The social cleansing of London council estates: everyday experiences of ‘accumulative dispossession’

Abstract

London's council estates and their residents are under threat like never before. Council tenants are being forced out of their homes due to estate renewal, welfare reforms, poverty, and the precarity of low-income work. Social cleansing can be understood as a geographical project made up of processes, practices, and policies designed to remove council estate residents from space and place, what we call a 'new accumulative form of (state-led) gentrification'. We outline these accumulative processes, practices and policies, but more importantly we present grounded, empirical evidence of council tenants and leaseholders' everyday experiences of dispossession, focusing our lens on three south London boroughs identified as eviction hotspots.

“So, Don’t You Want Us Here No More?” Slow Violence, Frustrated Hope, and Racialized Struggle on London’s Council Estates

“…As such, the threat of displacement ushered in by the programmes of estate renewal that began in London in the late 1990s was to destroy the protections afforded by the "good ghetto". The New Labour administration, who came to power in 1997, depicted inner city council estates as sinks of social and economic malaise, and their policy of demolishing council estates to provide new, mixed communities that would increase the amount of housing for Londoners, built by private developers, has continued under subsequent Conservativeled governments (see Lees and White 2020). Private capital has been encouraged to exploit the "rent gaps" evident in inner city council estate locations by providing a mix of supposedly affordable housing alongside lucrative "market-rate" housing development.…”

Displaced and vulnerable: a case study of “out of area” housing

“…This has resulted in households, often with children, being distanced from family and friends as well as fracturing links with services essential for those with vulnerabilities. This represents a process contributing to what Lees and White (2019) describe as “social cleansing” of the poorest and most vulnerable households (Stephens and Stephenson, 2016; Fitzpatrick et al, 2019) from areas with higher housing costs to areas with lower housing costs.…”

“…This paper, accepts that structural causes are driving the housing crisis and uses a case study to illustrate how this can impact on the most vulnerable. Specifically, the paper examines out of area (OOA) housing whereby vulnerable households are displaced to other local authority areas, a process that can be seen as contributing to what Lees and White (2019) describe as the 'social cleansing' of low income households from areas with highest housing costs to areas with lowest costs. Furthermore, the experience of OOA housing also reflects an outcome of a broader context of neoliberal housing policy that mirrors a broader demonisation of welfare (Jacobs and Manzi, 2017).…”

Lives on Edge: everyday practices of people experiencing poverty in disadvantaged areas

“…Within a Dutch context, in the case of the Groninger Veenkoloniën and the city of Groningen, social problems such as poverty are spatially diluted over a wider area. In other research this process is referred to as 'social cleansing' of disadvantaged areas (Lees and White, 2020). This might create the appearance of a 'better' and more livable neighborhood, but chapters two and four demonstrate that this process in fact alienates poor and marginalized groups and individuals from their neighborhood, their town.…”

“…Moreover, this way of addressing socio-spatial inequality and poverty leaves people experiencing poverty and marginalization increasingly powerless to influence changes to their neighborhood and in extension their futures. Many scholars have referred to this socio-spatial process as gentrification by stealth or state-led gentrification (Lees and White, 2020;Doucet, 2014;Bridge and Butler, 2011).…”