Social Housing and Urban Renewal: Conclusion

SOCIAL HOUSING AND URBAN RENEWAL A Cross-National Perspective This page intentionally left blank SOCIAL HOUSING AND URBAN RENEWAL A Cross-National Perspective EDITED BY PAUL WATT Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK PEER SMETS Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands United Kingdom North America Japan India Malaysia China Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2017 Copyright r 2017 Emerald Publishing Limited Reprints and permissions service Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78714-125-4 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78714-124-7 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78714-910-6 (Epub) ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001 CONTENTS List of Contributors vii List of Abbreviations ix 1. Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction Paul Watt 1 2. Holding on to HOPE: Assessing Redevelopment of Boston’s Orchard Park Public Housing Project Shomon Shamsuddin and Lawrence J. Vale 37 3. ‘The Blue Bit, that Was My Bedroom’: Rubble, Displacement and Regeneration in Inner-City London Luna Glucksberg 69 4. Gentrification as Policy Goal or Unintended Outcome? Contested Meanings of Urban Renewal and Social Housing Reform in an Australian City Lynda Cheshire 105 5. Are Social Mix and Participation Compatible? Conflicts and Claims in Urban Renewal in France and England Agnès Deboulet and Simone Abram 141 6. Promoting Social Mix through Tenure Mix: Social Housing and Mega-Event Regeneration in Turin Manuela Olagnero and Irene Ponzo 179 v vi Contents 7. Tenure Mix against the Background of Social Polarization. Social Mixing of Moroccan-Dutch and Native-Born Dutch in Amsterdam East Peer Smets 215 8. Phased Out, Demolished and Privatized: Social Housing in an East German ‘Shrinking City’ Matthias Bernt 253 9. Social Housing and Urban Renewal in Tokyo: From Post-War Reconstruction to the 2020 Olympic Games Chikako Mori 277 10. Territorial Stigmatization in Socially-Mixed Neighborhoods in Chicago and Santiago: A Comparison of Global-North and Global-South Urban Renewal Problems Javier Ruiz-Tagle 311 11. Caught Between the Market and Transformation: Urban Regeneration and the Provision of Low-Income Housing in Inner-City Johannesburg Aidan Mosselson 351 12. Social Housing, Urban Renewal and Shifting Meanings of ‘Welfare State’ in Turkey: A Study of the Karaplnar Renewal Project, Eskisxehir Cansu Civelek 391 13. The Inbetweeners: Living with Abandonment, Gentrification and Endless Urban ‘Renewal’ in Salford, UK Andrew Wallace 431 14. Social Housing and Urban Renewal: Conclusion Peer Smets and Paul Watt 459 About the Authors 479 Index 485 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Simone Abram Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK Matthias Bernt Leibniz-Institute for Research on Society and Space, Research Department 4 ‘Regeneration of Cities’, Erkner, Germany Lynda Cheshire School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia Cansu Civelek Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Agnès Deboulet Department of Sociology, University Paris 8, Nanterre Cedex, France Luna Glucksberg International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics, London, UK Chikako Mori Graduate School of Law and International Relations, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan Aidan Mosselson Gauteng City Region Observatory, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa Manuela Olagnero Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Torino, Italy Irene Ponzo FIERI: Forum of International and European Research on Immigration, Torino, Italy Javier Ruiz-Tagle Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile vii viii List of Contributors Shomon Shamsuddin Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Peer Smets Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands Lawrence J. Vale Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA Andrew Wallace School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Paul Watt Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AFHCO AKP AMI ANRU ANC ASGISA AUM BBP CAB CC CDS CHALK CHP CHP CRESR DCLG Drs DHPW EAP GDR GEAR GHLC GLC GPF Affordable Housing Company Justice and Development Party Area Median Income Agence Nationale de Rénovation Urbaine [National Urban Renovation Agency] African National Congress Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa Anxiety Uncertainty Management Better Buildings Programme Citizens Advice Bureau Conseil Citoyen [Citizens’ Council] City Development Strategy Charlestown and Lower Kersal Community Housing Provider Republican People’s Party (Turkey) Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research Department of Communities and Local Government Drucksache (printed paper) Department of Housing and Public Works Estate Action Plan German Democratic Republic (1949 1990) Growth Employment and Redistribution Government Housing Loan Corporation Greater London Council Gauteng Partnership Fund ix x GWG HA HMR IOS JHC JNR JOSHCO IMO KdU LA LBS LCC LCCH LRC LRI MAAC MP NASHO NDC NFP NHFC NHSS NPNRU PFI PNRU PP List of Abbreviations GWG Gesellschaft für Wohn- und Gewerbeimmobilien HalleNeustadt mbH (one of the two municipal housing companies in Halle (Saale)) Housing Association Housing Market Renewal Informatie, Onderzoek en Statistiek (Department of Information, Research and Statistics of the Municipality of Amsterdam) Johannesburg Housing Company Japanese National Railways Johannesburg Social Housing Company Chamber of Civil Engineers Kosten der Unterkunft (“costs for accommodation” provided for welfare recipients) Local Authority London Borough of Southwark Logan City Council Logan City Community Housing London Research Centre Logan Renewal Initiative Minami Aoyama Apartment Corporation Member of Parliament National Association of Social Housing Organisations New Deal for Communities Not for Profit National Housing Finance Corporation National Housing Subsidy Scheme Nouveau Programme National de Renouvellement Urbain [National Urban Renewal Programme] Private Finance Initiative Programme National de Renouvellement Urbain [National Urban Renewal Programe] Peckham Partnership List of Abbreviations PRU PUCA RDP SANCO SRB TARA TMG TOKI_ TUHF UR WG WP WVB ZUS xi Plan de Renouvellement Urbain [Urban Renewal Plan] Plan, Urbanization, Construction, Architecture Reconstruction and Development Program South African National Civics Organisation Single Regeneration Budget Tenants and Residents Association Tokyo Metropolitan Government Mass Housing Administration of Turkey Trust for Urban Housing Finance Urban Renaissance Agency Am Südpark: Wohnungsgenossenschaft Am Südpark eG (a cooperative housing company which went bankrupt in 2001) Welfare Party Centuria GmbH (name of a private housing company, specialized in asset management) Zone Urbain Sensible [Sensitive Urban Zones] This page intentionally left blank 1 SOCIAL HOUSING AND URBAN RENEWAL: AN INTRODUCTION Paul Watt FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA: THE DEVELOPMENT AND DECLINE OF SOCIAL HOUSING ESTATES Social housing estates — as developed either by local states (viz. public/ municipal housing) or voluntary sector housing associations — became a prominent feature of the twentieth century urban landscape in many Northern European cities, and also to a lesser extent in North American and Australian cities.1 Many of these estates were built as part of earlier urban renewal, “slum clearance” programs especially in the post World War II heyday of the Keynesian welfare state. Old, overcrowded, slum areas of private rental housing were demolished to make way for new modernist housing blocks and estates which provided physically improved and affordable rental housing for workers and their families. In both Northern Europe and North America, the estates were created at a time of considerable optimism both in terms of town planning and modernist architecture, and also in the capacity of welfare states to build and manage mass housing projects (Campkin, 2013; Urban, 2012). The heartlands of social housing in capitalist societies have been the large, industrial — now in many cases ex-industrial — cities of Northern Europe in 1 2 PAUL WATT the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, and West Germany where there was extensive social housing provision, often, although not exclusively, in the form of monotenure estates. In some cities, these estates were largely located in inner-city areas, as for example in London and Amsterdam, whereas in other cases the estates were predominantly built in the suburban periphery, for example on the outskirts of the major Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the grand ensembles around Paris, Copenhagen, and West German cities such as Cologne and Dusseldorf (Power, 1997; Turkington & Watson, 2015; Urban, 2012; Whitehead & Scanlon, 2007). In many Northern European societies, social housing took on a “mass” rather than a “residual” form (Harloe, 1995) in the sense that it did not house just the poorest and most vulnerable but instead catered for large tranches of the population, notably the industrial working class.2 It was, in the words of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, “the people’s home” (folkhemmet; Harloe, 1995, p. 1), an example of welfare capitalism in action. This was also the case in postwar Britain where millions of people “considered council houses better than private accommodation, both in quality and in the security they offered” (Todd, 2014, pp. 179 180). This extensive provision did not, however, equate to the universalism that dominated other sectors of the postwar Keynesian welfare state such as health, education, and social security. Instead, housing has long been recognized as the “wobbly pillar under the welfare state” (Torgersen, 1987), even if that pillar has proved to be a good deal wobblier in some societies (and their cities) than others, notably England (Hodkinson, Watt, & Mooney, 2013; Watt & Minton, 2016; Chapters 3, 5, and 13 of this volume). In contrast to Northern Europe, social housing was far less prominent in US, Canadian, and Australian cities and tended to operate via an explicitly “residual” model of provision which primarily catered for the poor and notably for racialized minority groups (Darcy, 2010; Harloe, 1995; Hirsch, 1983; Wacquant, 2008).3 The widespread postwar optimism regarding social housing did not, however, last long. Despite the often utopian visions which lay behind social housing estates, in a relatively short time they came to be seen as problematic Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 3 both in design and social terms by politicians, the mass media, and academics. This was especially the case in relation to the large, modernist concrete “tower and slab” estates (Campkin, 2013; Coleman, 1990; Urban, 2012), for example, the “brutalist” about-to-be-demolished Robin Hood Gardens estate in East London (Mould, 2017). They were, and often still are, regarded as “sink estates” — stigmatized crucibles of urban poverty, misery, and lawlessness (Campkin, 2013) — even if residents’ lived reality was often at some remove from such stereotypical, stigmatizing images (Garbin & Millington, 2012; Watt, 2008), as discussed further in this chapter and several chapters of this volume. Nowhere was this apparent systemic failure more pronounced than in the case of the public housing “projects” in the large US cities. Large postwar projects such as the Pruitt Igoe tower blocks in St. Louis, and Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago (now all demolished), rapidly became bywords for spatially concentrated poverty and crime. The sources of this decline were manifold but included, in various combinations, a significant underestimation of management and maintenance costs, systemic public underfunding, neglect and disinvestment, mounting unemployment coupled with demographic concentrations of poor families including many young people (see inter alia Bradford Hunt, 2009; Heathcott, 2012; Rainwater, 1970; Urban, 2012; Vale, 2013; Wacquant, 2008). Furthermore, the spatial concentration of poverty had a profound racialized aspect to it since the new modernist housing projects by and large replicated the racialized injustices of the old “black ghetto.” The deliberate racialized siting of the new public housing projects in or near the old inner-city black ghettoes, away from white neighborhoods, resulted in their becoming the “second ghetto,” as Hirsch (1983) famously described in the case of Chicago. The projects’ typically stark, towering appearance on the urban landscape only highlighted the symbolism of policy failures: “in many cities, public housing has simply become a more visible kind of slum, and by its very existence as a public programme highlights the failure of the federal response to poverty” (Rainwater, 1970, p. 524; original emphasis). If the US inner-city projects were emerging as problematic by the mid-1960s, their subsequent decline was further exacerbated by a lethal cocktail of 4 PAUL WATT deindustrialization and the flight of newly affluent blacks to the suburbs, as powerfully argued by the Chicago-based sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987, 1993). The “truly disadvantaged” — those poor African Americans left behind in the inner city including in the projects — not only lacked jobs but, unlike the ghettoes of early- to mid-twentieth century US cities such as Harlem, they also had a dearth of “respectable” role models. The result, Wilson argued, was the spatial concentration of poverty and social dysfunctionality in the inner city and the production of spatial “neighborhood effects” which result in negative life chances for the poor and their children over and above any individual disadvantages they might face. If concentrated urban poverty and social dysfunctionality were most severe in the US projects, they were also identified in Northern European inner-city and peripheral social housing estates (Beider, 2007; Musterd, Murie, & Kesteloot, 2006; Power, 1997; Turkington & Watson, 2015; van Kempen, Dekker, Hall, & Tosics, 2005). English council estates and the Parisian banlieues, for example, experienced large-scale urban disturbances — “riots” — during the 1990s and 2000s (Dikecs, 2007; Power & Tunstall, 1997). Furthermore, in academic terms, the “neighborhood effects” which Wilson identified arguably made their way from Chicago to the poorer areas of European and Australian cities including social housing estates. Those people growing up in such estates were said to be doubly disadvantaged — not only by their parents’ poverty, but also by the poverty and disadvantages of the place itself which magnified young people’s social exclusion (Friedrichs, Galster, & Musterd 2003; Jenks & Mayer, 1990; Manley, van Ham, Bailey, Simpson, & Maclennan, 2013). Estate residents were said to lack effective role models and connections to the world of work, since they were spatially isolated and lived with similar poor people to themselves. Before turning to the preferred policy solution to the decline of social housing estates via their all-too-literal “fall” — demolition — it’s worth pausing at this point to add vital nuance to the above overarching narrative. For one thing, what seems to have happened is that certain iconic, infamous US projects — such as Pruitt Igoe and Robert Taylor Homes — took on a symbolic significance that is way beyond their socio-spatial representativeness. Despite the specific problems faced by Pruitt Igoe and the way its Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 5 decline was produced by macro-social and economic forces, this did not prevent it from assuming a symbolic, even mythical status in the eyes of politicians and those who were only too happy to see public housing interventions as inherently problematic (Freidrichs, 2011; Heathcott, 2012). In other words, these particular projects came to symbolize what Goetz (2013, p. 40) calls an “exaggerated discourse of disaster,” in which any policy successes from the projects in general were drowned out by a plethora of “bad news” stories. As we discuss later, residents of the projects, especially AfricanAmerican women, were also at the forefront of concerted grass-roots mobilization attempts to combat the all-too frequent bureaucratic inertia and neglect they faced and in so doing demonstrated considerable attachment to their homes and neighborhoods (Feldman & Stall, 2004). In relation to this, there is also disproportionate media and academic attention given to the Chicago Housing Authority project “failures,” while the far more extensive, well-funded, and generally positive projects run by the New York City Housing Authority receive relatively little attention (Hyra, 2008; Urban, 2012). As for the frequent design determinism which the policy analysts all too often employ to justify demolishing public housing units, Urban (2012, p. 32) points out how “many [NYC] areas that in the 1960s acquired a bad reputation such as Harlem or the South Bronx were neither high-rises nor public housing, but rather poor neighborhoods of three-story brownstone houses from the late nineteenth century.” If US public housing is neither defined nor encapsulated by the Robert Taylor Homes or even the Chicago projects as a whole, it is even more questionable to try and make sweeping cross-national generalizations across from the US project experience to that of Northern European social housing estates (see inter alia Aalbers, van Gent, & Pinkster, 2011; Fenton, Lupton, Arrundale, & Tunstall, 2012; Stal & Zuberi, 2010; Wacquant, 2008). Not only were the latter far more extensive than the former, but in many European cities they were not equivalent to the racialized, hyper-marginalized enclaves of the US inner cities. As Wacquant (2008) and others have argued, the experiences of the black, inner-urban hyper-ghetto — in relation to racism, crime, poverty, and welfare state withdrawal — have no European equivalent, despite certain modernist architectural similarities (Urban, 2012). For one 6 PAUL WATT thing, the US projects have had long-term strict income ceilings which mean they tend to cater for the poor and vulnerable far more than in Europe. In comparison to the US projects, Northern European estates for much of their history did not cater for the very poor but instead for the manual working class and even sections of the middle classes (Harloe, 1995; Watt, 2005). More recently, however, many European countries have imposed formal income levels ceilings regarding who has access to social housing, while some continue to have no formal income restrictions (e.g., Austria, Denmark) (Scanlon et al., 2015). However, as Scanlon et al. (2015) identify, social tenants tend to have lower incomes than average in Europe. In addition, while the data are incomplete, they also found that ethnic minorities and immigrants tend to be overrepresented in social housing (31% in the Netherlands and 25% in Denmark), and even higher in large cities, for example Munich (Scanlon et al., 2015, p. 5), Paris and London (Urban, 2012), although not Berlin (Urban, 2012). Despite the concentration of lowincome and ethnic minority groups in social housing in Europe, this is still far from the situation pertaining to the US inner-city projects, and especially to the most infamous projects such as Robert Taylor Homes and Pruitt-Igoe. URBAN RENEWAL REDUX: DEMOLISHING SOCIAL HOUSING Since the epochal demolition of the Pruitt Igoe project tower blocks in St. Louis in 1972 (Heathcott, 2012) — the symbolic end of modernism according to Chris Jenks (cited in Harvey, 1989a) — social housing estates have been increasingly disappearing from the skylines of North American, Western European, and Australian cities. This eradication has occurred as a result of “new urban renewal” (Hyra, 2008) programs involving estates’ demolition and their replacement with mixed-tenure housing developments in order to solve problems of poverty concentration and social dysfunctionality. This “urban renewal redux” represents a rear-view mirror effect of how the old inner-city tenements were regarded as slums in the 1940s and 1950s and in need of demolition and replacement by the self-same modernist social housing estates that are now being torn down. As Vale (2013) has noted, in some cases this new renewal phase was even in the same place as Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 7 previous slum clearance schemes, giving rise to the phenomenon of what he terms “twice-cleared communities.” Another example of this can be seen in Chapter 9 of this volume where Chikako Mori shows how elderly residents of the Kasumigaoka Apartments experienced a double displacement as a result of Tokyo’s staging of the Olympics Games, first in 1964 and then again in preparation for the upcoming 2020 Games. These renewal programs — which in practice often come under the rubric of “urban regeneration” — have the aim of radically altering the neighborhoods where social housing estates stand, away from their being (or at least being seen as), concentrated zones of poverty, crime, drugs, and other social problems, by literally obliterating the estates — a form of physical “cleansing” with resultant “social cleansing” effects. In the United States, various policies were devised to combat poverty concentration and neighborhood effects, notably the Hope VI program which began in the early 1990s (Bennett, Smith, & Wright, 2006; Goetz, 2013; Vale, 2013). Hope VI meant demolishing the projects and, because of increasingly limited public housing replacement units, moving the poor away from their previous neighborhoods, while the latter were redeveloped into mixed-tenure areas with large numbers of affluent, often white incoming homeowners. The appearance of the latter would promote social mixing between wealthy homeowners and the remaining tenants, in which the latter would gain valuable social connections as well as raised aspirations by living cheek-by-jowl with homeowners. Furthermore, rather than such estates being primarily state-developed, they would be developed as part of public-private partnerships. This “new urban renewal” set of programs became the policy orthodoxy and spread out from the United States to many European and Australian cities with social housing estates (Darcy, 2010, 2013; Imrie, Raco, & Lees, 2009; Jacobs, Marston, & Darcy, 2004). Contemporary urban renewal is of crucial policy significance for cities and their denizens, not least those who live in the affected estates. It is also the subject of intense academic and policy debate regarding whether it promotes social mixing and spatial justice, as its proponents claim, or instead generates new socio-spatial injustices, inequalities, and insecurities, as its critics suggest. As the new urban renewal has spread geographically, so it has become increasingly 8 PAUL WATT controversial with academics condemning its simplistic one-size-fits-all approach which has failed to take into account the successes, as well as failures, of social housing estates (Goetz, 2013; Urban, 2012). Critical urbanists in particular regard the new urban renewal as little more than an integral component of neoliberal urban policies which ultimately result in the displacement of the poor from inner-city areas. It is de facto “state-led gentrification” — in other words, the state aiding and assisting private capital to maximize profits in hitherto unprofitable urban locations via exploiting the creation and realization of rent gaps (Glynn, 2009; Hodkinson, 2011; Lees & Ferreri, 2016; Uitermark, Duyvendak, & Kleinhans, 2007; Watt, 2013a). What has also happened is that the residents of targeted estates have challenged and even overtly resisted the renewal programs which were supposedly being undertaken for their benefit. This has taken several forms, including legal challenges as well as traditional mobilizations in the form of demonstrations and lobbying local politicians (see inter alia Cumbers, Helms, & Swanson, 2010; Douglas & Parkes, 2016; Flynn, 2016; Glynn, 2009; Lees & Ferreri, 2016; Pfeiffer, 2006; Watt, 2013a). Such opposition and resistance feature in Chapters 3, 5, and 9 of this volume. Resident opposition has even emerged in the archetypal “failed” US projects: “One of the more striking images of public housing transformation in Chicago was the sight of residents carrying signs protesting the demolition of Cabrini-Green project” (Goetz, 2013, p. 86). As Goetz and others highlight (Feldman & Stall, 2004; Pfeiffer, 2006), the Chicago projects were by no means as unidimensional as their detractors suggest. As Feldman and Stall (2004) detail, female African-American residents of the Wentworth Gardens project in Chicago mobilized and fought to improve their living conditions for decades in the face of official intransigence and neglect, while they latterly resisted the threatened demolition by the very same officials who had run their neighborhoods down. Such “place attachments” (Watt & Smets, 2014) to home and neighborhood are largely invisible to urban renewal professionals: “the satisfactions residents gained from living in these communities and the positive attachments they experienced remained opaque to outsiders, who saw only physical deterioration” (Feldman & Stall, 2004, p. 86). Feldman and Stall importantly raise the interrelated questions of perspective and power, questions which are all too frequently glossed over in the Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 9 technocratic world of urban policy — “whose voices count in renewal programmes?” As they argue, the voices which all too often do not count, and are not even heard, are those of low-income, public housing residents, and especially African-American women, who are also often those at the forefront of grassroots struggles to improve neighborhood services on estates (for the UK, see Gosling, 2008). Such grassroots struggles of social tenants have also been prominent outside the United States (Glynn, 2009; Lees & Ferreri, 2016; Watt, 2013a; Watt & Minton, 2016). In academic circles, there is mounting debate and skepticism as to how far social housing renewal has met its goals of enhancing social mixing and social mobility (Arbaci & Rae, 2013; Bridge, Butler, & Lees, 2012; Graham, Manley, Hiscock, Boyle, & Doherty, 2009; Smets & Hellinga, 2014; Smets & Sneep, 2017). To make matters worse, the intellectual foundation on which much social housing renewal policy is justified — neighborhood effects — is by no means as robust as its policy advocates recommend. Certainly, some scholars have produced state-of-the-art accounts of “enduring neighborhood effects” as in the case of Sampson’s (2013) magisterial overview of Chicago. Nevertheless, despite the growing mountain of research papers on neighborhood effects, there is little consensus regarding the size of such effects, their significance, or their causal pathways (Manley et al., 2013; van Ham, Manley, Bailey, Simpson, & Maclennan, 2012). There is even skepticism as to whether neighborhood effects even exist at all, a skepticism which comes from both individualistic (Cheshire, 2012) and structural (Slater, 2013) perspectives. Furthermore, as Slater (2013) and Davies and Imbroscio (2010) suggest, an exclusive focus on spatial inequalities and their all too visible manifestations (poor places/slums) and relatively easy and physically spectacular policy solutions (“knock them down”) can detract attention from mounting social inequalities and the much more entrenched and powerful forces which keep those inequalities in place. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, URBAN POLICY, AND SOCIAL HOUSING RENEWAL The previous discussion suggests the existence of a polarized set of both political and academic positions on social housing estates and urban 10 PAUL WATT renewal. One way of simultaneously summarizing and assessing this polarized debate is via discourse analysis. Using this, one can identify two distinct urban policy discourses regarding social housing renewal: first an official/ mainstream discourse that dominates both policy approaches and mainstream urban social science; and second an oppositional/critical discourse that is prominent among housing and community activists who are opposed to renewal at their estates, as well as among academic critical urbanists (Watt, 2013b). These discourses are summarized in ideal typical form in Tables 1 and 2. Each discourse utilizes a set of key framing policy tropes, which encompass the identification of policy “problems” (Table 1), “solutions” and “effects” (Table 2). These ideal types represent an extrapolation not only from several academic sources (especially Darcy, 2010, 2013; Glasze, Pütz, Germes, Schirmel, & Brailich, 2012; Johnston & Mooney, 2007), but also from numerous policy and activist documents and websites, notably those derived from my own research on regeneration on London council estates (see inter alia Watt, 2008, 2009, 2013a; Watt & Minton, 2016). Like all ideal types, these are not meant to encompass all elements of both discourses, but instead to highlight their main constituent features and also to act as “models” against which social reality can be compared. Before we examine these two discourses in detail, we will take a brief excursus into discourse analysis. This has proved to be a useful, albeit underutilized, tool in relation to urban policy (Jacobs, 2006), although it has featured in relation to social housing including regeneration and renewal (Darcy, 2010, 2013; Glasze et al., 2012; Marston, 2002; Watt & Jacobs, 2000; Watt, 2008). According to Levitas (1998, p. 3): Discourse […] means that sets of interrelated concepts act together as a matrix through which we understand the social world. As this matrix structures our understanding, so it in turn governs the paths of action which appear to be open to us. A discourse constitutes ways of acting in the world, as well as a description of it. It both opens up and closes down possibilities for actions for ourselves. Not only do discourses provide perspectives on knowing the social world, but they are also, as Levitas highlights, conduits for social action. In the urban Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 11 policy context, discourses act as ways of understanding policy issues, and they invariably do so by highlighting certain attendant “problems” while ignoring or sidelining others as well as providing mobilizing frameworks for action to “solve” the focused-upon problems (Stenson & Watt, 1999). Thus discourses frame and mobilize action — in this case either “for” or “against” renewal (Watt, 2013b), as we discuss in detail below. The main contribution toward examining social housing renewal from a discourse analysis perspective has come from Michael Darcy (2010, 2013) in two seminal papers. He examines how US, UK, and Australian housing authorities have fixed on a similar consensus around removing geographical concentrations of public housing and their replacement with “mixed income communities,” based on a congruence between “international policy transfer and apparent social scientific consensus” (Darcy, 2010, p. 1). Darcy insightfully notes how: Despite the marked variations in the location and form of the housing being replaced, the urban structures in which it occurs, and even in the socio-cultural composition of the targeted residential communities […] the stated rationale and aims of these policies and programs, and the premise on which they are designed, almost indistinguishable. — Darcy (2010, p. 2) As several chapters in this volume highlight, this general rationale has indeed formed the crux of social housing renewal policies and programs in the United States (Chapters 2 and 10), England (Chapters 3, 5, and 13), and Australia (Chapter 4). However, other chapters highlight how this rationale has extended well beyond the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia — all societies with prominent, albeit uneven liberal welfare state regimes — to encompass cities in societies with very different kinds of welfare state regimes and social housing trajectories, such as France (Chapter 5), Italy (Chapter 6), the Netherlands (Chapter 7), and Japan (Chapter 9). In other words, there seems to be some credence to the notion that we are witnessing what Darcy (2013, p. 365) calls a “globalised discourse 12 PAUL WATT of deconcentration.” Demolishing social housing estates and deconcentrating their populations, who are frequently poor, is routinely espoused as a form of technocratic “common sense” by politicians, planners, consultants, and architects, as well as by many academics. In the United States, the latter constitute what Imbroscio (2008, p. 111) refers to as the “Dispersal Consensus” in that, “A large and influential group of American scholars studying urban and low-income housing policy have coalesced around the central idea that the best way to ameliorate the plague of urban poverty in the United States is to disperse (or deconcentrate) the urban poor into wealthier (usually outlying suburban) neighborhoods.” Therefore, the demolition of social housing and the spatial deconcentration of its residents is de facto hegemonic within contemporary urban policy networks and organizations. In other words, the official/mainstream discourse functions as a “doxa” in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, that is, “the treatment of concepts as self-evident and therefore taken-for-granted” (Allen, 2010, p. 142). It utilizes a set of key framing policy tropes, which encompasses the identification of policy “problems” (Table 1), “solutions” and “effects” (Table 2). Dominant policy tropes informing the official discourse include “neighborhood effects,” “social mixing,” “community participation,” “rehousing,” “urban renaissance,” and “poverty deconcentration.” According to the official/mainstream discourse, the cause — or at least one of the main causes — of urban poverty and social exclusion is held to be the spatial concentration of social housing tenants onto monotenure estates, and hence social housing is itself considered inherently problematic (Table 1). The mechanism which brings this about is neighborhood effects, that is, the spatial clustering of poor tenants together in the same part of the city. Such clustering means that social housing estates are “ghettoes” of worklessness and crime and populated by a morally deficient, or at least socially disorganized and dysfunctional, “underclass” (Watt, 2008). In terms of social theory, the official/mainstream discourse is heavily reliant on social capital theory. Thus, tenants on social housing estates are characterized by weak social capital in the form of a spatialized form of classic anomie — normlessness, predicated on weak social ties. In some versions, a more subtle approach is taken, one which is informed by Putnam’s distinction between Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 13 Table 1: Official/Mainstream and Oppositional/Critical Urban Policy Discourses on Renewal Vis-à-vis Social Housing Estates — Problems. Policy Problems Official/Mainstream Discourse Oppositional/Critical Discourse Social rental housing Inherently problematic Meets housing needs Causes of urban poverty and Spatial concentration of social Unequal resource distribution social exclusion (PSE) housing (SH) Reliance upon market housing Neighborhood effects Proven Unproven Existing SH tenants Moral and economically flawed Deprived and marginalized citizens — citizens — “underclass” “working class”/“urban poor” Weak Medium strong Or bonding surplus + bridging Mutually supportive networks Tenants’ social capital deficit Physical quality of estates Poor Variable — according to investment and management Territorial stigma Strong and justified Strong but stereotypical Tenants’ place attachment to Weak Medium strong High Low estates Tenants’ desire to leave estates bridging and bonding social capital (Putnam, 2000). In the case of social housing estates, the problem in this variant is that it’s not so much that the tenants lack any form of social capital, it’s that they have the wrong sort of social capital — too much “bonding” (with their peers on the estate, classically in the form of youth neighborhood-based gangs) and not enough “bridging” with people not-like-them outside the estate. In addition, the estates are physically rundown and of poor quality, as well as being territorially stigmatized as “dangerous” and “rough” places. However, the dominant thrust of the official discourse is that such stigmatization is legitimate — in other words, estates really are hotbeds of crime and antisocial behavior. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to residents’ place attachment to the neighborhood, this is weak, while their concomitant desire to leave the estate is high. The second “counter-hegemonic” oppositional/critical discourse is typically associated with housing/community activists who in various guises 14 PAUL WATT (both individual and collective) challenge and contest specific regeneration projects (Douglas & Parkes, 2016; Elmer & Dening, 2016; Flynn, 2016), but also with radical/critical urban academics who both deconstruct and challenge the epistemological claims made by the official discourse (Brenner, 2009; Smith, 2002). Some of the key tropes of this critical discourse include “state-led gentrification,” “social cleansing,” and the “right to the city.” The counter-hegemonic oppositional discourse theoretically and politically challenges the parameters of the official renewal discourse. Rather than seeing urban renewal as a technocratic exercise in policy implementation and evaluation, the oppositional discourse regards such policy to be a key part of neoliberalizing, political-economic regimes that are qualitatively distinct from the postwar Keynesian welfare state regimes which developed the estates in the first place. As part of this, the oppositional discourse emphasizes how neighborhood effects are by no means proven, and that the official discourse replicates a stigmatizing set of stereotypes about social housing and its residents which ignore the often very real attachments that tenants have to their homes, neighbors, and neighborhoods. While acknowledging the power of territorial stigmatization, this oppositional discourse largely considers this to be stereotypical and unreflective of the sociological complexity and richness found in estates (see Foster, 1997; Smith, 2005 for illustrations based on research at London council estates). The official discourse policy solutions/effects, as set out in Table 2, are poverty deconcentration, reduced territorial stigmatization, and promoting social mixing between existing poor tenants and wealthy homeowners through mixed-tenure housing redevelopments. The dominant organizational assemblage for enacting urban renewal is public-private partnerships. Given tenants’ lack of place attachment (Table 1), they are only too willing to be decanted and rehoused and to move out of their current home and their justly stigmatized neighborhood. Consultation by housing officials with residents is genuinely participative and bottom-up. The new incoming homeowners are aspirational role models and job brokers for the remaining tenants and in this way the latter’s social capital is enhanced — or transformed away from unhealthy bonding to healthy bridging with people “not like them.” Thus gentrification is “positive” (Davidson, 2008), and the new post- Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 15 Table 2: Official/Mainstream and Oppositional/Critical Urban Policy Discourses on Renewal Vis-à-vis Social Housing Estates — Solutions/Effects. Policy Solutions/ Official/Mainstream Discourse Oppositional/Critical Discourse Policy framework Social/tenure mixing Roll-out neoliberalism Organizational Public-private partnerships Entrepreneurial city Spatial deconcentration of social Reduce social inequality Effects framework Solution to urban PSE Tenants’ mobility Consultation housing (SH) tenants Support and enhance SH Decant and rehouse Social cleansing Tenants want to move Tenants want to stay Bottom-up Top-down Genuinely participative Ideological New homeowners in Aspirational: role models and job Gentrifiers: lead separate lives and renewed estates brokers for tenants antagonistic to tenants Gentrification Positive State-led New communities Mixed and stable Divided and unstable City-scale Urban renaissance Reduced right to the city National-scale Heightened aspirations > increased Entrenched but spatially reshuffled following renewal social mobility inequalities renewal neighborhoods are mixed, stable, and sustainable. This upward neighborhood trajectory contributes to wider city-scale processes of urban renaissance, and to the heightening of national-scale social aspirations and upward social mobility. By contrast, the oppositional/critical discourse views social housing renewal as enhancing the neoliberal privatization of urban space which promotes the entrepreneurial city (Harvey, 1989b). As such, it amounts to state-led gentrification that results in displacement and heightened insecurities. Rather than poor tenants being decanted and rehoused, they are socially cleansed from these new upcoming areas. Resident consultation is top-down and ideological in the sense that it’s a box-ticking exercise which housing renewal officials have to undertake, but it has no real meaning since PAUL WATT 16 the key decisions have already been taken by the major state-private stakeholders. The affluent incoming homeowning gentrifiers lead separate lives and are often antagonistic toward whatever remaining social housing tenants there are. Hence, post-renewal neighborhoods are socially divided, tense, and unstable. Rather than renewal promoting social mobility and spatial justice, it promotes the social cleansing of the inner city via the expulsion of poor denizens to the suburban outskirts and the loss of their “right to the city” (Harvey, 2008). Social inequalities are both entrenched and spatially reshuffled. Both editors of this volume are sympathetic to the aims and values which guide the oppositional/critical discourse. This is not least on the basis of our own long-standing research which routinely demonstrates a profound gap between official renewal/regeneration aims and promises, and the on-theground, lived experiences of estate residents and others who are supposed to benefit (see inter alia Kennelly & Watt, 2012; Smets & Hellinga, 2014; Smets & Sneep, 2017; Watt & Wallace, 2014; Watt, 2008, 2009, 2013a). AIMS AND REMIT OF THE BOOK This book provides a research-based perspective on the renewal of social housing estates in a variety of cities during the last two decades. Its overarching aim is to put sociological — in some cases anthropological — flesh onto understanding the social processes and impacts of contemporary social housing renewal in a cross-national perspective. In so doing, it addresses themes of neighborhood and community, poverty and social exclusion, social mixing, mixed-tenure developments, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, demolition, displacement, urban governance, state-led gentrification, and neoliberal urbanism. It aims to understand how and why renewal occurs in a wide variety of urban spatial contexts, ranging from Northern European cities with long-established, extensive public and social housing provision, such as London and Amsterdam, to cities in the Global South, such as Santiago in Chile and the Turkish city of Eskisxehir, for whom social housing is a far more recent development. Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 17 Throughout the book, there is an emphasis on foregrounding how the residents of social housing estates themselves view and experience urban renewal. What social processes are involved in this self-avowedly benign transformation, and how do the supposed beneficiaries of renewal understand what’s happening to them, their homes and their areas? What effects does renewal have and to what extent do these effects mesh with the stated official renewal goals and aims? Again how do those most affected — social housing residents — view the postrenewal landscape, a landscape which may involve a loss of their existing homes and even neighborhoods? In addition to this resident emphasis, several chapters also consider the views of urban renewal officials and politicians, thus allowing for many points of comparison and contrast between “bottom-up” and “top-down” perspectives. The book initially emerged out of a conference session “Public/Social Rental Housing and Urban Renewal: New Inequalities and Insecurities?” which the editors organized at the XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, July 13 19, 2014, in Yokohama, Japan. Seven of the chapters are based on papers from this well-attended and well-received session, while the other five chapters are commissioned from researchers who the editors knew to be leading and upcoming scholars on social housing and urban renewal. All the chapters draw upon original research, most of which is based on a single neighborhood-based case study, although two chapters (5 and 10) are comparative case studies. Each chapter draws upon mixed-methods research. While several chapters incorporate survey and other statistical data, there is a more general emphasis on qualitative research methods including ethnography, observation, and in-depth interviews. This qualitative emphasis is entirely apposite for the book’s aims since the depth of the research findings facilitate an unraveling of the complexities, conundrums and blind spots of urban policy formulations, enactments and effects. The book is therefore distinguishable from existing cross-national studies of social housing renewal, such as van Kempen et al. (2005), and Rowlands, Musterd, and van Kempen (2009) which, while based on a single research project, tend to focus on quantitative renewal indicators. As such, these texts tend to underplay the lived experiences of residents undergoing the renewal of their homes and neighborhoods, as well as the dynamic changing nature of the renewal process itself. It is precisely these 18 PAUL WATT aspects of social housing renewal which the chapters in this book capture. Indeed there is growing recognition of the value of qualitative research in relation to urban regeneration (O’Brien & Matthews, 2016), not least from urban scholars who espouse an explicit antigentrification perspective: An ethnographic approach to the relationship between gentrification and social housing demolition is necessary to bring out the complex and interconnected processes through which the devaluation and displacement of communities and people, especially low income tenants and leaseholders, happen, as well as to analyse and understand the ways in which people’s lives are affected by them over the long term. — Ferreri and Glucksberg (2016; section 4.2) It is this volume’s emphasis on providing rich, detailed case studies of the renewal process and its effects, notably as experienced by estate residents, which distinguishes it from existing cross-national overviews of social housing renewal (see inter alia Droste, Lelevrier, & Wassenberg, 2008; Glynn, 2009; Turkington & Watson, 2015). Whatever their analytical strengths, these existing studies sideline the voices of social housing residents. The more mainstream Renewing Europe’s Housing, edited by Richard Turkington and Christopher Watson (2015), includes several case studies of particular renewal schemes across European cities, but its emphasis is examining renewal through the lenses of physical changes in the housing stock coupled with official statistics on housing units, population, income levels, etc. While the far more critical Where the Other Half Lives edited by Sarah Glynn (2009) broadens out beyond Europe to include North America, Australia, and New Zealand, many of its chapters focus on national-level policy and reactions to it. By comparison to Glynn (2009) and Turkington and Watson (2015), this volume more consistently and fully engages with how national policies are implemented at the urban level in relation to the lived experiences of the residents of social housing estates. This includes residents’ views of their homes and estates prerenewal, postrenewal, and also during the renewal process. While the spatial dimension of urban renewal is written into the ontology Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 19 and epistemology of specific initiatives with their explicit geographical demarcation vis-à-vis bounded and named estates, what is less recognized in the literature is the temporal dimension of renewal/regeneration (Davidson, McGuinness, Greenhalgh, & Robinson, 2013). Thus, one of the major epistemological omissions of much of the mainstream urban renewal literature is its misrecognition of how renewal is an extended process in time, as well as space. This is especially pertinent to residents who in many cases have a lifetime’s experience of living on their estates, for good or ill, whereas official engagement is of necessity more time-bound. It is also this temporal dimension which can bring out the power dynamics of the renewal process whereby official time scales of start and finish can be elongated into decades of residents’ lives. This temporal dimension can be identified in several chapters of this volume, but especially Andrew Wallace’s analysis of “endless” urban renewal in Salford in Chapter 13 (see also Wallace, 2015; Watt & Wallace, 2014). STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK The chapters concentrate on social housing in several distinctive types of city. First, there are the historic heartlands of social rental provision, that is major Northern European cities with long-standing, extensive but now diminishing public/social housing estates: London (Chapter 3), Sheffield (Chapter 5), and Salford (Chapter 13) in England; Paris, France, (Chapter 5); Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Chapter 7); and Halle in Germany, part of the former GDR (Chapter 8). Second, there are those Western cities in which public housing has historically played a residual role: the US cities of Boston (Chapter 2) and Chicago (Chapter 10), Logan in Australia (Chapter 4), and Turin in Italy (Chapter 6). Third, is Tokyo, Japan (Chapter 9) as an example of an East Asian city. Fourth, there are three cities from the Global South where social housing has been developed as part of relatively recent urban renewal programs: Santiago in Chile (Chapter 10); Johannesburg in South Africa (Chapter 11); and Eskisxehir in Turkey (Chapter 12). 20 PAUL WATT Shomon Shamsuddin and Lawrence J. Vale in Chapter 2 examine one of the most researched and controversial social housing renewal programs, the US HOPE VI program (Goetz, 2013; Vale, 2013). As Shamsuddin and Vale note, the majority of published research on Hope VI has focused on those examples where public housing residents form a minority in their nowrenewed neighborhood as a result of the influx of wealthy incomers. Their study goes against this trend by looking at the transformation of Boston’s Orchard Park into the rebranded “Orchard Gardens.” This redevelopment involved a Hope VI scheme where the majority of the units continued to be occupied by low-income households. Shamsuddin and Vale base their analysis on interviews with a sample of public housing residents both before and after HOPE VI redevelopment, and as such this is a unique study as far as the authors are aware. Interviews with housing authority staff, official documents, and archival materials are also used. Shamsuddin and Vale find increased residential satisfaction and significant declines in crime in Orchard Gardens following redevelopment, although concerns remain about safety and security. Their findings suggest that public housing renewal can accommodate a majority of poor, subsidized households with some degree of success. However, there was still a net loss of public housing units, as well as a clear process of filtering out “problem tenants” involving displacement, and such issues complicate notions of its being a wholly successful redevelopment. One important issue raised by Shamsuddin and Vale is which, if any, social housing tenants have the “right to return” to the postrenewal neighborhood. This issue has been particularly problematic in many Hope VI schemes where such a right has not existed prompting claims of “negro removal” (Goetz, 2013). The right to return features prominently in Luna Glucksberg’s Chapter 3, but in her case this was a right that residents had to struggle for as part of the renewal process. Glucksberg presents an ethnographic case study, involving participant observation, interviews, and archival research, of the regeneration of the “Five Estates” (council estates) in Peckham, an inner-city neighborhood located in south-east London. She considers the social implications of urban regeneration processes from an anthropological perspective centered on concepts of waste and value. In juxtaposing residents’ voices and experiences alongside those of local politicians Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 21 and officials, the chapter highlights how the values and interests of those with more power tend to steer postregeneration outcomes in the direction of state-led gentrification. The chapter shows how processes of demolitions and displacement can deeply affect residents in that the homes and communities they value were “wasted” — erased from the landscape. Glucksberg’s approach allows for a reconsideration of regeneration processes in novel ways: through a micro-level understanding of how individuals attribute value to objects and social relationships; and at the macro-level in how inherent power dynamics resulted in one set of values being respected and ultimately acted upon, while others were silenced. In employing life histories and long quotations from interviewees, Glucksberg eschews constructing a singular, unilinear narrative of regeneration constituting either a “success” or “failure,” and instead offers a dense polysemic account of contrasting narratives, while paying full attention to inherent power imbalances in the lengthy and tortuous regeneration process. In disrupting linear narratives of urban renewal, Glucksberg also deconstructs the notion that there is a singular “official” account of the renewal process, let alone residents’ own often contradictory accounts. In Chapter 4, Lynda Cheshire deepens our understanding of the complex nature of the official renewal account by focusing on the social construction of urban policy with reference to a case study of the Logan Renewal Initiative (LRI) in Queensland, Australia. Using a qualitative case study approach based on interviews and documentary analysis, Cheshire examines the competing aims of urban renewal programs and how different stakeholder groups advocate one element of the program while seeking to prevent another. Cheshire finds two competing agendas bound up within the LRI and with what she calls the “specter of gentrification” appearing in each. In focusing on social housing reform, the first agenda sees gentrification as an undesirable outcome that needs careful management. The second place improvement agenda, however, regards gentrification as an effective policy mechanism, albeit one that would be threatened by increases in the stock of social and affordable housing. The chapter demonstrates that renewal programs are rarely coherent policy tools, but are subject to change as stakeholders attempt to enact their own desired 22 PAUL WATT outcomes. The potential danger in the case of the LRI is that both outcomes will result in the marginalization of low-income groups unless their needs are prioritized. The chapter effectively demonstrates the manner whereby local policy agendas and circumstances mean that the supposedly straightforward relationship between renewal and gentrification is far more complex than generally conceived in the urban studies literature. The following three chapters focus on one particular aspect of urban renewal programs, that is, social mixing as enacted via tenure mixing. Agnès Deboulet and Simone Abram compare programs for urban housing regeneration in France and England in Chapter 5. They demonstrate how ideological similarities regarding policy ideas and programs played out differently in the different national contexts. Their chapter draws on results of several long-standing research programs, including fieldwork in several cities and regions in France and England which included participant observation in planning events, interviews, and neighborhood tours. In both countries, earlier promises for participation in housing renewal eventually gave way to demolition emphases, justified on technical grounds that were not shared with participants. The social mix and demolition linkage appeared contradictory, a contradiction that only a few residents could endorse. The chapter emphasizes the balance of power differences between France and England, and also looks at overlaps between policy objectives and similarities in housing renewal governance. It also highlights the frequent finding that residents’ insider commitments to the value of their social housing differ from “outsider” perspectives which judge such housing to be “poor.” The authors suggest that social housing renewal requires greater commitment and emphasis on residents’ experiences and views. In Chapter 6, Manuela Olagnero and Irene Ponzo also focus on social and tenure mixing based on a case study of the conversion of real estate complexes into public and subsidized housing built in Turin in relation to the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. As such, their chapter highlights the important role of sporting mega-events, such as the Olympic Games, in relation to urban regeneration vis-à-vis social housing, as also discussed by Chikako Mori in Chapter 9 with reference to the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (Kennelly, 2016; Watt & Bernstock, 2017; Watt, 2013a). Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 23 Olagnero and Ponzo explicitly compare policy goals aimed at producing social mix via the mixing of housing tenures, with outcomes. They employ survey data and semistructured interviews with residents, as well as interviews with key actors and observation in public places. Their findings suggest that regeneration policies vis-à-vis tenure mix are most effective in “area-based effects,” such as preventing neighborhood stigmatization and attracting private investments in local amenities, but less so for “people-based effects” such as mixed social interaction and positive role models. The chapter argues that achieving the latter people-based effects requires long-term interventions that extend beyond building and allocating new apartments. The chapter’s findings demonstrate how processes of social mix following on from regeneration require embedding in organizational and policy conditions. Peer Smets in Chapter 7 also provides an analysis of social mixing and tenure mixing, in his case in the Transvaal neighborhood in Amsterdam, one which has gone through various rounds of urban renewal. He does so against a backdrop of widening social polarization which is occurring in The Netherlands at the national scale between the native-born Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch. The chapter is based on ethnographic research in the neighborhood. The chapter shows how Transvaal residents from different ethnic and income backgrounds interact together in the neighborhood. By highlighting the national Dutch context of interethnic polarization, Smets offers a new vantage point to the European literature on renewal and social mixing that tends to emphasize class issues, that is, mixing poor social housing tenants with richer owners. In policy terms, the chapter contributes to the formulation of evidencebased policies for the improvement of social cohesion and everyday livability in such ethnically mixed neighborhoods which have gone through renewal. In Chapter 8, Matthias Bernt turns attention to the changing nature of social housing provision in a shrinking city in East Germany — HalleNeustadt. He employs mixed methods including statistical analysis, documentary analysis, interviews, and fieldwork. Social housing is under pressure in East Germany due to three developments. First, and somewhat unusually in European terms, social housing has had a temporary status in Germany and therefore the number of such units is nationally decreasing rapidly. This trend is pronounced in East Germany where most cities have experienced 24 PAUL WATT deindustrialization and extensive deprivation, and so lack the resources for new social housing subsidies. Second, privatization has reduced the municipally and cooperatively owned housing stock and increased the relevance of financial investors. Third, most East German cities have been demographically contracted; this has stimulated “rightsizing” policies and 350,000 housing units have been demolished since 2001. Combined, these three developments have resulted in concentrations of households living in poverty, plus the poor shifting to the least attractive parts of the city. Bernt shows how developments across several sectors have resulted in the marginalization of impoverished groups within the specific low-demand East German context, and in so doing he emphasizes how planning strategies, housing privatization, and changes in welfare provision interact. Chikako Mori takes up the theme of megaevents in Chapter 9 by focusing on social housing and urban renewal in Tokyo in the run-up to the 2020 Olympic Games. As such, her chapter offers a counterpoint to Chapter 6 by Olagnero and Ponzo who are considering the post-Olympics’ period. Mori examines the nature and impacts of urban renewal as conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) in relation to social housing. She employs a qualitative case study approach based on participant observation and interviews. Her findings suggest that the TMG has promoted urban renewal of city government owned land in public-private partnerships by emphasizing these projects “win-win-win strategy among residents-businesscity.” Nevertheless, such renewal has meant a deterioration of residents’ housing conditions as a result of either their displacement or a worsening of their housing environment. The chapter demonstrates a mismatch between the TMG’s rationale for renewal — the production of trickle-down effects and assisting existing residents — and the latter’s own experiences. The chapter offers insight into the “super-residualization” of social housing in Japan, characterized by the decrease in its size alongside urban renewal which benefits the middle and upper classes. Historically, social housing has played a limited role in most societies in the Global South. However, contemporary urban renewal has in some cases involved the development of new social housing, albeit under conditions of globalization and neoliberalization. The following three chapters offer Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 25 accounts of such development in the Global South. First of all, Javier RuizTagle in Chapter 10 offers an explicit Global North/Global South comparison on urban renewal by focusing on territorial stigmatization with reference to local residents in socially-mixed neighborhoods in the Cabrini-Green Near North area in Chicago, and the La Loma La Florida area in Santiago in Chile. The study involved qualitative research, including interviews, observation, and “spatial inventories.” Unsurprisingly, there are differences in terms of social differentiation, types of social mix, and housing tenure. Nevertheless, Ruiz-Tagle identifies several shared stigmatization problems between the two areas, including how distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in relation to social housing. In Chapter 11, Aidan Mosselson provides a critical examination of the urban renewal process in inner-city Johannesburg. He examines the effects of an approach to providing social housing which blends market-based practices with state intervention and regulation and discusses the implications these competing imperatives vis-à-vis urban renewal. His research involved interviews with property developers, officials, and tenants living in social and affordable housing developments. Mosselson highlights the contradictory and “overburdened” nature of the renewal process, given that the supply of social and affordable housing is expanding, while at the same time poor communities are being displaced. Mosselson’s chapter complicates and queries overarching neoliberalizing narratives in relation to urban renewal, by demonstrating how alternative developmental ambitions coexist with commercial practices. Cansu Civelek in Chapter 12 discusses the social housing history and urban renewal experiences in Turkey while simultaneously pointing out long-term similarities and differences between these and urban policy trends in the Global North. The chapter focuses on the Karapınar Project in Eskisxehir and is based on an anthropological case study and video documentary research that incorporates the views of local inhabitants, officials, and planners. In a similar manner to Glucksberg in Chapter 3, Civelek’s polysemic approach highlights the contesting claims and views regarding renewal and its consequences. The Karapınar Renewal Project is a Mass Housing Administration (TOKI_) project which claimed to turn gecekondu — squatter PAUL WATT 26 settlements — into a healthy neighborhood. Civelek argues that such claims were chimerical and that the authorities’ economic profits contrast with the economic burdens and dispossessions of the poor residents. For Civelek, the use of concepts of “social housing” and “welfare state,” which are normally associated with social democratic policies, by the Karapınar Project effectively distorted these concepts’ meanings and utilized them in creating a space for legitimacy. Chapter 13 by Andrew Wallace returns to the Global North, in his case to public housing in inner-city Salford, a deindustrialized British city and one ravaged, like many equivalent British cities, by postcrash, “austerity” cuts (Kennett, Jones, Meegan, & Croft, 2015; Mooney, McCall, & Paton, 2015). Two phases of qualitative fieldwork were conducted in an area of Salford subject to several regeneration schemes. The findings emphasize the challenges facing the residents of living in such spaces which are simultaneously partially gentrified and partially abandoned. Rather than a neat linear process of neoliberal urban transformation, the state has been rolled back, out and back again, and in the process Salford residents have been shunted from one logic of renewal and retrenchment to another. The chapter recognizes the “chaos” of urban renewal and welfare state retrenchment in this Global Northern urban periphery and in so doing offers a firmer platform for understanding the nuances of residents’ responses and resistances. In the concluding Chapter 14, Peer Smets and Paul Watt revisit the main themes, concepts, and approaches of the book. They also offer various suggestions for future research agendas, as well as a brief examination of the role of academics in relation to social housing and urban renewal. NOTES 1. Despite its common usage, “social housing” has no single, universal definition. Even within the European Union states, social housing forms a complex web of different tenures, providers, financing models, demographics, rent levels, and subsidy schemes (Pittini, 2012; Scanlon, Fernandez Arrigoitia, & Whitehead, 2015). A suitable working definition is: “Social housing is allocated according to need rather than demand and price, and this concept of need is politically or administratively Social Housing and Urban Renewal: An Introduction 27 defined and interpreted. Social housing is, explicitly, not allocated by market forces” (Haffner, Hoekstra, Oxley, & van der Heijden, 2009, pp. 4 5). Social housing, usually rental in form in the Global North, is distinguishable from the other two major housing tenures whose costs and prices are dominated by market mechanisms: owner occupation (either outright ownership or ownership based on a mortgage or loan) and private renting which is provided by landlords on a for-profit basis. Historically, social rental housing has mainly been provided by one of the following: either public/municipal housing provided by the state, usually local governments (“council housing” in the United Kingdom); or not-for-profit (or limited profits) voluntary organizations, typically called “housing associations” (Doling, 1997). The cross-national balance of housing providers — public or housing association — varies considerably even across Europe (Haffner et al., 2009; Pittini, 2012; Scanlon et al., 2015). In recent years, we have also witnessed greater private sector involvement in social housing provision in the European Union (Pittini, 2012). Internationally, social housing is largely rental, although public housing in some Asian societies, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, is provided for ownership (Gurstein, Patten, & Rao, 2015). 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