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'I am critical. You are mainstream': a response to Slater
Chris Hamnett
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CITY, VOL. 14, NOS. 1–2, FEBRUARY–APRIL 2010
On gentrification
‘I am critical. You are mainstream’:
a response to Slater
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Chris Hamnett
I
am pleased to have the opportunity to
respond once again to Tom Slater’s
(2010) arguments regarding gentrification and displacement. The issue is an
important one, which has major social,
analytical and political implications and it
merits serious debate.
Tom’s case seems to boil down to four
key issues. These are: first, that I ignore or
fail to engage with the key issue of
Marcuse’s classification of different types of
displacement; second, that I focus on the
claimed diversionary issue of replacement
versus displacement, which is in fact
undermined by Marcuse’s concept of exclusionary displacement; third, that I utilize
aggregate class analysis rather than a more
rounded approach to class; and fourth, that
my work is deemed to be mainstream
versus critical. I will respond to each of
these in turn. I will not respond to the various rhetorical devices employed by Tom to
paint a negative image of my work as a
detailed response would be tedious for
readers.
First, however, I should clarify the
reasons why I focus on his criticisms of my
own work rather than engaging in a wider
debate. There are two reasons. First, he
accords my work a key role in his critique of
current gentrification research, and as such,
it merits a detailed response. Second, I think
that my arguments and evidence regarding
the nature of urban social class change and
replacement are important and merit strong
defence.
Professor
CCIT_A_458437.sgm
14
February
Taylor
City:
10.1080/13604810903579287
1360-4813
Original
102010
chris.hamnett@kcl.ac.uk
00000
Analysis
&
and
Article
2010
Francis
ChrisHamnett
(print)/1470-3629
Francis
of Urban Trends
(online)
Displacement versus replacement
Tom accuses me of ignoring the key issues
and focusing on the diversionary issue of
displacement versus replacement. I think I
can make the same response, which is that he
ignores or circumvents the key issue of the
processes driving class change in many cities,
namely, differential growth and decline. This
issue is of great importance as many authors
simply assume that gentrification always
involves displacement and that the shrinking
of the working class in many cities is inevitably the result of gentrification and displacement. This is not the case. By virtue of his
rather narrow focus on displacement, Tom
overlooks the much wider processes generating social class change in contemporary cities,
not least the key role of de-industrialization
and the rapid growth of the financial and
business services sector, both of which have
played a key role in reshaping the urban class
structure. Over the last 40 years, the traditional manufacturing-based working class
has rapidly shrunk, to be replaced by an
expanding professional and managerial
service class, a large and growing group of
intermediate social classes and the economically inactive. Watt (2008) notes that the
middle class are not the only class in town.
He is of course correct, but equally gentrification is not the only game in town in terms
of class change.
Tom argues that in my response to his
article I ignore Peter Marcuse’s classificatory
work on displacement and focus on what he
ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/10/01–2180-07 © 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13604810903579287
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HAMNETT: ‘I AM CRITICAL. YOU ARE MAINSTREAM’
sees as the ‘red herring’ of class replacement.
There is no doubt that Marcuse’s conceptual
work on types of displacement is of considerable analytical and practical importance and I
would broadly support the distinctions he
makes between direct and exclusionary
displacement. The problem is not with
Marcuse’s types of displacement, however,
but with Tom’s failure to grasp that a decline
in the working-class population of a city is
not necessarily the result of displacement,
whether direct or exclusionary, but is, in large
part, a result of the changing industrial and
class structure of the city – he is thus in
danger of focusing on the symptom and
appears to choose not to diagnose the issue.
Research on London (Buck et al., 1986),
New York (Buck et al. 1992), Chicago
(Wilson, 1996) and other cities has consistently shown the impact of large-scale deindustrialization over the last 40 years. Many
of the jobs traditionally defined as ‘working
class’ have disappeared and, with them, large
parts of the working class themselves. This
decline has led to associated changes in housing demand. This is, arguably, one reason for
the abandonment of areas of working-class
and lower income housing in the inner areas
of former industrial cities such as Manchester
and Liverpool in Britain (Keenan et al., 1999)
and Detroit, Philadelphia and Cleveland in
the USA (Wilson et al., 1994; Margulis, 1995).
These areas have not declined or been abandoned as a result of gentrification but as a
result of the decline of the industrial base, a
shrinking workforce, ethnic change and
suburbanization. Tom tends to ignore these
wider changes in the economic base and
occupational class structure of cities and their
implications for the housing market. In this
respect he treats gentrification as the only
game in town in terms of social class change,
which it is not.
Regarding exclusionary displacement,
there is no doubt that the growth of a new
middle class of professionals and managers,
working in high-paid jobs in London and
other cities, has led to rapid house price inflation over the last 40 years and to the pricing
181
out of lower income groups from the housing
market, and I have written extensively about
this issue (Hamnett, 2003, 2009a) and argued
that a process of spatially displaced demand
linked to gentrification has pushed up house
prices in lower priced areas of London and
thereby led to exclusionary displacement
through the price mechanism. To accept the
existence of exclusionary displacement in
some circumstances, however, is a world
away from accepting Tom’s view that the
long decline of the urban working class in
some cities is primarily a result of gentrification-induced displacement. There is also a
wider problem in that house price inflation is
not restricted to gentrified areas and nor is it
simply the result of gentrification. On the
contrary, as I have shown elsewhere
(Hamnett, 2009a) average property prices in
both London and England and Wales as a
whole rose by exactly the same percentage
(230%) from 1995 to 2006 and created major
affordability problems. But, as Marcuse
(1986) notes in his definition of the term:
‘Exclusionary displacement from gentrification occurs when any household is not
permitted to move into a dwelling, by a
change in conditions which affects that
dwelling or its immediate surroundings,
which … differs significantly and in a
spatially concentrated fashion from changes
in the housing market as a whole’ (p. 156).
Thus, it is not possible to extend the concept
of exclusionary displacement to the city as a
whole. It has to possess spatial focus in order
to retain its explanatory power.
While there is no doubt that many lowwage workers have been effectively priced
out of the inner city by rising house prices,
this is a far cry from linking working-class
decline to middle-class growth in a direct
causal model. In this respect, the focus on
displacement as a cause of working-class
decline is somewhat of a red herring. The
primary cause is the collapse of the industrial
employment base and associated changes in
occupational class over a 40-year period
during which period virtually the entire
labour force has been replaced. The growth
182
CITY VOL. 14, NOS. 1–2
of the professional/managerial middle classes
in cities such as London and Paris has led to
exclusionary displacement of lower income
groups as a result of house price and rent
inflation but this is essentially a secondary
factor in working-class decline. Tom’s
consistent and unremitting focus on the role
of gentrification and displacement makes him
something of ‘a one club golfer’ in terms of
understanding wider processes of contemporary urban social change.
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Understanding urban social class change
When we come to the issue of social class
change, Tom’s argument is essentially that
my claims regarding the growth of the
middle classes in London are exaggerated
because I rely on both the uncritical adoption
of government class categories and census
data which ‘confuses the measuring tool
(the census) with class itself (a social relation
irreducible to measurement)’ (p. 172) and a
Goldthorpian type of employment aggregate
approach to class analysis ‘where social class
is nothing more or less than an empirical
question, and one that involves totting up the
amount [sic] of people who fit into (dubious)
occupational categories’ (p. 173) rather than a
more sophisticated analysis of class analysis
concerned ‘with other crucial processes of
class constitution, namely the social relations
of class struggle, collective action, exploitation, alienation and domination’ (p. 173).
It is heartening to see that Tom has at last
entered the debate about the nature of class
change, though it seems to me that the quote
he provides from Goldthorpe regarding the
basis of his schema does engage directly with
some of the realities of class position and
experience and that it is quite false to claim
that he is ‘interested in social class structure
purely for the sake of categorisation, going no
further than employment relations’. There is
no doubt that Goldthorpe has been consistently engaged in the issue of class definition
and categorisation, but so have most other
class analysts such as Wright and Martin
(1987), Marshall and Rose (1985), Marshall
et al. (1988), Esping-Andersen (1993) and
Wright (2005). This is for the simple reason
that if you cannot meaningfully define, operationalise (and thus hopefully measure) class,
you can say very little beyond assertion
regarding the nature of class changes.
We all know that there is clearly much
more to class analysis than simply totting up
the number of people in different class categories, not least the nature of changing class
inequalities (Sennett and Cobb, 1972; Savage
and Egerton, 1997), and the changing nature
of class identities (Savage, 2004), but I would
be interested to know what class categories
Tom would propose, and what they are
based on, and how, if at all, they can be
measured. Tom appears to have been
granted some form of divine access to an
understanding of class change denied to most
social scientists who have struggled to find
out how class structure is actually changing.
Thus he apparently understands the realities
while the rest of us labour in a cloud of
misapprehension.
There is also a fundamental contradiction
in Tom’s argument. If he believes that class is
‘a social relation irreducible to measurement’
and he approvingly quotes Ley (1994) that
‘numbers a class do not make’, why does he
bother quoting at some length from an
unpublished manuscript by Davidson and
Wyly (2009) which apparently takes issue
with the validity of the class categories
employed by the census and used by Butler
et al. (2008)? Davidson and Wyly point to
classificatory issues with Socio-economic
group 5 (SEG 5). There is no doubt that SEG
5, the intermediate non-manual workers, is a
very diverse group which includes a wide
variety of occupations, and some of the occupations included in SEG 5.2 raise problems
of accurate class categorisation. But this is all
well known, and the problems were explicitly noted in a lengthy footnote 2 of our 2008
paper (Butler et al., 2008).
Tom can argue that class is capable of classification and measurement, or that it is not,
but he cannot have it both ways which he
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HAMNETT: ‘I AM CRITICAL. YOU ARE MAINSTREAM’
seems to be attempting. Given that he
devotes considerable space to an apparent
critique of our research on London it seems
that he does in fact accept that class is capable
of classification and measurement and that
we are thus arguing about the appropriateness of the measures rather than saying class
is not measurable. This is a step forward.
What Butler and I were using in our analysis
was a standard measure of occupational class
to try to examine changes in occupational
class structure. We are not making claims
about its utility in wider debates about class
change such as class struggle or collective
action.
There are some well-known issues with
occupational class categories, which is
precisely why it was decided to replace the
traditional system of social classes and socioeconomic groups with a new National Statistics Socio-Economic classification in the
2001 census (Rose and O’Reilly, 1997). Also,
class categories do have analytical bite in that
the official class categories have, for many
years, shown consistent class-based variations in educational attainment, health, housing tenure, mortality, unemployment and
access to higher education (Halsey et al.,
1980; Reid, 1998). If official class categories
are as pointless and useless as Tom seems to
suggest, why do they show consistent differences in terms of life chances, and why does
the Labour government consistently push
policies to try to reduce class inequalities
based on these measures?
New build gentrification and displacement
Tom criticises my claims regarding the lack
of displacement by new build gentrification
and he claims that I ‘fail to appreciate’ the
work of Davidson and Lees (2005) who,
Tom says, have ‘carefully documented the
displacement effects of this form of gentrification’. He quotes them as stating that:
‘Using census data we have identified gentrification-induced social change along the
river, in particular the displacement of low-
183
income groups by high-income groups’
(Davidson and Lees, 2005, p. 1186). In fact,
their work does not support Tom’s claim in
any way as a careful reading would show.
First, their research on occupational change
in Thameside London boroughs from 1991
to 2001 shows that managers, professionals
and associate professionals and technical
staff increased by 21, 43 and 44%, respectively (broadly equivalent in magnitude to
the changes in class composition shown by
Butler et al., 2008), which Tom dismisses as
unrealistic while the other groups (with the
exception of sales and customer service
occupations) all declined by 8–29%. In fact,
their data shows that the top three occupational groups increased from 40% of the
total in 1991 to 52% of the total in 2001,
and if they included the administrative occupations as would be normal, the share would
be much greater. In other words, their
aggregate data supports the claims made in
Butler et al. (2008). This is an own goal for
Tom.
Second, their research claims on displacement display many of the problems I criticised in my initial response to Slater
(Hamnett, 2009b). In order to try to measure
the extent of potential displacement in riverside London, they aggregate the occupational
categories of all adult residents in 1991 and
2001 into two broad ‘classes’. Class 1 is what
they term a ‘gentrifier proxy’ and includes
SEGs 1, 2 and 3 (managers and senior officials, professionals and associate professionals, respectively) and class 2, a ‘displacee
proxy’ which includes SEGs 4 (clerical and
secretarial), 6 (personal services), 9 (process
operatives) and 5 (skilled trades) plus the
permanently sick and retired. They then
show that class 1 grew rapidly in virtually all
boroughs while class 2 contracted, though to
a lower extent.
There are several problems with this analysis. First, what they term socio-economic
groups are not in fact SEGs but broad occupational groups or Standard Occupational
Categories which are quite different. Second,
they do not say how they converted or
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CITY VOL. 14, NOS. 1–2
standardized the 1991 data to 2001 categories
as the 2001 census did not in fact include any
data on SEGs. Third, they include the retired
and permanently sick in class 2 which is
untenable, as the retired are just as likely to
include both ex professionals and managers
as they are unskilled workers. Fourth, by
labelling class 2 as a ‘displace’ proxy, rather
than say, lower class, they effectively
prejudge the causal processes at work.
Fifth, their conclusion that ‘Using census
data we have identified gentrificationinduced social change along the river, in
particular the displacement of low-income
groups by high-income groups’ (Davidson
and Lees, 2005, p. 1186) is simply not borne
out by their evidence. I would challenge
Davidson and Lees or anyone to show how
census data can provide convincing evidence
of displacement. It can show that one class or
housing tenure has grown and that another
has declined but it cannot show displacement. In fact, class 2 – the so-called displaces
– is likely to have declined as a result of a
long-term process of class change stemming
from de-industrialisation and the decline of
working-class jobs rather than the growth of
new build gentrification. Indeed, Davidson
and Lees state earlier in the paper that:
‘Although these strong concentrations of
gentrifiers and proportional decreases in
displace populations cannot unconditionally
demonstrate direct displacement, they do
strongly indicate that river-side areas have
already experienced significant population
change’ (2005, p. 1178). This is much more
accurate but Tom does not refer to this
important caveat. In his enthusiasm to search
out work which apparently casts doubt on
my research he either misrepresents or
misunderstands it.
Finally, of course, there is a remarkable
contradiction in Tom’s reference to the work
of Davidson and Lees as they utilize much
the same aggregate census employment
statistics as in Butler et al. (2008), which Tom
himself so roundly condemns in his response
and which Davidson and Wyly also apparently criticise in their unpublished paper.
Tom seems to want to have his cake and eat it
in terms of empirical evidence.
Tom’s rather cavalier attitude to empirical
research is well shown in his throwaway
comment on my work on loft conversions in
London (Hamnett and Whitelegg, 2007).
Tom states that:
‘the outcome is an essay that will tell us a
great deal about planning applications for
residential conversion (the mundane
transactions facilitating a particular type of
gentrification in London), but very little
about the marginalizations, exclusions and
injustices that allow some people to become
luxury loft dwellers whilst others around
them experience a loss of place.’ (p. 175,
emphasis added)
Drew Whitelegg and I spent a lot of time
collecting and analysing data on the number
of planning applications for conversions in
different boroughs for the simple reason that
it was necessary to try to find out the scale of
the process, when it started, how it spread
and the identity of the applicants. Tom
dismisses these as ‘mundane transactions …
facilitating gentrification’, but they are key to
understanding the scale of the process and
parallel the data collected and analysed by
Marcuse (1986) in his analysis of displacement in New York City where he looks at
the scale of cooperative and condominium
conversions, and the loss of single room
occupancy units (pp. 161–163) and also the
data collected by Bill Randolph and myself
(Hamnett and Randolph, 1988) for our
research on the scale and extent of flat ‘break
ups’ in London. This type of work is crucial
to understanding what is actually happening
rather than simply pontificating from the
sidelines as Tom seems to do.
Critical or mainstream?
Finally, I turn to the issue of critical versus
mainstream scholarship which Tom makes so
much of. Critical analysis does not necessarily entail taking Tom’s point of view. He
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HAMNETT: ‘I AM CRITICAL. YOU ARE MAINSTREAM’
has a very one-sided and partial view of
what constitutes critical scholarship, which
includes those who adhere to the view that
gentrification induces displacement, and
anyone who disagrees is labelled mainstream.
It is fascinating to note that Tom juxtaposes
the terms critical and mainstream (mostly in
relation to my work) no fewer than 10 times
(maybe more) in his response. This reminds
me of the Daleks in Dr Who (a British TV
series) who repeat in a mechanical voice ‘I am
critical, you are mainstream’: ‘exterminate!’.
Tom seems to have discovered a novel way to
conjugate the verb to criticise which goes
along these lines:
‘I am critical
He is mainstream
You are mainstream
We are critical
They are mainstream.’
Tom is trying to appropriate the critical high
ground and claim it as his own. In Tom’s
rather monocentric view, critical is what he
believes in and mainstream is what he is
opposed to. I would term this stereotyping
and an attempt to create an ‘in-group’ and an
‘out-group’. I think the issues are too important to play this kind of exclusionary game.
But if that is indeed the game, I think it very
reasonable to claim that it is Tom who is
forcefully defending the mainstream position, and me who is being critical.
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Chris Hamnett is Professor of Geography at
King’s College London. Email: chris.hamnett
@kcl.ac.uk