Staff profile

My PhD project will analyse the struggle over the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), a now-defunct redevelopment program in London, through the lens of social and political geography. I plan to examine two phenomena: a political dispute over HDV; and the social tensions between council and noncouncil tenants (such as homeowners) over the questions of belonging. HDV’s relevance comes from its uniqueness-it was successfully stopped by residents. I plan to investigate why this anti-regeneration campaign was successful in contrast to other campaigns’ failures. I will pay attention to the following: how community relations shaped and were shaped by this particular fight and how claims to a “social citizenship” were made and received.

Here, one’s type of housing helps determine one’s “social citizenship” status in the context of state-led displacement. Council tenants are marginalized in ways traditional homeowners are not. Haringey council tenants, threatened with state-led displacement, disrupted the everyday through protest in a bid to obtain the same rights as traditional homeowners. By interpreting the Haringey campaign through the lens of citizenship, I will expand the literature in several ways. I lace together the “acts of citizenship” theory with research on state-led gentrification resistance, providing a new model to understand both. I also extend the literature on citizenship by studying how authorities receive acts of citizenship. Understanding how authorities accept or reject new citizenship-seekers is key to why an outcome happened, rather than taking it as given. This research will enhance our current understanding of, and the literature, on social citizenship.