11.10 Regeneration + resistance: A contribution to the debate Carolyn Smith, Project Mimique http://www.projectmimique.org.uk/1-27.HTM

On Friday, October 22, 2010, This is Not a Gateway Festival hosted a discussion led by Judith Ryser, Michael Edwards and Bob Colenutt, entitled 'Urban renaissance': for whom? Reflections on 'failure' and the attempts to rewrite 'resistance'. Here, Carolyn Smith of Project Mimique elaborates on her contribution to the discussion. This piece is structured around some of the key questions set out by Ryser, Edwards and Colenutt at the beginning of the conversation. In restating the obvious, our apologies if it reads like a FAQ.

Q. Is gentrification an unavoidable byproduct of urban regeneration? PM: Regeneration is all about gentrification: encouraging 'social mix' was a key planning policy of the last Labour government. For this, read breaking up areas of working class housing with new, higher-income, development. As a result of security of tenure, this doesn't always lead to the immediate displacement of previous residents. Urban renewal in the United States displaced thousands. In comparison, C21 displacement in London is mild, and concentrated around key nodes such as the Olympic developments. However, the significant amount of regeneration that has taken place in the capital has done little to alleviate overcrowding (common for minority families) or house more marginalised persons in the city. Grown-up children are often stuck living in their parents' accommodation. Those with precarious or low-incomes live with the ever-present threat of homelessness. The single homeless themselves have little hope of anything other than hostel or short-life accommodation. Regeneration benefits the more wealthy working class (families, pensioners) already housed in social housing, or higher-income aspirant homeowners such as key workers (nurses, firemen, police, at the start, now even town planners are regarded as 'key', clearly a policy of convenience). Displacement, however mild in the city as a whole, becomes significant when it affects you personally. The estate I live on, Balfron Tower and Carradale House in Poplar, is soon to be refurbished. All short-life housing co-operative tenants such as myself, and tenants of Bow Arts Trust, will be forced to leave Carradale House this summer, and Balfron Tower follows 18 months down the line -- this was only to be expected -- but leaseholders will also be forced to move out or face a CPO. Poplar HARCA tenants will be forced to vacate for around 18 months to 2 years. Tenants have no automatic right of return (and indeed a financial incentive -- a home loss payment -- to move permanently) and they have to bid for alternative accommodation through the Council's lettings scheme. Poplar HARCA say: "We know how important it is to so many of you to know whether you can return or not, but it is one of the questions we just don't know the answer to yet. We had hoped to build new homes and sell some of these and 130 homes from both blocks to help pay for the works and build new affordable homes for rent. However, the Council did not give us planning permission and the housing market crashed. This means we have had to rethink how we pay for the works. We know that the homes in Balfron Tower sell for more money tha[n] those in Carradale and so we may have to prioritise these for sale. Based on feedback so far we think that tenants in Carradale will be able to return. As soon as we can be clearer, we will tell you". The estate was designed by Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger. It is prime real estate and with spectacular views of Canary Wharf and the City. Q. Can local communities succeed in bringing about urban renaissance? PM: The term 'urban renaissance' is problematic for me, while the word 'community' I regard as a recourse to a resemblance, the substance of myth. 'Urban renaissance' was coined by the architect Richard Rogers, and its framework boldly set out in his book with Mark Fisher, A New London (Penguin, 1992).The benchmark of the urban renaissance was the cappuccino. If you could get that on the high street, Rogers famously quipped, the urban renaissance was deemed to be a success. A more trite advocacy of gentrification effects one could not hope to find. Rogers sets out his case for the urban renaissance with a call for action. He highlights the reappearance of the city-state and the intense rivalries between European cities, comparing it to quattrocentro Italy. He notes that Paris and Frankfurt make no secret of attempting to lure the financial sector away from London. "Rising to the challenge and sustaining our position will not depend simply on offering a cheap deal on the rent as was the strategy in Docklands," he writes. "Rather they will involve providing the best aspect of every aspect of city life: efficient transport, affordable homes, an attractive and clean built environment, as well as dynamic cultural facilities and a vibrant public life". The 'urban renaissance' is clearly tied to the complex of the 'World City' (an ideological construction), and London's dominance in Europe as a financial centre. Rogers' proposals exhibit also a certain romanticism -- a love of the city square pace Sitte, a call for the restoration of the city gates, a plea against the standardisation of the high street -- and are inflected with the banalities of the organic analogy. 'Balanced', mixed development forms the basis for the revival of urban culture. But I admire his initial statement for two reasons. (1) High densities are the spice of life, and (2) finally we have a concrete proposal, and international examples of, a democratic, discursive planning system, distanced from the control of the local state. Only with a reformed model, such as the one Rogers proposes, could residents, organisations and businesses local to an area, as well as concerned professionals, hope to influence the localities in which they reside and operate. I have certain reservations about democratic planning, such as a potential class bias among participants and how disagreement is arbitrated, and (with Ploger and Hillier) would counterpose an agonistic model to the one advocated based on collaboration, but Rogers' proposal surely would be a step in the right direction. And he does not deprecate social housing. Rogers points to work done in the Netherlands and demands buildings of a similar high design quality. Elsewhere, Michael Edwards notes that it is the absence of planning controls in Rotterdam that has enabled innovative and high quality social housing design. A libertarian fix! Q. Are there limits to the regeneration process? In space? In time? PM: Are there limits to capital? Capital's switching into the production of the built environment is what has been harnessed to fund so-called regeneration initiatives. With the financial sector becoming more heavily regulated after the crash, one can perhaps assume that the built environment remains an attractive option. What has gone since the last election, is the political will to tackle urban deprivation with anything other than cuts and coercion. It has to be emphasised that regeneration as a spatial initiative is also a social process, in the full Marxist sense of the term: infused with contradiction and crisis. The New Labour government combined a communitarian discourse with social democratic panaceas -- heavily reliant on the Durkheimian ideology underpinning European Union strategy -- in its definitions of the problems facing poor, inner city residents, and in the solutions then applied. In were references to a 'culture of poverty' transmitted through the generations, attacks on single motherhood and paternalistic models of good parenting, alongside acute spatial regulation of those that infringed the norms of politeness or respectability. Work was hailed as saviour of the poor, low-grade training was ubiquitous, and the Government propped up poverty wages through a negative tax, extending the benefits to middle and even high-income workers (thus enhancing legitimacy). Social conflict was denied in appeals to social cohesion. A myth was propagated: that regeneration of our inner cities was required to combat endemic crime, vandalism, and the refusal of work. It became all too easy to build that myth in calling regeneration to account. By this I mean that appeals for jobs and housing for local people are complicit in this mythification. Coalition rule has stepped up the vicious rhetoric against welfare claimants. Stigmatisation will surely compound ground-level resentment against such facile 'improving' initiatives, especially as more fundamental services are curtailed. One might well breathe a sigh of relief as naked class conflict steps out into the open once again. Time itself is a question of Being. Heidegger talks about the need for the state of Being-in-the-world of a clearing -- or, in German, Lichtung -- a time for reappraisal and reflection. After 13 years of Labour rule and technocratic realism, we now need, surely, a period of critical reflection on ways in which governments attempt to discipline populations, and the norms (biopower) which they seek to inculcate to effect such containment. Regeneration is merely one aspect of such a process. The welfare state and health service are others. Rather than adopt a merely defensive posture in relation to service cuts, I feel we should be fiercely critical of the regulatory animus of such services, intrinsic as they are to advanced Liberal strategies of rule. Q. Are there alternative urban development models to the comprehensive regeneration process? PM: Physical regeneration is incremental -- piecemeal -- rather than comprehensive. But this is besides the point. To accept regeneration as a necessary process is to accept that society is broken, and that strategies of habitation in the interstices of the society of the consumption norm are invalid. I would challenge such a scenario. Allotments provide food, and with informal work both supplement meagre incomes. Sickness, while often a product of a pathogenic medical industry, is also a retreat from a visceral world. The anti-social family refuses the power geometries of patriarchy. Conditions of legality constitute a despotism. Where does urban development -- alternative or otherwise -- fit in here? I would argue that urban development essentially breaks up such strategies of resistance; the building of cities is a technology of governance -- an imposition of the rule of law (a moral order) -- as much as a footprint of capital (Ploger 2008). At the heart of my polite disagreement with the seminar holders was a Foucauldian position: that techniques that could be utilised at a local level were part of a biopolitical repertoire, that is, resistant or otherwise, they effect the better management (i.e. the self management) of populations. Another way of putting it would be to point out the canonical split in sociology. Community development initiatives, such as the Bromley-by-Bow Centre, derive from a building of the social, (as we mentioned before) a Durkheimian and potentially repressive tendency. Building on sociology's other canonical protagonist Max Weber, I regard the social as a myth shielding a profound violence. Rather than fostering social cohesion, which runs the risk of oppressing the marginal, I feel one should disclose processes of rationalisation, the better to side-step or challenge them. One group that might be used as an exemplar here is THACMHO -- Tower Hamlets African Caribbean Mental Health Organisation -- set up to critique processes of racism in mental health treatment and diagnosis, and provide support to those diagnosed. It is currently attempting to recover the phonographic archives of the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference organised by R.D. Laing and David Cooper. It was at this conference that the Black Panther Stokely Carmichael introduced the concept of 'institutional racism' to the British Left. Activists have also produced a book: Power Writers and the Struggle Against Slavery. The organisation can be contacted c/o Social Action for Health, Brady Centre, 192 Hanbury Street, London E1 5HU. Bibliography Barrett, M. & M. McIntosh (1982) The Anti-social Family (London) Verso Edwards, M. (2010) www.michaeledwards.org.uk Fine, B., R. Kinsey, J. Lea, S. Picciotto & J. Young (eds) (1979) Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy Theory to Marxism (London) Hutchinson Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time (Oxford) Blackwell Hillier, J. (2003) '"Agon"izing over consensus: Why Habermasian Ideals Cannot be "Real"', Planning Theory 2(1): 37:59 Illich, I. (1977) Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (Harmondsworth) Penguin Kinsey, R. (1979) 'Despotism and legality' in B. Fine, R. Kinsey, J. Lea, S. Picciotto & J. Young (eds) (1979) Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy Theory to Marxism (London) Hutchinson Levitas, R. (1998) The Inclusive Society: Social Exclusion and New Labour (Basingstoke) Palgrave Poplar HARCA (2010) Carradale & Balfron Refurbishment Fact Sheet, provided to all tenants in the two blocks, November 3 Ploger, J. (2004) 'Strife: Urban Planning and Agonism', Planning Theory 3(1): 71-92 ------- (2008) 'Foucault's Dispositif and the City', Planning Theory 7(1): 51-70 Rogers, R. & M. Fisher (1992) A New London (London) Penguin