Estate regeneration and its discontents: a response to reviewers

Abstract

Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents (Watt, 2021) emerged out of over a decade of research undertaken in the politically charged, often bewildering world of public/social housing regeneration in london. The book focusses upon estate regeneration schemes that began during the late 1990s to mid-2010s and which involved either partial or complete demolition of existing estates, and their replacement with mixed-tenure neighbourhoods including large numbers of market homes for sale or rent. The book outlines and explains the housing policy and urban policy contexts within which estate regeneration has taken place. However, the book’s central aim is to put residents’ voices centre-stage in terms of understanding how the lengthy regeneration process impacted upon them and their communities over the years and even decades that regeneration unfolded. The main themes that dominate the book occurred routinely at each estate that I researched: resident ambivalence regarding pre-regeneration estates (valuing many aspects of their homes and neighbourhoods, but seeing these same places devalued by factors such as landlord neglect and disinvestment); resident distrust of, and frustration with, the confusing and obfuscatory consultation process; displacement anxiety as residents worried over where and when they would be rehoused; and the morphing of regeneration into physical, social, psychosocial and symbolic ‘degeneration’, including a numbing sense that they were living in a never-ending limbo-land. The estates that I studied were also characterised by several residents actively campaigning against demolition, and such resistance is reflective of the multiple discontents that estate regeneration has given rise to in london. In twenty first century neoliberal academia where competitiveness and the mantra of ‘sorry, no time’ are increasingly the norm, it’s an increasingly https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2023.2209935