COMPETING IDEAS OF
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SPACE
Locating Critiques of Housing Renewal
in Theory and Practice
Ed Ferrari, University of Sheffield
2012 HSA conference
University of York
19 April 2012
Outline
• Introduction
– Housing Market Renewal (HMR)
– Two ‘classic’ formulations of social justice
• Conceptualising socio-spatial justice
• Locating critiques of HMR
– Gentrification
– Demolition
• Towards an evaluation
• Conclusions
Housing Market Renewal
• One of the most controversial regeneration
programmes in recent English urban policy
• Confirmed in 2003 Sustainable Communities plan
• £2.2 billion over 2002-2010
• Nine, later 10, ‘Pathfinders’ – North & Midlands
• Market focus: problematised market conditions,
not housing or neighbourhood conditions per se
• Demolition of some 31,000 homes
Criticisms of HMR
• Residents, academics, media commentators as
well as the programme’s protagonists have all
criticised aspects of HMR
– Over-emphasis on demolition
– Devalorisation of built heritage
– Commodification of housing & ‘space of
neighbourhood positions’ (Allen 2008)
– Epistemological claims of protagonists (Webb 2010)
• These are over and above ‘normal’ programmatic
criticisms (VFM, management, transparency, etc.)
(At least) two critiques…
(I) The gentrification critique (Slater, Cameron, Allen…)
– HMR as (state led) gentrification
– A revanchist analysis
– Demolition, as part of this, is destructive and serves
remote interests
(II) The epistemology critique (Allen, Imrie, Webb…)
– Self-interested policymaking
– Partial claims to knowledge
– Opaque, biased research
• This paper is concerned with (1)
Socio-spatial justice
• Two ‘classic’ formulations of social justice relating
to local territories
– Deontologist: concerned with fairness of process
– Consequentialist: concerned with fairness of
outcomes. (Distributional justice.)
• In evaluations of housing renewal policies, a more
assertively spatial definition of social justice is
warranted:
– Processes and outcomes bound together in a
‘sociospatial dialectic’ (Soja 1983)
Multiscalar geography of justice
• The justness of both process and outcomes can
be seen as operating within a complex, multiscalar space:
– Whether something is just or not crucially depends
on the scale of:
• the conceptualisations of what a policy is trying to achieve
• the acts and purviews of policies
• our observations of processes and outcomes
• Jessop et al’s (2008) ‘sociospatial dialectic’ is used
as a frame to look at the relationship between:
– formulations of justice
– geographic scales of acts, conceptualisations
Jessop et al’s (2008)
‘Structure Field’ framework
• There have been various ‘spatial turns’, each
privileging a type of spatiality within the policy
analysis process
– T:
– P:
– S:
– N:
Territory
Place
Scale
Network
• What’s needed is a way of understanding how
these different forms interact
Structuring
principles
Territory
Fields of operation
Territory
Housing market
restructuring,
‘balanced markets’
argument;
demolition of ‘low
demand’ housing
Place
Scale
Network
Place
Place
competitiveness,
gentrification and
‘space of positions’
arguments;
demolition of
‘obsolescent’
housing
Scale
Multilevel planning
frameworks, e.g.,
RSS, subregional
housing strategies,
SHMAs
Network
Strategic multi-area
partnerships, HMR
Pathfinder boards
Housing and
neighbourhood
design codes,
‘place making’
arguments
Refurbishment,
‘housing as being’
arguments,
demolition of
housing in poor
condition, heritage
arguments from
within
Representations of
place and identity;
histories of scale,
‘heritage’
arguments from afar
Neighbourhood/
multi-agency
partnerships; ‘place
marketing’ or
‘branding’
arguments;
Neighbourhood
Renewal
City-regional
economic
development
strategies,
economic
‘rescaling’
arguments, ‘New
Urban Politics’
Regional labour
market connectivity,
polycentric regional
economies,
transport networks,
‘connectivity’
arguments
Changing urban
structure (changing
jobs-homes
balance); ‘rescaling’
of neighbourhood
functions and social
networks
Neighbourhood
connectivity: ‘urban
renaissance trickledown’ arguments
Implications for an evaluation
• Need for a nuanced understanding of the ‘multi-scalar geographies’
of regeneration policy and intervention
• The harms that demolition visits on residents and places need to be
very carefully weighed against the ‘harms’ of inaction in the ‘place’
when set in the context of territories, networks, and the rescaling
of economic and social milieus
• Finding a just balance here is non-trivial
• But it is essential lest we fall into two traps:
– The “local trap” (Purcell 2006): we only seek answers at the micro
level, missing the wider prevailing headwinds
– The inaction trap: the logical extension of neo-Marxist analyses where
our struggle against the system paralyses us at the local level: facing up
to pragmatic realities about the space of positions that households and
houses occupy whether they choose to or not
Conclusion
• The pragmatic answer is that action/intervention
can be justified, but there are difficult questions of
definition which call for balanced debate
– ‘the public interest’ (whose public interest?) (see eg
Campbell & Marshall 2002, Porter)
– Balance between process and outcomes in the
evaluation of justice
• It is difficult without addressing these to conclude
definitively that HMR is/was an ‘unjust’ policy
“Justice and injustice are infused into the
multiscalar geographies in which we live, from the
intimacies of the household to the uneven
development of the global economy”
Edward W Soja (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice