The invention of the ‘sink estate’: Consequential categorisation and the UK housing crisis

Abstract

This article explores the history and traces the realisation of a category that was invented by journalists, amplified by free market think tanks and converted into policy doxa (common sense) by politicians in the United Kingdom: the ‘sink estate’. This derogatory designator, signifying social housing estates that supposedly create poverty, family breakdown, worklessness, welfare dependency, antisocial behaviour and personal irresponsibility, has become the symbolic frame justifying current policies towards social housing that have resulted in considerable social suffering and intensified dislocation. The article deploys a conceptual articulation of agnotology (the intentional production of ignorance) with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power to understand the institutional arrangements and cognitive systems structuring deeply unequal social relations. Specifically, the highly influential publications on housing by a free market think tank, Policy Exchange, are dissected in order to demonstrate how the activation of territorial stigma has become an instrument of urban politics. The ‘sink estate’, it is argued, is the semantic battering ram in the ideological assault on social housing, deflecting attention away from social housing not only as urgent necessity during a serious crisis of affordability, but as incubator of community, solidarity, shelter and home.

Keywords

agnotology Bourdieu housing ‘sink estate’symbolic power territorial stigma think tanks

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anthony

(2011, July 10). Review of Hood Rat by Gavin Knight. The Guardian.

Arthurson

(2004). From stigma to demolition: Australian debates about housing and social exclusion. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 19, 255–270.

August

(2014). Challenging the rhetoric of stigmatization: The benefits of concentrated poverty in Toronto’s Regent Park. Environment and Planning A, 46, 1317–1333.

Auyero

(2012). Patients of the state. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Baldwin

(1972). No name in the street. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Bourdieu

(1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bourdieu

(1996). On the family as a realized category. Theory, Culture & Society, 13, 19–26.

Bourdieu

(2014). On the state: Lectures at the College de France. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Boys Smith

Morton

(2013). Create streets, not just multi-storey estates. Retrieved from http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/create%20streets.pdf (last accessed 4 May 2018).

10.

Buchanan

Woodcock

(2016). Councils spent £3.5bn on temporary housing in last five years. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38016728 (last accessed 4 May 2018).

11.

Campkin

(2013). Remaking London: Decline and regeneration in urban culture. London, UK: I.B. Tauris.

12.

Carlyon

(2013). Food for thought: Applying house price inflation to grocery prices (research report). Shelter. Retrieved from http://england.shelter.org.uk/professional_resources/policy_and_research/policy_library/policy_library_folder/food_for_thought (last accessed 4 May 2018).

13.

Crossley

(2017). In their place: The imagined geographies of poverty. London, UK: Pluto Press.

14.

Crump

(2002). Deconcentration by demolition: Public housing, poverty, and urban policy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 581–596.

15.

Darcy

(2010). Deconcentration of disadvantage and mixed-income housing: A critical discourse approach. Housing, Theory & Society, 27, 1–22.

16.

Davies

(2016). The happiness industry. London, UK: Verso.

17.

Dorling

(2014). All that is solid: The great housing disaster. London, UK: Allen Lane.

18.

Dorling

(2016, October 21). Has Brexit burst the British housing bubble? New Statesman. Retrieved from http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/10/has-brexit-burst-british-housing-bubble (last accessed 4 May 2018).

19.

Eddo-Lodge

(2011, August 8). Twitter didn’t fuel the Tottenham riot. The Guardian.

20.

Fernandez

Aalbers

(2016). Financialization and housing: Between globalization and varieties of capitalism. Competition and Change, 20, 71–88.

21.

Forrest

Murie

(1988). Selling the welfare state: The privatisation of public housing. London, UK: Routledge.

22.

Goetz

(2013). The audacity of HOPE VI: Discourse and the dismantling of public housing. Cities, 35, 342–348.

23.

Gray

Mooney

(2011). Glasgow’s new urban frontier: ‘Civilising’ the population of ‘Glasgow East’. City, 15, 4–24.

24.

Guy

(2013, February). Two nations, one mission. Total Politics.

25.

Hancock

Mooney

(2013). ‘Welfare ghettos’ and the ‘broken society’: Territorial stigmatization in the contemporary UK. Housing, Theory & Society, 30, 46–64.

26.

Hanley

(2007). Estates: An intimate history. London, UK: Granta.

27.

Hills

(2007). Ends and means: The future role of social housing in England. LSE Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion. Retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/5568/1/Ends_and_Means_The_future_roles_of_social_housing_in_England_1.pdf (last accessed 4 May 2018).

28.

Hodkinson

(2012). The new urban enclosures. City, 16, 500–518.

29.

Imbroscio

(2008). Challenging the dispersal consensus in American housing policy research. Journal of Urban Affairs, 30, 111–130.

30.

Kallin

Slater

(2014). Activating territorial stigma: Gentrifying marginality in Edinburgh’s periphery. Environment and Planning A, 46, 1351–1368.

31.

Kipfer

Petrunia

(2009). ‘Recolonization’ and public housing: A Toronto case study. Studies in Political Economy, 83, 111–139.

32.

Knight

(2014). The estate we’re in: Lessons from the front line. Policy Exchange. Retrieved from https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/the-estate-were-in.pdf (last accessed 4 May 2018).

33.

Lansley

Mack

(2015). Breadline Britain: The rise of mass poverty. London, UK: One World.

34.

Lees

(2014). The urban injustices of New Labour’s ‘New Urban Renewal’: The case of the Aylesbury Estate in London. Antipode, 46, 921–947.

35.

Liu

Blomley

(2013). Making news and making space: Framing Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Canadian Geographer, 57, 119–132

36.

Madden

Marcuse

(2016). In defense of housing. London, UK: Verso.

37.

Malpass

(2005). Housing and the welfare state: The development of housing policy in Britain. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

38.

Marris

(1986). Loss and change (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.

39.

Maude

(2012). Ten years of modernization: Looking back and the challenges ahead. Policy Exchange. Retrieved from http://powerbase.info/images/1/14/Maude_PX_speech.pdf (last accessed 4 May 2018).

40.

Medvetz

(2012). Think tanks in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

41.

Meek

(2014). Private island: Why Britain now belongs to someone else. London, UK: Verso Books.

42.

Minton

(2017). Big capital: Who is London for? London, UK: Penguin.

43.

Mirowski

(2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the economic meltdown. London, UK: Verso.

44.

Morton

(2010). Making housing affordable: A new vision for housing policy. Policy Exchange. Retrieved from https://www.policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/making-housing-affordable-aug-10.pdf (last accessed 4 May 2018).

45.

Morton

(1976, November 18). Tough estates. New Society, p. 365.

46.

Musterd

Van Kempen

(2007). Trapped or on the springboard? Housing careers in large housing estates in European cities. Journal of Urban Affairs, 29, 311–329.

47.

Power

(1997). Estates on the edge: The social consequences of mass housing in Europe. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

48.

Proctor

Schiebinger

(Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

49.

Ramsden

Adams

(2009). Escaping the laboratory: The rodent experiments of John B. Calhoun and their cultural influence. Journal of Social History, 42, 761–792.

50.

Savills (2016). Completing London’s streets (Report to the Cabinet Office). Retrieved from http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/uk/residential—other/completing-london-s-streets-080116.pdf (last accessed 4 May 2018).

51.

Slater

(2004). Municipally-managed gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto. The Canadian Geographer, 48, 303–325.

52.

Slater

(2014). The myth of ‘Broken Britain’: Welfare reform and the production of ignorance. Antipode, 46, 948–969.

53.

Slater

(2016a). The housing crisis in neoliberal Britain: Free market think tanks and the production of ignorance. In Springer

Birch

MacLeavy

(Eds.), The Routledge handbook of neoliberalism (pp. 370–382). London, UK: Routledge.

54.

Slater

(2016b). The neoliberal state and the 2011 English riots: A class analysis. In Thörn

Mayer

Sernhede

Thörn

(Eds.), Understanding urban uprisings, protests and movements (pp. 121–148). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

55.

Slater

Anderson

(2012). The reputational ghetto: Territorial stigmatization in St. Paul’s, Bristol. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 530–546.

56.

Smith

D. M.

(1994). Geography and social justice. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

57.

Steinberg

(2010). The myth of concentrated poverty. In Hartman

Squires

(Eds.), The integration debate: Competing futures for American cities (pp. 213–227). New York, NY: Routledge.

58.

Sutterluty

(2014). The hidden morale of the 2005 French and 2011 English riots. Thesis Eleven, 121, 38–56.

59.

Sylvester

(2001, July 21). Portillo supporters to fight on. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1334769/Portillo-supporters-to-fight-on.html (last accessed 4 May 2018).

60.

Thörn

Holgersson

(2016). Revisiting the urban frontier through the case of New Kvillebäcken, Gothenburg. City, 20, 663–684.

61.

Toynbee

(1982, February 19). Once no one wanted to live there. Now, thanks to Anne Power, the estate has been pulled back into shape. The Guardian.

62.

Tyler

(2013). Revolting subjects: Social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain. London, UK: Zed Books.

63.

Van Kempen

Dekker

Hall

Tosics

(Eds.). (2005). Restructuring large housing estates in Europe. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

64.

Wacquant

(2007). Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality. Thesis Eleven, 91, 66–77.

65.

Wacquant

(2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

66.

Wacquant

(2012). A Janus-faced institution of ethnoracial closure: A sociological specification of the ghetto. In Hutchison

Haynes

(Eds.), The ghetto: Contemporary global issues and controversies (pp. 1–31). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

67.

Wacquant

(2017). Practice and symbolic power in Bourdieu: The view from Berkeley. Journal of Classical Sociology, 17, 55–69.

68.

Watt

Minton

(2016). London’s housing crisis and its activisms. City, 20, 204–221.