COMPETING IDEAS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SPACE

Locating Critiques of Housing Renewal in Theory and Practice

Ed Ferrari, University of Sheffield2012 HSA conference

University of York19 April 2012

Outline• Introduction

– Housing Market Renewal (HMR)– Two ‘classic’ formulations of social justice

• Conceptualising socio-spatial justice• Locating critiques of HMR

– Gentrification– Demolition

• Towards an evaluation• Conclusions

Housing Market Renewal• One of the most controversial regeneration

programmes in recent English urban policy• Confirmed in 2003 Sustainable Communities

plan• £2.2 billion over 2002-2010• Nine, later 10, ‘Pathfinders’ – North & Midlands• Market focus: problematised market

conditions, not housing or neighbourhood conditions per se

• Demolition of some 31,000 homes

Criticisms of HMR• Residents, academics, media commentators as

well as the programme’s protagonists have all criticised aspects of HMR– Over-emphasis on demolition– Devalorisation of built heritage– Commodification of housing & ‘space of

neighbourhood positions’ (Allen 2008)– Epistemological claims of protagonists (Webb 2010)

• These are over and above ‘normal’ programmatic criticisms (VFM, management, transparency, etc.)

(At least) two critiques…(I) The gentrification critique (Slater, Cameron,

Allen…)– HMR as (state led) gentrification– A revanchist analysis– Demolition, as part of this, is destructive and serves

remote interests(II) The epistemology critique (Allen, Imrie, Webb…)

– Self-interested policymaking– Partial claims to knowledge– Opaque, biased research

• This paper is concerned with (1)

Socio-spatial justice• Two ‘classic’ formulations of social justice

relating to local territories– Deontologist: concerned with fairness of process– Consequentialist: concerned with fairness of

outcomes. (Distributional justice.)

• In evaluations of housing renewal policies, a more assertively spatial definition of social justice is warranted:– Processes and outcomes bound together in a

‘sociospatial dialectic’ (Soja 1983)

Multiscalar geography of justice• The justness of both process and outcomes can be

seen as operating within a complex, multi-scalar space:– Whether something is just or not crucially depends on

the scale of:• the conceptualisations of what a policy is trying to achieve• the acts and purviews of policies• our observations of processes and outcomes

• Jessop et al’s (2008) ‘sociospatial dialectic’ is used as a frame to look at the relationship between:– formulations of justice– geographic scales of acts, conceptualisations

Jessop et al’s (2008) ‘Structure Field’ framework

• There have been various ‘spatial turns’, each privileging a type of spatiality within the policy analysis process– T: Territory– P: Place– S: Scale– N: Network

• What’s needed is a way of understanding how these different forms interact

Structuring principles

Fields of operationTerritory Place Scale Network

Territory Housing market restructuring, ‘balanced markets’ argument; demolition of ‘low demand’ housing

Place competitiveness, gentrification and ‘space of positions’ arguments; demolition of ‘obsolescent’ housing

Multilevel planning frameworks, e.g., RSS, subregional housing strategies, SHMAs

Strategic multi-area partnerships, HMR Pathfinder boards

Place Housing and neighbourhood design codes, ‘place making’ arguments

Refurbishment, ‘housing as being’ arguments, demolition of housing in poor condition, heritage arguments from within

Representations of place and identity; histories of scale, ‘heritage’ arguments from afar

Neighbourhood/ multi-agency partnerships; ‘place marketing’ or ‘branding’ arguments; Neighbourhood Renewal

Scale City-regional economic development strategies, economic ‘rescaling’ arguments, ‘New Urban Politics’

Changing urban structure (changing jobs-homes balance); ‘rescaling’ of neighbourhood functions and social networks

Network Regional labour market connectivity, polycentric regional economies, transport networks, ‘connectivity’ arguments

Neighbourhood connectivity: ‘urban renaissance trickle-down’ arguments

Implications for an evaluation

• Need for a nuanced understanding of the ‘multi-scalar geographies’ of regeneration policy and intervention

• The harms that demolition visits on residents and places need to be very carefully weighed against the ‘harms’ of inaction in the ‘place’ when set in the context of territories, networks, and the rescaling of economic and social milieus

• Finding a just balance here is non-trivial• But it is essential lest we fall into two traps:

– The “local trap” (Purcell 2006): we only seek answers at the micro level, missing the wider prevailing headwinds

– The inaction trap: the logical extension of neo-Marxist analyses where our struggle against the system paralyses us at the local level: facing up to pragmatic realities about the space of positions that households and houses occupy whether they choose to or not

Conclusion• The pragmatic answer is that

action/intervention can be justified, but there are difficult questions of definition which call for balanced debate– ‘the public interest’ (whose public interest?) (see

eg Campbell & Marshall 2002, Porter)– Balance between process and outcomes in the

evaluation of justice• It is difficult without addressing these to

conclude definitively that HMR is/was an ‘unjust’ policy

“Justice and injustice are infused into the multiscalar geographies in which we live, from the intimacies of the household to the uneven development of the global economy”

Edward W Soja (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice