Competing Ideas of Social Justice and Space: Locating Critiques of Housing Renewal in Theory and in Practice

Abstract

This article considers the experience of the English government's policy of Housing Market Renewal from the perspective of spatial justice. The paper first proposes an analytical framework that situates competing notions of territorial social justice within a space of complex sociospatial relations. The dialectic of two formulations of social justice is first set up, comparing ‘procedural’ or deontological forms of justice and the distributional justice of outcomes. Soja's formulation of spatial justice is advanced as an appropriate balance between spatial and socio-historic contexts for the justice question. Drawing on the literature on sociospatial relations, concrete critiques and justifications of HMR are then positioned in terms of the intersection of structuring principles and policy fields. The role of demolition in urban restructuring programmes is used to explore the differential spatialities involved in different justicial perspectives. It is concluded that ‘gentrification’ critiques of HMR are only partial in their evaluation of justice and lack normative power. Some practical implications for the design of urban restructuring policies are offered.

Key Words:

• Housing Market Renewal
• social justice
• spatial justice
• sociospatial relations
• UK

Notes

1. This is why recent moves by the UK government to devolve planning to the microspatial level involve inherent questions of justice.

2. I knowingly use the term ‘gentrification’ in a broad sense to encompass the full gamut of approaches, technologies and justifications that are used in relation to the social and spatial reconfiguration of parts of cities to the detriment of the poor, whether as a consequence of or explicitly sought by (state) strategies, and whether or not involving the displacement of existing populations.

3. The sole exception was the Gateway Pathfinder in Kingston-upon-Hull.

4. There is also a related but separate issue about neighbourhood social conditions and the use of demolition to address problems of crime, antisocial behaviour, cohesion, service provision, and so on.

5. Of course, in some instances these rights were not strong and residents contested official determinations on their properties’ conditions.

6. It is worth noting that the eventual demolition of around 31,000 dwellings (Audit Commission, 2011) fell some way short of original plans. Ferrari and Lee (2010, p. 98) for example found that by the end of 2007/2008 less than nine per cent of original demolition plans in the northwest of England had been realised.

7. Ian Cole makes precisely this point in a letter to The Guardian (Society supplement, 20 March 2007).

8. While tempting to label it a ‘compromise’, that would be the wrong word because it suggests that there is a purer, workable alternative. For reasons argued throughout this paper, the only viable responses must be framed within complex amalgams of the social and spatial, and of scale, in other words, involving situated judgement (see Campbell, 2006).