The Right to Stay Put: Contesting Displacement in Urban Regeneration
Friday 28th and Saturday 29th August
Venue: Ida Kinsey Village Centre, 17 Guide Post Road, Grove Village, Manchester M13 9HP
A Participatory Geographies Working Group event as part of the Royal Geographical Society / Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference – see www.rgs.org
It is now 25 years since Chester Hartman first advanced the notion of the ‘right to stay put’ for lower income group struggles against gentrification. Since then, gentrification and related processes of privatisation and marketisation have become integral to neoliberal urban strategies across the world. Despite this proliferation, academics have generally responded poorly to Hartman’s call to arms. Rather, as Slater observes (2006, 2008), gentrification research has generally lost its critical edge, and from some quarters gentrification has even been celebrated as beneficial to incumbent low-income groups (Freeman, 2006; Vigdor, 2002). This is not our experience and with this session we seek to restore Hartman’s principle to the heart of gentrification research by inviting contributions from activist geographers in the widest sense of the term (academics, teachers, housing professionals, campaigners, trade unionists and ordinary residents) to share and exchange their experiences, insights and methods to better defend people’s ‘right to stay put’. In the spirit of making geography ‘relevant’ beyond the policy-academy complex, the session will have a practical orientation and will offer reflections, stories, tactics, lessons and strategies for developing successful urban resistances. The aims are to: (1) share experiences and develop practical knowledges about what works in urban resistance; (2) create an educational space for encounter and dialogue between those involved in similar critical work and activism; and (3) start to develop an action research network and a knowledge/resource base for wider dissemination.
Chris Allen (Manchester Metropolitan University), c.allen@mmu.ac.uk
Lee Crookes (University of Sheffield), l.crookes@sheffield.ac.uk
Stuart Hodkinson (University of Leeds), s.n.hodkinson@leeds.ac.uk
Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh), tom.slater@ed.ac.uk