Roger Robinson: Cities Imaginaries Lecture 2021

The Actuality of Gentrification

The danger with gentrification is that it breaks up long-held communities and bonds and histories without acknowledging and valuing them. Brixton has resisted gentrification before and it will again but a lot of energy and resources are being placed into the process of its gentrification, far more than the resources that were available to support it's long time inhabitants.

About the speaker

Roger Robinson is a writer who has performed worldwide. He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020, shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2020, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. His latest collection A Portable Paradise was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the Black British writing canon. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works and he has toured extensively with the British Council.

Lara Choksey (respondent) is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on confluences of embodiment, land, utility, and citizenship in the social reproduction of environment. She is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, and Visiting Research Fellow at the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her most recent publication is Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Matthew Beaumont (chair) is Co-Director of UCL Urban Laboratory and Professor in English Literature at UCL. His most recent publication is The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (Verso, 2020).