The event takes place on June 29, 2021, at 13:15 (EEST) / 11:15 (GST). Everyone can participate in the event by joining the Zoom meeting or following the Facebook live.
This talk is based on a recently published monograph by Policy Press which provides an interdisciplinary account of the controversial urban policy of demolition and rebuilding of social housing estates amid London’s deepening housing crisis and growing polarisation between the have-nots and have-lots.
This is the first book to provide a theoretically informed, empirically in-depth account of the dramatic ways that estate regeneration is reshaping London, fuelling socio-spatial inequalities via state-led gentrification. It is based on over a decade of original research involving fieldwork, interviews with 180 residents and over 50 officials and politicians, as well as a survey at an east London housing estate.
The first part of the talk focuses on residents’ views and experiences of living at their estates before regeneration occurs. It examines estates as valued places with reference to residents’ place attachments and belonging. The second part of the talk focuses on estate residents’ experiences of living through regeneration. This illustrates how regeneration is experienced as physical, social, symbolic and psychosocial degeneration. Residents are left struggling to cope in a ‘limbo-land’ as regeneration/degeneration elongates over many years and even over decades of their lives.
More about the book: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/estate…
Paul Watt is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London. He has published widely on social housing, urban regeneration, homelessness, the London housing crisis, gentrification, suburbanization, and the 2012 Olympic Games. He is co-editor of Social Housing and Urban Renewal: A Cross-National Perspective with Peer Smets (Emerald, 2017), and co-editor of London 2012 and the Post-Olympics City: A Hollow Legacy? with Phil Cohen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Paul is a member of City Editorial Board.
The event takes place within the project Estates after Transition.