{"id":21361,"date":"2016-11-24T17:21:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T17:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.singleaspect.org.uk\/?p=21361"},"modified":"2025-11-22T12:34:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T12:34:28","slug":"paul-watt-at-the-ra-september-26th-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/?p=21361","title":{"rendered":"Paul Watt at the RA &#8211; September 26th 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Forgotten Estates: architectural debate\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/K-xktCBOd70?start=3130&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He was one of four speakers and a chair, and his talk was such a good summary of what has happened to council housing under New Labour and since that I have transcribed it, with the help of YouTube (upload, wait, download captions), below:-<\/p>\n<p>Okay I&#8217;m going to start somewhat\u00a0differently I&#8217;m not really going to talk about the architecture I&#8217;m not going to talk about the estates, in a way the concept of a council estate is epiphenomenal to really the fundamental key aspect of what we&#8217;re dealing with. The key aspect for council housing for me is that it&#8217;s a part of the welfare state.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In other words then what happens is that council housing is a housing tenure.<\/p>\n<p>You can access it, you pay rent to a landlord.<\/p>\n<p>The point is that you as a citizen need housing but you don&#8217;t have enough money to buy or rent a house in the private market. You then go to the state and the state says okay you&#8217;re in housing need and we will then supply this house to you. Now this idea that in some sense the state is responsible for providing housing is actually a relatively recent idea, it&#8217;s only really been around in the last century or so and really you only find welfare states in certain Northern European and North American societies, they&#8217;re relatively unusual.<\/p>\n<p>[In] many parts of the world\u00a0you won&#8217;t actually &#8211; the idea\u00a0that the state should somehow take\u00a0responsibility for housing its citizens is anathema, doesn&#8217;t happen, so in other words then, what we have to do, we have to think about council housing, for me anyway, as part of the way that the welfare state emerged that the way that the welfare state developed.<\/p>\n<p>I just want to try and put a statistic on\u00a0this which I think gives it some idea of the scale and the importance of council housing in this city. [The] 2011 census it showed that in Birmingham the population that the number of households in Birmingham was 411,000 houses. Birmingham&#8217;s the second biggest city in the UK. Now this size of Birmingham is actually smaller than the total number of households renting from councils in London. In 2011 there were 440,000 households renting council homes in London and that&#8217;s about fourteen percent of the entire\u00a0 population.<\/p>\n<p>Now of course that very large substantial figure is of course far less than the peak which was 30 years earlier in the 1981 Census. At\u00a0that point councils, councils in London housed 777,000 households, thirty-one percent of the entire city. In Inner London forty-three percent of all inner Londoners lived in council housing. Tower Hamlets, eighty-two percent of all the residents of Tower Hamlets lived in council housing, Southwark two-thirds.<\/p>\n<p>The point about all these statistics is this &#8211; is that council housing in relationship to the\u00a0development of London as a city is not some sort of marginal phenomena and they&#8217;re certainly not forgotten\u00a0estates, they&#8217;ve actually been, Council housing has actually been central it&#8217;s been key to the way that this city has developed &#8211;\u00a0again you can\u00a0clearly see this just in relationship to walking around the city. Walk around boroughs like Camden or Islington or Southwark or Lambeth or Tower Hamlets, everywhere you will see council built estates.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll see council housing and this is very very dissimilar to many other European certainly North American cities.<br \/>\n<a name=\"project\"><\/a><br \/>\nNorth American cities again, even if you take very large cities with very large public housing, the so called projects like Chicago. Chicago housing authority at its peak only had 35,000 units and most of those were actually cut off and separated behind major express ways. In Paris the social housing units the banlieue they&#8217;re located 20 or 30\u00a0miles outside of the city &#8211; they are in that sense spatially marginal. So it&#8217;s really not the case that London&#8217;s council estates are marginal.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re not forgotten they&#8217;ve actually been key to the way the city&#8217;s\u00a0developed over the last century.<\/p>\n<p>Well then you&#8217;ve got to ask yourself ok so what was the distribution of council houses across the city, across the country, and it&#8217;s not random.\u00a0There&#8217;s no randomness about it. It&#8217;s very very clear that in a very few\u00a0wealthy, you won&#8217;t find much council housing or council estates in wealthy rural areas. Where you will find lots of council housing is in\u00a0predominantly industrial urban areas, the large cities.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a politics to this and that you can&#8217;t duck this there&#8217;s no sort of &#8211; there&#8217;s no &#8211; people talk about the post-war\u00a0consensus there&#8217;s it was never that much of a consensus. When you drill down at the local level to what was going on between Labour and Tory\u00a0councils, and it&#8217;s very very clear again if you look at London it was in the &#8211; it was in the Labour authorities &#8211; that&#8217;s where you have the large concentrations of council housing.<\/p>\n<p>The LCC which was absolutely unheard of unprecedented period of 32 years of Labour hegemony from 1933 up until 1965 it built\u00a0thousands and thousands of households in the inner core and again if you take said you look at Southwark\u00a0two-thirds of alternate households back 1981 were council tenants. Compare that, with say Barnet. Barnet&#8217;s pretty much always been a Tory authority<\/p>\n<p>Barnet even at its peak never got beyond nineteen percent of its stock as\u00a0council housing. So there&#8217;s a politics to this and essentially again you can track this through &#8211; particularly in the early part of the 20th century. One of the ways that, one of the ways that the Labour Party developed in London because London of course was a little bit different than say the coalfields areas or\u00a0steel heavy industrial\u00a0cities like Sheffield because London didn&#8217;t rely on large industry &#8211; London was primarily working classes, small\u00a0workshops.<\/p>\n<p>So Labour had a problem and actually being able to mobilise in that sense so what they did throughout the first part of the 20th century was that they mobilised on a ward basis\u00a0precisely around municipal socialism. We will provide you council housing on the rates. We will actually provide this thing. It was incredibly electorally successful and it was also politically successful and it also was very much part and part of the way that the Labour Party grew up and developed in the 20th century.<\/p>\n<p>So in other words then what you have is a whole series of political economic configurations have brought this thing into being.<\/p>\n<p>This might be a heretical thing to say being on a panel with\u00a0architectural specialists &#8211; at the end of the day architects don&#8217;t build housing. States build housing. Capital builds housing.\u00a0That&#8217;s the key aspect, the\u00a0relationship between state and capital and what we&#8217;ve clearly seen over the last 30 or 40 years is a switch away from the notion that the state should provide council housing on the basis of need towards the idea that essentially private capital should produce housing on the basis of profitability that&#8217;s the key shift that&#8217;s gone on.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0relationship to what&#8217;s the micropolitics of what&#8217;s happened over the last 30 years clearly Thatcher as well known yeah, the\u201cright to buy\u201d the creation of the \u201cproperty owning democracy\u201d these are long-term Conservative interests and also in terms of the the spending on council estates in during that period during the 18 years of Conservatism. By 1997 it&#8217;s generally estimated that across the country there were something like \u00a319 billion pounds\u00a0worth of repairs needed on estates.<\/p>\n<p>Now what then happens is this. In 1997 clearly the\u00a0election of Labour in that year was a key moment. Everybody was, lots of people by 1997 were aware that the NHS was struggling, it was generally a common perception the NHS was struggling. But also council housing was incredibly struggling. I interviewed people at the time the conditions that people were living in were appalling. In Camden something like in Camden, ninety-five percent of council homes didn&#8217;t meet \u201cdecent homes\u201dstandards.<\/p>\n<p>So what happens then is that Labour comes in 1997 but they do\u00a0something different than all other Labour governments. What they do is they cut council housing out of their agenda because they basically make this pact with the electorate.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cYou guys, you like the NHS, you like state funded education, we&#8217;re going to maintain that but you&#8217;re not too keen on council housing. You might want to buy it, but it&#8217;s got all these supposedly dystopian attributes to it the things that my colleagues have talked about. So what we&#8217;re going to do is we&#8217;re not going to actually reinvest in this part of the welfare state.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>They did put in the \u201cDecent Homes\u201d program that was investment in the existing stock but they put in place an incredibly\u00a0complicated governance arrangement. They basically said to councils &#8211; they didn&#8217;t allow councils to borrow on their income streams for all kinds of reasons which can ask me about &#8211; but essentially then New Labour said<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cRight well you can improve your stock, the condition of the stock but we&#8217;re not going to give you any money, we&#8217;re going to set targets but with not going to be new finance so what we&#8217;re going to do is then you can actually then have a stock transfer you can stock transfer to a Housing Association &#8211; and stock transfer then can lever in the funds that housing association so we can lever in the funds, or you can have a PFI or you can have an ALMO an Arms Length Management Organisation&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>but they were against direct investment by councils by local authorities in the stock. But in their 2000 Green Paper they actually talk about stock transfering 200,000 homes per year.<\/p>\n<p>So in other words what&#8217;s happened is this. Is that the political party which created, created this part of the welfare state, cut it off at its knees &#8211; and &#8211; they didn&#8217;t build any more.<\/p>\n<p>Again you can see the figures in relationship to this the country generally everybody knows now they didn&#8217;t build enough social housing. The expectation that housing associations, the so-called third arm of the housing sector we&#8217;re going to actually provide social housing at the numbers that councils councils used to provide in the post war period. It never happened. It was never going to happen either. It was clear. So essentially there what you&#8217;ve got is you&#8217;re leaving it to the markets.<\/p>\n<p>Well the market as we know again, the market will only provide certain kinds of housing to those people who can pay. It&#8217;s certainly not going to provide homes for people who are on low-incomes, it&#8217;s not going to happen.<\/p>\n<p>So by the time then and essentially again in terms of Labour then they carried on the \u201cright to buy\u201d ok, so they cut the discounts. They did implement the stock transfer and the whole Decent Homes Program was wrapped up in all these governance complexities.<\/p>\n<p>Really what was necessary in 1997 to address that \u00a319 billion pound deficit was a Marshall Plan. You actually needed it was some sort of Marshall Plan to really address the terrible conditions that council tenants were living in rather than what the long drawn-out process that Labour took in place.<\/p>\n<p>Now what happened in London, I&#8217;m just talking about very briefly about London is that at some point in the late 1990s &#8211; the Labour councils &#8211; they\u00a0switched their agenda &#8211; they switched from being New Urban Left to sort of saying, look we&#8217;re deprived areas, we&#8217;ve got all these problems, that they suddenly discovered that\u00a0they had\u00a0an asset base. In other words they were sitting on valuable land. That valuable land of course a lot of it is council estates.<\/p>\n<p>So what they&#8217;ve been doing then over the last decade or so, this includes\u00a0Labour councils as well as\u00a0Conservative councils is they&#8217;ve basically been maximising their asset base. That&#8217;s what they talk about. They talk about this. But the problem they&#8217;ve got, this problem that you talk about in relationship to Robin Hood Gardens, is they&#8217;ve actually got existing residents there, so somehow they have to spring them, they&#8217;ve got to get rid of them, and that then is the contentious thing which is clearly happening right across the city in relationship to the way that many residents in many estates and I&#8217;ve spoken to many, many reasons for different regeneration of estates.<\/p>\n<p>Yes there are often things wrong with the estates. Nobody&#8217;s saying that there aren&#8217;t problems in the estates and a lot of that, as my colleagues have said it&#8217;s down to insufficient investment, insufficient maintenance, but nevertheless the idea that London council estates are in any way analogous to the US projects of the 1960s and 1970s is laughable.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s simply not the case and again if you think about &#8211; there&#8217;s a whole history to the way that the urban policy and\u00a0regeneration is involved and many of the ideas have come forward from the US, particularly the Hope VI program which was instituted in the mid-1990s &#8211; and that&#8217;s migrated to\u00a0the UK.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Yes ok,\u00a0so what we need to do is knock down mono-tenure public estates, the projects, and replace them then with multi-tenure housing estates that will then somehow raise the aspirations of the remaining public tenants.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The US projects were never the equivalent of London council states. The levels of homicide in US projects were never ever the levels of crime that you had on London estates. As many ways it was a false analogy in many ways.<\/p>\n<p>My experience of estates and talking to lots of residents is estates are incredibly mundane places. They&#8217;re just places where people live get on with their lives &#8211; have squabbles with neighbours sometimes &#8211; some people live on big estates and people live on small\u00a0estates &#8211; some people live in houses some people in flats but, as I said, the key fundamental aspect is this aspect to do with the Welfare State and what we&#8217;re seeing in relationship to the housing crisis is the way that as this aspect of the Welfare State is being cut to bits so it&#8217;s having all of these really\u00a0incredibly negative impacts on London residents and the spikes in homelessness now across the city.<\/p>\n<p>There are something like 50,000 households living in\u00a0temporary accommodation &#8211; 17,000 of those have actually been displaced out of their borough. So what you have is this sort of increasing nomadism around the homeless population with all incredibly negative impacts on peoples children the welfare etc etc and without\u00a0&#8211; this is a\u00a0Party Political issue it&#8217;s not just no wonder the Conservatives have passed the awful Housing and Planning bill 2016 because they can do this, because the party which should have loved and created and nurtured that part of the welfare state didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s almost like an open goal it&#8217;s now open goal for the Conservatives to put in place even worse policies.<\/p>\n<p>Paul Watt 26\/9\/2016<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Further reading:-<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWHAT IS THE ARCHITECT\u2019S ROLE IN THE \u2018HOUSING CRISIS\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ok, I\u2019m going to do the non-architectural bit.\u00a0 I know nothing about architecture &#8211; so all I\u2019ve been asked to do today is provide a bit of a framework in relationship to the housing crisis, social housing and urban regeneration.\u00a0 A plug for my forthcoming book, which looks at the way social housing, urban regeneration, and urban renewal has happened across social housing estates across a national perspective.<\/p>\n<p>Ok, so if you look at the discourse of the regeneration industry and the professionals working in it, or politicians, essentially it\u2019s a very successful discourse &#8211; in other words &#8211; everything is doing extremely well.\u00a0 This was a report, a couple of years ago, this was a quote from David Lunts, who was the executive director of Housing and Land at the GLA.\u00a0 Basically what he is saying is London has these massive housing challenges, but it\u2019s heartening to see the huge number of successful estate regeneration schemes getting underway in the Capital.<\/p>\n<p>In Kidbrooke, which was the old Ferrier Estate in Greenwich, Woodberry Down in Hackney, Grahame Park in Barnet, South Acton West Hendon in Barnet &#8211; these are estates being transformed all across London.\u00a0 So this is a very positive narrative that you get. After researching two of those estates in particular, I\u2019ve spoken to lots of residents on those estates.\u00a0 That is certainly the idea &#8211; that this is highly successful &#8211; and certainly not what a lot of residents themselves say and think, about the way their lives have been fundamentally transformed by the process that has gone on.<\/p>\n<p>I want to talk a little bit about the rationale about what\u2019s going on right now.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s important to understand the way the whole thing is framed.\u00a0 Essentially the renewal regeneration in relationship to social housing estates.\u00a0 This is really now being pushed as one of the key ways to solve what is called \u2018London\u2019s Housing Crisis\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s a housing crisis which is interpreted in a particular direction.\u00a0 There are four key arguments as to why it is then that council-built estates &#8211; and there are hundreds across London &#8211; why is it then that they need to be renewed, regenerated, and in fact demolished and to have new housing built on the land.<\/p>\n<p>The first is demographic.\u00a0 What\u2019s happened since the 1980s is that London\u2019s population has increased.\u00a0 Many of the estates were built at a time of relatively low population.\u00a0 Estates like this [Cressingham Gardens] have got relatively quite a lot of green space.\u00a0 So the argument is that if you knock these existing estates down then you can rebuild and build at higher densities, and provide more homes, which will then help to solve the \u2018housing crisis\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>The second argument is an architectural aesthetic argument. There are all kinds of critiques that have been formed in relationship to the estates, and particularly I suppose the archetype of modernist-brutalist estates like the Aylesbury and the Heygate.\u00a0 The argument then is you can improve design standards, and particularly the environmental standards are much better now than 30 or 40 years ago &#8211; you can improve the environmental standards.\u00a0 Then you can replace the ugly modernist estates with the popular street.\u00a0 This was very much the argument that Lord Adonis put forward in his [City] Villages Report a couple of years ago.\u00a0 The great bits of London are the old Victorian streetscapes &#8211; what we need then is to get rid of those awful modernist estates, and then in some way return to the landscape of the Victorian City.<\/p>\n<p>The third reasons is social reasons really.\u00a0 The argument then is that estates in London tend to have high concentrations of deprivation.\u00a0 So the argument then is that if you can actually deconcentrate the levels of deprivation in the area, by building new private housing, you actually end up improving people\u2019s lives. You\u2019ll create then, in the jargon, \u2018mixed tenure sustainable communities\u2019.\u00a0 Increasingly this is the argument that is put forward, for example in relationship to Cressingham, is that it\u2019s a win-win, because you\u2019ll also then be able to reduce your social housing waiting list.\u00a0 The economics arguments are that refurbishment is too costly, as again in relation to Cressingham. Again of course the key argument as well is that you can bring in private funds, and in many ways it\u2019s bringing in these private funds that is the key thing that drives a lot of this anyway.<\/p>\n<p>So what\u2019s actually happened &#8211; if you take the argument that this is a fantastic thing it\u2019s going to increase the amount of housing -well yes it does.\u00a0 This chart from the GLA report that was done a couple of years ago, and basically what it shows is, it looks at 50 estates in London that were demolished and it looks at what the type of housing that was produced on those estates.\u00a0 You can see here is a 10-fold increase in the private housing.\u00a0 What\u2019s also gone up is what\u2019s called the intermediate level housing, shared ownership, shared equity, affordable rented products basically.\u00a0 Affordable rents up to 80% of market rents &#8211; that\u2019s also gone up.\u00a0 But as you can see from this bar chart here, the tenure that has gone down is socially rented housing.\u00a0 So that\u2019s gone down by eight thousand.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the arguments that are put forward currently by politicians is that well, \u2018this is the past\u2019.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to enter a bright new dawn.\u00a0 For example, in the case of Haringey, having some very complex mechanisms that are supposed to lever in the amount of social rented housing.\u00a0 But the available evidence so far suggests that it hasn\u2019t happened, and there are very good reasons for that because it all relates to the issues of private finance.\u00a0 The point is that when the developers are involved in these kind of processes they\u2019re not doing it for charity &#8211; they\u2019re doing it to make money.\u00a0 Essentially they operate on a roughly 20% return on capital.\u00a0 If they don\u2019t get that 20% then they will argue that the scheme is unaffordable, it\u2019s financially unviable.\u00a0 Always what happens then, is that the element of regeneration mix that decreases, if the developer says that it is unviable, is the amount of affordable housing, contained in it is the socially rented housing.<\/p>\n<p>So if you use the past as some kind of idea of what is going to happen, then the argument is that actually really if you think about the London housing crisis, not in terms of mere number of units, but exactly what housing is being produced, then it\u2019s very clear to me that knocking down estates to rebuild new mixed tenure developments won\u2019t actually do it.\u00a0 At the end of the day, it\u2019ll probably actually reduce the amount of socially rented housing &#8211; and it\u2019s that element of the housing crisis which is never properly factored in.\u00a0 That\u2019s the key factor of the housing crisis, it\u2019s been going on for forty years, it\u2019s essentially a working class problem.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s really only the last ten years as private renting has got much more expensive and the housing crisis hit middle classes, so that\u2019s become the way the housing crisis is framed.\u00a0 I just want to say, where did this all come from?\u00a0 Where did it come from, the idea that you build all these public housing estates in a period of optimism, and then 30 or 40 years later you think \u2018Ok, they\u2019re a problem, lets knock them down\u2019?\u00a0 Well essentially, it came from the US, and it really comes from what\u2019s called the projects.\u00a0 In particular, projects, large scale public housing like the Robert Taylor Homes, which was built in 1960s and was demolished in 2007.\u00a0 Huge area in the south side of Chicago, cut across by two major expressways.\u00a0 In many ways, these projects, in particular Robert Taylor Homes, came to signify the failures of public housing.<\/p>\n<p>A very famous sociologist called William Julius Wilson wrote a book about the inner cities of the US, called \u201cThe Truly Disadvantaged\u201d, and what he basically argued was, that these areas, contained spatial concentrations of the really really disadvantaged.\u00a0 It has a strong, a very powerfully strong, racialised aspect of it in the US, because 95% of the inhabitants of Robert Taylor Homes were African American.\u00a0 So what then happened, and what Wilson argued was that, you had a series of what were called neighbourhood effects.<\/p>\n<p>The argument is then that people in Robert Taylor Homes, they\u2019re poor not just because they\u2019re poor and got low incomes, but they\u2019re also poor because they\u2019re clustered together with similar poor people like themselves.\u00a0 So hence then, the argument comes forward, and this was enacted from what\u2019s called the \u2018Hope Six Programme\u2019 was to demolish many of the projects like Robert Taylor Homes.\u00a0 So the argument was that, what you have to do is, is spatially deconcentrate the poor, so you have to knock down the existing dwelling, and you have to rebuild, and you have to rebuild mixed tenure developments.\u00a0 The idea is that if you do that, then you\u2019ll prevent these neighbourhood effects.\u00a0 So that\u2019s where it comes from, and this is basically what Mike Darcy calls a \u2018globalised discourse of deconcentration\u2019.\u00a0 This is the policy orthodoxy.<\/p>\n<p>Discourse analysis in two minutes&#8230; So, the way to think about it is this, essentially there are two discourses going on.\u00a0 A discourse is simply a framework of knowing, and also a framework for action. By and large there are two frameworks going on.\u00a0 The hegemonic discourse, that is the one that dominates the policy mainstream, that dominates the mainstream thinking.\u00a0 Opposed to that is a counter-hegemonic discourse and oppositional discourse.<\/p>\n<p>Essentially the official mainstream discourse is all about tenure mixing, you have to have tenure mixing, you can\u2019t have tenure mixing of mono-tenure areas.\u00a0 You have public-private partnership, and what you have to have is you have to de-spatially concentrate the social tenure tenants.\u00a0 Tenants, then, because the place that they\u2019re living in is so awful, as with Robert Taylor Homes, they\u2019re only to glad to leave, they want to be rehoused. Consultation in this process is bottom-up, it\u2019s genuinely participative.\u00a0 The new homeowners who come into the estates then function as aspirational role-models for the remaining social renting tenants.\u00a0 Gentrification is positive, and the new communities following renewal are strong and stable, mixed and stable.\u00a0 At the city scale, they contribute towards an urban renaissance.\u00a0 And at the societal level heightened aspirations increase social mobility.\u00a0 It\u2019s a win-win.\u00a0 That\u2019s the dominant discourse, that informs the entire regeneration industry very largely.<\/p>\n<p>On the other side then, is a bunch of people like academics, a bunch of people then on the ground, residents who are increasingly critical because of what is actually being done to their estates. Who basically say it\u2019s actually the long term function of neo-liberalism. What it really does then is a process of social cleansing.\u00a0 It\u2019s a process of filtering the poor out of areas of the city.\u00a0 By and large many of them want to stay in these estates, particularly London estates.\u00a0 There is nothing wrong with them fundamentally, they\u2019re decent places to live, it\u2019s just that they\u2019ve haven\u2019t been properly invested in.\u00a0 Consultation processes &#8211; consultation is part of the statutory process that regeneration has to go through &#8211; but from this perspective actually the consultation process is top-down and ideological.\u00a0 They\u2019re simply run as stamping exercises, they\u2019re not genuine.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve spoken to lots and lots of residents of lots of estates, if you use the word consultation they\u2019ll simply laugh at what\u2019s involved.\u00a0 The new home owners then, rather than being aspirational role-models will simply be sealed off in their bit of the private estate behind gates.\u00a0 Gentrification is then state-led.\u00a0 Then of course the new communities that follow the regeneration rather than being mixed and stable are definitely unstable.\u00a0 Again, you can see some of this partitioning off in some of the new estates. There is clear physical divide between old bits of the estate and new bits of the estate.\u00a0 At the city scale, what this means then, is that it\u2019s a reduced right to the city.\u00a0 At the national scale, what you get then is an entrench that spatially reshuffles social inequalities.\u00a0 The poor still stay poor, it\u2019s just that they\u2019re just not poor here, they\u2019re poor over there basically.<\/p>\n<p>Paul Watt<\/p>\n<p>28th June 2017 19:00 &#8211; 21:45<\/p>\n<p>The Rotunda, Cressingham Gardens, Tulse Hill<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/architecturalworkers.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/architectural-workers-transcript.pdf\">https:\/\/architecturalworkers.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/07\/architectural-workers-transcript.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>He was one of four speakers and a chair, and his talk was such a good summary of what has happened to council housing under New Labour and since that I have transcribed it, with the help of YouTube (upload, wait, download captions), below:- Okay I&#8217;m going to start somewhat\u00a0differently I&#8217;m not really going to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6,7,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-estates-under-threat","category-events","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21361"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29560,"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21361\/revisions\/29560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singleaspect.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}