Urban geographies for violence and destruction: urban research and the ‘Housing Market Renewal’ programme in the UK

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the politics of geographical knowledge production and, in particular, how urban élites are making increasing use of geographical knowledge to legitimise urban policy programmes that service the interests of state and business élites while visiting harm on others. The article takes as its focus processes of disinvestment whereby working class areas of cities are deliberately (or allowed to become) run down in order to make them ripe for future redevelopment and gentrification. Some geographers have called this process ‘creative destruction’. Two points are pertinent. First, political rhetoric has conventionally been used to legitimise such processes – given that they might otherwise be problematic – ‘in the eyes of the people’. Geographers tended to make their own observations of these processes from a critical distance. Second, the state and capital are now making greater use of geographical knowledge in order to buttress their political rhetoric and thereby their legitimisation of programmes of creative destruction. This is a cause for concern because increasing use is being made of geographical knowledge in order to legitimise the manufacture of oppression in UK cities. A case study of the Housing Market Renewal programme in the UK is used to make this argument.