Housing Struggles, Regeneration and Gentrification
This thread addresses the entangled crises of housing, displacement, and speculative development in global cities.
Housing Struggles, Regeneration and Gentrification critiques regeneration as a term often co-opted to obscure gentrification and calls for more just, participatory approaches to urban redevelopment. The works foreground citizen agency, communal knowledge and grassroots strategies, from DIY housing to open-source urbanism. By interrogating who benefits from dominant models of housing and development, this thread advocates for equitable futures rooted in collective action and spatial justice.
Counterspeculations: Audio Tour of the City of London
Counterspeculations is a critical soundwalk through the City of London that examines the hidden logics and mythologies of financial capitalism. Blending field recordings, narration and site-specific reflections, the series features scholars, artists and theorists who explore the cultural and symbolic dimensions of finance – from algorithmic trading and digital speculation to gold, almanacs and anarchist histories. Recorded during a 2018 workshop organised by UCL Urban Laboratory and the ReImagining Value Action Lab, the project invites listeners to rethink the city as a site where money, imagination and power converge in unexpected ways.
Contributors: Conrad Moriarty-Cole, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Robbie Richardson, David Benque, Ed Mayo, Judith Suissa, Carla Ibled, Brett Scott, Paul Gilbert, Steven Taylor, Carey Young, Rachel Rosen
Reactivating the Social Condenser! Architecture against Privation
Companion audio to an exhibition and research project exploring the concept of the "social condenser" in architecture and its urban impacts.
Contributors: Dubravka Sekulić (ETH Zürich), Oleksiy Radinski (Visual Culture Research Centre, Kiev), Łukasz Stanek (Manchester School of Architecture), Michał Murawski (School of Slavonic and East European Studies [SSEES], UCL), Jane Rendell (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Nick Beech (Oxford Brookes / CCA), Andrew Willimott (SSEES, UCL), Victor Buchli (UCL Anthropology), Udo Grashoff (SSEES, UCL), Andrea Phillips (Goldsmiths, University of London), Owen Hatherley (The Guardian), Michael Marriott (Artist), Jonathan Charley (University of Strathclyde), Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge)
The Case of Robin Hood Gardens
The Case of Robin Hood Gardens is a two-part seminar series examining the cultural, architectural, and social legacy of the modernist housing estate in East London. Through expert talks and artistic reflections, the series explores the complex debates surrounding demolition, regeneration and the value of preserving housing heritage. Hosted by UCL Urban Laboratory in 2015.
Contributors: Adrian Forty (Professor, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Alan Powers (Writer and editor of Robin Hood Gardens Re-Visions (2009)), Catherine Croft (Director, Twentieth Century Society; Editor, C20 Magazine), Sarah Wigglesworth (Architect), Jane Rendell (Professor, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Jessie Brennan (Artist; Creator of A Fall of Ordinariness and Light and Regeneration!), Susanne Tutsch (Architect; Co-organiser of Streetlife in Robin Hood Gardens), Judit Ferencz (Illustrator; PhD Student, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Mark Lemanski (Architect and researcher), Murray Fraser (Professor, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)
Change by Design: Collective Imaginations for Contested Sites in Euston
The Change by Design report launch, held on 30 November 2015, presented the outcomes of a participatory design workshop led by Architecture Sans Frontières-UK in partnership with Citizens UK, UCL, and the University of Sheffield. Focusing on the regeneration of London’s Euston area in light of HS2 proposals, the event explored alternative community-led visions for development. The launch featured a public debate on the limitations and potentials of participatory planning, questioning how meaningful community engagement can be achieved amidst increasingly top-down and market-driven urban transformation processes.
Contributors: Beatrice de Carli (Architecture Sans Frontières-UK), Katherine Wong (Architecture Sans Frontières-UK)., Lianne Hartley (Mend London), Catherine Greig (Make Good), Viola Petrella (Architects for Social Housing), Michael Edwards (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL), Sophie Morley (Architecture Sans Frontières-UK). , Cllr Sally Gimson (Camden Council), Fran Heron (Resident, Ampthill Estate), Stephanie Leonard (CitizensUK)
“Navigating the System” Audio Accompaniment
This exhibition sheds light on the lives of London’s boat-dwellers—continuous cruisers who live without a fixed address. Through personal stories, it reveals how this nomadic community navigates the city's canals and the UK's bureaucratic barriers to healthcare and services, highlighting the systemic challenges faced by those living outside conventional housing.
Contributors: Will Milner, Sam Francis, Nosazemen Agbontaen, Joseph Cook , Caitlin Vinicombe, Kara Blackmore, Nura Ali, Lucie G, Charlotte Klein, Dhrub Kumar, Danny Steadman, Rosie Strickland, Arlene Wandera
From Garden City to Garden Left-Overs: Spatial appropriations in the gardens of Bahçelievler, Ankara
Lecture by Deniz Atlay on the appropriation of shared gardens in Ankara’s early republican housing cooperatives and the threats posed by urban regeneration.
Contributors: Dr Deniz Atlay, Jordan Rowe
Richard Baxter: Contextualising the debate on high-rise housing
Debate from 9 June 2014 with Richard Baxter on the modernist high-rise as a place of home.
Contributor: Richard Baxter (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Geography department in Queen Mary, University of London and the Centre for Studies of Home)
Ruth Glass and London: Aspects of Change 1964–2014
Held fifty years after the publication of London: Aspects of Change (1964), this UCL event revisits the influential work led by Ruth Glass, who famously coined the term ‘gentrification’. Bringing together sociologists, planners, geographers and historians, the original book offered a cross-disciplinary portrait of a rapidly changing city. This commemorative event reflects on how the themes explored – such as housing, race, governance and land values – remain central to understanding twenty-first-century London, highlighting both continuities and shifts in the city's urban dynamics.
Contributors: Ben Campkin (UCL Urban Lab), Chair: Claire Colomb (UCL Bartlett School of Planning), Phil Cohen (Birkbeck), James Cheshire (UCL Geography), Michael Hebbert (UCL Bartlett School of Planning), Loretta Lees (University of Leicester), Margaret Byron (University of Leicester), Panel discussion led by Michael Edwards (Bartlett School of Planning), This event has kindly been supported by the the UCL Grand Challenge for Sustainable Cities
State of the Legacy: 01: Looking Back: Evolution of the Legacy Promise
This session critically explores the regeneration legacy of London 2012, assessing how private-led development displaced strategic planning and failed to deliver equitable outcomes in East London.
State of the Legacy: 02: Delivering Legacy: Governance
This session critically examines the exceptional governance frameworks behind London 2012, including quangos and corporate-led planning, revealing shifts in development control and democratic accountability.
State of the Legacy: 04: Prosperity: Jobs, training and workspaces
This session interrogates the employment legacy of London 2012, highlighting the contradiction between promises of prosperity and the displacement of existing jobs during Olympic Park development.
State of the Legacy: Inclusive Housing Workshop
A participatory workshop exploring how London’s Olympic Park could host a 100% affordable, community-led housing development in its final neighbourhood.
A documentary capturing the realities of building London’s Olympic Park, highlighting construction workers’ experiences and the unfulfilled promises of legacy, such as apprenticeships and labour protections.
The Other Side of Docklands (1991)
A grassroots documentary capturing how Isle of Dogs residents responded to displacement, health risks, and exclusion during the London Docklands redevelopment, forming SPLASH to advocate for secure housing.
New London Vernacular – Pioneering Urbanity in an Expanding Capital
Architect Lee Polisano presents a design vision for Old Oak Park Royal, reflecting on how to achieve quality urbanism in London's profit-driven development landscape.
New London Vernacular – Urban Qualities
Simon Kretz presents on urban qualities, followed by a multidisciplinary panel discussion on how to achieve spatially and socially inclusive cities within real estate-driven urbanism.
Urban Pamphleteer: Issue 02. Regeneration Realities
This issue critiques how “regeneration” is often used to justify gentrification and profit-led redevelopment. It calls for ethical, community-led approaches that bridge the gap between policy and lived experience.
Urban Pamphleteer: Issue 06. Open-source Housing Crisis
This issue tackles London’s housing crisis by promoting open-source, participatory strategies that challenge speculative development and empower citizens to reclaim agency in shaping housing futures.
Urban Pamphleteer: Issue 11. Multi-stories: Estate interventions in London and Paris
This issue explores how social housing estates in London and Paris are represented, experienced, and reimagined. Bringing together visual, ethnographic and historical perspectives, it challenges stigmatising narratives and highlights the everyday lives, memories and attachments that shape these urban settings.
Navigating the System is an exhibition at the UCL Urban Room exploring the barriers London’s boater community faces in accessing healthcare and services without a fixed address. Featuring photography by Caitlin Vinicombe and research by Joseph Cook and Nura Ali, it highlights systemic exclusions and advocates for inclusive, community-informed approaches.
Urban Lab Films: Equal by Design
A philosophical and design-led reflection on the UK housing crisis, Equal by Design uses Spinoza’s ideas to analyse income inequality, social housing and wellbeing in architecture.
Open Source Housing Crisis Workshop
Workshop hosted by Central Saint Martins’ Graphic Communication Design team, supported by Restless Futures, bringing together designers, researchers, and housing activists to develop open-source, network-based tools addressing London’s housing crisis. Outcomes were later published in Urban Pamphleteer (2015), contributing to debates on spatial justice and urban change.
Canary Wharf: A workshop for the future city
This research explores Canary Wharf as a lens into London’s transformation into a global financial centre, assessing its role in speculative urbanism, socio-spatial inequality and the global-local tensions embedded in regeneration.
Ongoing archival and research initiative documenting the work of Ruth Glass and the Centre for Urban Studies at UCL, highlighting their foundational contributions to urban sociology and their enduring relevance to contemporary urban debates.
LGBTQ+ nightlife spaces in London
A long-term research collaboration documenting the evolution, significance, and challenges facing LGBTQ+ nightlife venues in London since 1986, highlighting their cultural, spatial and political relevance.
An architectural and oral history project documenting the displacement of Limehouse’s original Chinatown community in London, highlighting forgotten immigrant narratives within urban regeneration and social housing.
A comparative study of university-led regeneration projects, exploring the role of higher education institutions in shaping inclusive urban development, with a focus on UCL East.
Urban Lab Walk: Ruth Glass’ 1964 London Route in 2024
- This blog post documents an early morning urban walk following the route described by Ruth Glass in her seminal 1964 work London: Aspects of Change. Organised by postgraduate urbanists at UCL, the event juxtaposed archival maps, historical images and Glass’s text with present-day observations. Participants discussed themes of transformation, urban heritage and spatial memory at eight stops across the city, reflecting on changes in architecture, culture and identity. The walk highlighted how Glass’s insights remain strikingly relevant, offering a lens into London’s evolving yet persistent urban fabric.
- This piece critically examines the urban regeneration impacts of sports mega-events, focusing on the 2012 London Olympics and drawing comparisons with Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and 2016 Rio Olympics. Eduardo Nobre highlights the social and spatial inequalities tied to these events and advocates for participatory planning models grounded in community–university collaboration to counter top-down, market-led approaches.
Urban Lab Walk: Hackney — Aftermath of Regeneration
- This guided walk through Hackney, led by author Ashley Hickson-Lovence, followed the fictional route of the 392 bus from his novel The 392. Framed as part of UCL Urban Lab’s 2022 programming, the event blended personal memory, literary storytelling and critical reflection on gentrification and urban change in East London.
Urban Lab Walk: The GreenWay — Green & Blue Infrastructure
- This walk critically explored East London’s green and blue infrastructure through lived experience, environmental history and community storytelling. From the historic sewer system under the Greenway to the floating islands of Abbey Creek and the contested light access at Pudding Mill Allotments, the event highlighted the layered intersections of ecology, regeneration and community-led stewardship. It showcased how grassroots actors and ecosystems adapt within uneven urban change.
Urban Lab Walk: Kings Cross — Beyond Regeneration
- Tom Bolton led a walk exploring King’s Cross and its surrounding communities, highlighting how regeneration has transformed the area while displacing or neglecting peripheral neighbourhoods such as Somers Town and Maiden Lane. The tour revealed stark contrasts between revitalised zones and neglected spaces, questioning the inclusivity of urban redevelopment.
Roger Robinson on the actuality of gentrification in Brixton
- Poet Roger Robinson reflects on decades of life in Brixton to deliver a deeply personal lecture on gentrification’s impact on Black and Brown communities. Drawing on sound, food, and space as key signifiers of cultural loss and erasure, he critiques how regeneration displaces working-class communities while co-opting their histories and aesthetics.
Urban Trees and Architectural History
- Clare Melhuish explores the historical, symbolic, and intrinsic cultural value of urban trees in city life. Moving beyond utilitarian frameworks, she reflects on the importance of trees in urban imaginaries, architectural history, and everyday experience, calling for a more holistic, culturally sensitive understanding of urban green infrastructure.
Timescapes of Urban Change: Postcards from regeneration in Barcelona and London
- This two-part international workshop examined the temporalities of urban change in Barcelona's Raval district and East London. It explored how long-term regeneration, institutional planning, and everyday practices intersect, collide, and shape urban experiences across time. The workshops brought together academics, planners, and activists to reflect on the layered impacts of regeneration, contested participation, and the limits of planned urban futures.