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Peckham Settlement: Bingo, Reminiscing and Nursery

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Peckham Settlement: Bingo, Reminiscing and Nursery WASTING THE INNER-CITY: WASTE, VALUE AND ANTHROPOLOGY ON THE ESTATES Luna Glücksberg Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a PhD in Social Anthropology Goldsmiths College, University of London January 2013 1 WASTING THE INNER-CITY: WASTE, VALUE AND ANTHROPOLOGY ON THE ESTATES Abstract This thesis considers the social implications of urban regeneration from an anthropological perspective centred on concepts of waste and value. It is concerned with the symbolic devaluation of people, their homes and communities on inner-city estates in south-east London. This process is of course nothing new, as the extensive literature on gentrification both in the UK and around the world, by anthropologists and social scientists in general, testifies. The originality of the thesis lies in connecting large scale urban regeneration programmes to small scale, everyday processes of dealing with waste in people’s homes, and communally on their estates. The ethnography connects these two levels by showing how those who live on estates often lack the most basic tools – such as lifts that work, or doors that open, or space in their kitchens – to engage in recycling themselves, meaning they are excluded and ‘othered’ from a morally loaded value-creating circuit which feeds into their symbolic representation as intrinsically worthless and ‘other’. Meanwhile, the very same residents engage in community building in their everyday lives, producing and reproducing their estates as sociable spaces they care deeply about, even though within the confines of a framework that only recognises value in what is privately, individually owned, epitomised in the ‘Right to Buy’ policy that has deeply affected housing estates in England for the past thirty years, residents' efforts are either misread or ignored by those in charge of the estates. The thesis thus challenges the misrepresentation of its main set of respondents – working class, poor, ethnically diverse inner-city dwellers - as valueless and as waste themselves, labels that are attached to them not just by media and popular 2 culture, but also by officers, policies and politicians, who are interviewed and interrogated at length in the course of the thesis. Furthermore, it questions the alleged parallels between processes of urban regeneration and recycling. It is easy to understand why local authorities and developers would wish to adopt the morally loaded terminology of recycling and apply it to their programmes, presenting regeneration as related to recycling in its positive connotations of both improvement and recovery of the old, be it people or homes. The ethnography shows instead that regeneration in practice is more akin to wasting and buying new, in that established residents are moved out of their homes, which are then demolished, or wasted, and new middle class incomers are welcomed in – bought anew? 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ......................................................................................................................... 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................... 9 Chapter One – Introduction ..................................................................................... 11 1.1 Locating the field ............................................................................................... 20 1.2 Methodology ................................................................................................ 24 Issues of reflexivity and positionality .................................................................. 24 Fieldwork in practice ........................................................................................... 27 Moving on and up to the estates .......................................................................... 29 The Peckham Settlement: bingo, reminiscing and nursery .................................. 33 Getting out of the field ......................................................................................... 35 1.3 Structure of the thesis................................................................................... 37 Chapter Two –Waste and devaluation ..................................................................... 40 2.1 Popular discourses: waste as a moral and technical problem ...................... 41 2.2 Anthropological understandings of waste and value ................................... 44 Durable, transient and rubbish: waste as a social category .................................. 46 A material culture approach ................................................................................. 47 Complexities of waste and value ......................................................................... 50 Recent developments: materiality and the Wastes of the World ......................... 52 2.3 Why does it matter? ..................................................................................... 53 2.4 Symbolic devaluation................................................................................... 57 Surveying, counting and moralising in history .................................................... 59 Still with us today: contemporary examples of symbolic devaluation ................ 62 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 65 Chapter Three – Peckham: introducing (and producing) the field ...................... 67 3.1 Peckham by numbers ......................................................................................... 68 3.2 Slums and social housing in Britain ............................................................ 76 Right to Buy: changes on the estates ................................................................... 79 A Marxian analysis of the built environment ...................................................... 82 Houses and being: Housing Market Renewal in Liverpool ................................. 84 3.3 Voices of Peckham ............................................................................................ 87 Old Peckham: bingo, caring and family ties ........................................................ 88 Changing landscapes ............................................................................................ 91 Decline of Rye Lane ............................................................................................ 92 Times are changing: new shops for new people .................................................. 94 Pushed out and left behind ................................................................................... 96 The nursery: normality and visibility ................................................................... 99 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 102 Chapter Four – The Five Estates ............................................................................ 105 4.1 The Peckham Partnership Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) bid ........... 108 4.2 The Five Estates: physical and socio-economic background .................... 112 4.3 Councillors’s views .................................................................................... 114 Steve ................................................................................................................... 114 Brandon .............................................................................................................. 118 4.4 Officers’ views ........................................................................................... 122 Daniel ................................................................................................................. 123 Florence.............................................................................................................. 125 Celia ................................................................................................................... 128 4.5 Residents’ voices ....................................................................................... 131 4 Tina, North Peckham Estate .............................................................................. 131 Doreen and Stacey, Sumner estate ..................................................................... 133 4.6 Silences that speak ..................................................................................... 141 4.7 Regeneration in practice: national constraints and policy changes ........... 142 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 146 Chapter Five – More regeneration: different outcomes and a few contradictions .................................................................................................................................... 150 5.1 Aylesbury Estate: the complexities of regeneration .................................. 153 5.2 Wood Dene: emptiness and failed plans .................................................... 160 5.3 Mountain Estate stuck in the middle: disabled tenants and the selective practices of Housing Associations ......................................................................... 168 5.4 Wood Vale Estate: regenerating the plans ................................................ 173 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 179 Chapter Six –Value and people on the estates: the tenants’
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