Tottenham after the riots: The chimera of community and the property-led regeneration of ‘broken Britain’

Introduction

The launch of Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda in 2010 coincided with the country’s worst recession in 60 years. A year later a series of urban riots across England, sparked by disturbances in Tottenham, London Borough of Haringey, made a test case for the relevance of Big Society prescriptions. The 2011 Tottenham riots occurred in a context of a regeneration policy vacuum at a time when Big Society rhetoric was clearer about how community power might be unleashed in well-to-do neighbourhoods than in places like Tottenham. This article argues that the Big Society diagnoses and prescriptions to fix what senior Conservative Party figures, including Cameron, have called ‘broken Britain’ map incoherently on to debates about British urban policy. Firstly, we locate Cameron’s Big Society narrative within an ongoing renegotiation of the role of individuals, communities and the state within British social policy. When it comes to urban policy we identify a retreat from efforts to engage communities in urban renewal and an embrace of private sector-led local corporatism as the mechanism by which to foster local economic growth, mainly through property development. There is a resonance with the market-led and property-led regeneration of the Conservative government in the 1980s. A key difference however, is that within current policy arrangements local authorities, who were excluded from Urban Development Corporations and Enterprise Zones which managed the property-led regeneration schemes of the 1980s, are now very much ‘inside the tent’ as stakeholders.

The big policy shift has been the rejection of efforts to engender community participation that were integral to funding criteria since the early 1990s under both Conservative and New Labour governments. This is despite the fact that, ostensibly at least, the Big Society agenda centres on the aspiration to promote voluntarism and social action by empowering communities and neighbourhoods to take local decisions, solve local problems and take over the running of services and facilities (Cabinet Office, 2010). But notwithstanding the rhetoric of the Big Society, accompanying legislation has undermined rights that communities and councils had to shape the economic and social development of their localities. Coalition policy on local economic growth complements this agenda with an explicit focus on property-led regeneration and, for the first time in 40 years, the abandonment of the principle that additional regeneration resources should be targeted at deprived areas.

The Big Society, property-led regeneration and urban policy

The Big Society as a political narrative proclaimed a rupture with the previous New Labour government’s centralist and statist approach to government. It amplified an apparent ideological chasm between both Labour and the Conservatives over the nature of the state and its role in the economy and society (Smith, 2010: 819). Yet British social policy has long been marked by continuities as well as ruptures for all that its policy debates have often taken on an overtly ideological character. Symbolic pronouncements have sometimes obscured the nature and extent of actual change in British social policy. Thatcherism defined not just how the British Conservative Party came to embrace neo-liberalism but a broader ideological settlement within British society that Tony Blair claimed could be safely entrusted to New Labour. The signature idea of Thatcher’s successor John Major was the Citizen’s Charter agenda of public sector reform which emphasised responsiveness to citizens as customers by means of choice, performance standards and other forms of audit culture (Audit Commission, 1992). Blair’s signature contribution to high-concept ideological politics was the ‘Third Way’. His Rubicon was the abandonment of Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution which (as drafted by Sidney Webb in 1917) committed the Labour Party to bringing the means of production into public ownership. Blair’s Third Way endorsed Thatcherite reforms to the public sector, some further privatisation of services and public–private partnerships in areas such as education, childcare, health and welfare-to-work.

In a 1987 interview Thatcher famously proclaimed that there was no such thing as society, a pronouncement that seemed to be, but was not, contradicted in various post-2010 ones by Cameron about the Big Society. As put by Thatcher in her interview with Woman’s Way magazine, published on 31 October 1987:

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem. I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, as you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

In her 1996 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture Thatcher claimed that she never minimised the importance of society:

Conservatives do not take an extreme atomistic view of society. We need no lectures now, or at any other time, about the importance of custom, convention, tradition, belief, national institutions or what the Romans would describe as ‘piety’. Nor do we dispute that the bonds of society need ultimately to be guaranteed by the State. It is Marxists, not Conservatives who imagined – or at least pretended to imagine – that the State would wither away.

No. What marks out our Conservative vision is the insight that the State – government – only underpins the conditions for a prosperous and fulfilling life. It does not generate them. Moreover, the very existence of this State, with its huge capacity for evil, is a potential threat to all the moral, cultural, social and economic benefits of freedom.

States, societies and economies, which allow the distinctive talents of individuals to flourish, themselves also flourish. Those which dwarf, crush, distort, manipulate or ignore them cannot flourish. (Thatcher, 1996: 6)

Thatcher’s (and Joseph’s) vision of a free economy required a strong state (Gamble, 1988). Regulatory bodies were needed to manage proxy markets. Various forms of marketisation emerged rather than free markets and free competition. The ‘Big Society’ has been depicted as a re-branding exercise designed to distance the party from Thatcher’s libertarian rhetoric. Yet, as defined by Cameron, it differed little from Thatcher’s own declared social and political ideals. As put by Cameron in a 2010 speech:

Big society – that’s not just words. It is a guiding philosophy – a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control. It includes a whole set of unifying approaches – breaking state monopolies, allowing charities, social enterprises and companies to provide public services, devolving power down to neighbourhoods, making government more accountable. And it’s the thread that runs consistently through our whole policy programme – our plans to reform public services, mend our broken society, and rebuild trust in politics. They are all part of our Big Society agenda. (Cameron, 2010)

The implicit proposition was that almost anything else, the free market, charities or volunteers, was better than a big state (Kisby, 2010: 485). Thatcherism had been mostly preoccupied with rolling back the state by means of free enterprise, privatisation and internal marketisation of state provided services. What was new under Cameron was the stated intent to engineer individual and community alternatives to big government. But again there were precedents. The citizens’ charters introduced under John Major re-described citizens as consumers and promoted a ‘rights and responsibilities’ active citizenship agenda which was also championed by New Labour under Blair and Gordon Brown. Ideas of responsibility, the latter proclaimed in a February 2006 Guardian piece, ‘come alive in new forms of active civic engagement. Out go old assumptions of individuals passively receiving services; think again of the responsible parent, the informed patient, the active citizen … who – with an extension of choice and voice, individual and collective – are taking control and driving change forward’ (Brown, 2006).

Under New Labour (1997–2010) the emphasis on consumer choice and new managerial approaches to accountability if anything deepened. Nor did Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ project break with the marketisation of the public sector promoted by previous Conservative governments. As intellectually influenced by Anthony Giddens, the Third Way denoted an agenda of promoting individual reflexivity and individual responsibility as a means of meeting the challenges of globalisation, social change and the presumed inability of the welfare state to underwrite cradle-to-grave security. The Third Way accepted Thatcher’s rejection of elements of the post-World War II welfare settlement. It proposed an enabling state that invited its members ‘to plan, understand and design themselves as individuals’ (Giddens, 1998: 36). It also championed entrepreneurial spirit and civic responsibility (Driver and Marell, 2000: 157).

New Labour’s active citizenship agenda was most tangible in the field of urban policy (Smith, 2002: 437). Much of this was inherited from the previous Conservative government. Under John Major, the City Challenge Programme (1991–1993) introduced funding criteria aimed at levering regeneration schemes that fostered community participation. City Challenge, its successor, the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) programme which was retained by New Labour until 2003, and New Labour’s own New Deal for Communities (NDC) in turn promoted an agenda of active citizenship, through an ongoing expansion of expectations about the nature and extent of community participation in regeneration processes (Smith, 2002: 437; Marinetto, 2003: 114). This agenda was imposed top-down by successive Conservative and New Labour governments concerned that local authorities might otherwise not involve inhabitants of deprived communities in decision-making.

City Challenge itself was something of a break with a previous phase of property-led regeneration that explicitly rejected an earlier 1970s vogue for community participation. During the late 1980s the Conservative government promoted Enterprise Zones and Urban Development Corporations as vehicles for public–private partnerships and property-led regeneration outside of the political and administrative control of local government. A notable example was the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) where the focus was on the regeneration of place rather than on its inhabitants, on forms of economic development (financial services) that had little to do with the past economic activities of long-standing residents, where some new residents inhabited gated communities and where gentrification also changed the residential profile.

Such forms of property-led regeneration have formed the basis of major urban renaissance projects in other parts of London (e.g. Stratford, White City and Paddington) as well as in cities like Liverpool and Manchester. In the international context, large-scale property redevelopment has been the means through which cities such as New York, Baltimore, Copenhagen and São Paolo sought to transform deprived and run-down localities (Harvey, 2012). Within this policy framework, gentrification has emerged as a global urban strategy, something to be levered by combinations of regulation and deregulation and state facilitation of developer interests, rather than to be left to the gradual takeover of once deprived localities by more affluent residents (Minton, 2009). The phenomenon of gentrification was identified by Ruth Glass in her study of Islington in North London as a process ‘whereby the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of a district is changed’ (1964: xxvi). But what was once variously a ‘seemingly serendipitous, unplanned process’, ‘a quaint sport of the hipper professional classes unafraid to rub shoulders with the unwashed masses’, by the end of the twentieth century had come to be seen as ‘extreme, ambitiously and scrupulously planned’ (Smith, 2002: 439).

Tottenham has now become the putative focus of what has been termed ‘third wave gentrification’, characterised by state encouragement of gentrification within previously hard-to-reach, deprived urban neighbourhoods including public housing estates. Third wave gentrification is at a more advanced trajectory in the London Borough of Southwark as well as in its current epicentre in the East London boroughs of Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets. Its defining aspect is that it is state-led and promoted by local authorities whose approach is shaped by the steep rise in London residential land values, on the one hand, and the failure by central government to provide them with the investment they need to maintain and renew their social housing stock, on the other (Watt, 2013: 102). It is triggering a wave of development that is changing both the architectural topography and socio-demographic profiles of the localities where development is taking place. The redevelopment of the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney, for example, will result in the proportion of private homes rising from 31 per cent to 59 per cent. In Southwark where council properties on the 1000-home Heygate estate have been emptied of their residents to facilitate large-scale redevelopment, over 50 per cent of the new units built will be private. Likewise, Southwark’s Aylesbury estate, whose residents previously rejected a stock transfer to a housing association, is being decanted and redeveloped with at least half of the new homes being earmarked for private sale. There are examples of similar developments in the East London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets (Watt, 2013: 102–103).

What is striking about this phase of state-led property regeneration is the extent to which it represents more of a continuity of policies initiated by New Labour than anything that might be described as a distinctive aspect of the Big Society agenda. In many cases, the developments that are now taking place were planned and initiated before the current Coalition government came to power. Other major property-led regeneration projects that began under New Labour include the Stratford Olympic site, Paddington Basin and White City (Westfield) developments in London and the building of major new retail districts in Manchester and, again, London (Minton, 2009). In keeping with New Labour’s urban policy ethos, there is an aspiration to foster ‘mixed communities’ as a means of growing social capital in deprived areas, improving their capacity to advocate for public resources and increasing their economic spending power (Lees, 2008: 2451). The inference that deprived communities are sites of dysfunction also echoes New Labour’s approach to urban renewal (Amin, 2007). Such gentrification inadvertently displaces those who can no longer afford to live in an area (Watt, 2009: 231). It can also take on a more overt form through the relocation to other areas of council tenants from estates earmarked for redevelopment. Council housing acted as an effective buffer against market-led regeneration in London and other UK cities until a few decades ago. Many council estates were and remain effective no-go areas for affluent gentrifiers. The gentrification of such areas is only possible if this is organised or sponsored by some agency but, even then, has proved difficult to lever (Cameron and Doling, 1994: 1217).

Tottenham after the riots

After the Riots: The Final Report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel (2012), a committee established by Parliament, argued that the causes of the riots in Tottenham included high youth unemployment and ‘toxic relations’ with local police (RCVP, 2012: 21). Its explanation of underlying causes focused considerably on Britain’s one million or so young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). It noted that of the children under seventeen years of age involved and brought before the courts, two-thirds were deemed to have special educational needs. They were also more likely to live in the 10 per cent lowest income areas, to be receiving free school meals and to have been excluded from school at least once (RCVP, 2012: 17). It cited the analysis of Tottenham Member of Parliament David Lammy that long-term causes of the riots included poor education, ineffective parental guidance, poor role models, father absence, ill-discipline, unemployment and a variety of social and developmental problems (RCVP, 2012: 21).

A report by the Mayor of London’s Office, It Took Another Riot (2012), made various recommendations for coordinated and better value-for-money responses to an estimated 900 or so dysfunctional families out of Tottenham’s population of 118,000. It placed a strong emphasis on a larger vulnerable and transient population dependent upon the state but living in poverty. It located its prescriptions within the broader political narrative about the role of the state variously addressed by Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. It argued that the founders of the British welfare state never aimed to create a situation where individuals and their families took so little responsibility for their welfare as had prevailed in Tottenham:

Beveridge wrote that policies of social security ‘should be achieved by co-operation between the state and the individual’ and that the state ‘should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family’. These principles do not prevail in Tottenham, and whilst on one hand government has proven dysfunctional in addressing local challenges, on the other a minority of individuals have become over-reliant on the state, at times treating with a sense of entitlement benefits that were intended to serve as a support. (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 15)

The report took its title from a 1981 confidential Cabinet report It Took a Riot written by Thatcher’s Home Secretary Michael Heseltine following the 1981 Toxteth disturbances. Heseltine’s diagnosis was that Liverpool was in a spiral of post-industrial decline and chronic unemployment, hampered by emasculated and compartmentalised local decision-making processes. It is not fanciful to read several commonalities with Big Society ideas and the prescriptions set out in the report commissioned by Parliament and the plan proposed by the Mayor of London’s Office. Heseltine, like Cameron appealed to one-nation Conservative Party ‘traditions of social justice and national evenhandedness’. He emphasised a role for voluntary organisations and self-help groups though he did not see these as flourishing in deprived areas without state support. As he acknowledged: ‘it may exceptionally be necessary to support paid workers without whom voluntary bodies might collapse’ (Heseltine, 1981: 17). He also argued that existing local government was not up to the job and that funding for regeneration should be routed through some new body set up to encourage private sector investment and ‘free the spirit of enterprise which is latent’ (1981: 6). Heseltine’s proposals focused on the physical regeneration of Toxteth, the promotion of enterprise and private sector investment, improving the quality of housing and on using education, training and employment opportunities to address the prevailing hopelessness of people in the area:

Young people expect to be unemployed and they are being brought up by parents who expect them to be unemployed. We have to realise the hollowness of the phrase ‘parental responsibility’ when unemployed parents – many of them single – live cooped up with energetic kids with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. If parents have lost their sense of purpose, they cannot command their children’s respect. (Heseltine, 1981: 3)

Thirty-one years later It Took Another Riot emphasised the need to foster resilience amongst Tottenham’s vulnerable residents whilst similarly betting that a programme of property-led regeneration would turn the area around. Tottenham has been the focus of generations of urban policy prescriptions from the decision during the early 1960s to build the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, to decades of effort by Haringey Council to maximise the construction of social housing in Tottenham to more than three decades of effort in the aftermath of the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots to regenerate the area. The disturbances occurred following a peaceful demonstration about the shooting dead by the police of Mark Duggan, a young black man on 7 August 2011. For some community members, the disturbances had a profound resonance with events from twenty-five years previously in 1985 when the killing by the police of a local black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, in her home led to the Broadwater Farm riots. The cause of that disturbance was attributed by local political and community leaders at the time to the treatment of the black community by the police. However, as the Gifford Inquiry report on the riots makes clear, community alienation from the police was only one aspect of a wider sense of grievance about housing and other council services, unemployment and racism (Gifford, 1986).

The Gifford Inquiry into the 1985 riots identified poor urban planning as a causal factor. Construction of Broadwater Farm began in 1967 but was stopped for some time in 1968, after the Ronan Point disaster when a similarly constructed ‘Larsen–Neilsen’ block collapsed. Work was completed in 1973. As with many such schemes allocations were predominantly made from the clearance of old back-to-back housing. However, the end result lacked the essentials for making the estate into a living community for the more than 3000 people who lived there. The shops, pub, laundrette and doctor’s and dentist’s surgeries specified in the original design were cut from the scheme due to cost (Gifford, 1986: 16). Transport facilities were poor. The estate was difficult to get to by bus and from the beginning there was a dangerous polarisation between the estate and neighbouring residential areas whose residents had opposed its construction. Some years before the 1985 riots a Department of the Environment report on difficult-to-let housing had concluded of Broadwater Farm that because conditions were so poor and the estate so monolithic, the demolition of the estate would have to be seriously considered (Gifford, 1986: 18).

In the decades after the 1985 riots Tottenham became the beneficiary of public investment to regenerate the built environment and foster the economic renewal of Tottenham High Road. This funding was secured on the basis that Tottenham contained some of the most deprived localities in Britain (rather than for the quality of proposed regeneration schemes put forward by the local authority). The area received funding under a range of regeneration programmes including SRB, NDC and the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF). Despite these efforts Northumberland Park ward which contains the Tottenham Hotspur soccer stadium remains one of the most deprived wards in England.

It Took Another Riot described ‘a dismal environment’ of intergenerational unemployment, boredom, poor aspiration, households at the very sharpest end of poverty, children with depression, parents with substance addictions and domestic violence: ‘With no employment or fun, and little sport, gangs can provide some with stimulation and a sense of belonging, although most of all provide a sense of safety in numbers’ (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 72). Tottenham remained a depressed area in a rich city despite high public spending – an average of £17,500 per head per annum compared to a London average of £10,255. It Took Another Riot was adamant that Tottenham could not be fixed by further cosmetic regeneration improvements to existing estates. It noted that over £30 million was spent refurbishing the Broadwater Farm estate after the 1985 riots (‘just one example of decades of initiatives that have randomly rained down upon the area and failed to address the underlying problems’, Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 8).

It argued that there had never been a coordinated effort on sufficient scale to address fundamental issues: ‘Problems get addressed, but they don’t get solved. Measures are taken and money is spent, and yet the underlying issues don’t go away’ (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 48). There were interwoven problems with housing, health, education, aspiration, crime, the area’s reputation, business and employment (2012: 8). Among the root causes of many of these, it identified the intergenerational legacy of industrial decline. Tottenham from the 1970s lost several large industrial employers including one (Gestetner) that had employed 3000 people and a furniture manufacturer that employed 6000. But the area had since experienced generations of population churn through which the old white working class were joined by the black residents whose grievances with the police were the trigger for the 1980s disturbances. Since then new groups of poorer tenants and immigrants have been attracted to the area by lower private sector rents or because they were sent there by other local authorities who placed those on their housing waiting lists in temporary accommodation in Haringey because it was cheaper to do so. It Took Another Riot emphasised that Tottenham had the highest levels of temporary accommodation in London amounting to 3.5 per cent of residents compared to a London average of 1.2 per cent and a UK-wide average of 0.2 per cent (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 26). The report argued that Tottenham’s low rents attracted transient populations:

There is a high level of population churn, with many residents leaving the area each year, and others arriving from all over the world – partly as a consequence of the relatively cheap cost of living compared to wider London. The churn disrupts schooling, leads to lower regard for the urban environment … There is also an ‘escalator’ effect at play, and when new arrivals have become economically settled, they may move elsewhere. (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 45)

In the decades after the 1985 riots much of its African-Caribbean community had moved from Broadwater Farm only to be replaced by Kurdish and Somali immigrants. Similarly in Northumberland Park the most marginal continued to be new transient residents. In various efforts to engender community participation in regeneration initiatives these communities tended to be left out. Consultation exercises and participation programmes focused on the better-off and better educated community representatives who could be better described as advocates for the areas they lived in rather than representative of deprived communities in those areas. Many of the poorest and most vulnerable inhabitants of Tottenham were part of a population churn of homeless persons and asylum seekers into the borough. Whilst these contributed statistically to local levels of deprivation, they were not part of the community as represented by New Labour-era regeneration boards and consultative bodies. Nor were these members of the community groups that opposed various regeneration initiatives. The emergence of such groups reflected, to a considerable extent, the gentrification of some parts of Tottenham, for all that these declared their opposition to further gentrification (Dillon and Fanning, 2011: 124–126).

The ‘Plan for Tottenham’

It Took Another Riot suggested that any further expenditure on the regeneration of Tottenham would be pointless unless the in-migration of new waves of marginal immigrants and those on accommodation waiting lists from other boroughs was curtailed. It argued that housing regeneration could increase the quality and mix of dwellings, reducing overcrowding in the process. There was a running inference that regeneration would squeeze out some of Tottenham’s most marginal residents, or at least prevent others like them from moving to the area (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 104). The report proposed a new regeneration governance structure for Tottenham. Powers and budgets currently with the council, the Greater London Authority and central government would be given to a new body with a Chair from the private sector. This would push through the regeneration programme whatever local opposition emerged. As put in the conclusion of It Took Another Riot:

Regeneration can be a controversial process. Every building has memories attached. New developments may not be to everyone’s taste. The benefits of physical regeneration are often questioned too – does it lift people out of poverty, or simply price them out of living in the area? (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 104)

The inference was that pricing-out some of Tottenham’s current population was a price worth paying:

It is easy to forget the severity of the problems that need addressing. Extreme overcrowding. Some of the highest unemployment in London. Cases where children’s education is routinely two years behind that expected of their age. Violent crime. Life expectancies that drop six months for every stop a bus makes as it travels East.

We must acknowledge that inaction is a choice to maintain the status quo – and everything that that implies. (Mayor of London’s Office, 2012: 104)

On 31 July 2012, Haringey Council announced a regeneration plan, the Plan for Tottenham, which aspired to create thousands of new homes and jobs (Haringey Council/Mayor of London, 2012). It focused predominantly on the physical regeneration of the area unlike another report, After the Riots: Taking Tottenham Forward (Tottenham Community Panel, 2012). Commissioned by Haringey Council and produced by the Tottenham Community Panel (a group of community leaders), the report set out recommendations that mirrored the aims of previous urban renewal schemes in Tottenham: regenerate Tottenham High Road, improve the image of the area, create opportunities for young people and improve the relationship between the police and the community. In keeping with these previous regeneration approaches the Tottenham Community Panel also emphasised ‘community involvement and leadership’ (2012: 5).

The Plan for Tottenham unambiguously supported the place shaping approach of the Mayor of London’s Office and boiled its arguments into short copy-written paragraphs set alongside glossy representations of what Tottenham would look like following the implementation of the plan. The skyline of Northumberland Park would be dominated by a new slightly relocated Tottenham Hotspur soccer stadium. Northumberland Park would be transformed by 2025 from being one of the most deprived wards in England into ‘north London’s premier leisure destination with new high quality housing and improved transport options’. £430 million of investment in the stadium would create over 800 jobs and 285 new homes (Haringey Council/Mayor of London, 2012: 14, 16). However, the Strategic Regeneration Framework (Haringey Council, 2013) that fleshed out the Plan for Tottenham envisaged the building of 10,000 new homes and the creation of 5000 jobs by 2025. It emphasised that achieving these targets would depend on Tottenham’s ability to attract large-scale investment. Following the 2011 riots the Coalition government agreed a £41 million public sector funding package for Tottenham and also provided a £500 million borrowing guarantee to act as a lever for investment in transport and housing. The Strategic Regeneration Framework envisaged ‘working positively with developers and investors’ (Haringey Council, 2013: 5). Council-owned land in the area would be used to lever private sector development. Home ownership would be encouraged to promote a better balance in the area. Proactive controls would result in higher quality private housing by preventing conversions and clustering of houses in multiple occupation. The council would ‘work with portfolio landlords to improve the standards of private sector rental housing’ (Haringey Council/Mayor of London, 2012: 45). There would be investment in transport to improve services in areas such as Northumberland Park where they are currently poor. A ‘fun, civic heart’ would be created in nearby Tottenham Green, and Seven Sisters, at the other end of Tottenham High Road from Northumberland Park, would be turned into ‘a stunning new gateway into Tottenham’. Property-led regeneration, the Plan for Tottenham claimed, would ‘improve the quality of life for everyone – encourage investment, jobs, economic growth, quality housing and strong neighbourhoods’ (Haringey Council/Mayor of London, 2012: 14, 22, 14).

In some respects the Plan for Tottenham mirrored New Labour-era regeneration schemes for the area. Wards Corner, a site adjacent to Seven Sisters underground station, had been identified as the main focus of a previous smaller-scale property-led regeneration. It became the focus of a long-running and successful campaign by community groups and businesses seeking to retain an indoor market on the site of a proposed new retail development scheme. In 2010 community opponents won a landmark case against Haringey Council and its private sector developer partners in the High Court preventing the eviction of ethnic minority businesses from Wards Corner.

Similar community opposition has since emerged against elements of the Plan for Tottenham. Under the slogan ‘No Gentrification for Tottenham’, a well organised community coalition has depicted the Plan for Tottenham as a threat to small local businesses and the housing security of ethnic minorities on low incomes. It also characterised It Took a Riot as an attempt both to punish and blame the people of Tottenham for the 2011 riots:

Put together, all the above statements can be seen as an attempt to say that either the community as a whole, or some unspecified ‘angry’ section of it was responsible for the riots. There is also an attempt to say that immigration is partly to blame for crime in Tottenham in general. It then implies that these problems could be helped by a dispersal of some of the people currently in lower rent accommodation via higher rents and less social housing. Passages of the report look dangerously like they are proposing a ‘soft’ collective punishment of people in some housing tenures and from some social groups in Tottenham for the riots. (Our Tottenham/Haringey Housing Action, 2012)

Our Tottenham, the network of community groups that grew out of the Wards Corner coalition has argued for community-led regeneration focused on affordable housing and the protection of local services and amenities. It argued that the council was ‘gifting public money and assets to profit-driven developers’, that the Plan for Tottenham promoted a ‘corporate-led and large-scale urban development that would result in increased rents, unaffordable housing and the loss of some independent local shops, homes, community facilities and small business’ (Our Tottenham Planning Working Group, 2014). It opposed, for example, proposals to demolish two rows of shops and the homes above them to create a new pedestrian walkway from the underground rail station to the relocated Spurs ground. Local traders presented a petition signed by 4000 people against the proposed demolitions and the displacement of existing shops. The traders argued that there had been little or no community consultation in arriving at the Plan for Tottenham. The coalition between residents’ organisations, amenity groups and local traders was very similar to the pre-2011-riots campaign against development at Wards Corner. In both cases a disjuncture between property-led regeneration goals and the interests of existing communities and businesses was emphasised:

Regeneration is not about providing a football venue or boosting land values to justify an investment. The council should not be acting like a Corporation. Regeneration is not about moving the existing community OUT so more up-market people can move in. (Our Tottenham Planning Working Group, 2014)

It is apparent that community engagement and community participation as emphasised in all of the three post-riot reports sit uneasily with efforts to implement the Plan for Tottenham. There has been some formal community consultation but initiatives to date – about 2000 local residents were consulted about their vision for Tottenham – have reached out to far fewer people than have signed petitions opposing elements of the Plan for Tottenham (Haringey Council, 2013). The limited scope of such consultation is hardly surprising in a context where success is so heavily predicated on the ability of the council to woo private developers.

Conclusion: The limits of gentrification and the chimera of community

During its time in office, New Labour significantly increased the level of resources within deprived areas. Between 2001 and 2008 over £3 billion was allocated to the 88 most deprived local authority districts in England through the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. This expanded upon previous Conservative government urban policies (City Challenge and Single Regeneration Budget) of investing public funds into deprived areas. New Labour’s flagship initiative, the New Deal for Communities (NDC) invested £50 million in each of the 39 localities where it operated over a ten-year period. Launched in 1998 to ‘turn around the poorest neighbourhoods’, the NDC focused on small areas and included considerable focus on community engagement (DETR, 1998). Community representatives were incorporated on to partnership boards that oversaw the implementation of neighbourhood renewal strategies. The current policy context, illustrated by the case of Tottenham, marks a profound departure from this approach. Since the election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government in 2010, there has been ‘a dramatic shift in the discourse around neighbourhood regeneration’ with regeneration itself apparently sidelined as a policy tool (Broughton et al., 2011: 82). Indeed, the explicit theme of Coalition local economic development policy as set out in its White Paper, Local Growth: Realising Every Place’s Potential, has been to foster prosperity and growth in all parts of England (Crowley et al., 2012). In line with the government’s narrative of decentralisation and local empowerment, the strategies introduced as a means of realising this policy objective have centred on providing local areas with the freedoms and flexibilities to encourage private sector investment and business growth. Within this policy framework local areas are encouraged to identify and develop their unique selling points, and to innovate and compete in attracting private sector growth and investment.

There is little evidence that The Localism Act (2011) has empowered places like Tottenham in the way envisioned by Big Society rhetoric. The degree to which the Act’s neighbourhood planning provisions enable residents to meaningfully shape development decisions for their locality is diminished by policies on infrastructure and local economic growth that promote and facilitate development even when it is against community wishes. The current context, illustrated by Tottenham, is one where Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) consisting of local authority and private sector partnerships – with central government support – are very much in the driving seat. Implicit in this approach is the expectation that local authorities within LEPs will use the more flexible approaches to planning and regulation that they are now permitted in order to foster local economic growth. In effect, local government has taken on a direct role in levering property-led regeneration. During the 1980s, local authorities were outside the tent and saw property-led regeneration schemes such as Enterprise Zones as undermining their powers. Now, within London at least, even Labour-run local authorities appear to have embraced insider roles in equivalent schemes. Some of these, including Haringey Council, have bought into gentrification policies as a means of fixing communities like Tottenham’s in the face of considerable community opposition to such goals.

Such an approach reflects an underlying municipalist ethos that has historically informed the response of local authorities to the progressive erosion of their power and sovereignty which began in the Thatcher era and continued under New Labour. Municipalism manifests itself in a default tendency by local authorities to promote their strategic aims and institutional interests by levering the resources and power they have at their disposal to advance those interests (Dillon and Fanning, 2011: 4). In this particular policy context, development is seen as ‘the only game in town’ that local authorities engage with in order to pursue their strategic regeneration aims as it is a sphere in which they continue to exercise some leverage. Indeed, in some instances local authorities have emerged as the main drivers of flagship regeneration schemes (see for example, Raco and Henderson, 2008).

In Tottenham, as in the established ‘third wave’ gentrification boroughs, the promotion of developer-led regeneration strategies has triggered resistance from local activists who see it resulting in the displacement of existing working class communities and threatening their diversity by changing the socio-demographics of localities earmarked for development. There is, however, little concrete evidence as of yet of property-led regeneration leading to significant change in the socio-economic profile of Tottenham’s deprived localities, at least in the short term. The Tottenham Strategic Regeneration Framework envisages the building of an additional 10,000 new homes between now and 2025 (Haringey Council, 2013). However, the actual number of units being provided by development projects that are either approved or already in progress is significantly below the scale needed for these target figures to be achieved. The ‘refreshed’ Northumberland Park master plan, for example, provides for up to 4500 new homes – mainly through the demolition and redevelopment of the area’s main council housing estate – but so far the only housing being generated consists of 200 units for private use that will be built as part of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club development. Likewise, the master plan for Tottenham Hale envisages the building of up to 5000 new homes over the long term. However, no housing-related development proposals for the area have emerged as of yet.

The plans and strategies produced by Haringey Council following the publication of the Plan for Tottenham aspire to the medium- to long-term socio-demographic transformation of the area. In addition to a significant increase in housing density, major infrastructure development, the attraction of large employers and a high profile third level institution to the area, the development of niche industry sectors and cultural hubs and major public realm improvements are all envisaged. To realise these ambitions, however, Haringey will need to find major private sector partners. For this reason Tottenham is being marketed to potential development partners as ‘the next chapter in London’s regeneration story’ with a £41 million development fund and a £500 million borrowing guarantee (Haringey Council, 2014). Yet there are indications that this will be insufficient to pump prime the regeneration of Tottenham. Even at a time when the commodification of space in areas accessible to central London has reached unprecedented levels, Tottenham has been unable to attract major investment in housing. A 23 March 2014 article on Haringey Council’s development plans for Tottenham in the London Evening Standard noted how the ‘gentrifying desire line that has crept northwards from Shoreditch to Dalston’ falters at Tottenham before leapfrogging across to Walthamstow.

Even if the developments envisaged in the Plan for Tottenham did occur and its goal of creating new mixed communities was realised, it is unlikely that a transformative improvement in community cohesion that benefitted existing residents of Tottenham’s deprived localities would occur. Most evidence to date suggests that development that gentrifies deprived working class areas does not lead to either social mixing or the fostering of bridging social capital between groups capable of benefitting in the localities concerned (Butler and Robson, 2003; Davidson, 2012). Instead studies from the UK and elsewhere point to serious dis-benefits for existing residents of deprived areas in the form of direct and indirect displacement (Lees, 2008; Davidson and Lees, 2010; Cheshire, 2012; Le Gales, 2012).

The local economic and community strategies of the Coalition government embody a rupture with decades of urban policy that directed regeneration and capacity building resources towards deprived areas. Beneath the rhetoric of localism and the Big Society, the key implication of this policy shift is that, for the first time since the early 1990s, there are no national urban renewal programmes in place providing dedicated regeneration funds to deprived communities. Instead they are expected to look to the market for the resources they need for physical, economic and social renewal. Another implication is the exclusion of communities from meaningful decision-making about developments in their localities. What we see from current efforts to revitalise Tottenham is urban policy driven by a corporatist alliance comprising institutional and private sector interests that excludes community actors. While the reports published in the wake of the 2011 riots stressed the importance of building community infrastructure and improving community–institutional relations, the policy solution being applied to address Tottenham’s needs is a regeneration strategy predicated on the commodification of urban space, the facilitation of developer interests and changing the nature of the community. Such an approach leaves unresolved the ongoing, underlying problems with the way in which institutions engage with and address the needs of deprived communities in places such as Tottenham.