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Ed Ferrari, University of Sheffield 2012 HSA conference University of York 19 April 2012

COMPETING IDEAS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SPACE Locating C ritiques of Housing R enewal in Theory and Practice . Ed Ferrari, University of Sheffield 2012 HSA conference University of York 19 April 2012. Outline. Introduction Housing Market Renewal (HMR)

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Ed Ferrari, University of Sheffield 2012 HSA conference University of York 19 April 2012

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  1. COMPETING IDEAS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SPACELocating Critiques of Housing Renewal in Theory and Practice Ed Ferrari, University of Sheffield 2012 HSA conference University of York 19 April 2012

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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.)

  5. (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)

  6. 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)

  7. Multiscalar geography of justice • The justness of both process and outcomes can be seen as operating within a complex, multi-scalar 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

  8. 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: Territory • P: Place • S: Scale • N: Network • What’s needed is a way of understanding how these different forms interact

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. “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

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