Antoine Paccoud

The issue of land and its ownership remains under-explored in relation to the housing affordability crisis. We argue that the concentrated ownership of residential land affects housing production in Luxembourg through the interplay of landowner and developer wealth accumulation strategies. Drawing on expert interviews, we first show that the country's growth-centred ecology has produced a negotiated planning regime that does little to manage the pace of residential development. Through an investigation of the development of 71 large-scale residential projects since 2007, we then identify the private land-based wealth accumulation strategies this facilitative planning regime enables. This analysis of land registry data identifies land hoarding, land banking and the strategic use of the planning system. The Luxembourg case-with its extremes of land concentration, low taxes and public disengagement from land-provides a glimpse at the influence of landowner and property developer strategies on housing affordability free of the usual mediating impact of the planning system.

This article analyses the interrelation of ethnicity, class and tenure in the gentrification trajectories that have taken place in England in the most recent intercensal period (2001–2011). It argues that the return of the Private Rented Sector has made possible the extension of social change to areas not favored by White British (majority ethnic) middle-class owner-occupiers. This has seen the inflow of White British private renters into White British working-class areas and the arrival of private renting Not White British middle classes – primarily migrants – in working-class areas with a significant proportion of Not White British individuals. There is thus an ethnic dimension to the geographical spread of buy-to-let gentrification and the movement toward property wealth re-concentration it feeds. The middle-class individuals entering gentrifying areas as private renters are however not classical gentrifiers as the closing of rent gaps starts with the supply of private rented units by property investors.

This article investigates the ways in which the structure of the private ownership of property affects the operation of land and housing markets. It draws on detailed Land Registry data to identify the types of actors found at the top of the property wealth distribution in Dudelange, Luxembourg, and to gauge their respective influence on the production of the residential environment. While the top tail is made up of property developers, landowners and super-landlords, an analysis of the planning and land assembly processes for six large scale residential developments in the city since the 1970s shows that the production of housing is driven by a small group of tightly interconnected private landowners and property developers. The level of property wealth concentration in a given territory is thus not innocuous – it affects the production of the residential environment, especially when multiple property ownership is interlinked with the concentrated control over residential land. The study complements discussions on the relation between property, wealth and the production of housing that focus on homeowners, small-scale private landlords and the super-rich (on the consumption side) and, on the production side, on selected actors such as financialised property developers and public landowners.

The post-political literature – which equates ‘the political’ with insurgencies directed against the state – has only limited relevance for planning, focused as it is on the ways in which conflict is displaced from the functioning of the state apparatus. The post-political literature has however neglected a significant change in Alain Badiou’s conceptualisation of the relation between the political and the state: the introduction of a political subject which acts from the within the state – what he calls the state revolutionary. This figure, which makes ‘evental’ planning possible, is fleshed out through a Saint-Simonian reading of Haussmann’s planning practice in his first years as Prefect of the Seine.

This article looks at the distribution of social upscaling across London linked to changes in tenure between 2001 and 2011. Against a background of discussions of suburban decline, it shows that there are a number of Outer London areas which have seen upscaling trajectories linked to the private rented sector. The analysis reveals that this particular type of upscaling was made possible by the variegation in the Outer London landscape: within a space dominated by early to mid-20th century semi-detached and terraced (row) housing, areas of distinctive architecture and excellent accessibility offer a diluted version of the metropolitan milieu gentrifiers seek in the inner city. Buy To Let gentrification in Outer London can thus be understood as an overspill by those uninterested in, or unable to access, ownership and priced out of high house price Inner London.

Accepted version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/68533/

Recent discussions of gentrification in the UK have centred on new builds and on the influence of particular public programmes. This paper focuses on a form of gentrification that has cut across both of these: buy-to-let, broadly defined as the purchase and transfer of a dwelling to the private rental market. Initiated in response to a favourable legislative and financial context, this form of property investment has not usually been considered as gentrification, likely because it is at odds with the historical link between gentrification and ownership in the UK, poses problems with consumption side explanations and is not seen as displacing low-income residents. The paper uses a detailed comparison of small-area social and tenure data from the 2001 and 2011 UK censuses to show that buy-to-let has become a prominent tenure trajectory in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This prominence emerges from the opportunity it affords to use the general value gap created by the deregulation of the private rental sector to close rent gaps in the most urban, central and disadvantaged areas of England. This tenure shift, shown to be intrinsically linked to gentrification, creates vast opportunities for asset appreciation but also initiates long term trajectories of displacement in surrounding areas.

Accepted version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/65124/1/Paccoud_planning_perspectives.pdf

The transformation of Paris by Haussmann (1853–1870) is presented as a classic case of state-led modernization. What most accounts do not take into consideration is that Haussmann faced formidable opposition from property owners in his attempts to realize the emperor's ambitions for Paris, an opposition that centred on competing interpretations and uses of planning law. Based on heretofore unstudied archival material, this paper traces Haussmann's attempts to establish his (at times) creative use of planning law as legitimate in a context where planning was firmly in the hands of property owners. Haussmann's strategic use of the law, or planning practice, was able to lay bare the fact that planning law has no legitimacy in itself – only particular uses of the law can gain or lose legitimacy. Planning power can thus be defined as the possession of legitimacy in the use of planning law; and since the legal framework is a site of contest rather than a source of legitimacy, planning power depends on external legitimation. In the Haussmann case it is clear that state backing was central, even though (implicit) early support from the Parisian population cannot be ruled out until more research has been conducted.

While central to early gentrification studies, the idea that social and tenure changes were inseparably linked
to displacement has recently fallen out of research in the field. This has led to difficulties in the context of a
recent shift in the tenure trajectory associated with gentrification. While the process has historically been
linked to an increase in home ownership in the UK, the situation today is marked by the return of the private
rental sector, a return associated with the rise of buy-to-let investors, the loss of social housing and quickly
escalating rents. Gentrification operating in the UK today must thus be thought of as private rental-led
gentrification – transitions to private rental in the context of social upscaling. This is shown through a
detailed comparison of small-area social and tenure data from the 2001 and 2011 UK Censuses. While this
tenure shift has been documented in gentrifying areas over the years, little is known about its impacts on
local neighbourhoods. This is a dangerous blind-spot as private rental-led gentrification is more pernicious
than gentrification linked to ownership: it is currently more widespread and likely to displace poorer
residents, creates commodified spaces and its production dispossesses low-income owners.

This thesis is concerned with empirically determining whether a particular political sequence can be interpreted through Badiou’s philosophy. It focuses on the public works that transformed Paris in the middle of the 19th century, and more specifically on Haussmann’s planning practice. From an epistolary exchange between property owners, Haussmann and the Minister of the Interior during Haussmann’s first years as Prefect of the Seine, the thesis draws out a political event: the playing out in a singular context of an opposition over a political practice predicated on equality. In this case, the opposition is in the field of planning as regulation: the sanctity of property rights against a planner’s efforts to break the complacency of the planning apparatus towards property owners. The thesis argues that Haussmann was a Saint-Simonian state revolutionary that sought to make property owners contribute to the public works in equal relation to the benefits they extracted from them. In the face of sustained opposition, this planning practice was ultimately sacrificed by the imperial regime. Haussmann’s first years as Prefect are shown to have taken place in the temporality of Badiou’s events, while the commonly invoked process of Haussmannisation best describes the situation that followed the demise of Haussmann’s planning practice. Badiou’s notion of the state revolutionary gives us a way to think through the difficulty and evanescence of regulation. It can help us understand those fleeting moments when political will was used to break hierarchies of power and capital. Badiou’s philosophy is shown to be compatible with a social science that is concerned with isolating and singularising particular political sequences, of which early Haussmann is one.