Housing and the Realignment of Urban Socio-Spatial Contracts

Abstract

This paper argues that narratives of the Big Society and localism in England enacted through housing and planning policies; and housing welfare and benefit reforms across the entire United Kingdom, partly articulate, but primarily mask, a particular governmental response to the present structural crisis in housing and its sociological impacts. This response may be located within a wider political project aimed at realigning understandings of cities and the right for working class and younger populations to occupy urban space and access welfare as enacted through affordable and decent homes. The paper utilises social contract theory to suggest that the promotion of localism in housing systems needs to be understood within wider struggles of naming the world and reframing the respective rights and responsibilities of the state and particular population groups. The paper concludes that Big Society rationales represent an implicit acknowledgement of a regressive reduction in the ambition of government to address the housing crisis as it affects low and middle-income populations and its related social consequences.

Work Clubs and the Big Society: reflections on the potential for ‘progressive localism’ in the ‘cracks and fissures’ of neoliberalism

“…In the case of housing, for example, the policies pursued through the Localism Act combined with effects of key welfare reforms (for instance, Local Housing Allowance and the 'bedroom tax') have the potential to undermine access to affordable social housing and create more precarious housing pathways for vulnerable groups. In this respect, the reconfiguration of the 'social contract' (Flint, 2015) around housing destabilises what was widely perceived and experienced as a public 'good' -namely affordable and accessible social housing that underpinned the 'rights to the city' of economically disadvantaged groups. Flint (2015: 51) contrasts this with past urban planning and housing policy informed by social equality paradigms that 'offered an urban and governmental ambition greater than the emaciated goals of the Big Society'.…”

“…This process involves rescaling the governance and accountability of service delivery by delegating risk, responsibility and accountability from central government onto new subjects including local government, the private sector and local community organisations (Williams et al, 2014). At the same time, the Big Society has been portrayed as providing cover for creating new spaces for market forces and profit accumulation that enable private actors to fill the gap left by state withdrawal (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012;Flint, 2015;McKee, 2015). This has led, in some policy domains, to a fundamental redefinition of the relationship of citizens with the state and wider society.…”

Putting Localism in Place: Conservative Images of the Good Community and the Contradictions of Planning Reform in England

“…For these groups, stimulating belonging and attachment to 'the local' is sacrificed against national fiscal priorities to reduce government spending, supported by a seemingly more politically successful use of a morally charged rhetoric of fairness to justify widespread and ongoing cuts in welfare spending. If the full promise of localism has not materialized in Ambridge, it seems clear that it was never really offered to many people in deprived areas whose rights to place are increasingly seen as the property of the state and therefore as conditional and subject to ongoing punitive intervention (Flint, 2014).…”

Democracy of housing policy as exemplified by Poland. Political and linguistic analysis

“…In the context of the same discussion, John Flint (2015) alludes to the concept of a social contract and critically assesses the use of narration linked to the concept of Big Society for the purpose of masking actions leading to a nation's withdrawal from its responsibilities to social groups (particularly to employees and young people) who are experiencing housing difficulties and issues linked to urban space, including gentrification.…”