Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective

Kirsteen Paton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317129301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Städtische Soziologie

Focusing on the working-class experience of gentrification, this book re-examines the enduring relationship between class and the urban. Class is so clearly articulated in the urban, from the housing crisis to the London Riots to the evocation of housing estates as the emblem of 'Broken Britain'. Gentrification is often presented to a moral and market antidote to such urban ills: deeply institutionalised as regeneration and targeted at areas which have suffered from disinvestment or are defined by 'lack'. Gentrification is no longer a peripheral neighbourhood process: it is policy; it is widespread; it is everyday. Yet comparative to this depth and breadth, we know little about what it is like to live with gentrification at the everyday level. Sociological studies have focused on lifestyles of the middle classes and the working-class experience is either omitted or they are assumed to be victims. Hitherto, this is all that has been offered. This book engages with these issues and reconnects class and the urban through an ethnographically detailed analysis of a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification which historicises class formation, critiques policy processes and offers a new sociological insight into gentrification from the perspective of working-class residents. This ethnography of everyday working-class neighbourhood life in the UK serves to challenge denigrated depictions which are used to justify the use of gentrification-based restructuring. By exploring the relationship between urban processes and working-class communities via gentrification, it reveals the 'hidden rewards' as well as the 'hidden injuries' of class in post-industrial neighbourhoods. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive 'sociology of gentrification', revealing not only how gentrification leads to the displacement of the working class in physical terms but how it is actively used within urban policy to culturally displace the working-class subject and traditional

Chapter 1
Restructuring Theory

What is required is a better specification of the relationship between capitalist dynamics and the social conditions of modernity. A principal connection is through the analysis of inequalities constantly generated by the mechanisms of accumulation which are reproduced, modulated or transformed in the discourse of mundane practices of daily life captured by analysis of the experience of modernity.

(Savage et al., 2003: 69)

To begin to explore how urban restructuring impacts upon local places, everyday lives and identities requires discrete but interrelated literatures on deindustrialisation, gentrification and class, as there is no comprehensive theoretical account of this process at large (Bagguley et al., 1990; Savage et al., 2003). They instead contain unresolved issues around the relationship between economic and cultural processes. The opening quote from Savage et al. suggests this is indicative of the wider failings of urban sociological analysis which lacks a succinct articulation of the relationship between structure and agency and cultural and economic forces in relation to their spatial setting. The focus of this chapter is to demonstrate how a framework of hegemony is useful for understanding contemporary processes of urban restructuring, particularly the specific way in which gentrification is used to manage deindustrialisation: its effects on working-class people’s everyday lives and identities and forms of negotiation and resistance. To do this, I frame the discussion in four main parts. The first details the use of hegemony as a framework of restructuring; in the following three sections I apply this framework to literature on restructuring, gentrification, and class before reasserting the importance of ethnographic, place-based studies of class for understanding these complex hegemonic processes of restructuring.

I begin by outlining how hegemony works and how it can operate as a theoretical framework adept at understanding urban restructuring and the relationship between economic and cultural forces and structure and agency. Hegemony refers to a form of rule relevant to how transformations in productive and social relations are managed whilst the capitalist system is maintained overall. It involves a mix of consent and coercion which combines structural and agential processes, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between the material and the phenomenological. However, its application is not unproblematic and interpretations tend to focus on opposing aspects of structure and agency which undermines its dialectical meaning. I develop the concept from the work of Gramsci (1971) and consider how it has been usefully applied to understand Fordism. I outline cultural and structural interpretations in Western Marxism (Williams, 1977; Anderson, 1976; Poulantzas, 1967; Hall and Jacques, 1989) which undermine the strength of the concept by focusing on opposing features. I suggest that this schism can be avoided by making an analytical distinction between two aspects of hegemony – between the structure and the surface level projects (Joseph, 2002). This can be taken forward to explore urban restructuring and strategies involved in managing the shift from Fordism and how this is experienced in everyday life.

Thus, the second part of this chapter explores how hegemony can be used to theorise the crisis of Fordist capitalism and subsequent deindustrialisation. Prevailing theories of restructuring known as the regulation school draw from a hegemonic framework (Aglietta, 1987; Lipietz, 1986; Jessop, 1990; Harvey, 1982, 1990). While they capture the economic processes involved and attempt to incorporate agency and social relations, they fall back into structural and masculinist understandings. Deindustrialisation and the rise of neoliberalism not only involve the restructuring of the economy, they result in the restructuring of urban policy and the relationship between the state and civil society, as well as, citizenship and class. Regeneration has become the leading government strategy for restructuring places and local populations, extending power to both local agencies and businesses through urban entrepreneurialism and to citizens through participation. These forms of regeneration help manage social relations of neoliberalism whilst effectively blurring the relationship between civil society and the state. This is expressed through the concept of consumer citizenship (Christopherson, 1994). Regeneration is revealed to be, in essence, a class project that decontextualises and reproduces class inequality.

In the third part of this chapter I consider gentrification as a class based process of neighbourhood transformation and as a key regeneration strategy. Contemporary definitions fail to adequately theorise how and why contemporary processes of gentrification are used as part of regeneration strategies (Lees and Ley, 2008) and the implications this has for working-class communities. This section demonstrates how gentrification is both an economic and cultural process which has been effectively harnessed by the state to manage deindustrialisation for material and socially productive ends. Gentrification has evolved from a means of urban renewal to a strategy for regulating working-class behaviours and practices (Uitermark et al., 2007). Thus, I put forward a new theoretical understanding of gentrification. It is defined here as part of a hegemonic project which supports neoliberal and flexible forms of accumulation. It does so by seeking to create the more affluent citizen, in a moral and material sense, recalibrating both space and subjectivities. This involves the transformation of class and productive relations through negotiations, realised at the local and individual level.

The fourth part outlines how class analysis has responded to deindustrialisation and urban restructuring. The legacy of community studies of class (Dennis et al., 1956; Jackson, 1968; Young and Wilmot, 1957; Lockwood, 1958) includes too tight a focus on collectivity and a failure to clarify the relationship between class position and individual identity, paving the way for sociological narrative on deindustrialisation which heralds the end of class and the rise of the individual self-maker (Beck, 1992; Bauman, 1998; Giddens, 1991; Pakulski and Waters, 1996). The relationship between class position and identity are said to have unravelled. Consequently, we know little of how class identities are being restructured. Exploring class and place and their complex interrelationship offers a means of countering the supposed identity-position disconnect. Contemporary class analysis has made great inroads, incorporating culture, identity and, crucially, its intersection with other axes of oppression: ‘race’; gender; and sexuality (Taylor, 2010). Significantly ‘culturalist class theorists’ (Savage et al., 2001, 2005, 2005a; Skeggs, 1997, 2004; Reay, 2005) deploy the concept of disassociation to express the disjuncture between class position and identity. Class is, then, revealed to not only to be an economic inequality but a devalued social location subject to stigma. While this exploration has been vital, this turn to culture and identity and, by extension, a turn to Bourdieu (Reay, 2011) runs the danger of leaving the material and the economic behind. I suggest that making disassociation the focus of class analysis can disaggregate and discount collectivity and underplay the significance of place. Disassociation is not merely a process of class opposition and individualisation; it reveals the material basis of a hegemonic shift towards post-industrial neoliberalism which is a profoundly urban process. Social and physical locations are both the site of inequality, stigma and pathologisation yet the working of this intersection of place and restructuring processes in this sense is missing from class analysis. A hegemonic framework can connect issues of class identity with the material recomposition of society. This is evident in how place and homeownership express social identities (Savage et al., 2005). The neighbourhood is a crucial site for observing the interrelationship between social and physical space. People’s locational narratives (Anthias, 2005; Savage et al., 2005) provide a powerful account for understanding class in relation to a process of hegemonic change. Residential biographical stories of how and where people live reveal the making of the social locations, hierarchies, boundaries and categories, and people’s actual physical location in relation to their material reality. This reveals the coding of people and places – or spaces and subjectivities – as historically and materially meaningful, expressing the material and cultural aspects of class that are being reworked by the neoliberal hegemony. Thus a place-based case study usefully enables us to combine these elements.

I conclude this discussion by reassessing the application of hegemony within the context of deindustrialisation and urban restructuring. Hegemony allows us to see the connection between production and social relations vis-à-vis gentrification. This framework brings together the disparate research fields and offers a progressive understanding that transcends orthodox explanations. Understanding urban restructuring as a hegemonic project helps explain how class positions and identities, as well as neighbourhoods, are restructured. Gentrification acts as an intermediary between capitalist processes of deindustrialisation and contemporary working-class lives. Gentrification expresses the two aspects of hegemony. It captures the structural aspects through productive relations of flexible accumulation and spatial fixes, as well as, the political strategy of neoliberalisation involved in creating this hegemony. Working-class people adapt to processes of restructuring. Individualised behaviours and consumption in neighbourhoods, like homeownership, are linked to the economic base and political strategies of hegemony. This process is distinctly class based as it bolsters the powers of the ruling class and denigrates the working class, although this can be negotiated. Thus, urban restructuring is inextricably linked to working-class communities and identities. I suggest that there is a third analytical aspect to hegemony: the emergent lived experience that is the result of reciprocal negotiations between structure and agency. This is best viewed in the locale, connecting micro and macro processes, achieved through a case study. I end by demonstrating how to take this forward into an empirical application in relation to a neighbourhood in Glasgow, Scotland.

Hegemony as a Framework for Urban Change

Frameworks used to theorise urban restructuring tend to focus on economic processes and are, therefore, often deterministic. Other frameworks have been used to theorise the relationship between structure and agency in urban restructuring: Bourdieu’s habitus (Bridge, 2001); Giddens’s structuration (Cattell, 2004; Healy, 2003) and Foucault’s governmentality (Raco, 2000; Flint, 2006) but they fail to capture this interplay in relation to both social class and economic change. Hegemony can provide a framework that is particularly adept in this respect. Fundamentally, as a concept, hegemony is a form of rule that is realised consensually, as well as, coercively. It operates as an intermediary between capitalist accumulation and social relations, denoting the reciprocal interplay between material and ontological levels and therein lies its use value as a framework for understanding urban restructuring. Hegemony is a political strategy that is responsive to transitional stages of capitalism, through which productive relations and social reproductions are recomposed without upsetting the overall form of capitalism. Unlike aforementioned frameworks, hegemony transcends economic or cultural reductionism through a dialectic perspective of the base-superstructure model (Gramsci, 1971) and puts class relations at the centre of this process. In some respects, using hegemony as a framework to understand urban restructuring is not novel (Harvey, 1989; Jessop, 1990; Aglietta, 1987) however the application of hegemony used in these studies involves a theoretical understanding of agency and class rather than one that is practical or empirically validated. Indeed, different applications of hegemony emphasise either structural or agential aspects which undermine its dialectical meaning. It is essential to maintain this balance to make the concept meaningful. In the first part, I outline the origins of the concept via Gramsci, how it operates and how it has been applied to understand Fordism as productive relations and as a way of life. I then consider some ways it has been interpreted in Western Marxist debates (Williams, 1977; Anderson, 1976; Poulantzas, 1967; Hall and Jacques, 1989) which foreground the strengths and weaknesses of hegemony. This is because the framework of hegemony is sociological as it makes an intrinsic, reciprocal connection between structure and agency which can illuminate the relation between urban restructuring and working-class groups. Appreciating its power as a framework for understanding urban restructuring requires considering how hegemony operates empirically, exploring the actual mechanisms for achieving hegemony, the role of the state and civil society, the degree of consensus and coercion involved, the formation of the historic bloc, new coalitions and compromises made and the emergent culture under new economic conditions. I suggest that seeing hegemony as comprising two aspects – structural hegemony and surface hegemony of actual projects (Joseph, 2002) provides analytical clarity which can avoid this schism and can be used to attend to the shortcomings in urban sociological analysis.

Origins, Features and Application

To understand hegemony in more depth, I will consider its origins, the key features of how it operates and how it has been applied to understand the project of Fordism. There has been a recent revival and reappraisal of Gramsci’s canon of work. Thomas (2009) mines recent contributions to articulate and recapitulate what he calls a ‘Gramscian moment’ in social and political theory, although this trend has not developed in the same way within sociology. Thus my use of it here is less the thorough expedition such as Thomas’s tour de force (see too Ekers et al., 2012) but rather to ascertain and assert its contemporary explanatory value and its empirical salience in applied sociological research. Hegemony is normally understood as a form of rule that emphasises consent rather than coercion. It is associated with the writings of Gramsci (1971), who developed it from Lenin’s interpretation of the rule of the proletariat, to describe political rule more generally, reflecting on the historical context of capitalist crisis and restructuring and the relationship between the state and civil society. The capitalist conditions which drive modern society must be secured socially and it is in this space that the concept of hegemony becomes meaningful (Joseph, 2002). For Gramsci, it expresses the political strategy of bourgeois rule over the working class in a stabilised capitalist society. His interpretation is novel because it refers to the interplay between structure and agency in periods of transformative politics, whereby the state rules through force while civil society does so by consensus. This is because hegemony is exercised through society’s superstructure, as opposed to its base, comprising the state and civil society. He based his formulation of this political strategy on the differences between Eastern and Western European states, as a shift from primordial rule to a more gelatinous yet stable rule. The Western state exemplified hegemonic power via a more developed civil society which helps rule in a more complex and balanced way than through more simplistic state-based dominance, ideology or force. This is because civil society helps rule by harnessing support and consent through different methods, such as rewards, universalising values and practices and socialisation to a create a whole mode of living, all of which convince people to support the hegemonic order. Combined in this way, the state and civil society provide persuasive moral and ethical initiatives:

[…] every state is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of productive forces for development, and hence the interests of the ruling class. (Gramsci, 1971: 258)

The point being that by emphasising the significance of consensus, a hegemonic framework of interpretation tries to explain why, despite exploitation, capitalism continues to reign rather than viewing consciousness in a reductive or deterministic sense. Nevertheless, Gramsci (1971) notes that consent is armoured by coercion as the threat of the state is pervasive, even if implicit. It is the cultivation of the balance between consent and coercion which is critical and is managed by the state and civil society and makes this a powerful conception and warrants more thorough consideration of the mechanisms through which hegemony operates.

The sociological strength lies in the fact that hegemony offers a way of exploring the relationship between structure and agency in relation to social class and economic change. This is because Gramsci’s elaboration of hegemony refers not only to a form of rule but to a deeper level of organisation. Hegemony can describe the way in which dominant social groups achieve their leadership on the basis of attaining social cohesion and consensus which maintain structural relations (Joseph, 2002). Class is central to the functioning of hegemony because objective social divisions must be present in order for hegemony to occur. For a social group to maintain its hegemonic position it must have the economic, political and cultural conditions behind it which enable that group to present itself as ruling. The ruling group fights for its position and secures consent to its leadership through political projects, social alliances, coalitions and compromise, forming what Gramsci calls a hegemonic bloc. In this way, hegemony involves the agency of actors seen in the relational and intersubjective aspects of political projects which are compelling and shape social reproduction. Yet the hegemonic bloc is not only defined on the basis of relations between groups but on the basis of the relations between groups and structure (base-superstructure) so that hegemony involves the process whereby structures and superstructures co-determine and relate to one another. Thus, the organisation of hegemony at the level of social groups relates to the organisation of society at the political level and to the level of production. Thus for Gramsci, hegemony is not just a reference to the domination of the ruling class. Since the ruling social group are born out the particular stage of capitalist development, it has liberatory potential for the working class. Social classes can form their own consensus to challenge the prevailing hegemony and build a counter hegemony. Hegemony offers the possibility for change but this is set within structural confines rather than borne of social agents.

Therefore, hegemony relates to both the unity and social cohesion of the social system and the reproduction of basic structural processes and relations (Joseph, 2002). It is both structural and strategic, ensuring that social relations speak to productive relations and securing this support through consensus and compromise. Hegemony is, therefore, essential during times of economic change and crisis:

[…] what is involved is the reorganisation of the structure and the real relations between men and women on the one hand and the world of the economy or production on the other. (Gramsci, 1971: 263)

This function is best understood empirically. Gramsci applied his definition of hegemony to Fordism as a project of productive and social relations that support capitalist societies. He deemed Fordism the ultimate stage in the process of progressive attempts by industry to overcome the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Gramsci, 1971), encapsulating the new form of production and consumption throughout the early twentieth century which partly solved the inherent accumulation crisis. It offered a means of empirical reflection on the defeats of the working-class movement in various countries. As a mode of economic regulation, Fordism introduced new methods of production vis-à-vis scientific management through an adroit combination of force and consent whereby trade unions were attacked but compensated with high wages and benefits (Hunt, 1997), thus, Gramsci’s assertion that ‘hegemony here is born in the factory’ (Gramsci, 1971: 285). Fordism requires workers to possess certain attributes compatible with repetitive work which by extension requires compatibility with life outside the factory, like self-control and emotional stability. Fordism also represents a lived experience; Gramsci conceives it as a whole way of life, generating coherent patterns of social reproduction which form the dominant culture (Williams, 1977). It involves ‘[…] the biggest collective effort to create with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and a new type of man’ (Gramsci, 1971: 302). Moral regulation and leadership help realign social practices towards the Fordist model, largely shaping the patterns of daily life and relations in the early twentieth century:

[…] adapting the civilisation and the morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production; hence of evolving even physically new types of humanity. (Gramsci, 1971: 242)

Althoug...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Restructuring Theory
• 2 Restructuring Class Identity
• 3 Elective Belonging and Fixity to Place
• 4 Gentrifying Working-Class Subjects: Participating in Consumer Citizenship
• 5 The Paradox of Gentrification: Displacing the Working-Class Subject
• Conclusions: Reinvigorating Urban Class Analysis
• Appendix: Cases of Gentrification
• Bibliography
• Index