Housing Policy, the Right to the City and the Construction of Knowledge

The Power of Group Stigmatization: Wealthy Roma, Urban Space and Strategies of Defence in Post‐socialist Romania

“…Contrary to popular and media discourse, the families we spoke to were not desperate to migrate to Western Europe in search of more generous welfare entitlements; rather, they were likely to do so reluctantly—in response to intense stigmatization and harassment in their home town or city. Most respondents attempted to limit these experiences through defensive strategies of mutual avoidance behaviour and by steering clear of public spaces, behaviour that highlights the inability of upwardly mobile Roma to ‘legitimately participate in (access) and appropriate (occupy) urban space’ (Flint, : 258). Often there was also evidence of the internalization of stigma that some wealthy Roma respondents sought to counter by moving (and, to a degree, being ‘pushed’ out) abroad.…”

Reconstructing public housing

“…It inspired several instances … of newly-built housing where the tenants of old slum houses were enabled to find a site, and commission an architect to design their own new housing … The proudest moment of my housing advocacy was when the Weller Street Co-op chairman, Billy Floyd, introduced me at a meeting by waving a tattered copy of Tenants Take Over and saying: "Here's the man who wrote the Old Testament … But we built the New Jerusalem!" 58 The Weller Street campaign ignited what some have dubbed Liverpool's "Co-op Spring" 59 or "new-build cooperative revolution", 60 fuelling what became the country's largest such movement. This constituted an extraordinary shift from a situation in which most of Liverpool's working-class residents were housed by the 'Corpy', without any control over the type, design or location of their home, to one where for the first time they had genuine decisionmaking power over these aspects and a real sense of ownership.…”

“…In failing to expand and diversify its customer base, develop its own assets or compete for new contracts with the new-build co-ops, Neighbourhood Housing Services eventually went under. 60 Closing in 1987, its clients were shared out amongst Merseyside 58 Wates, "The Liverpool Breakthrough: Or Public Sector Housing Phase 2". 59 Hugh Anderson, "Co-op Dividends", Architects' Journal (18 July 1984).…”

Housing and the Realignment of Urban Socio-Spatial Contracts

“…Minton (2012) has sought to make historical connections through describing programmes such as HMR as the 21 st Century equivalent of previous slum clearance initiatives. But this is to miss a key point, which is, despite all the controversy about HMR and Hope VI in the United States (see Flint, 2012;Goetz, 2013), these programmes represented a reinvigorated belief in the power of state planning, enacted through housing policy, to reshape cities (Judt, 2010). This was a belief with a lineage back to the birth of environmental improvement projects of the 19 th Century Victorian city (Smith, 1981).…”

“…There has been an increasing international coalescence and alignment in housing, planning and urban policy in Western neo-liberal societies in the last twenty years, characterised by a uniformity of diagnosis of problems and a commonality of rationalities and techniques to address them: low demand, neighbourhood effects, poor stock condition and declining personal morality and responsibility; to be addressed through quasi or full privatisation, mixed communities and physical and demographic and reconfigurations of urban environments (see Flint, 2012).…”