Debt & Dispossesion:

Is the Contemporary University an agent of Gentrification?

Ben Beach - SN 925215

History & Theory - Megha Chand

No one should forget that the management plans that are being imposed, and the financial engineering behind them, are typical products of the university itself, which is the laboratory of Neoliberalism and one of its most powerful institutions, its hardly slated to disappear in some catastrophic collapse.

- UC Santa-Cruz Occupation, Communiqu from an Absent Future

Despite UCLs radical past, in some senses it is perceived now as an elite environment. A new location offers the chance to reconnect with our progressive past and re-articulate our impact on the communities we serve

- UCL Management, The Stratford Proposition

You may think of yourself as a part of the student body, but for the bond guys and the more intelligent ones in university management you are simply thought of as what creates returns

- The Imaginary Party, Housing Speculation, Student debt, Fees & Dispossession, a 21st Century love story

ITS ALL WRONG. LEAVE US ALONE

- Carpenters Estate resident, letter to UCL

Stills from Carpenters Estate: A Short InvestigationBy Ben Beach

It has been claimed that the contemporary University functions as both a factory1 and a supermarket.2 Within this context, it is claimed to produce knowledge-products integral to late Capitalism, namely technological innovation, cultural or semiotic goods and a steady stream of low-level functionaries, necessary to reproduce its political-economic conditions.3 Elsewhere it has been claimed that this role of the University has emerged within a restructured capitalism that follows the crisis of the Keynesian planner state in the mid-1970s.4 In response to this crisis a qualitatively new genus of capitalist production emerges, variously termed by academics such as David Harvey and Fredrick Jameson as Neoliberalism, Late Capitalism and Post-Fordism. The turn to Neoliberalism with its attendant cultural shift towards Post-Modernism5

1 Andrew Ross, The Rise of the Global University, in Towards a Global Autonomous University, eds Edu-Factory Collective, (Autonomedia, New York, 2009) 2 Randy Martin, Conditions of Interdisciplinarity in Towards a Global Autonomous University, eds Edu-Factory Collective, (Autonomedia, New York, 2009)3 The Situationist International, On the Poverty of Student Life, in The Situationist International Anthology, Trans. Ken Knabb, (Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 1998)4 Antonio Negri, The Crises of the Crises State, in Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crises and New Social Subjects, 1967-83, (Red Notes, Rome, 1988)5 Frederick Jameson, Post-Modernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Verso: London, 1991)

has transformed the University from that seen in the Keynesian era, where it sought to train workers to add value through their labour power - into a site that cultivates a new debtor subject6 through a shift where students access Higher Education (HE) exclusively through tuition fees and almost always, through the leveraging of personal debt.7

However the crisis which precipitated the rise of the Neoliberal University was never solved, but instead, indefinitely deferred and was to re-appear with a vengeance with the emergence of the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2007/08. As the shockwaves from the GFC resonated into the real economy and the socialisation of bad banking debts by states rendered it a sovereign debt crisis, one of the hallmarks of Neoliberal management took hold - shock therapy - extending and expanding the Neoliberal program under the guise of Austerity.8 It was all too predictable that in the wake of Thatchers claim that there is no such thing as society9 the benefits of education would be viewed by politicians as exclusively a process of individual consumption and as such, the Student as Consumer should pay for the privilege of their future immiseration; through their dual status of both a worker and as a debtor. The student who will subsequently create alienated value in their work now pays for their own training, creating alienated value in both spaces.

This thesis will consider the mechanisms by which universities may now be forced to fund themselves given that a significant portion of public funding has been withdrawn. This will be with particular reference to fixed capital investments in the urban environment with such investments observably accelerating and exacerbating problems of gentrification in low-income areas.

It will seek to articulate a causal relationship between Neoliberalism with its varying economic and cultural lineaments, the emergence of the Neoliberal

6 Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future, trans. Arianna Bove (AK Press: Oakland, CA, 2011)7 UC Santa Cruz Occupation, Communique from an Absent Future, We Want Everything, Entry posted September 24, 2009, http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/ [Accessed 7 February, 2013]8 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Allen Lane: London , 2007) 9 Margaret Thatcher, Interviewed by Douglas Keay, London, October 31, 1987

university10 and the use of Architecture as Capital11 in relation to the contemporary university as agent of gentrification. It is contended here that there is a direct link between cuts to university funding and the forced evictions, dispossession and urban (re)engineering that large-scale regeneration programs entail. If this hypothesis is deemed to be valid, the critical theory proposed will be presented as a starting point for a critical praxis amongst oppositional residents, students and HE workers.

Applying the arguments of academics such as David Harvey, Andrew McGettigan and Anna Minton, University College Londons (UCL) proposed expansion into the Stratford Carpenters Estate will be used as an exploratory case study to examine these relationships. Empirical evidence, primarily in the form of interviews and content analysis will be employed and triangulated with discourse analysis - the unit of analysis for this extended case study is the Carpenters Estate, based as mentioned in Stratford, London.

For the purposes of this analysis, Gentrification will be understood in line with the original definition of urban Sociologist Ruth Glass. Glass used the term to describe the dispossession of communities from neighbourhoods due to influxes of capital originating in urban land markets, consequently displacing them to a subsequent inability to access housing, given the resultant rent and price increases.12 Regeneration is considered here as on the production-side of the gentrification process, primarily initiated and legally superintended by the state but enacted mainly through private capital for the benefits of private investors13. This thesis will seek to demonstrate that regeneration is a spatial manifestation of Neoliberal ideology, erasing history in a Tabula-Rasa approach to create sites of capital accumulation through urban (re)engineering.

10 UC Santa Cruz Occupation, Communique from an Absent Future, We Want Everything11 David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso: London, 2012)12 Tom Slater, Gentrification of the City, in The New Blackwall Companion to the City, eds Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson (Wiley: London, 2011)13 Slater, Gentrification of the City, 50

The Beginning of the End of History

For academics such as Harvey, Negri and Jameson, the Social, Political and Economic transformation they have termed Neoliberalism can be seen to have arisen from the successive economic crises of the 1970s. Writing in the Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey asserts the origins of the crises emerge from the failure of Fordist-Keynesianism to contain the contradictions inherent in Capitalism.14 Harvey cites Karl Marxs explanation of these contradictions as arriving from three basic conditions needed for the maintenance of a Capitalist system; Growth, control of the labour market and technological innovation. [Appendix 1]

Harvey contends that these contradictions manifest themselves fully into the 1970s crises of over-accumulation, as a combination of technological advances in manufacturing - leading to rising unemployment - and a saturation of markets across the Western world. This in turn created a decline in demand for goods resulting in long-term stagflation. The long term nature of fixed capital investments, tied into idle productive capacity, prevented any reallocation of capital, leaving significant surplus capacity in the economy. Facing a continued decline in profitability and increasing competition from newly industrialising countries, Western capital (primarily the Anglo-American economies) began a process of restructuring and adjustment towards what Harvey terms Flexible accumulation.15 The Modernism of Fordist production and Keynesian economics receded in these countries and Neoliberalism with its attendant logic of the post-modern had arrived.

Writing in The Crisis of the Planner State, Antonio Negri shares these conclusions. Here he identifies the consequent restructuring of capital towards a more fluid composition as manifested through a negative-Keynesian regulation of the money supply and the disciplining of labour-power.16 This negative-Keynesian approach would utilise the flexibility afforded to governments by monetary

14 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) p14315 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990 p14516 Antonio Negri, The Crises of the Crises State, 1988

policy, using this as tool against rampant inflation whilst restoring the positive balance of the market, this itself occurring through deregulation, privatisation and the flow of finance into what has been referred to as the FIRE sectors - finance, insurance and real estate17. This would have the effect of spurring what Harvey termed paper entrepreneurialism, i.e the valorisation of capital through financial transactions as opposed to productive activities leading to the financialisation of society.18

Negri posited that the mixed-market model of Keynesianism with collective wage bargaining to mediate final consumer demand at its centre had led to massively increasing wages and in turn declining profitability. Negri states that to return to profitability, capital would have to destroy the homogeneity of labour power through the fragmentation and further atomisation of workers by attempts to break political and behavioural unity in the struggles of this social proletariat, whenever and wherever this shows signs of appearing.19 The highly composed Keynesian labour market, the agent which had created the unparalleled growth of the post-war Golden Age, would have to be decomposed in order to re-vivify growth and profits.

If Harvey and Negris analysis is taken as historically vindicated, these attempts to fragment and break labour power can be seen to have a direct relationship to the subsequent flourishing of post-modern culture. As Fredrick Jameson observes; Postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order, [...] but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself.20 Viewed as a continuation of the restructuring begun in the 1970s, Postmodernism was a potent ideological weapon against Negris increasingly volatile and politically antagonistic Social Proletariat. Through the disconnection of society from its temporal location, both history and its class-based subjectivities could be erased, leaving society free to be reconstituted with a new, individualistic subjectivity of Consumer21 17 Antonio Negri, The Crises of the Crises State 198818 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990 p17019 Antonio Negri, The Crises of the Crises State 198820 Fredrick Jameson, Post-Modernism: Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Verso: London, 1991)21 Terry Eagleton, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism in The New Left Review, July, 1985

and in the process destroying the power of socialised labour. It is little wonder then, that in declaring the supremacy of Capitalism in 1989, Francis Fukuyama would rebuke and invert Marxist Historical Materialism proclaiming the End of History.22

As restructured Capital advanced, a process of consolidation and integration saw the interlinking of national and global financial centres.23 As Paper Entrepreneurialism generated increasingly huge profits from increasingly abstract mechanisms, surplus capital piled into assets, primarily financial instruments and real estate, massively inflating prices. Nowhere was this more apparent than with real estate, as debt-financing led to money pouring into urban centres, leading to surging real estate values24 and fuelling huge waves of regeneration in what has been termed by some academics as Big-Bang Architecture25.

22 Francis Fukuyama, The End Of History? in National Interest, 198923 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, (London: Verso, 2008) p1624 Credit Action, UK Average House Prices, Graph, http://creditaction.org.uk/assets/PDF/statis-tics/2011/august-2011.pdf [Accessed February 10, 2013]25 Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City, (London: Penguin, 2009)

Credit Action, UK Average House Prices, Graph, http://creditaction.org.uk/assets/PDF/statis-tics/2011/august-2011.pdf [Accessed February 10, 2013]

Writing in Rebel Cities, Harvey contends that the role of the city in absorbing surplus capital can be identified as early as 1853 with Haussmanns reconstruction of Paris expedited in order to absorb both surplus labour and capital, disciplining any resistance to his program with violence.26 Contemporary Regeneration projects appear to follow much the same trajectory, this being nowhere more evident than in Londons Canary Wharf.

As Anna Minton elucidates in Ground Control, developments such as Canary Wharf marked the beginning of large-scale, Neoliberal urban engineering in areas of low land values. Kick-started by unelected and largely unaccountable Urban Development Corporations semi-governmental bodies designed to stimulate investment in regeneration schemes - powers such as Land Assembly enabled the creation of huge tracts of land for development. This was achieved through the appropriation of available public land and the issuance of Compulsory Purchase Orders that if necessary, would permit the use of force to sequester homes and businesses on adjoining private land.27 Zones of exemption from planning laws sidelined democratic processes, whilst public funds were used as leverage to increase land values and entice developers; causing capital to flood in and start a property boom that Minton describes as A Gold rush.28 Minton critiques the consequences for local communities as disastrous, erasing all traces of previous histories, with the resultant gentrified areas inaccessible to low-income persons.29 Despite its numerous demonstrable flaws, both Minton and Harvey assert that the Neoliberal model of urban renewal has become the dominant force in contemporary cities.30

26 Harvey, Rebel Cities, 201227 Minton, Ground Control, pp 1-2028 Ibid.29 Ibid.30 Minton, Ground Control, Harvey, Rebel Cities

Historys Revenge, or the Consolidation of the Neoliberal University

Like the crises of the 1970s, the financial crash of 2008 would bring with it a huge program of restructuring. Describing it as a Financial Krakatoa Paul Mason characterises the crash as one created through intense financial speculation on massively inflated asset bubbles, in particular asset-backed securities secured against property markets that were then sold on in financial markets trading primarily in derivatives and debt.31 As the system teetered on the brink of collapse32 policy makers frantically pumped money into the Banks in a string of global bailouts. In the United Kingdom, figures for the costs of such measures vary between 850 Billion33 to 1.5 Trillion34. However in spite of such extensive re-capitalisation, the UK has in the intervening period experienced an economic depression with the economy in early 2013 remaining 4% smaller than its peak in early 2008.

Led by David Camerons Conservatives, a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government took office in May 2010 promising to cut wasteful government spending to bring the deficit down and restore stability in a program backed by economists and business leaders35. According to the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies the coalition governments fiscal agenda was to be the longest, deepest, sustained period of cuts to public service spending...since the Second World War.36

The Higher Education (HE) sector would not be exempt from this new reality, with the Government announcing that annual government spending on the HE sector would be cut from 7.1 Billion to 4.2 Billion.37 In addition the

31 Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, (London: Verso, 2009)32 C-Span, Paul Kanjowski on the Bailout situation Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD8viQ_DhS4 [Accessed February 10, 2013]33 Andrew Grice, 850 Billion: Official Cost of the Banking Bailout, The Independent, December 4, 200934 Emma Rowley, Bank-Bailout adds 1.5 Trillion to Debt, The Telegraph, Business and Finance, January 16, 201135 The Conservative Party, The Conservative Manifesto 2010, (London: The Conservative Party, 36 Lary Elliot & Katie Allen, Budget brings longest, deepest cuts since second world war, IFS says, The Guardian, Economics, June 23, 201037 Jeeveen Vasagar, Universities Alarmed by 40% cut to teaching budgets, The Guardian,

Government outlined that, consequent to the Browne Review into HE funding, the cap on tuition fees would be increased from 3000 to 9000 per annum, with changes in loan provision transferring the economic burden of education overwhelmingly onto the individual student.38

The proposed reforms, embodied within the 2010 Higher Education Bill, met overwhelming resistance. This began in November of that year when over 50,000 students marched through Central London before proceeding to occupy and vandalise the headquarters of the Conservative Party.39 Subsequent protests quickly transmogrified into full blown rebellion, with walkouts and occupations happening at Schools, Colleges and Universities across the UK, all set to the rhythm of increasingly forceful and antagonistic demonstrations culminating on December 9, in what was widely dubbed The Battle of Parliament Square.40

Yet despite the ferocity of the opposition, Senior Management Teams (SMT) of Universities across the country were silent, resisting pressure from the protests to condemn the Governments plans, choosing instead to pursue suppression of dissent and to evict occupations through the courts.41 The elite Russell Group of Universities were actively lobbying as early as May 2010 for the abolition of the tuition fee cap - which would allow institutions to raise fees to levels determined by the individual SMTs - despite being aware this would trigger cuts in funding.42

Such a seemingly counter-productive stratagem can be explained as part of a strategy to further extend the Neoliberal university, through the inducement of a Market into Higher Education. Writing in 2011 Andrew McGettigan claimed that ...penetration of Higher Education by business imperatives and practices

October 20, 201038 Sean Coughlan, Students face tuition fees rising up to 9000, BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11677862 [Accessed February 10, 2013] 39 Adam Gabbet, Demo 2010 Coverage Live Blog, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2010/nov/10/demo-2010-student-protests-live [Accessed February 10, 2013]40 Dan Hancox, Fightback! A reader on a Winter of Protest, (London: Open Democracy, 2011)41 University of Cambridge, Statement from the Vice Chancellor on the Occupation of the Com-bination Room, http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/notices/vcstatement.html [Accessed February 10, 2013]42 Graeme Paton, Universities call for rise in student tuition fees, The Telegraph, May 18, 2010

is a marked trend of the last 20 years. These extensive reforms are consistent and continuous with previous developments but represent a qualitative leap forward.43 McGettigan postulates that these reforms to the HE sector are part of an ideological program, in which the functions of the state are erased to the point where they do no more than ensure circulation and superintend the interests of financial capital - itself seeking profitable returns - with private sector providers of services. Citing Milton Friedmans essay The Role of Government in Education McGettigan concludes that the primary aim of the Government is the further commodification of education so as to allow the creation of a competitive education market, this itself expedited through the financialisation of institutions. The ultimate aim being the transformation of Universities into more business friendly spaces.44

43 Andrew McGettigan, The Process of Financialisation of Higher Education, SCEPSI The European School of Social Imagination. http://scepsi.eu/kafca/the-process-of-financialisation-in-higher-education [Accessed February 10, 2013]44 McGettigan, The Process of Financialisation of Higher Education

Debt, Dispossession & UCL

We now have two priorities. To ensure that these cuts do not impact negatively on current and future students, and to find alternative funding sources to replace these lost funds. This will be particularly challenging given the immediate year-on-year cuts to the overall budget.

- Professor Steve Smith, president of Universities UK45

It is within this context that UCLs expansion plans should be considered. Marketed as a desire to create a World Leading Research Campus UCL intends to construct a 23 acre campus on the perimeter of the Olympic Park in East London on land currently occupied by the Carpenters Estate, a large social housing provision minutes from Stratford station. Current plans involve the eviction of over 700 residents from their homes, before the Tabula-Rasa

45 Jeeveen Vasagar, Universities Alarmed by 40% cut to teaching budgets

Demolish. Dig. Design%

Instead, we can see in the processes of the Olympics the effect of a high-capital growth project on a section of the working class already mutating through another, parallel process of class decomposition. Capital and class move together. Newham proletarians out, Bloomsbury capital in. The student population and infrastructure of the modern university can also be put to use in the name of the Olympic spectacle.

- Richard Broadie, Bloomsbury Olympic

Sitting at a Strategic Access Point to the Olympic site, the residents of Carpenters did not see the danger when they welcomed the Olympic bid. Situated in one of the most deprived pars of London, it was promised the Olympic Legacy would improve the area for everyone. As the bulldozers move in, again, class dynamics play out in full swing. Capital must by its logic seek to re-invest to generate fresh %!# $"""

functioning as a sponge for surplus capital, the monopoly rent generated by the Olympics has created a $

"% "

map of London can be read differently: The areas yet to be cleansed.

Accumulation by Dispossession Carpenters Estate demarcated in Red.

Carpenters Estate (Red)& Olympic Park

approach sees the total demolition of all existing structures, along with all traces of the community and its history.46 UCLs marketing brochure asserts that UCL Needs land to expand within London, citing that UCL must have growth.47 But this posits some critical questions: to what end and why must UCL have growth?

In the Student protests of 2010, hundreds of students seized control of spaces at the heart of UCL in a sustained campaign of direct action; organising occupations, economic disruption and protests in a concerted effort to force UCLs SMT to condemn the Governments plans48. Like many other universities UCL management resorted to legal coercion to bring the campaign to an end and like many other managers, UCLs provost - Malcolm Grant - had been instrumental in lobbying for higher tuition fees.49

The dichotomy between the position of UCL management and the bulk of the student and academic population was widely perceived as indicative of Neoliberal logic amongst the managers. Yet despite having actively lobbied in support of the Governments changes, UCLs Finance Committee - which includes Malcolm Grant - was predicting significant budget cuts following the 2010 General Election as early as 2009, stating that financial planing for such a contingency had already begun.50 This seemingly contradictory approach - on one hand lobbying for fees whilst with the other acknowledging these would come at the cost of severe funding cuts - can be reconciled when examined as part of a process of financialisation. As McGettigan describes in detail, unlike the public nature of state funding, the private nature of individualised tuition fees allows their use as securities in the issuance of bonds, or rather securitised loans.51

46 UCL, The Stratford Proposition, London: UCL, 201247 UCL, The Stratford Proposition, London: UCL, 201248 UCL Occupation, UCL Occupation: News, http://web.archive.org/web/20101212004607/http://blog.ucloccupation.com/2010/11/ [Accessed February 11, 2013]49 BBC News, Universities back Fees Increases, BBC News Website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7947605.stm [Accessed February 11, 2013] 50 UCL, Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 July 2009 (London: UCL 2009)51 Andrew McGettigan, The Third Revolution: 2. Bonds: The Market In Research Fortnight, September 2011

As McGettigan illustrates, bankers and financiers perceive that demand for University bond-issuances would be enormous, with the under-leveraged nature of the university sector permitting the absorption of billions of pounds in capital. Securitised on a long-term stream of income from tuition fees, guaranteed through demand for university places outstripping available supply, McGettigan suggests that such bonds would have the august AAA investment-grade credit rating and quotes financiers as claiming Investors would love to get their hands on anything to do with the University Sector.52 Citing Karel Thomas, a representative of a lobby group for financial directors of UK universities, McGettigan states that universities interest in bonds centres on funding capital projects, typically new buildings. It is within this context that Thomas is quoted as saying ...raising funds for investment in facilities through bond issues will work for some universities, most likely larger institutions with secure cash-flows and big investment plans.53

With the cost of UCLs Stratford expansion projected to exceed 1 Billion on top of an additional 500 Million construction program at its existing Bloomsbury campus, it is instructive to find that in the Financial Times, Malcolm Grant is quoted as looking with great interest at Cambridges 350m recent bond issuance and triple-A credit rating.54 It would seem reasonable to conclude then that the rise in tuition fees has directly allowed UCL to fund expansion programs that otherwise would have been impossible. Increases in fee caps have permitted the formation of a market in securitised student debt in UK higher education.

The 2011 UCL White Paper is a 10 year strategy; outlining a vision for UCL of close collaboration with commercial enterprise, the development of the next generation of Business Leaders and the translation of the intellectual capital of the UCL community through commercialisation of intellectual property, the management articulate numerous orthodoxies of Neoliberal thought55. Hinting 52 McGettigan, The Third Revolution: 2. Bonds: The Market, September 201153 Ibid.54 Chris Cook, UCL wins approval for Stratford Campus, The Financial Times, October 25, 201255 UCL, UCL Council White Paper, 2011 - 2021 (London: UCL, 2011)

at the motives for future developments, the paper states that UCL will not be financially sustainable by raising tuition fees alone and that financial forecasts to 2014 accept that continued investment in the estate and infrastructure is key to our future sustainability56. Perhaps the most revelatory statement of the impetus for the Stratford development is the explicit statements written in UCLs 2012 Financial report:

The reduction in HEFCE teaching grant is creating an imperative for investment in the estate... Capital funding for universities has shrunk dramatically and it is now almost entirely the responsibility of universities to obtain funding for capital investment. UCL has an ambitious plan... to transform the Universitys estate with future expenditure of around 100m per annum on an unprecedented scale. This includes the prospect of a new University campus in east London.57

If UCLs internal documents do not clarify the extent to which the Stratford expansion is driven primarily by financial concerns, then UCLs initial marketing document The Opportunity in Stratford is markedly more candid. The Counterfactuals of the economic modelling declare that UCL needs to build upon its collaboration with businesses and Entrepreneurs, develop incubator

56 UCL, UCL Council White Paper, 2011 - 2021, p5457 UCL, Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 July 2012 (London: UCL 2012)

space and facilities for start-up companies and a range of initiatives in the area aimed at boosting economic growth. All of this is articulated in a language of capital investments financial opportunities and regeneration.58 With UCL clearly stating that any location must be within London where large-scale facilities can be provided at a lower cost [...] and financial sustainability the proliferation of the term regeneration throughout the document betrays much of the rationale for the selection of the site.

The London Borough of Newhams (LBN) economic demographics report of 2011 notes high levels of poverty and deprivation that are both persistent and prevalent59. Robin Wales, the Mayor of Newham - who residents mockingly call Robin the Poor - has stated that Newham imports poverty and exports prosperity; the people who move into the borough are far poorer than those who leave60. The regeneration Masterplan states its explicit economic motives, with Stratford set to become a vibrant new centre for East London that will drive the future growth of the capital addressing worklessness, deprivation and a transient population.61 Concurrent with both Minton and Harveys arguments, the low-income nature of the Stratford population correlates with low land values, allowing maximum profits to be extracted from new developments62.

Outside of the cold and inhuman statistics of LBN and UCLs economic modelling, a subaltern history of class dynamics can be read in the Carpenters Estate. Discourse from residents encapsulates what can never be adequately described through numeric analysis, demonstrating a close-knit community with a low crime rate and long standing inhabitants sharing both friendship and a sense of place. In a letter to UCL Council, one resident wrote:

58 UCL, The Stratford Proposition, London: UCL, 2012 59 London borough of Newham, Local Economic Assessment 2010-2027, London borough of Newham, Regeneration and Property Directorate, 201060 Mike Law, Sir Robin Wales, Forest Gate Labour Meeting, Johns Labour Blog, entry posted November 6, 2009, http://grayee.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/sir-robin-wales-forest-gate-labour.html [accessed February 11, 2013] 61 London borough of Newham, Stratford Masterplan: Executive Summary, London borough of Newham, 201162 Harvey, Rebel Cities, pp 27-67

UCL Management..

..wants to destroy his Home.

Eviction is necessarily a violent process. UCL is forcing the Residents of Carpenters Estate from their homes against their will. The 700 residents are of no concern to UCL managements desire to build a 1 Billion campus, funded through the debt of current and future students. Despite failing to have any meaningful consultation with Residents, Students and Academics, proponents have chosen to press ahead, branding residents Peasants and Academics Full of Shit. Students reject this as undemocratic and unacceptable, and in response, have occupied the Wilkins Garden Room for use as a

discursive and informative space. Come and join events, talks and workshops.

facebook.com/uclusavecarpenters

Youre not only going to destroy perfectly solid homes youre going to take away a community that many of us have been for years, something that cannot be replaced!!! Our estate is a very nice quiet crime/trouble free estate where we feel safe to walk about at night... Many elderly residents that have had to move out already are now away from their friends and community that they knew and now are very lonely and unhappy.63

Another wrote:

I have lived in Newham all my life and brought up a family of four on Carpenters Estate with no trouble its always been trouble free and not much crime at all. We have a good close community because we have all lived together for 41 years. So much trust that we have each others keys.64

Whilst another articulates:

We have homes that have seen three generations pass through them. This is what drew me to this community nine years ago. Not just the great amenities and transport links, but an overwhelming sense of belonging. To a place that expanded the boundaries of my home and merged it with my neighbours, so much so that the words home and community have become indistinguishable to me.65

For those outside the community, the Carpenters Estate is perhaps best characterised by the three large tower blocks that puncture into the Stratford skyline. Designed by Thomas North and Kenneth Lund after whom the blocks are named, they typify a typology of 1960s council architecture common in London. The estates construction took place against a backdrop of a massive housing crisis following the Second World War. As Colin Ward observes, the Government was placed under huge pressure to act by the direct action of the working classes; who squatted and occupied abandoned buildings through

63 Anon. Letter to UCL Council, September 17, 201264 DW, Letter to UCL Council, September 17, 201265 JA, Letter to UCL Council, September 17, 2012

increasingly large networks of mutual aid and solidarity66. In 1943 with class antagonisms increasing, Quintin Hogg - a Conservative MP - asserted whilst debating the Beveridge Plan to establish the Welfare state that; We must give them reforms or they will give us revolution67.

Subsequent governments scrambled to generate ever greater numbers of units as housing became central to Post-War reconstruction. Yet as Adrian Forty postulates, with the need to maintain productive output in the factories, sufficient labour was not available to build the volumes required. Following technology transfers from the automobile industry, system building offered Politicians a way out; using prefabricated parts and unskilled labour to rapidly (and cheaply) erect towers. Yet Forty argues that the use of prefabricated concrete was far from simply utile, but a deeply ideological choice; creating the illusion of change required by Social Democracy, whilst the productive structure of the economy remained fundamentally unchanged. It would be this synonymity with Social-Democratic values that would later fuel the towers destruction; as Postmodernism attacked Negris Social Proletariat the explosive demolition of the towers - freshly rebranded as symbols of decline - would be advertised as public spectacles68.

Surviving the demolitions on the 1980/90s, residents welcomed the siting of the Olympic park on adjoining land and the promises of the Olympic Legacy, few realising the extent of the threat69. As Harvey affirms in Rebel cities, the ability to extract monopoly rent in from such centres of symbolic capital translates into gold dust in property markets70. Both developers and LBN alike 66 Colin Ward, Housing: An Anarchist Approach, London: Freedom Press, 197667 Mary Lee Settle, London 1944 in We Write for our Time: Selected essays from 75 years of the Virginia Quaterly Review, Edited by Alexander Burnham, p344 (Virginia: Virginia University Press, 2000)68 Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, (London: Reaktion books: 2012)69 Richard Brodie, Bloomsbury Olympic70 Harvey, Rebel Cities, pp103-12

have been quick to advertise the investor potential of the glass walled flats emerging on the peripheries of the estate; part of the Regeneration Supernova currently exploding across Newham71. Eager to cash in, UCLs proposition lists 800,000 Ft2 of floor space for the University, with the corresponding - 720,000 Ft2 listed as Non-UCL residential or Partner Space72. With UCL functioning as a property developer the source of the return on the Stratford investment becomes starkly apparent. Embodying the rationale Minton describes as behind Canary Wharf, UCLs proposition highlights the availability of infrastructure and transport links, enthusiastically highlighting that Leveraged by huge public sector investment, CBRE research shows that 1.6 billion of private sector capital has been invested so far in the Olympic Park and surrounding areas.

In November 2011 would residents of Carpenters Estate find out exactly what regeneration meant for them. In an interview with a chair of Carpenters Against Regeneration Plans (CARP), OM described how representatives of the council descended on the estate, knocking on doors and informing people that UCL was locating there, presenting people with seemingly no option but to move 71 London Borough of Newham, Investor Prospectus, (London: Borough of Newham: 2012)72 UCL, The Stratford Proposition, London: UCL, 2012

away; for many residents, this was the first they had heard of the scheme. OM described in detail how the Tenants Management Organisation (TMO) supposedly representing residents was largely run by council bureaucrats, who having hollowed out internal democracy, would uncritically accept the plans being proposed by the council. Describing the Consultation process UCL offered to residents, OM pointedly stated:

I couldnt believe what I was hearing... John Johnson [UCL relations officer] came to speak to the steering group members about the procurement of the various partners to do the development for the estate. He says, you can have an input into it, in terms of selecting who should be the architect and surveyor; and I am sitting there thinking you want us to select the very people who are going to help displace us?73

Discussing UCLs Stratford expansion in the Financial Times, Minton characterises such developments as driven forward by a combination of dirty tricks and astro-turfing, leaving communities with a sense of being At War with local authorities74. Indeed, A Consultation report by LBN characterises opponents as Against Change, simply marking their negative responses as Distortions instead highlighting the success of primary school children creating Postcards and discussing the use of Compulsory Purchase Orders75.

It is difficult to comment on the architecture as none is proposed, simply a vague allusion to world class buildings, alongside a washed-out massing render, which appears to be shooting columns of light skyward. Like the Flexible Accumulation that brought the scheme into existence, UCLs marketing boasts that central to the design will be flexibility: floor-plates that can adapt to reflect the pace of change in [...]business and higher education76. As Jameson argues in The Brick & The Balloon, postmodern architecture embodies the logic of the financial capital that created it: the endless extension of open plan 73 OM, Carpenters Against Regeneration Plans, Interview by author & Corina Tuna, University College London, January 20, 201374 Anna Minton, Undemocratic Developments, The Financial Times, November 30, 201275 London Borough of Newham, Stratford Metropolitan Masterplan Supporting document: Con-sultation Report, London: Borough of Newham76 UCL, The Stratford Proposition, London: UCL, 2012

UCL Stratford the provision of flexible and sustainable space for teaching, research and living

UCL Stratford is not envisaged to be an east London satellite to the Bloomsbury campus, but a new internationally recognised research-led hub, benefiting from the symbiosis of activities and endeavours across an enlarged UCL estate.The Framework proposes a landmark gateway onto the site. A central green spine route runs through the heart of the quarter, that will connect Stratford Old Town to the Greenway to the south of the site and, crucially, provide direct links to the Olympic Park. This will be animated by a series of nodes set within high-quality public realm, creating a vibrant environment for students, university staff and the wider public. The design will reflect the highest prevailing standards of environmental sustainability, while meeting modern research requirements and teaching methods. Central to the design will be flexibility: floorplates that can adapt to changing modes of occupation over time, reflecting the pace of change in teaching methods, technology, business and higher education.

UCL Stratford Proposition 5

Section 2: The opportunity in Stratford

A research-led scheme of c. 2.35 million ft has been developed in order to consider potential investment requirements, at an estimated capital investment of c. 1 billion. This is a flexible, comprehensive site capacity study based on conventional urban design concepts that makes reasonable assumptions about the level of density and site coverage. It is not a representation of the scheme that will ultimately be developed.

Stratford is UCLs preferred option. UCL has produced a Strategic Development Framework for the site that concludes that it has the potential to accommodate 1.5 million 3.0 million ft of research, teaching and residential facilities, alongside opportunities for collaboration and partnerships with private, educational and international partners

space surrounded by advanced curtain walling, a modernism stripped of content constituting merely empty form and embodying the seeds of its own demolition when land values rise again77. As Minton states in Ground Control, the logic of Neoliberal urban space is one of control achieved through intensive surveillance, erasing spontaneity and replacing it with carefully orchestrated spectacle. Utilising an army of security guards to remove undesirable elements, the focus of the privatised spaces is the attainment of high footfall to sustain the retail outlets supplied in lieu of social space. Minton summarises this approach as Clean and Safe, producing sterile, corporate landscapes designed around the accumulation of capital instead of the socialisation of people78. A cursory glance at the new buildings surrounding Carpenters and the nearby Westfield shopping centre suggests the world class buildings will follow much the same logic, erasing the estates history and with it, its class based subjectivity. [Appendix 2]

It is unsurprising that UCLs proposition is generating such antagonism, as UCLs SMT relentlessly force through the proposals whilst residents are sidelined, patronised and displaced. Student opposition has been the subject of intimidation campaigns79, whilst Andrew Grainger, UCLs head of estates and formerly a key manager in the development of Canary Wharf80 said of opposition from UCLs built environment faculty, that there is a difference between academic expertise and practical [application]. More candidly, Robin Wales simply stated academics are full of shit and that a lot of regeneration is nonsense talk.81 In letters to UCL, the gulf between residents and the institution is stark:

77 Fredrick Jameson, The Brick & The Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation in The New Left Review, March 199878 Minton, Ground Control, pp37-8179 UCL Save Carpenters Estate, Press Release: UCL students vow to continue Carpenters cam-paign despite intimidation, http://ucl4carpenters.tumblr.com/post/36916928223/press-release-ucl-students-vow-to-continue-carpenters [Accessed February 12, 2013] 80 Linkedin, Andrew Grainger, http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-grainger/3/177/357 [Accessed February 10, 2013]81 Natasha Gorodnitski, UCL Stratford: Approach to Academics, entry posted November 20, 2012, http://uclu.org/articles/ucl-stratford-approach-to-academics [Accessed February 10, 2013]

We DO NOT WANT TO MOVE FROM OUR HOME on the.. Estate, we love our community and WE ARE a community, we will FIGHT UCL plans. We feel what has been proposed is Illegal.82

Another bluntly stated:

My Family and I are so ANGRY. How dare anyone try and evict us from our home of 26 years? Is there no justice for ordinary people in this country? When the big boys with all their millions tell us to move, guess we have no choice but to roll over? This is our home we have worked hard to pay for it, if UCL think they are taking what belongs to us well think again. We are not for sale. ITS ALL WRONG. LEAVE US ALONE. 83

Given Ruth Glass coined the term Gentrification whilst an academic at UCL, it is bitterly ironic that UCL should seek to justify its actions through the institutions history by stating: Despite UCLs radical past, in some senses it is perceived now as an elite environment. A new location offers the chance to reconnect with our progressive past and re-articulate our impact on the communities we serve.84 Clearly, the community being served is not the one being erased for the construction of a high-end supermarket, where the current cost of entry is 9000 a year.

Through analysis of the historical origins of Neoliberal thought as articulated by Harvey, Negri and Jameson, it is demonstrable that such logic is dominant amongst management in the University sector. As the extensive research of Andrew McGettigan and documents obtained from UCL demonstrate, the Neoliberal program has seen the transformation of Higher Education into a knowledge services industry, that prioritises capitalist expansion. It is apparent that there is a direct causal link between cuts to HE funding and UCLs expansion of its estate, with multiple documents clearly stating this. It can be demonstrated through McGettigans research and UCLs statements in

82 MF, Letter to UCL Council, September 17, 201283 DJP, Letter to UCL Council, September 17, 201284 UCL, The Stratford Proposition, London: UCL, 2012

the media that the rise in tuition fees and concurrent market in student debt is directly enabling expansion programs to an extent that was not possible before 2010. The student is now a debt factory, the more debt he produces, the more expansion will be possible; It is little wonder that the Russell Group lobbied for no cap at all on tuition fees85. With universities as diverse as Imperial, De MontFort and Cambridge86 now exploring debt-financed urban expansions, it is probable that UCL is at the vanguard of this approach.

UCLs proposal in Stratford displays every hall mark of Neoliberal urbanism, spurred on by public sector leveraging, financed through debt and driven by the desire to create sites of capital accumulation. Discourse from residents demonstrates the lack of any consultation, democracy or community participation in the scheme, instead being subjected to imposition and patronisation in a process that unstopped, will ultimately end in the total erasure of their community and its history, displacing class-based subjectivities. It is clear that UCL is an agent of gentrification; UCL Stratford represents an act of accumulation by dispossession, a scheme proposed not for the benefit of existing communities but the continued valorisation of capital. As the abstractions of UCLs financial modelling and LBNs statistical analysis clash against the lived reality of the Carpenters residents being forced from their homes, the unadulterated 85 NUS, NUS warns Russell Groups call for removal of tuition cap would leave students with 40,000 debts, http://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/news/nus-warns-elite-russell-groups-call-for-removal-of-fee-cap-would-leave-students-with-40000-debts/ [Accessed February 12, 2013]86 McGettigan, The Third Revolution: 2. Bonds: The Market, September 2011

violence of debt and financialisation is brought manifestly into the open87. It is a disgusting and brutal schism between capital and people, which to the warped logic of duplicitous shits such as Malcolm Grant and Robin Wales is celebrated as Growth.

It is beyond to scope of this essay to discuss the innovative and dynamic strategies being deployed by residents and students in opposition, instead this thesis seeks to offer a critical theory as a starting point for a critical praxis. It is essential that architects engage critically when the consequences of architecture can degrade the lives of millions of people. A failure to do so is a best moral complicity and at worst, collaboration with flagrant social injustice. When regeneration programs represent the spatial translation of Neoliberal Capitalism, authorised by subservient political structures and enacted through the violence of the state, it is clear that we should look not to our political leaders, but to each other. If UCL Stratford is demonstrably consequential of macro-economic processes, it is plausible that cities globally are subject to the same mechanism. UCL Stratford, like so much of the miserable future on offer, cannot be allowed to happen.

87 Walter Benjamin, On a Critique of Violence In One Way Street and Other Writings

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Appendix 1

Foundational to the functioning of Capitalism, is the continued search for and creation of a surplus value - a circuit of valorisation - which manifests itself as Economic Growth. A steady rate of Growth must be maintained if capital accumulation and profitability are to continue and as such, any barrier to growth will necessarily trigger a crises. Growth is dependent upon living-labour creating surplus value from which capital can extract profits, creating an oppositional binary between workers and capital, with both parties vying for control of this surplus value and thus, Capitalist control of the labour market is essential for profit extraction. Technological and organisational developments are spurred on by the constant desire to maximise profits, with new technologies reducing labour and productions costs, with competition forcing other other Capitalists to match the advances. If control of the labour market is essential to the continuity of capital, then advances in organisational systems with which to regulate are of equal importance.88 Due to the often contradictory nature of these foundations, Marx concludes that there is no way in which these foundations can be composed to generate the necessary constant growth, giving Capitalism its inherent tendency towards crises.89

Appendix 2

The name of the estate and much of its official history stems from the Worshipful Company of Carpenters - a historic livery company - who originally purchased the land in 1767 with the intention of valorising capital90. If as Marx once quipped historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice, then it is somewhat prophetic that the Carpenters Company also invested heavily in technical education at UCL and that the construction of the current estate was achieved through Compulsory Purchase Orders issued in the 1950s; the roots of the estates destruction is somewhat etched into their fabric91.

88 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990 p18089 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Capital, 188390 Worshipful Company of Carpenters, A History of Stratford: Worshipful Company of Carpenters, 201291 Richard Brodie, Bloomsbury Olympic, Mute Magazine, April 2012