Grounding accumulation by dispossession in everyday life. The unjust geographies of urban regeneration under the Private Finance Initiative
| Author | Stuart Hodkinson, Chris Essen |
| Position | School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.; School of Health, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. |
| Pages | 72-91 |
Grounding accumulation by
dispossession in everyday life
The unjust geographies of urban regeneration
under the Private Finance Initiative
Stuart Hodkinson
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, and
Chris Essen
School of Health, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to ground Harvey’s (2003) top-down theory of “accumulation by
dispossession” in the everyday lives of people and places with specic focus on the role of law. It does
this by drawing upon the lived experiences of residents on a public housing estate in England (UK)
undergoing regeneration and gentrication through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
Design/methodology/approach – Members of the residents association on the Myatts Field North
estate, London, were engaged as action research partners, working with the researchers to collect
empirical data through surveys of their neighbours, organising community events and being formally
interviewed themselves. Their experiential knowledge was supplemented with an extensive review of
all associated policy, planning, legal and contractual documentation, some of which was disclosed in
response to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Findings – Three specic forms of place-based dispossession were identied: the loss of consumer
rights, the forcible acquisition of homes and the erasure of place identity through the estate’s
rebranding. Layard’s (2010) concept of the “law of place” was shown to be broadly applicable in
capturing how legal frameworks assist in enacting accumulation by dispossession in people’s lives.
Equally important is the ideological power of law as a discursive practice that ultimately undermines
resistance to apparent injustices.
Originality/value – This paper develops Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession in
conversation with legal geography scholarship. It shows – via the Myatts Field North estate case
study – how PFI, as a mechanism of accumulation by dispossession in the abstract, enacts
dispossession in the concrete, assisted by the place-making and ideological power of law.
Keywords Public housing, Accumulation by dispossession, Gentrication, Law of place,
Private Finance Initiative, Urban regeneration
Paper type Research paper
The authors would like to thank members of the Myatts Field North Residents Association, and
other local residents, for their time, assistance and support in the research project underpinning
this paper. We would also like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council
(RES-061-25-0536) for funding the research that underpins the article. The research project was
solely designed by Hodkinson and funded under the ESRC’s First Grants scheme following
rigorous blind peer review of the application and an institutional ethics review at the University of
Leeds. The ESRC funded the academic and researcher time on the project plus travel, subsistence
and other costs to conduct the research and disseminate the results but had no involvement in the
research process itself.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1756-1450.htm
IJLBE
7,1
72
Received 30 January 2014
Revised 24 September 2014
10 October 2014
14 October 2014
Accepted 17 October 2014
InternationalJournal of Law in the
BuiltEnvironment
Vol.7 No. 1, 2015
pp.72-91
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1756-1450
DOI 10.1108/IJLBE-01-2014-0007
1. Introduction
In Western legal frameworks, dispossession is narrowly dened as the deprivation or
eviction from rightful possession of property or land (see Fox O’Mahony and Sweeney,
2011). Yet, land, law and dispossession have a far more complex historical geographical
relationship traversing colonial and contemporary time and space (see Fay and James,
2009). Critical scholarship has helped to denaturalise property rights and law, unsettling
previous assumptions of how land came to be legally owned in the rst place and by
whom (Blomley, 2004;Wily, 2012). Such alternative meanings and histories of
dispossession are embodied in the socio-spatial transformations of “primitive
accumulation” (Marx, 1976) that gave birth to capitalist social relations. These processes
were prevalent in the colonial “pillage” of the territories and peoples of the global South
throughout more than 500 years (see Galeano, 1997/1973), and the removal of ordinary
people’s customary rights to subsist from the commons during the countryside
enclosures in Britain and other European societies throughout the same period
(see Neeson, 1996). Crucially, these territorial appropriations around the world are
synonymous with what Blomley (2003, p. 130) calls “legal violence”, in which the
imposition of maps and property laws – often through state-sponsored force – played
essential roles in naturalising and protecting the new owners’ legal rights to land and
resources they had expropriated (Harris, 2004;Wightman, 2013).
Dispossession is currently attracting renewed academic attention, most notably
through David Harvey’s theoretical reworking of primitive accumulation as
“accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003, p. 158). Harvey (2010, p. 45) argues that
since 1973, global capitalism has been engulfed in an ongoing crisis of
“overaccumulation”, in which surpluses of capital are unable to nd enough outlets to
make prot. Old and new mechanisms of dispossession – led by the privatisation of state
industries and assets – have thus been pushed to the forefront of state–corporate growth
strategies so as to release public or common assets and resources into the market “where
overaccumulating capital [can] invest in them, upgrade them, and speculate in them”
(Harvey, 2010, p. 158). Viewed against the background of nearly four decades of
neoliberal policies in diverse national settings, Harvey’s thesis is highly persuasive and
is lent extra credibility by the new round of state sell-offs and restructuring under
austerity programmes in North America and Europe following the 2008 nancial crisis
(see Kitson et al., 2011). Yet, Harvey has also attracted valid criticism, particularly
within a diverse Marxist scholarship for, inter alia, his contingent reading of continuous
historical processes of dispossession (Glassman, 2009), weaknesses in his wider theory
of overaccumulating capital (Ashman and Callinicos, 2006) and his under-theorisation
of the “deeply political role of states in orchestrating dispossession” (Levien, 2013,
p. 382).
While such debates fall beyond the remit here, this article responds to a more general
critique of contemporary dispossession theories as top-down abstractions that lack
historical–geographical specicity of how dispossession plays out and is experienced
by people on the ground (Hart, 2006). Alongside a growing number of studies
attempting to precisely interrogate Harvey’s theory in different contexts, we have
elsewhere sought to territorialise and urbanise contemporary processes of accumulation
by dispossession as “new urban enclosures” through an analysis of UK neoliberal
policies towards housing and regeneration (Hodkinson, 2012). But there are two
substantive weaknesses in this emergent research. First, there remains little sense of
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Grounding
accumulation
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