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LIFE in a ZOO

Matthew Thompson

To cite this article: Matthew Thompson (2017) LIFE in a ZOO, City, 21:2, 104-126, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1353327 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1353327

Published online: 14 Sep 2017.

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Download by: [University of Liverpool] Date: 17 September 2017, At: 14:23 CITY, 2017 VOL. 21, NO. 2, 104–126, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1353327 LIFE in a ZOO Henri Lefebvre and the (social) production of (abstract) space in Liverpool

Matthew Thompson

Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically ‘performed’, this paper takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change—occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between ‘abstract space-makers’ and ‘social space-makers’—is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liver- pool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures.

Key words: production of space, abstraction, urban policy, neighbourhood regeneration, housing, community development

Introduction his paper looks at the dialectical struggle Henri Lefebvre sees as

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 ‘An unequal struggle, sometimes furious, Tdefining the historical production sometimes more low key, takes place between of space—between the forces of Logos and the Logos and the Anti-Logos [...] The Logos Anti-Logos, or abstract space and social makes inventories, classifies, arranges: it space—by grounding it more concretely cultivates knowledge and presses it into the at the neighbourhood scale, to consider service of power. [Anti-Logos] by contrast, the impact of urban regeneration pro- seeks to overcome divisions—divisions grammes and planning policy on everyday between work and product, between repetitive and differential, or between needs life. It builds on recent work in critical and desires. On the side of the Logos [...] are urban theory towards a socio-spatial ranged the forces that aspire to dominate and approach that conceptualises neighbour- control space: business and the state ... In hood change as the product of political the opposite camp are the forces that seek to decisions and collective actions in space— appropriate space: various forms of self- ‘spatial projects’—as much as the result of management ...’ (Lefebvre 1991, 391–392) more structural socio-economic,

# 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 105

demographic and technological shifts. I housing cooperative movements of the follow Madden (2014) in conceptualising 1970s, and some of the UK’s first urban com- neighbourhood as an unfinished ‘spatial munity land trusts (CLTs) emerging today. project’ in which various actors and organ- Most notable is Granby Four Streets CLT, isations project out into space their own which in 2015 was the first ever housing specific agendas in myriad colliding, com- project to win the prestigious Turner Prize. peting and cooperating ways which But this is not a story of simple contesta- together help enact or produce place. I tion producing progressive outcomes. In the bring this into closer conversation with following, I argue that the common charac- Aalbers’ (2006, 2014) distinction between terisation of abstract vs. social space is a two broad approaches towards producing more complex and dialectically interwoven neighbourhood: ‘abstract space-makers’, relation, with ambiguous outcomes stemming who promote the generation of exchange from their collision and combination in his- value and bureaucratic rationalisation of torical contexts. I show how the production space, and ‘social space-makers’, concerned of neighbourhood is shaped through the with the production of use value—convi- interaction of abstract and social space- vial ends of play, collective encounter and makers, clashing and cooperating with social reproduction. This socio-spatial unforeseen and often violent impacts. approach, however, risks oversimplifying Lefebvre saw violence as an inherent feature the dialectical relation between abstract of abstract space, and I show that spatial pro- and social space. A deeper engagement jects conceived and implemented by social— with Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) The Pro- as well as abstract—space-makers can con- duction of Space may help elucidate the tribute to the production of (violent) abstract critical perspective this approach brings to space. the complex process of neighbourhood Through Granby’s history, I trace how decline and transformation. earlier actions and decisions taken by social To understand these processes more space-makers are complicatedly implicated in clearly, I focus my lens on a case study of shaping the future production of space, Granby in Liverpool, drawing on original adversely interacting with other conditions and secondary data, including semi-struc- down the decades to produce often contradic- tured interviews and participant observation, tory and counterintuitive outcomes. For conducted between 2012 and 2015 for doc- instance, the admirable activism of Granby toral research which looked into Liverpool’s residents in contesting demolition-and- recent post-war history of experimentation rebuild policies inadvertently led to the formu- with collective alternatives to public lation of a more heavy-handed technocratic

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 housing. Granby is an interesting case as an model for state intervention in low demand especially deprived and long-neglected neighbourhoods, intriguingly called the LIFE inner-city neighbourhood in which various model, whose rationale I will explain below. technocratic state policies for comprehensive LIFE in turn became the precedent for the redevelopment—tools of abstract space— monolithic zoning logic of Housing Market have been applied since the 1960s to Renewal (HMR), the latest and most interven- contend with worsening economic and tionist in a long line of attempts to resolve the housing conditions, and which in turn have city’s ‘wicked’ problems of unemployment, been contested by residents and civil society depopulation, housing vacancy, deprivation organisations in ways which have produced and dereliction (Cole 2012; Cocks and Couch new social spaces through democratic inno- 2012). HMR, as it was rolled out in Liverpool, vations in housing management and neigh- involved the subdivision of target areas for bourhood governance. These include one of comprehensive redevelopment into ‘Zones of the country’s largest and most successful Opportunity’—commonly referred to by the 106 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

unfortunately metaphorical ‘ZOO’. This is contrasted with the opposite and insepar- paper, then, is also about LIFE in a ZOO: the able concept of appropriation’. Posited everyday life of Granby residents trapped in a against the onslaught of abstract space is a ZOO and the violence enacted by HMR as a dialectical counter-movement for the re- technology of abstract space. In what follows, appropriation of social space, reconnecting I explore place-based resistances to, but also people and place, the users and producers of the co-production of, such technocratic tools space, working towards a radical experimen- of abstract space and their genesis in contradic- tal-utopian possibility—what Lefebvre calls tory interactions between abstract and social ‘differential space’. Lefebvre’s ([1968] 1995) space-makers. earlier concept, The Right to the City, can be seen as an expansive political vision to combat the urban symptoms of abstract Lefebvre’s theory of abstract space space—displacement, division, exclusion, alienation, peripheralisation—through the For Lefebvre ([1961] 2002, 305) the historical generalised production of social and differen- production of space is a movement towards tial space. Thus, we have two opposing— the domination of what he calls abstract though radically unequal—forces competing space: the unified socio-spatial dimension of against each other to inscribe space with state technocracy and market capitalism, their own vision, according to fundamentally together producing ‘a naked empty social different conceptions of society. Due to the space stripped bare of symbols’. In classical historical dominance of abstract space, those Marxism, exploitation in the production struggling for social space must actively process—the labour–capital relation—is the contest and challenge dominant models. The original source of alienation and the (socio-economic) production of housing is primary contradiction of capitalism; all thus marked by a struggle between what others mere derivative reflections. Extending Aalbers (2006) calls ‘social space-makers’, Marx’s theory of alienation in the sphere of who produce and reproduce space with use production to the sphere of social reproduc- value for inhabitants, and ‘abstract space- tion, Lefebvre criticised Marx for limiting makers’, who instrumentalise space for the his analysis to the economic sphere; for not production of exchange value. seeing the effects of alienation in the political This distinction broadly correlates with the and cultural spheres of bureaucratic state dialectic between conceived and lived space in power and the quantification, calculability Lefebvre’s spatial triad. The former is com- and managed spectacle creeping into every- posed of ‘mental’ abstractions—those intel- day life (Wilson 2013a). By a dual process lectual, technocratic and scientific

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 of division and homogenisation—‘differ- discourses, plans and logics that construct ence-through-sameness’—abstract space analytical and rational representations of works to divorce people from the land, social reality to justify abstract space— enclosed through legal and spatial bound- which projects itself onto lived space, in the aries, and divided into exchangeable units ‘devastating conquest of the lived by the con- for state control and capital accumulation ceived, by abstraction’ (Lefebvre, quoted in (Lefebvre [1974] 1991). It imposes a quanti- Wilson 2013a, 366). In contrast, lived space tative homogenous equivalence that violently is ‘directly “lived” through its associated erases diverse subjective experience, place images and symbols, and hence the space of identities, historicity and qualitatively rich “inhabitants” and “users”’ (Lefebvre 1991, collective cultures. 38), and also those artists, writers and philo- In characteristically dialectical fashion, sophers who attempt to meaningfully rep- Lefebvre (1991, 165) argues that abstract resent lived space and its imaginative space ‘attains its full meaning only when it transformation (Leary 2013). This is the THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 107

most physical, ‘pre-rational’ and affective space in efforts to shape urban space in the space of everyday experience (Pierce and image of the movers. Contrary to orthodox Martin 2015); the realm of collective narratives which conceptualise urban memory, desire, art, music, play, festivity, decline and recovery as a naturalised process eroticism, intoxication, excess and encounter in a city’s or neighbourhood’s ‘life cycle’, (Merrifield 1995). For Lefebvre, the latter is the socio-spatial approach foregrounds the very essence of the ‘urban’: the concen- agency, collective action and political trated interaction of people, ideas and decision-making as significant powers con- materials through social encounter (Merri- tending otherwise deterministic and struc- field 2013). tural processes of demographic, The third unifying dimension in the spatial technological and economic change. triad is ‘perceived space’ or spatial practices, Spatial projects can be further explicated which ‘secrete’ society’s space through accu- with Martin’s concept of ‘place-frames’: com- mulated multiple ‘daily realities’ and material peting representations of space used as politi- flows (Lefebvre 1991, 38). Abstract space can cal tools to re-imagine and reproduce urban be seen as the accumulation and penetration space for different ends (Pierce and Martin of ‘conceived space’ into the more material 2015). Place-frames may guide the practical spatial practices of society; as the foreclosure ways in which spatial projects attempt to of the possibility of encounter through div- remake urban space—explicable through ision, homogenisation and alienation (Merri- ‘performativity’. Place-frames can have field 2013). Social space is that which resists powerful performative effects on urban and escapes the grip of abstraction, protecting reality. We can see this all too clearly in the the use values of lived space and the promise manner in which maps, statistical research, of a post-capitalist ‘differential’ space (Leary viability models, zoning policies, property 2013; Wilson 2013a). brochures and vision statements inscribe In reinterpreting Lefebvre’s theory of the environments with their designs, in more or production of space for the neighbourhood less conscious ways. Abstract space is thus scale, Madden (2014) introduces the concept not simply emergent hegemonic social of ‘spatial project’, a term he uses to signify reality but also those specific tools or technol- ogies of power geared towards the ‘represen- ‘Coordinated, continuous, collective tational erosion of differentiated symbolic campaigns to produce and format space systems by an instrumental rationality’ according to identifiable logics and strategic (Wilson 2013b, 519). Tools of abstraction goals, pursued by specific actors utilizing have a dual ontology, simultaneously describ- particular techniques.’ (480) ing or representing the world and constitu-

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 tively intervening in or ‘performing’ the Reflecting Lefebvre’s (1991, 129) key insight world. Aalbers (2014) and Christophers that the social relations of production (2014) adapt Judith Butler’s concept of ‘per- ‘project themselves into a space, becoming formativity’—‘the reiterative power of dis- inscribed there, and in the process producing course to produce the phenomena that it that space itself’, Madden (2014, 480) explains regulates and constrains’ (Butler, quoted in that spatial projects are, ‘as the phrase has it, Aalbers 2014, 531)—to the study of how spatial projections of social power; they maps and viability models, respectively, have produce space, in an ongoing, contingent, a ‘performative’ effect on the urban space uneven manner’. This forms the basis of the they claim to merely map or model. Power- socio-spatial approach to urban change: the fully remaking space in the image of the very idea that urban space is defined, shaped and assumptions and axioms used to observe and reproduced by projections ‘out’ into space; measure it, these instruments ‘perform’ a politically motivated ‘movements’ into certain vision of social reality into existence. 108 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

In this paper, I illustrate how Liverpool’s established homelessness campaign organis- post-war ‘slum clearance programme’ and ation, to investigate the potential for a rehabi- 21st-century HMR Pathfinder are technol- litation alternative. Their solution was the ogies of abstract space, with powerfully per- Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project formative, violent impacts on lived space. (SNAP), rolled out from 1969 to 1972, as This reflects similar arguments made about one of the first action–research programmes post-war suburban housing development nationwide to experiment with participatory and transport planning (Butler 2005); and rehabilitation of inner-city terraced neigh- neoliberal public housing restructuring pol- bourhoods as an alternative to comprehensive icies, specifically HOPE VI, the pioneering renewal; a sibling of the Community Devel- American precursor to HMR (Jones and opment Projects then gaining government Popke 2010). However, it is not just abstract policy support (McConaghy 1972). SNAP space-makers who can remake space in this was to provide the vital link with residents, way: social space-makers too can have a per- articulating their needs to the council, formative impact through grassroots spatial whilst delivering much-needed housing visions, together producing complex ‘entan- improvements, such as reducing densities, glements’ of competing spatial projects, installing inside toilets and repairing dilapida- which require disentangling if we are to tion. This was later to become the blueprint uncover the ways in which power works to for the rehabilitation approach to regener- produce space. The following historical ation, fervently supported by the 1973–83 analysis of the production of Granby in Liberal council administrations and delivered Liverpool explores such entanglements. by the city’s growing housing association sector (Holmes 2005). However, SNAP ran against the grain of Tracing the (social and abstract) conventional thinking on urban renewal, production of Granby, Liverpool operating in only one small corner of the Granby Planning Action Area, with the Despite its uniqueness as perhaps the most remainder still earmarked for clearance and multicultural and ethnically diverse area of redevelopment (see Figure 1). The local Liverpool—home to one of the oldest and Labour Party had controlled council policy most established black communities in from 1955 until 1973, during which they Britain—Granby’s historical trajectory is an pursued a large-scale demolition and council extreme example of Liverpool’s economic house-building programme known as the fate. Once a very prosperous quarter of mer- ‘Slum Clearance Programme’—reflecting chant and artisan houses fronting tree-lined similar policies across the UK in the post-

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 streets and grand boulevards, the area had war period (Cole 2012). As late as 1966, the by the 1960s accrued a reputation for crime, council decided to clear 78,000 houses it vandalism and squalor (Merrifield 2002; deemed unfit for human habitation, mostly Beckett 2015). Liverpool City Council in the inner-city ring of Victorian terraces. efforts to regenerate the area were hindered SNAP was caught up in a battle with the by poor communications with residents, council to prevent further clearances, yet its made difficult by deprivation, transience, funds and project boundaries were delimited. the predominance of private tenants renting Within the wider Granby Planning Action off small-time absentee landlords and the Area, SNAP covered only its southern hostility provoked by the threat of demoli- corner, known as the Granby Triangle. tion imposed by the post-war ‘slum clearance The slum clearance programme—as a state programme’ (Hook 1970). In response, the technology of abstraction—reveals what council set up Granby Planning Action Lefebvre saw to be the fundamental violence Area and invited Shelter, the recently of abstract space. Where Marx saw the THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 109 Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017

Figure 1 Map of main clearance areas in Granby, 1969–70, with SNAP marked as ‘L’ (Source: McConaghy 1972, 62; permission to reproduce here courtesy of Shelter: www.shelter.org.uk). 110 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

actions of labourers in specific industries Second, symbolic violence—difference- abstracted into quantitatively equivalent through-sameness—has been incurred by units of abstract labour-time to be traded as the operation of monolithic urban renewal, money, Lefebvre revealed analogously how as a technology of abstract space, which for abstraction divides urban space into rational- Lefebvre (1991) ised parcels or plots, alienated from lived ‘Destroys the historical conditions that gave context. Just as commodity fetishism con- rise to it, its own (internal) differences, and ceals the violence carried out on producers any such differences that show signs of in the enforced expropriation of their developing, in order to impose an abstract labour, so too is violence performed by homogeneity.’ (370) abstract space on people and place. Lefebvre (1991, 289) goes so far as to suggest that Granby’s council-led redevelopments involved ‘there is a violence intrinsic to abstraction’. the total erasure of existing 19th-century street Violence in abstraction begins with the act patterns, replaced by identikit suburban of subsumption—subsuming disparate pro- designs, with blocks arranged in internally cesses and heterogeneous things into hom- facing culs-de-sac. With little coherence or leg- ogenous abstractions or signs (Jameson ibility in either building design or road layout, 2015). This involves the necessary exclusion the surrounding area has lost much of its of some aspects of reality. This rather abstract unique urban identity, and appears sharply at sense of violence takes on real power in the odds with the original four streets remaining historical–material production of space. In of the Granby Triangle (see Figures 2 and 3). his account of an ‘actually existing abstract A local architect describes the result as a space’ in Mexico, Wilson (2013b) represents ‘history lesson in all the bad architecture of abstract space as three forms of violence: the last 30 years’ (Interview 2014). At the risk first, direct violence, such as state power of romanticising the terraces, it must be deployed on citizens in enforced displace- remembered that they too are a concrete ment; second, symbolic violence, the subtle expression of abstract space, built by speculat- homogenisation, flattening or simplifying of ive builders to house migrant workers, often in lived meanings by the domination of logics appalling conditions, and arranged in abstract of equivalence, accumulation, quantification grid-like street patterns, with standardised and bureaucracy; and third, structural vio- ‘back-to-back’ housing designs. There was a lence, the socio-economic structural reason why it was called the slum clearance dynamics of capitalism, embodied through programme: many of these houses lacked impositions of grids and systems through basic modern facilities like hot water and which exchange value flows. inside toilets. In many respects, then, the

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 We can see this three-fold violence of council was enlightened in its reformist deter- abstract space enacted in Liverpool from the mination to upgrade insanitary living con- slum clearances to more contemporary inter- ditions with modern housing, but whose ventions. First, direct violence is evident in methods of implementation leant too heavily the displacement and breaking up of commu- on abstract rationality, with too often violent nities necessitated by the slum clearance pro- implications. gramme. Some estimates put the number of However, such streets quickly became residents decanted from Liverpool’s inner home to densely woven networks of city to the new towns and outer estates as families, friends and neighbours who high as 160,000 (Sykes et al. 2013). Liverpool’s forged communal ties and created rich comprehensive urban renewal has been social space out of the deleterious material described by Lane (1997,140)as‘asortof environment. Destroying such a delicate latter-day urban equivalent of the Highland social fabric through comprehensive redeve- clearances of several hundred years ago’. lopment was a directly, as well as THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 111 Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017

Figure 2 The stark reality of neighbourhood decline in Granby (Source: Author’s own photographs, 2014).

symbolically, violent act—replacing social ‘Liverpool ... has suffered two blitzes in the space with an abstract space of homo- last 30 years. The first left the whole city geneous housing estates. This goes to show ruined but defiant. The second has picked off that, while social space remains vulnerable areas with equally devastating results. The to conquest by abstract space, so too can new enemy is faceless.’ (Merseyside Socialist Research Group 1980, 67) abstract space be colonised by social space. Third, for the most damning critics, the Despite such strong language, these critics are clearances amounted to a kind of structural nonetheless adamant that the local state is violence, a tragic repeat of the Second not, ultimately, to blame for the devastation; World War Blitz: 112 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

(Sykes et al. 2013). The combined effects tipped some neighbourhoods into a vicious spiral of decline: unemployment, depopula- tion, housing vacancy, dereliction, crime and social unrest. This structural form of vio- lence indirectly enacted by post-war planning in combination with socio-economic forces was to hit Granby especially hard (Figure 2).

Urban regeneration in a SNAP!

Figure 3 Identikit HMR housing replacing Victorian and It was into this context of the violent abstrac- Georgian terraces in the Granby Triangle. tion of the slum clearances and structural economic decline that SNAP was mobilised as an alternative method of regeneration rather, the ‘new enemy is faceless’—the aiming to renew social space. SNAP was impersonal, structural logic of abstract intended as a rehab alternative to demolition; space. These public policy mistakes were yet the idea was to go deeper than mere phys- not conscious attacks, intentionally carried ical upgrading: to work closely with existing out by planners, but rather enactments of residents to satisfy needs and make lasting the faceless, modernist ‘analytic spirit’ of improvements in health, welfare and employ- the post-war period (Lefebvre 1991, 307– ment. A local office for SNAP workers— 308). composed of architects, housing managers According to some critics, Liverpool’s and even a sociologist—was opened ‘on- modernist comprehensive renewal pro- site’ in Granby, allowing direct contact with grammes amounted to ‘major self-inflicted residents. This was a forward-thinking public policy mistakes’, which compounded move for regeneration policy towards more seismic economic shifts to create the ‘perfect social space-making, but one which also storm’ for a vicious cycle of decline (Sykes blurred the boundaries between professional et al. 2013, 307). In the mid-20th century, experts and resident-users, complicating the Liverpool witnessed the destruction of its neat distinction between conceived/abstract maritime base due to global economic and lived/social space. restructuring leaving the city ‘marooned on Many of these SNAP professionals became the wrong side of the country’ (Lane 1997, co-op activists in developing the country’s 46). The consequences were devastating, Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 first rehab housing cooperatives in 1972 and especially for the inner-city dockside neigh- the first secondary co-op support agency to bourhoods, so dependent on jobs associated service them; in turn inspiring a city-wide with the docks. Liverpool’s population movement of some 50 co-ops, as an alterna- halved from over 800,000 in the post-war tive system of public housing based on collec- period to just over 400,000 in 2000 (Cocks tive dweller control (Thompson 2016). More and Couch 2012); around three quarters of directly, SNAP initiated the organisation of the docklands population were lost, leaving street committees elected by residents. Task up to 60% unemployment rates for those forces were organised as discussion groups left behind (Lane 1997, 126). Much of this on each subject reflecting local concerns, was voluntary migration, as people left in such as housing, health and crime, and their search of work, but an estimated 160,000 findings were incorporated in the SNAP people were displaced to the metropolitan final report to the council (McConaghy periphery by the slum clearance programme 1972). THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 113

One of the task forces set up by SNAP to had severe repercussions for the vitality of encourage resident control over the planning the area in the long run. process was tasked with transportation and Significantly, clearance area ‘A’ (Figure 1) traffic. Prior to SNAP, the council had com- was to prove especially damaging to the mitted to a plan for the construction of a future of the area, in ways which combined major distributor road to connect the problematically with SNAP Task Force southern suburbs with the city centre, traffic calming measures. In order to build running right through the heart of Granby. the new housing estate in conventional This would have left the grand boulevard of 1970s layout, the top end of Granby Street Princes Avenue ludicrously under-utilised was built over, and cut short from connecting as the ‘widest pedestrian walkway in to the major arterial road, effectively severing Britain’ (McConaghy 1972, 97), bulldozed the main shopping street of Granby from its properties, divided Granby in two and dis- vital connection with the city centre. With placed many residents to new-build estates. the state acting here to undermine rather This example captures the violent power of than enhance spatial flows—seemingly abstract space: counter to the logic of abstract space—this demonstrates the limits of a Lefebvrean ‘In order to dominate space, technology analysis in interpreting state technocracy introduces a new form into a pre-existing simply as its lever. The state is not reducible space—generally a rectilinear or rectangular to abstract space and serves multiple rational- form such as a meshwork or chequerwork. ities—some, it seems, less rational than A motorway brutalizes the countryside and others. the land, slicing through space like a great knife. Dominated space is usually closed, When coupled with SNAP’s choice to sterilized, emptied out.’ (Lefebvre 1991, block Granby Street’s southern entrance 165) too, this dubious decision created a stagnant dead-end road without the throughflow— One of Lefebvre’s (1991, 381–382) examples pedestrian, car or bus—that had once sus- of practical ‘counter-projects’ mobilised tained it as a vibrant district shopping against abstract space to protect social space artery. In his political analyses of Granby, is ‘when a community fights the construction Andy Merrifield (1996, 2002) recalls Jane of urban motorways or housing develop- Jacobs’ prescription of an active and busy ments’. We can see this in the SNAP Task ‘street ballet’ in which many eyes-on-the- Force’s opposition to the urban motorway street provide the best form of safety and and their successful campaign for a compro- self-policing. Residents certainly got a much mise solution avoiding Granby altogether. quieter and safer street in pushing for culs-

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 However, the experience of being threatened de-sac, but by the late 1980s the area had by increased traffic throughflow of the once again become a hotspot for crime, para- highway scheme stimulated resident fears doxically encouraged by the cul-de-sac bol- that their neighbourhood would be overrun lards, preventing a vibrant street ballet of by traffic. Moreover, Granby was historically passers-by. Granby Street was finally a locus of kerb-crawling and crime (Hook opened up at the junction with Princes 1970). Residents understandably wanted to Avenue in 1993 but ‘until then, the street stem this flow of unwanted activity and so had been blocked off, and the social isolation Task Force representatives decided on a seemed to be perpetuated by its physical iso- traffic management scheme that blocked off lation and fortress-like quality’ (Merrifield the ends of most outwardly connecting 2002, 58). streets (McConaghy 1972). The resulting By the 1980s, Granby had effectively cul-de-sac layout did indeed resolve these become ‘Liverpool’s ghetto’ (Beckett 2015). issues in the short term, but unfortunately According to the 1981 census, 40% of men 114 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

in Granby ward were jobless (Beckett 2015); remaining terraces in Granby today as high as 90% for black teenagers (Merrifield mapping almost perfectly onto the original 2002). The coincidence of unemployment and SNAP boundaries. These four streets at the poverty with certain ethnic and demographic bottom of the Granby Triangle were to groups, notably young black men, had severe become the centre of a long-standing struggle repercussions when in 1981 rioting erupted in by residents to save the area from successive response to police brutality and racial dis- waves of demolition, after rehab had passed crimination against the local black commu- out of the policy limelight (see Merrifield nity, the longest established in the UK. 1996, 2002 for a detailed account). Not only Ironically, bollarding had another function did SNAP save several streets from demoli- unforeseen by the SNAP Task Force: not tion but also cultivated a culture of empower- only helping keep crime and kerb-crawling ment and hope that would resurface several out—albeit displacing it elsewhere—but also decades later as resistance to the next wave helping police contain urban unrest as an of demolition plans. Collective action anti-riot tool for ‘kettling’, along with the against displacement evolved into one of the so-called ‘riot hills’, installed on some of the country’s first urban CLTs—christened cleared housing sites (Hughes 2015). Granby Four Streets CLT—to rehabilitate Since then, Granby has been marked by empty homes for local use under collective territorial stigma, dissuading many prospec- ownership (Thompson 2015). At the same tive tenants from moving in, contributing to time, however, by continually stalling and the growing problem of depopulation and preventing council plans, anti-demolition low demand, with ‘hard-to-let’ properties campaigning led to a deadlock in decision- falling into disrepair. The once bustling making, leaving the area in a kind of purga- Granby Street became almost entirely tory, with counterintuitive consequences for vacant and derelict, its Post Office closing the development of a new policy approach in 1994 owing to successive hold-ups. The geared more than ever towards abstraction. area has also suffered from ’redlining’ prac- tices, not unlike those analysed by Aalbers (2014) in US cities; and neglect in basic LIFE in a ZOO public services such as street lighting, clean- ing and rubbish collection, coupled with It was the council’s difficult experience of inaction over regeneration, which many resi- working in neighbourhoods like Granby dents suspect to be intentional ‘managed that led to a game-changing policy for bring- decline’ dished out by the council as ‘punish- ing clearer leadership and greater coordi- ment’ for the 1981 Uprising (Interviews nation in addressing such complicated

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 2014). However, the contributory factors of regeneration dilemmas. The Liberal Demo- Granby’s decline are multiple and complex, crats took council control from Labour in fundamentally deriving from Liverpool’s 1998 and initiated a new Housing Strategy economic problems but also rooted in legisla- to bring about more coordinated collabor- tive changes at the national level, such as the ation between council departments, housing 1988 Housing Act, removing government associations, developers and communities; funding for rehabilitation, and placing creating more joined-up strategic regener- increasing commercial pressures on public ation in contexts where multiple tenures, housing providers, gradually privatised as owners and interests overlap, collide and con- market actors (Hodkinson 2012). flict to create the sort of stalemate reached in Although SNAP may have adversely con- Granby (Inside Housing Awards 2004). First, tributed to this decline, its enduring effects stock transfer to housing associations was as a spatial project, long after the programme promoted as the ‘only realistic option’ ended in 1972, is encapsulated in the only (Richard Kemp, then Executive Member for THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 115

Housing, quoted in Holmes 2005, 131). for housing associations, inspired by SNAP; Second, the ‘LIFE model’ rationalised later given coherence as a joined-up policy inner-city neighbourhoods into five distinct initiative in the Liverpool Strategic Housing zones, or ‘areas of opportunity’, and assigned Partnership and the LIFE model (Holmes one lead housing association to each (Inside 2005). On the flipside, it was the GIA Housing Awards 2004). policy of the Liberal council that proved par- Under the LIFE model, each housing ticularly favourable to the development of association would assign itself a clearly rehabilitation housing co-ops, which went defined role within each area, following L- on to inspire a politically radical and socially I-F-E: Lead in an area; Influence what empowering new-build co-op movement, in happens; Follow by collaborating with which working-class member-residents had others; or Exit where presence is minimal the chance to collectively design, develop, (Holmes 2005). In Granby, as for the entire own and manage their homes for the first L8 postal district, Plus Dane became the time in their family history (Thompson Lead association, and began developing 2016). This is abstraction counterintuitively plans for holistic neighbourhood manage- creating the conditions for social space- ment, working more closely with the makers. council to plan redevelopment. Winning an Crafted out of GIA precedent, in response Inside Housing award in 2004, the rationale to growing neighbourhood regeneration of the LIFE model was that: deadlock, the LIFE model in turn con- structed the operational muscle tissue ready ‘Without [it], the council, private developers to be fully flexed once HMR funding was and other partners would have had to consult, secured. Liverpool led a group of northern negotiate and collaborate with around 40 city councils to lobby central government associations operating across the market for funding intervention in ‘failing’ housing renewal pathfinder area. Residents and other markets (Interviews 2014). Early research stakeholders would be confused by the range of partners and effective delivery of the reports (Nevin et al. 1999) commissioned by programme could be hampered.’ (Liverpool Liverpool Council recommended that Liver- Council’s group manager for neighbourhood pool’s inner city could be a pilot for govern- services, quoted in Inside Housing Awards ment funding of housing market 2004) restructuring, becoming one of the largest recipients when HMR Pathfinders were The LIFE model was thus a rather rational launched nationally in 2002 (Cocks and response to the confusion of too many Couch 2012). agencies operating in one area, duplicating The rationale for HMR was radical in its processes. Yet the irony of naming a techno-

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 multi-scalar focus on regional market cratic spatial policy ‘LIFE’—a tool of restructuring, bringing together and rationa- abstract space designed to rationalise lived lising the confusing number of previous and space—seems lost on policymakers; just as ongoing area-based initiatives in a similar the symbolic significance of ‘ZOO’ would vein to LIFE. Once given the green light, likewise later elude HMR’s architects. Liverpool was in the perfect position to hit The LIFE model is where the logic behind the ground running. The five ‘areas of oppor- HMR Pathfinders seems partly to derive. The tunity’ formatted by the LIFE model were impetus for strategic demolition-and-rebuild translated into the four Zones of Opportu- schemes in large-scale zones of empty nity distinctive to Liverpool’s HMR Pathfin- homes was already beginning to emerge in der, unwittingly creating a problematic Liverpool Council thinking as far back as metaphor in the acronym ZOO, within the early 1970s, with the creation of mon- which many people still lived. In order to opoly General Improvement Areas (GIAs) identify specific areas ripe for intervention, 116 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

researchers constructed indicators of decline, Indeed, assets of architectural and social value abstracted from international academic data, remaining in these cordoned off areas have from which to ‘rate’ different areas based on been described as ‘collateral damage’ by a their relative popularity and projected sus- politically prominent proponent of HMR tainability (Nevin et al. 1999)—creating an (Interview 2013). According to one regener- abstract model of ‘neighbourhood viability’ ation consultant, these zones were treated linked to capacity to generate exchange not as lived spaces but as abstract sites in a value (Webb 2012). Affected communities ‘chessboard’ of strategic land parcels, to be were not invited to contribute to this stripped bare of residents and packaged up problem definition process, and so the evi- for redevelopment, so the Pathfinder partner- dence for this intervention was drawn pri- ship may ‘shift pieces around’ to be activated marily from only those abstract at different stages according to changing ‘representations of space’ conceived by pol- dynamics of market profitability and resident icymakers and researchers. To get ‘objective’ opposition (Interview 2013). This was the evidence on what type of houses to build, start of the abstract monolithic one-size- HMR policymakers conducted surveys with fits-all approach that characterised HMR, their target consumer population, those which has faced sustained academic critique middle-class residents currently living in for excluding residents from the decision- affluent suburbs (Webb 2012). Their making process, with no resident represen- responses were unsurprisingly in favour of tation on the governing board of stakeholders the kind of suburban housing they lived in: (Cole 2012); and as a form of state-led gentri- arranged in culs-de-sac with gardens and fication or symbolic violence, erasing garage space for a car to commute into the working-class lived space for an aspirational city (Figure 3). ‘space of positions’, radically transforming Following the LIFE logic, the HMR Path- place in the image of a target middle-class finder appointed a single preferred housing population, attracted through an improved association and developer for each ZOO to ‘residential offer’, thereby marginalising carry out refurbishment and rebuild plans in alternative ways of valuing housing as smaller-scale renewal areas (Liverpool City shelter or belonging (Allen 2008). Council 2003). These renewal areas—or In spending public funds to transfer land to ‘regeneration zones’—covered large areas of private developers and quasi-privatised land, encompassing residential blocks, includ- housing associations to profit from the sale ing housing worth saving, in order to create of new homes, HMR has been framed as large enough ‘land banks’ and economies of ‘accumulation-by-dispossession’, part of the scale for profitable redevelopment by the ‘new urban enclosures’ eating into public

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 Pathfinder partners. The centralised systema- housing (Hodkinson 2012). HMR Pathfinders tic and large-scale approach of the British have been characterised as ‘grant regimes’ housing development industry means that (Cocks and Couch 2012) which lobby for developers will only take on land for redeve- state funding to dispossess residents from lopment above a certain spatial scale, which their homes—through compulsory purchase when combined with the ZOO/LIFE model orders (CPOs) and tenancy evictions with in Liverpool HMR delivery, leads to a ques- meagre compensation—and then revalorise tionable approach akin to the land through demolition-and-rebuild so that regime partners may pocket the difference ‘Pulling out all teeth and replacing them with in value from the ‘rent gap’. Indeed, an uncon- dentures even if only a few teeth show signs of caries, rather than keeping and repairing all scious recognition of the violence played out teeth as long as possible by fillings or root in accumulative asset-stripping is expressed canal treatments.’ (Schulze Ba¨ing 2014) in the standardised signs put up on CPO’d THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 117

Figure 4 ‘All items of value have been removed from this property’: a familiar sign of asset-stripping in HMR areas—in Anfield (left) and Granby (right) (Source: Author’s own photographs).

properties in HMR zones to dissuade thieves many believed the council was needlessly and squatters (Figure 4). demolishing good housing as part of the The boundaries of these renewal areas large-scale zoning conditions required by within the five ZOOs were marked by ‘wel- the Pathfinder partners for profitable devel- coming’ signs repeated across the city in the opment; or else was part of a long-term puni- same generic format (Figure 5). This is tive strategy for the 1981 Uprising and abstract space at its most transparent, subsequent anti-demolition campaigning revealed in the tagline ‘creating neighbour- (Interviews 2014). Having evicted most hoods for the future’, as if to emphasise remaining public tenants from housing these neighbourhoods are not for current association stock before its transfer into users but rather end-users in some distant council ownership for consolidation, only future. Paradoxically, ‘creating’ suggests an those defiant homeowners—those with the active doing in the present—it assures us security of tenure and increasingly embattled action is happening right now—but with an and passionate commitments to place— ever-receding time horizon, existing in the remained to resist HMR. abstract, as an indeterminate vision. The council had for years tried to buy out these homeowners with arguments about the structural condition of properties, Structurally or politically unsound? deemed unsafe for inhabitation. One

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 common argument was that the bay Many residents of the Granby Triangle were windows—striking architectural features of glad to move out of their crumbling homes larger properties—were coming away from and into housing newly built by HMR; the wall and ‘structurally unsound’ (Inter- others were not. Popular opinion was often views 2014). Official surveys recommended more favourable than critical commentaries that these bays be pulled down and bricked suggest. In Anfield for instance—an in, but residents sought an independent ex-HMR neighbourhood now home to assessment, which advised the bays could Liverpool’s other successful urban CLT, indeed be ‘tied-in’, thereby saving the Homebaked—demolition was supported by houses and confirming suspicions that the some 90% of the local community (Ellis council was bent on demolition. One of the and Henderson 2013). In Granby, however, most dramatic confrontations came in 2011 the building stock was generally perceived when residents engaged in picketing and as much higher architectural quality, and direct action to blockade Cairns Street with 118 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2 Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017

Figure 5 Indicative signs heralding the boundaries of regeneration zones (Source: Author’s own photographs).

cars against approaching bulldozers. They spirit of resistance. The council eventually alerted the local press so that the resulting earmarked the end two houses of Cairns stand-off was reported (Duffy 2011); a suc- Street, to be demolished and rebuilt. Resi- cessful strategy that further galvanised the dents organised a peaceful protest as THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 119

contractors began scaffolding. Despite Plus Dane completed after HMR funding modest numbers—around 20 residents— was withdrawn by the incoming Coalition their sustained picketing using megaphones, Government. This, then, is a concrete banners and placards successfully prevented example of how abstract space ‘asphyxiates contractors from entering the houses to whatever is conceived within it and then carry out demolition; attracting good cover- strives to emerge’ (Lefebvre 1991, 370). age in the Liverpool Echo (Duffy 2011; Violence is central to HMR, as a technol- Stewart 2011). Some activists super-glued ogy of abstract space. A long-standing resi- locks shut and painted scaffolding with dent-activist describes the actions of a state- ‘anti-vandal paint’: an ironic signifier of hired private contractor: ‘civic vandalism’ (Interviews 2014). But the builders ultimately beat them to it, arriving ‘As soon as people left they bricked them up before sunrise to begin stripping out from the inside, so if you looked from the interiors, causing structural damage to an street they had all this oozing kind of adjoining property scheduled for refurbish- concrete, then they walked outside and smashed all the windows, leaving you with ment. A council spokesperson dismissed it jaggy bits of glass.’ (Interview 2014) as ‘unfortunate’ collateral damage (Stewart 2011). Residents accused the builders of The violence enacted was most acute in intentionally damaging the structure to instances where, particularly reported in leave no choice but demolition. Anfield, the bricking up of houses was Such underhand practices of invoking— initiated on the same day evicted residents and performing—structural damage to make moved out their belongings (Interviews the case for the bulldozer is a familiar story. 2015). By bricking up the windows, the con- Activists witnessed contractors throwing tractors were able to secure against crime, bricks through wooden floors to ‘test their squatting and the elements houses which strength’, collapsing into cellars, thereby were already in a dangerous state of disrepair helping bring about the very degradation through wilful neglect (Figure 6). But to they were employed to prevent (Interviews remaining residents it revealed the assump- 2014). Shortly before their dissolution, the tions made about their neighbourhood, left Granby Residents’ Association were told by in a visually vandalised condition as a scar the council that their base in a disused office for the community to daily endure: on one of the corner buildings on Granby Street was likewise structurally unsafe; they ‘I think it shows that you actually despise the were consequently evicted, leaving them people who are living there, that you don’t without a headquarters from which to plan even rate them as fully human; because it’s

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 anti-demolition campaigns. Incidentally, this what you’d do if there was nobody there isn’t is the building that SNAP had originally reha- it? It’s what you’d do if it was like an old bilitated from a ruin into the Granby Centre, military site say, or somewhere that nobody with various functions as a community lived.’ (Interview 2014) anchor over the years, and later a neighbour- hood police station, known locally as the In some sense, this is a ‘concrete abstraction’ ‘cop shop’ (Interviews 2014). Residents (Lefebvre 1991). The concept of abstract believe the council’s reason to be a patent lie space is seen by Łukasz Stanek (2008) as ana- to suppress any possible resistance to demoli- logous to Marx’s concept of ‘concrete tion plans; a suspicion confirmed when the abstraction’: labour as an ‘abstraction which very same office in the cop shop was later became true in practice’ (Marx, quoted in offered as a base, without any extra work to Stanek 2008, 62). Just as money is the con- make it safe, to the builders working on the crete abstraction of labour, so too are phys- redevelopment of Beaconsfield Street, which ical spaces of regulation, quantification and 120 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

Figure 6 Subversive art in Granby Four Streets (Source: Author’s own photographs, 2014).

circulation—property plots, suburban and security and bureaucratic rationalisation, sprawl, pre-fab tower blocks, distribution disregarding aesthetic and psycho-social channels, containerised ports, communi- effects on existing residents, who, unsurpris- cation networks—the concrete abstractions ingly, refer to the programme as ‘living of abstract space. Thus, the meaning of through Hell’ (Interviews 2014). abstract space as a ‘concrete abstraction’ is In direct response to the bricking up of twofold: the concrete transformation of ‘voids’, residents subverted these images of material space in terms of abstract represen- violence through artistic expression—colour- tations; and the subtler infusion of social ful pigeons perched on window ledges to space with the abstract sense of value as an brighten up the bleak view; pointing to an objective equivalent. This latter sense is alternative vision of new life emerging out evoked in the HMR signs exclaiming ‘all of the cracks of abstract space. They also items of value have been removed’ (Figure boarded over some of the more prominent 4). In the former sense, the abstract space of window infills, emblazoning them with mess- HMR logic is made concrete in the hostile ages of hope, resilience and play (Figure 7). homogeneity of Granby’s grey breeze- These symbols hint at the creative use of blocked windows and in the negative public space and acts of ‘commoning’ going impacts on residents (Figure 6). on in Granby (Thompson 2015). Encoura- Such a violent approach to securing empty ging collective encounter, festivity and the properties nonetheless appears in accordance carnivalesque, they are tentative micro- with council guidelines in the ‘Living expressions of the jouissance of differential Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 Through Change’ programme for HMR space (Merrifield 1995). delivery. This aimed ‘to make clearance areas and their surrounding area, safe, secure, clean and well managed’, through Granby CLT: finishing the work that SNAP what was called ‘Target Hardening’, ‘fitting started extra security measures (i.e. doors, locks, etc.) to occupied properties and around the Since 2011, a loose alliance of social space- clearance areas’; and ‘Enhanced Void Secur- makers—resident-activists, social financiers ity’, ‘ensuring that empty properties are and radical architects—has formed around appropriately secured to reduce the risk of the shared vision of establishing a CLT, as vandalism and anti-social behaviour’ (Liver- an institutional vehicle to drive forward com- pool City Council 2007, 28). This impersonal munity-led rehabilitation rather than demoli- and technocratic language emphasises safety tion, for the common ownership of land and THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 121

Figure 7 Resisting the symbolic violence of abstract space (Source: Author’s own photographs).

democratic management of perpetually CLT-owned house whilst they work with affordable homes for local people. This has residents to complete the renovations. With grown organically from a guerrilla gardening such obvious spatial, ideological and histori- project transforming the dereliction into a cal connections, it is no wonder that leading public street garden, host to a popular CLT activists have begun reading the original monthly street market. Such creative re- SNAP report (McConaghy 1972) as a rich appropriations of neglected land for commu- repository of historical evidence and source nity use are attempts to reclaim social space of inspiration. Positioning the CLT as its from the abstract space of comprehensive contemporary heir, they believe they are ‘fin- redevelopment—forms of ‘commoning’ that ishing the work that SNAP started’ (Inter- work between the legal and spatial bound- view 2015). aries of abstract space to re-imagine and And just like SNAP, the CLT is riven with perform social space (Thompson 2015). contradictions. In 2015, Granby CLT became The CLT has recently been successful in the first ever community-led housing project, acquiring 10 properties from the council, and Assemble the first ever architectural with their vision for the entire neighbour- design studio, to win or indeed be nominated hood adopted by development partners, for a national art award (Thompson 2016). Plus Dane and Liverpool Mutual Homes. This has brought a huge amount of unex- The complex and contradictory struggle to pected publicity upon which Assemble and develop the CLT—to secure community CLT activists have capitalised, starting a mandate, find funding, convince the council social enterprise, the Granby Workshop to transfer public assets and develop (Figure 8). This specialises in the very Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 designs—has been documented in detail else- business of the regeneration process, employ- where (Thompson 2015). Of interest here are ing some 14 local people with paid positions the continuities and parallels between the to design and make furniture, housing fix- CLT campaign and SNAP, which maps tures and architectural features, using directly onto, and first saved, the Granby reclaimed materials recycled from the CLT Four Streets from demolition. Both spear- houses (Thompson 2016). Whilst pointing in headed a radically participatory, hands-on, a promising new direction for the neighbour- immersive and holistic approach to neigh- hood—creating much-needed economic bourhood regeneration. Building on the activity, whose surpluses will largely be SNAP idea for an on-site office, the CLT’s reinvested in further regeneration—this also architects—a collective of do-it-yourself highlights the dependency of social space on innovators from London, called Assemble— abstract spaces of global exchange: The have been living with the community in a Granby Workshop is selling products 122 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2 Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017

Figure 8 Assemble member, Lewis, being interviewed by a German film crew in the Granby Workshop (top); and Leroy Cooper, a well-known long-standing Granby resident likewise caught on camera at a Cairns Street Market (bottom).

around the world on the back of its Turner Granby has in many ways become a ‘zoo’ Prize fame, thereby commodifying the once more—though a different kind of zoo: project, even the neighbourhood itself. a Debordian ‘spectacle’. Indeed, the THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 123

neighbourhood is at risk of being repackaged the viability and legitimacy of community for consumption by gentrifiers, tourists and ownership via the CLT. But the ways in international researchers; residents have long which abstract tools are used in each complained of ‘researcher fatigue’. Most approach differs markedly: whilst HMR recently, Granby has won more attention as bricks up and suffocates social space with a finalist in the 2016 UN-BSHF World concrete abstractions—sometimes quite lit- Habitat Awards. This process of being erally—CLT campaigners are working in, plugged into global circuits of (cultural) with and against abstract space to build a capital was accelerated by the Turner Prize more convivial space based on use values. victory. The question remains whether all Although Lefebvre (1991), and by exten- those residents left outside of the limelight sion Aalbers (2006, 2014), provides a neat cast by Assemble feel quite so victorious? heuristic of ideal-type actors in the pro- When not so long ago it was unthinkable to duction of space, this historical case illustrates residents, there is now the very real prospect how social reality is far more complex and of gentrification, whereby a colonising group contradictory than this simple opposition of design professionals recreate the habitus between abstract and social, conceived and of the neighbourhood in their own image. lived, space suggests. The struggle between The true promise, therefore, of the CLT these two visions is always unfinished, open- model—as a performative tool of social ended and complex; reproducing space and space—is to mitigate against this risk with creating new conditions for different spatial institutional covenants to protect affordable projects, in ways which clash, cooperate or housing for local people in perpetuity, made interlock to produce unexpected results— accountable by democratic governance. How what Lombard (2014) describes as ‘entangle- well this works in practice remains to be seen. ments’ of power. We might, then, elaborate Madden’s (2014) notion of neighbourhood as an unfinished spatial project by emphasising Conclusion: disentangling the (social) the messy and contradictory crossovers and production of (abstract) space combinations between various interest groups, with finely shaded orientations This paper has shown how the LIFE and towards abstract and social space, each con- ZOO models had ‘performative’, and taining potentials for the other. violent, impacts on Granby’s urban environ- In showing how HMR, and the post-war ment and inhabitants, just as Christophers comprehensive redevelopment that preceded (2014) and Aalbers (2014) have demonstrated it, embodied and violently enacted abstract for planning policies elsewhere. The abstract space, I do not mean to imply that the

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 logic of these programmes materialised in direct and symbolic violence incurred in monolithic development zones, the destruc- Granby was intentionally directed or con- tion of architecturally valuable housing, the sciously performed by policymakers and Target Hardening and breeze-blocking of development actors. I simply suggest that voids delivered through the ‘Living the ‘analytic spirit’ through which these pol- Through Hell’ programme—yet also icies were conceived and operated had violent spurred some residents on towards alterna- implications: that, pace Lefebvre and by tive spatial projects. These anti-demolition extension Wilson (2013a), this violence is an activists are now beginning to ‘perform’ a intrinsic facet of abstraction, but which is new kind of social space, by utilising the reproduced by social space-makers too. language and tools of abstraction—master- Seeing the issue as one of the dominance of plans, business plans, costings, building abstract space, and the insidious logic of models—to convince gatekeepers, notably abstraction working its way through the the council and national funding bodies, of models, plans and approaches of abstract 124 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

and social space-makers alike—albeit more Granby’s sister and Liverpool’s only other predominant in the former—allows us to successful CLT project to date, Homebaked move on from a crude ‘blame game’ in Anfield, mirrors this trend—driven by towards understanding the complex systemic artists from the get-go, and funded by the processes and often perverse incentive struc- Liverpool Biennial arts festival—raising pro- tures influencing individual actions at work blematic questions around the role of art, cul- in the production of neighbourhood. tural capital and social class in regeneration. In this light, often counterintuitive out- In constructing these spaces as artworks to comes can be seen to result from the decisions be collectively crafted, experienced and then of well-intentioned projects aiming for inclus- consumed in popular, architectural and aca- ive and participatory social space. We can see demic press, do we not risk aestheticising pol- this (social) production of (abstract) space in itical issues; demeaning the long hard struggle the SNAP Task Force’s bollarding off of of social space-making; fetishising as a Granby, cutting vital throughflow sustaining product the deeply embedded social process the neighbourhood. The social space-making of regeneration? In reifying these projects as of SNAP, then, has had both progressive and outstanding one-of-a-kind artistic creations, regressive effects on the production of space: do we not place them in a bubble of excep- saving Granby from demolition; initiating tion, depoliticising their power to contest the co-op movement; inspiring new demo- abstract space by boxing them off as unthrea- cratic planning practices among local tening spectacles? Their categorisation as ‘art’ housing associations; sowing seeds for the certainly problematises identification as pro- CLT vision—but also contributing to the gressive social space—progressive for who area’s isolation and socio-economic decline. exactly? We can also see this in the genesis of the mono- Invited to write in a special edition of Liver- lithic logic of ZOOs in the LIFE model, pool Biennial’s online journal, Mitchell (2014, whose roots in turn can be traced back to 5) situates Homebaked CLT—equally appli- SNAP and to the Liberal council’s GIA cable to Granby—alongside May 1968 and zones for rehabilitation, which helped bring Occupy, within the radical tradition of Liverpool’s housing co-op movement as well urban occupation and anti-capitalist struggle. as the LIFE model into being. Successful He suggests that ‘Homebaked [CLT] and resistance against successive regeneration pro- Co-operative Bakery Anfield are just as thril- grammes inspired by SNAP created a dead- ling as the example of the neighbourhood park lock in decision-making and provoked more forums that developed across Turkey after extreme state-led solutions. This reveals how Taksim Square was cleared out’ because they progressive spatial projects can, through

Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 myriad historical connections, inadvertently ‘Show that urban space can be collectively contribute to the expansion of abstract space. taken and collectively remade, that use can Lastly, the social space produced by the dominate exchange, that our fate is not Granby CLT spatial project—for all its necessarily a fate written by the tendency achievements in eschewing the monolithic towards abstract space in capitalism.’ and technocratic abstraction of comprehen- sive redevelopment for a more experimental, Mitchell sees projects like Homebaked and democratic, holistic and socially responsive Granby CLT as oppositional to abstract approach—is nonetheless implicated in the space, and believes the trick to undermining production of abstract space. The ZOO of its dominance lies not with confrontational HMR has been replaced by a different kind power, as classical Marxists hold, but rather of zoo—a ‘spectacle’ of media-friendly arts- through a kind of anti-power, slowly reveal- led regeneration, inserting Granby into ing the true source of its energy, the labour global circuits of cultural consumption. of the multitude: THOMPSON: LIFE IN A ZOO 125

‘But here’s the secret: [...] the tendency comments on earlier drafts, and the anonymous towards abstract space, requires an enormous reviewers for their challenging critical feedback. amount of work, both to push it forward and to maintain the actual space—the exchangeable space—that results. [...] Any Disclosure statement system so reliant on the labour of multitudes in order to support an image of naturalness is No potential conflict of interest was reported by the eminently interruptible.’ author.

Mitchell’s insight cuts both ways: social space is incredibly difficult to develop and sustain, Funding and perhaps even more dependent than abstract space on the energies of the multi- This work was partly supported by the ESRC [ES/ tude for its sustenance. Social space must be J500094/1]. actively produced and renewed by partici- pants through intensive engagement, and is References always at risk of slippage into, appropriation or co-optation by abstraction. Whilst abstract Aalbers, Manuel. 2006. “‘When the Banks Withdraw, space has the benefit of systemic momentum Slum Landlords Take Over’: The Structuration of on its side, social space-makers must cam- Neighbourhood Decline through Redlining, Drug paign all the more vigorously to create Dealing, Speculation and Immigrant Exploitation.” Urban Studies 43 (7): 1061–1086. spaces for use rather than accumulation or Aalbers, Manuel. 2014. “Do Maps Make Geography? disciplinary regulation. Such a perspective Part 1: Redlining, Planned Shrinkage, and the Places on power—incremental, immanent change of Decline.” ACME: An International E-Journal for through slowly expanding the use values Critical Geographies 13 (4): 525–556. and social practices rather than confronting Allen, Chris. 2008. Housing Market Renewal and Social Class. Abingdon: Routledge. abstract space directly—indeed resonates Beckett, Andy. 2015. Promised You A Miracle: UK 80-82. with the ethos of SNAP and Granby CLT. London: Penguin Books. Like other critical commentaries on the Butler, Chris. 2005. “Reading the Production of Suburbia subject, however, this paints a particularly in Post-War Australia.” Law Text Culture 9: 11–33. bipolar vision of abstract and social space: Christophers, Brett. 2014. “Wild Dragons in the City: Urban Political Economy, Affordable Housing Devel- as if withdrawing our labour from the opment and the Performative World-making of former will automatically generate the Economic Models.” International Journal of Urban latter, or vice versa; that promoting social and Regional Research 38 (1): 79–97. space will necessarily destroy abstract space Cocks, Matthew, and Chris Couch. 2012. “The Govern- by encroaching directly into its domain, ance of a Shrinking City: Housing Renewal in the Liverpool Conurbation, UK.” International Planning Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 14:23 17 September 2017 through direct ‘appropriation’. If I have Studies 17 (3): 277–301. shown anything here it is to emphasise the Cole, Ian. 2012. “Housing Market Renewal and Demoli- more complex dialectical relationship tion in England in the 2000s: The Governance of between these two aspects in Lefebvre’s ‘Wicked Problems’.” International Journal of Housing (1991, 52) theory of the production of Policy 12 (3): 347–366. Duffy, Tom. 2011. “Peaceful Protest on Toxteth Street space: that ‘abstract space carries within Forces Demolition Men to down Tools.” Liverpool itself the seeds of a new kind of space’, but Echo, July 12. http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/ that, likewise, if we are not careful, social news/liverpool-news/peaceful-protest-toxteth-street- space gives birth to abstraction. forces-3369896. Ellis, Hugh, and Kate Henderson. 2013. Planning Out Poverty: The Reinvention of Social Town Planning. Acknowledgements London: Town and Country Planning Association. Hodkinson, Stuart. 2012. “The New Urban Enclosures.” I would like to thank Abby Gilbert, Phil Horn, Melanie City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Pol- Lombard and Japhy Wilson for their insightful icy, Action 16 (5): 500–518. 126 CITY VOL. 21, NO.2

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