Structures of power and inequality

Abstract

In this thoughtful and scholarly book, Paul Watt offers an account of London’s local authority housing policies that is informed mainly by the experiences of council tenants who have been subjected to ‘regeneration’ policies over the period 2007–2019. This period is significant as it included the aftermath of the global financial crisis when local authorities in London struggled to manage government-imposed austerity spending cuts and deliver essential services in housing, education, and aged care. Estate Regeneration and its Discontents consists of three parts: policy analysis and the research context, which critiques longstanding sociological interpretations and the history of regeneration; estates before regeneration which considers the significance of place for residents; and living through regeneration, where Watt explores the views of tenants during the implementation and aftermath of interventions. Watt is in favour of estate regeneration to address the years of under-investment, but he argues that it needs to maintain or increase the public housing stock and preserve neighbourhood sociality. So, for Watt, though the ostensible rationale for estate-based regeneration was to improve the quality of the residualised housing, it also included an architectural design component the estates were deemed not to meet environmental standards and were poorly integrated into the neighbourhood (p. 80). In practice, what eventuated in London was deeply problematic as many of the regeneration interventions were undermined by privatisation policies, austerity spending cuts and restrictive allocation policies. And yet, as Watt explains, when compared to the private rental market, public housing is valued by many tenants, as it is secure and of better quality. As he explains, public housing provided ‘genuinely affordable and secure homes for over a century to an unusual extent by the standards of most major Western cities’ (p. 4). And in the early 1980s almost one in three of all London’s households − 770,000 − lived in public housing. Yet by 2016, the number of households in public housing was only 444,000. In my review I consider Watt’s analysis under three headings: structures of power and inequality; tenant and activist perceptions; and critical research.