stability in London’s class structure these data suggest clear and localised patterns of intensification in class geographies across the capital, an intensification characterised by a growing cleavage between Inner and Outer London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London's housing crisis is rooted in a neo-liberal urban project to recommodify and financialise housing and land in a global city. But where exactly is the crisis heading? What future is being prepared for London's urban dwellers? How can we learn from other country and city contexts to usefully speculate about London's housing future? In this paper, we bring together recent evidence and insights from the rise of what we call ‘global corporate landlords’ (GCLs) in ‘post-crisis’ urban landscapes in North America and Europe to argue that London's housing crisis—and the policies and processes impelling and intervening in it—could represent a key moment in shaping the city's long-term housing future. We trace the variegated ways in which private equity firms and institutional investors have exploited distressed housing markets and the new profitable opportunities created by states and supra-national bodies in coming to the rescue of capitalism in the USA, Spain, Ireland and Greece in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. We then apply that analysis to emerging developments in the political economy of London's housing system, arguing that despite having a very low presence in the London residential property market and facing major entry barriers, GCLs are starting to position themselves in preparation for potential entry points such as the new privatisation threat to public and social rented housing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Calais Jungle has existed in some form for several years. It grew in size tremendously as a result of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, but was spectacularly demolished in October 2016. When the Jungle was still standing, it was a site of intense violence perpetuated by the local police, state authorities as well as French legal systems. Much of the literature that has explored the Jungle thus far has rightly depicted it as an unofficial refugee camp, a ‘state of exception’ and a site of biopolitical experimentation with distinct ‘camp geographies’. However, it is the contention of this paper that while these experimentations occur and fuel the precariousness of the site, the Jungle can be seen as a slum, and indeed, that it can be seen as a slum of London’s making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A few months ago I took part in a gloomy debate about the housing crisis with the celebrated modernist architect Kate Macintosh. All the speakers had referred despairingly to the demolition of dozens upon dozens of London's housing estates—the ‘London clearances’ written about so cogently by Simon Elmer and Geraldine Dening in this Special Feature. When Kate got up to speak she talked about her experience of designing South London's landmark Dawson's Heights in the 1960s and the success of recent community projects in bringing North London's once troubled Broadwater Farm Estate together. ‘Does she not know it's also under threat of demolition?’, I wondered to myself. It turns out she did, with her voice cracking as she continued, breaking down in tears at the thought of what the community now had to face, despite all their efforts. Then she composed herself and continued. But as she returned to her seat she was tripped up by a misplaced lead and fell, breaking her arm. It was an upsetting incident and felt to me like a disturbing metaphor for London's housing crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

'Homelessness' in the UK, currently at record levels, is the focus of an ever-expanding mass of law, policy, procedures, practices, and institutions and enterprises of all sorts, from government, local government, national and local NGOs. All are implicated in the drive to keep houseless people in their place, obedient, out of sight, receiving assistance in the 'appropriate' way. This contribution is an account of a successful activist campaign to make a UK city adopt a Homeless Bill of Rights. It is unusual as a campaign using a legal discourse, that of human rights, not to create legally enforceable rights but as a political tool to force a different kind of visibility and equality. The political philosophy of Jacques Rancière helps to theorize these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interview with Disabled People Against Cuts campaign group illuminates ways that disabled people in the UK are campaigning on and off the streets against neoliberal austerity measures and, more widely, against the capitalist city. As the development of cities was structured by capitalism, disabled people have, in so many material, organisational and symbolic ways, been excluded by a capitalist city not built in their image. Welfare capitalism brought many gains for disabled people, but neoliberal capitalism has been ripping them away in the most brutal and demeaning of ways. Disabled people have been pushed to the margins in both industrial and post-industrial cities that have sought the most productive waged labour and ideal bodies. As such, the capitalist city disables people, and thus by default the city that disabled people must fight for is an anti-capitalist city based on use value. As the interview with DPAC demonstrates, disabled people are fighting both collaboratively and confrontationally, rolling their way into new spaces and working collectively to model what a future society could look like. It is therefore argued that disabled people's protests present a core challenge to the capitalist city, and thus their presence in both urban street movements and academic debate is crucial for any radical Right to the City movement. Disabled people are calling for an ableing city shaped to meet the needs of its inhabitants, rather than its inhabitants being coerced into shaping themselves to fulfil the needs of the capitalist city. As such, the city that disabled people call for is not just for them, but for anyone who is segregated, excluded or dispossessed by the capitalist city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we develop a political critique of urban form at the time of a tall building boom? Pointing to limitations of interpreting towers as representations of finance and power, I introduce an understanding of skylines as phantasmagoria of capitalist culture: a dazzling image that abstracts from the commodified urban landscape by promoting its further commodification. I show that both professionals who argue for and those who argue against the construction of tall office buildings in London approach the built environment as an easily marketable visual reproduction that is defined as a compositional whole: a bounded composition with St Paul’s Cathedral at its centre. I claim that this approach and the widespread idea that commercial skyscrapers destroy the historic cityscape assume an element of integrity that is ideological and which itself must be ‘ruined’ because it forecloses a space for emancipatory politics. My argument for a shift of the ways in which cityscapes are viewed draws on Walter Benjamin’s critical montages and allegories. I explore his reading of ruins as emblems of the fragility and destructiveness of capitalist culture and his understanding of ruination as a form of critique. My discussion of ruining the city’s beautiful appearance focuses on wholeness and symbolic coherence. In so doing, I provide an interpretation of skylines that sheds light on the ways in which financial capitalism is justified by a specific way of viewing the city and the ways in which it is embedded in texts that are deemed to be socially meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Justice for Grenfell. Source: Paul Watt, 2017. ‘It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord … and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.’Grenfell Action Group (2016)‘Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.’Judith Butler (2012, 148)‘For what may we hope? Kant put this question in the first-person singular along with two others—What can I know? and What ought I to do?—that he thought essentially marked the human condition. With two centuries of philosophical reflection, it seems that these questions are best transposed to the first-person plural … . Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it. What would it be for such hope to be justified?’ Jonathan Lear (2006, 103) No one who observed the deadly fire in Grenfell Tower or its chaotic aftermath can doubt that it constituted precisely the catastrophic event that its residents feared. Beginning in the early morning hours of Wednesday, the 14th of June, the 24-storey public housing block in North Kensington, in inner west London, was rapidly consumed by an uncontrollable conflagration. The exact number of fatalities is still being tallied, but as of this writing, at least seventy-nine people have died. Scores of family members and neighbours are missing. Dozens of those who survived are in hospital. Hundreds of people were made homeless and have lost everything. The disorganised and inadequate response by local authorities and the Westminster government spurred protests that resembled a resistance movement. It quickly emerged that tenant and resident organisations, such as the Grenfell Action Group, had been calling attention to the risk of disaster in the building for years. The tower lacked a building-wide alarm or sprinkler system and contained only a single staircase for escape. Recent renovation work may also have contributed to the risk of fire. Rather than being heeded, tenants who raised these concerns were actively threatened by the council. Following the fire, reports suggested that when refurbishing the tower’s exterior cladding, the landlord, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, may have opted for substandard, in fact flammable materials in pursuit of cost savings. As this picture emerged, popular outrage grew. Increasingly it seems that the tower’s largely working-class residents had been living with a level of deadly risk that would never have been tolerated for their wealthier neighbours in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though urban space is increasingly shaped by private finance, the tactics and breadth of housing movements are also integral to the shape of our cities. This struggle for a democratic physical and social environment is acute in London, where mobilisation does not reflect the widespread animosity and structural tensions that exist between inhabitants and their landlords. The localised nature of the housing movement gives it endurance as people fight in their direct self-interest. But the connective structures between local groups, whether on a city-wide or continental scale, also need to amplify struggles, to make a coalition more than the sum of its parts. The creation of fluid democratic strategy in these scenarios has never been resolved by political parties, trade unions, NGOs, or most social movements. With popular discontent driving opposition parties leftwards, grassroots campaigns need the strength that both prevents us folding into parliamentarianism, and that requires leftist politicians to seek strategic alliances. This uncomfortable relation should be articulated as an exercising of community power more than a bestowal of trust. For many campaigners who have limited experience of either consistent grassroots power or its relation to political power, making one serve the other is a new challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we look at the origins of London's housing crisis and how it is being used to justify a policy of estate regeneration that is demolishing the homes of the communities they house. Our argument is that regeneration is the key mechanism in what we call the London Clearances, which is making London's local authority-owned land available for private investment and redevelopment. To expand this programme, the Conservative Government has announced its intention to recategorise existing council housing as brownfield land, a term used in planning to describe previously industrial or commercial land that has fallen into disuse. We trace the origins of this policy, from think-tank to mayoral platform to government legislation—most recently in the Housing and Planning Bill—and analyse its justifications in the twin narratives of austerity and densification. We examine how the economic forces of international finance is driving estate regeneration through Labour Councils, and situate this in the context of the wave of legislation passed by this Government to dismantle the welfare state. Faced with this programme for the social cleansing of London's working class communities and the catastrophic effects it will have on the city, the article concludes with a consideration of current and possible future forms of resistance by housing campaigners, including an outline of the principles underlining the authors' own response to what we argue is a politically legislated and economically driven ‘crisis’ in housing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]