Books by Neil Gray
Rowman & Littlefield, 2018
With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private hou... more With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago.
Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggles asks what housing campaigners can learn from a proven organisational victory for the working class.
A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
My Introduction to the book is available here: https://ws1.nbni.co.uk/widgets/page/5b8cfb86f5ba7407e8544359/0
Journal Articles by Neil Gray
Progress in Human Geography, 2022
Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well p... more Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well placed to contribute to radical geographical debates. In particular, the methodology of 'class composition' analysis provides a rigorous, materialist critique of transforming capitalist social relations. This paper first provides vital historical-theoretical context from the milieu of Italian Operaismo, before emphasising the value of autonomist Marxist analyses of three contemporary geographical frontiers: labour process, migration, and social reproduction. It ultimately argues that the laudable motivations of the autonomous geographies project, explored in this very journal, would be better served through an explicitly materialist autonomist geography.
Urban Studies, 2022
Comparing case studies of long-term, large-scale urban regeneration projects in Glasgow and Edinb... more Comparing case studies of long-term, large-scale urban regeneration projects in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland, this paper brings together two addendums to the rent gap model in the shape of the 'reputational gap' and the 'state subsidy gap'. These neologisms are mobilised to clarify the risk-laden centrality of the state's role in both the formation and potential closure of rent gaps in large-scale areas of disinvestment and devalorisation. Whilst such projects often appear as expressions of capital's state-mediated extractive power over the built environment, we consider them as examples of capitalist failure or fragility-for even with striking levels of public subsidy to address 'market failure' the land and property market has not been reinvigorated according to plan. This highlights the need, we argue, for further critical scrutiny of failed or stalled urban regeneration projects as a means of foregrounding the instability, rather than the omnipotence, of contemporary urban capitalism.
Antipode, 2022
Class composition was the most important concept to be developed within the rich milieu of Italia... more Class composition was the most important concept to be developed within the rich milieu of Italian autonomist Marxism, acutely addressing subject-object dichotomies and organisational problems of internal differentiation in and between classed, raced and gendered social formations. Yet "compositionist" analysis has received remarkably little attention within urban-geographical literatures. This paper reviews and develops the class composition concept, offering the first fully developed theorisation of spatial composition and underscoring its relevance for a contemporary politics of space. It stresses the importance of immanent, reflexive non-teleological periodisations of capitalist relations for anti-capitalist struggle through the intertwined concepts of spatial composition and the tendency. Through this theoretical lens it narrates the innovative and under-examined spatial praxis of often women-led urban movements in 1970s Italy, arguing that these remarkable struggles provide vital lessons for thinking through the diverse modalities of organisation and class recomposition emerging in the material geographies of social reproduction today.
City, 2022
This paper develops the neologism state subsidy gap to underscore the necessity of state interven... more This paper develops the neologism state subsidy gap to underscore the necessity of state intervention in the formation and potential closure of rent gaps. The state subsidy gap is the economic gap that must be bridged by the state to make a currently unviable urban investment scenario potentially profitable for private developers. The pertinence of this conception is particularly apparent in old industrial, relatively impoverished cities where global capital is less likely to dump its surpluses with secure expectation of profitable returns. The issue is exacerbated in economically risky neighbourhoods encompassing fragmented land ownership, poor infrastructure and large-scale areas of urban devalorisation. Such conditions necessitate substantial derisking public intervention if ‘market failure’ is to be addressed—yet success is never guaranteed and is far from universal. It is argued that much closer attention to the stalling, interruption or failure of urban regeneration projects is imperative given the extent of public expenditure and the limited social outcomes arising from attempts to correct market failure. Here, the concept of the state subsidy gap shows its value, shedding light on unjust social outcomes, exposing capitalism’s inherent vulnerabilities, and illustrating the dependence of private capital on public interventions for its reproduction.
Radical Housing Journal, 2019
In this conversation, RHJ editors have asked Amanda Huron and Neil Gray to reflect on their appro... more In this conversation, RHJ editors have asked Amanda Huron and Neil Gray to reflect on their approach to strategies and histories of tenant and resident militancy and what lessons can be learnt from the past to shed light on contemporary housing struggles.
Antipode, 2018
The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying ur... more The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state-form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard-fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of " Laboratory Italy " thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.
Area, 2018
Speirs Locks is being reconstructed as a new cultural quarter in Glasgow North, with urban booste... more Speirs Locks is being reconstructed as a new cultural quarter in Glasgow North, with urban boosters envisioning the unlikely, rundown and de-populated light industrial estate as a key site in the city's ongoing cultural regeneration strategy. Yet this creative place-making initiative, I argue, masks a post-political conjuncture based on urban speculation, displacement and the foreclosure of dissent. Post-politics at Speirs Locks is characterised by what I term 'soft austerity urbanism': seemingly progressive, instrumental small-scale urban catalyst initiatives that in reality complement rather than counter punitive hard austerity urbanism. Relating such processes of soft austerity urbanism to a wider context of state-led gentrification, this study contributes to post-political debates in several ways. Firstly, it questions demands for participation as a proper politics when it has become practically compulsory in contemporary biopolitical capitalism. Secondly, it demonstrates how an extreme economy of austerity urbanism remains the hard underside of post-political, soft austerity urbanism approaches. Thirdly, it illustrates how these approaches relate to wider processes of 'real abstraction' – which is no mere flattery of the mind, but instead is rooted in actually existing processes of commodity exchange. Such abstraction, epitomised in the financialisation and privatisation of land and housing, buttresses the same ongoing property dynamics that were so integral to the global financial crisis and ensuing austerity policies in the first place. If we aim to generate a proper politics that creates a genuine rupture with the destructive play of capital in the built environment, the secret of real abstraction must be critically addressed.
Antipode, 2015
When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega-event, we have a... more When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega-event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the " state of exception ". Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of " necessity " combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.
City, 2011
Focusing on Glasgow’s East End, home to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper explores the ways... more Focusing on Glasgow’s East End, home to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper explores the ways in which narratives of decline, ‘blight’ and decay play a central role in stigmatising the local population. ‘Glasgow East’ represents the new urban frontier in a city that has been heralded in recent decades as a model of successful post‐industrial transformation. Utilising Löic Wacquant’s arguments about advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation in the urban context, we argue that narratives of decline and redevelopment are part of a wider ideological onslaught on the local population, intended to pave the way for low grade and flexible forms of employment, for punitive workfare schemes and for upwards rent restructuring. To this end, the media and politicians have played a particularly important role in constructing Glasgow East as a marker of a ‘broken Britain’. While the focus of this paper is on Glasgow’s East End, the arguments therein have a wider UK and global resonance, reflected in the numerous cases whereby stigmatised locales of relegation are being re‐imagined as elements in wider processes of neo‐liberalisation in the city.
Key words: advanced marginality, territorial stigmatisation, blight, urban frontier, neo‐liberalisation
Planning Theory and Practice, 2013
A short contribution to a Planning, Theory and Practice intervention issue suggesting a shift fro... more A short contribution to a Planning, Theory and Practice intervention issue suggesting a shift from workers' inquiry to 'neighbourhood inquiry', premised on a possible politics arising from the general trend from industrialisation to urbanisation. A precursor of what I've been calling 'territorial inquiry' lately.
Book Chapters by Neil Gray
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 2020
Capitalism is a particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the ... more Capitalism is a particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the private ownership of the means of production (MP) and its operation for exchange value, and the related need for people to sell their own labor power (LP) to make a living. Dialectics and class struggle From a Marxist dialectical perspective, society is personified by two fundamentally opposed classes (capitalist and proletariat). As an outcome of class struggle, society can be transformed through time, from one hegemonic mode of production to another (e.g., feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to communism) as the oppressed class (e.g., workers) seeks to overthrow and liberate itself from the oppressor (e.g., the capitalist class). Surplus value Surplus value is value created by the unpaid labor of wage workers, over and above the value of their LP (necessary labor time), and appropriated without compensation by the capitalist. For Marxists, the production and appropriation of surplus value is a fundamental aim of capitalism. Commodity fetishism The term used critically by Marxists to describe mainstream economists' failure to acknowledge, and attempts to mystify, the social relations (and exploitation) that underlie the production of commodities. Uneven development The tendency under capitalism for some places to develop very rapidly while other places experience decline. The Marxist theory contends that the two countervailing tendenciesdof growth and declinedare fundamentally related and intrinsic to capitalist forms of production. Spatial fix The stabilization of capitalist production through geographical extension and reconfiguration via particular organizational place-based forms and locational arrangements for the purpose of expanded capital accumulation.
The Green City and Social Injustice: 21 Tales from North America and Europe. London: Routledge. , 2021
Following an industrial boom from the mid-to-late 19th century, Glasgow's East End underwent exce... more Following an industrial boom from the mid-to-late 19th century, Glasgow's East End underwent exceptional levels of industrial decline. By the 1960s, it suffered from wholesale abandonment and devaluation, visible through widespread swathes of vacant and derelict land and decrepit building structures. After several unsuccessful regeneration attempts over the decades, in 2007 Glasgow City Council (GCC) won the bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games in the East End. In 2008, the same area was subject to the largest regeneration project in Scotland-Clyde Gateway-rooted in sustainability discourses and the provision of new green and blue infrastructure. This chapter critically inquires into who has benefited from this process.
Rowman & Littelfield, 2019
A co-written chapter on the use value of gentrification theory across differing socio-geographica... more A co-written chapter on the use value of gentrification theory across differing socio-geographical contexts. My contribution, ABSTRACTION? LET'S ASK LEFEBVRE, draws on philosophically inclined Marxist theorists, including Marx himself, Henri Lefebvre, Alfred Sohn-Rothel, Derek Sayer and others, to defend the political and analytical utility of real or determinate abstraction in theory.
Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle, 2018
Using spatial composition analysis, I aim to show the ongoing relevance of the 1915 Rent Strikes ... more Using spatial composition analysis, I aim to show the ongoing relevance of the 1915 Rent Strikes by situating them within wider concerns over social reproduction and rent; concerns which have often been obscured historically by the theoretical separation of productive and reproductive spheres. Manuel Castells (1983) typifies a certain reading of the Rent Strikes within the Marxist tradition, designating housing and social reproductive struggles as a secondary contradiction behind the primary contradiction of workplace struggle. With this analytical framework, the ongoing relevance of women-led direct action by tenants in the Rent Strikes has often been relegated behind a ‘forward march of labour’ that has since lost its way in the factory desert.
Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.
Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle , 2018
Britain and Ireland are in the grip of an entrenched and escalating housing crisis. This book exp... more Britain and Ireland are in the grip of an entrenched and escalating housing crisis. This book exposes the causes and consequences of that crisis, revealing its more permanent character, and showing how tenants and residents have been challenging it. The book was inspired by the centenary of the 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, which played a decisive role in establishing rent controls in Britain for the first time and ultimately forcing the government to introduce public housing provision in 1919. It reexamines this formative moment of tenant organization in light of new empirical research and new theoretical understandings, exploring its relevance through a largely hidden continuum of tenant struggles following 1915 and through multiple contemporary case studies from the most significant housing struggles in Britain and Ireland today. The primary focus is on the particular context of Britain and Ireland, 1 but given the depth of the housing crisis across multiple borders, these studies will resonate with those attempting to comprehend and contest housing tyranny internationally. Here, I provide a brief historical overview of rent unrest in Britain and Ireland, focusing initially on the 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow but also on the many, largely hidden, tenant and resident struggles in the sphere of social reproduction before, during and after 1915. Such a summary is politically vital because the labour movement and related trade unions have often viewed the housing question as merely secondary to workplace struggles in the sphere of direct production (see Moorehouse et al. 1972; Sklair 1975; Englander 1983; Bradley 2014). Yet, as Bunge (1977) observes, it is precisely on the 'second front' of social reproduction that the everyday life of the working class (in all its diverse dimensions) is located. Exploring this blind spot is all the more crucial because the capacity for radical change in the workplace
Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle, 2018
Routledge, 2018
Co-authored book chapter with Libby Porter in (2018) Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement... more Co-authored book chapter with Libby Porter in (2018) Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells Us About Ownership, edited by Cockburn P J L, Thorup M, Brunn M H and Risager B S. London: Routledge.
Reports by Neil Gray
mPOWER, 2021
This report explores the state of energy transition within Europe’s municipalities, drawing on ex... more This report explores the state of energy transition within Europe’s municipalities, drawing on existing academic and non-academic literature, and primary data collection carried out as part of the mPOWER project. It highlights the key role of municipal actors in the energy transition, although progress takes a wide range of forms including new forms of public ownership, utilising supra-national funding opportunities and increasing citizen participation.
Interviews by Neil Gray
Bella Caledonia, 2022
Currently, builders across the UK are charged 20% VAT for refurbishing residential properties and... more Currently, builders across the UK are charged 20% VAT for refurbishing residential properties and 0% for new-builds. The 20% VAT rate is for most work undertaken on houses and flats, including work done by builders and similar tradespeople. The 0% VAT rate is for work on new build construction projects, or work closely related to it, including the demolition of existing buildings and site preparation.
The current VAT regime is a perverse charter for building decay and (heavily incentivised) demolition that presents a stubborn, unjust legal-financial constraint to building repair, retrofitting and rescue.
Yet, if current VAT rates were harmonised this would give builders a genuine choice between repair and retrofitting versus demolition and destruction. Given the extent of fuel poverty at a time of escalating energy prices and given the scale of carbon emissions from households and embodied carbon loss from demolition, the stakes are obvious for challenging energy injustice and meeting energy efficiency and carbon reduction targets.
Neil Gray, writer, researcher, and housing activist with Living Rent tenants’ union, interviews Malcolm Fraser, architect, writer and built environment campaigner about his long-term campaigning work on the Builders VAT issue.
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Books by Neil Gray
Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggles asks what housing campaigners can learn from a proven organisational victory for the working class.
A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
My Introduction to the book is available here: https://ws1.nbni.co.uk/widgets/page/5b8cfb86f5ba7407e8544359/0
Journal Articles by Neil Gray
Key words: advanced marginality, territorial stigmatisation, blight, urban frontier, neo‐liberalisation
Book Chapters by Neil Gray
Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.
Reports by Neil Gray
Interviews by Neil Gray
The current VAT regime is a perverse charter for building decay and (heavily incentivised) demolition that presents a stubborn, unjust legal-financial constraint to building repair, retrofitting and rescue.
Yet, if current VAT rates were harmonised this would give builders a genuine choice between repair and retrofitting versus demolition and destruction. Given the extent of fuel poverty at a time of escalating energy prices and given the scale of carbon emissions from households and embodied carbon loss from demolition, the stakes are obvious for challenging energy injustice and meeting energy efficiency and carbon reduction targets.
Neil Gray, writer, researcher, and housing activist with Living Rent tenants’ union, interviews Malcolm Fraser, architect, writer and built environment campaigner about his long-term campaigning work on the Builders VAT issue.
Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggles asks what housing campaigners can learn from a proven organisational victory for the working class.
A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
My Introduction to the book is available here: https://ws1.nbni.co.uk/widgets/page/5b8cfb86f5ba7407e8544359/0
Key words: advanced marginality, territorial stigmatisation, blight, urban frontier, neo‐liberalisation
Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.
The current VAT regime is a perverse charter for building decay and (heavily incentivised) demolition that presents a stubborn, unjust legal-financial constraint to building repair, retrofitting and rescue.
Yet, if current VAT rates were harmonised this would give builders a genuine choice between repair and retrofitting versus demolition and destruction. Given the extent of fuel poverty at a time of escalating energy prices and given the scale of carbon emissions from households and embodied carbon loss from demolition, the stakes are obvious for challenging energy injustice and meeting energy efficiency and carbon reduction targets.
Neil Gray, writer, researcher, and housing activist with Living Rent tenants’ union, interviews Malcolm Fraser, architect, writer and built environment campaigner about his long-term campaigning work on the Builders VAT issue.
Video interview available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vswy9l7YAPw&feature=youtu.be
https://antipodefoundation.org/2018/07/27/author-interview-neil-gray/
The post is intended as an opening salvo for a more extended paper on green gentrification in North Glasgow.
http://www.bcnuej.org/2020/12/02/what-will-glasgows-smart-canal-mean-for-its-historically-deprived-communities/
http://www.workerscity.org/