Assemblages for community-led social housing regeneration

Assembling Under the Westway: The Emergence of Social Infrastructure in North Kensington, London

“…Through this case study, and looking at both periods, we trace how different forms of alliances, places where people gather, attachment between people and place, and interrelationships between actors, material and non‐material, human and non‐human (McFarlane 2011; Sendra 2018; Watt 2016) establish activist practices that can produce new forms of social infrastructure.…”

“…To address these objectives, we develop a framework to understand the processes for creating these social infrastructures, the alliances between different actors, and the capacities that emerge from social movements. This framework builds on assemblage thinking, which critical urbanists have used to explore existing social networks and the capacity of alliances and interrelations between different actors to challenge the power relations within them (McFarlane 2011; Sendra 2018). While much of the literature has focused on the capacity of assemblages to challenge power relations (McFarlane 2011), there is not much work on the capacity of activist movements to generate social infrastructure.…”

Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism: London and Toronto

“…The chapter concentrates on three particular themes that are related to local authority (council) provision of social housing and maintenance of their housing stock: firstly, social housing estate redevelopment, which has been widely contested across London (Watt and Minton 2016;Lees and Ferreri 2016;Sendra 2018); secondly, the opposition to joint ventures between local authorities and private developers, a common strategy that local authorities are adopting to deliver housing in times of austerity ; and thirdly, the influence that campaigns have had on the draft planning documents published by the Mayor of London: the Estate Regeneration Good Practice Guide (December 2016), the Housing Strategy (September 2017) and the London Plan (December 2017)…”

Grenfell’s provenance: Private finance initiatives and the slow violence of an historic event

“…If anything, the current political economy of enforced scarcity only seems to have hardened the local state’s ‘hatred of democracy’ (Rancière, 2006) in this regard (see Penny, 2017). As the fiscal futures of local councils become increasingly tied to their ability to inflate and capture rising land values (Beswick and Penny, 2018), senior councillors and officers all too often propose controversial council estate demolitions and state-facilitated gentrification while dismissing and silencing resident-led, managed, and controlled alternatives (Sendra, 2018).…”