Introduction

The contributions in this collection confirm the pressing need to move beyond conventional wisdom on gentrification processes in order to advance our understanding of the contemporary ‘third model’ of gentrification in which public policy is a crucial driver (Cameron and Coaffee, 2005). However, the relationship between gentrification and public policy has not been a primary focus of gentrification research (Lees and Ley, 2008), and consequently our understandings are not fully theoretically developed. Explanations offered are often beset by the same binaries of older orthodox explanations: culture/consumption versus capital/production explanations and a dichotomisation of social groups – working class/middle class, with a bias towards the experience and role of the latter. More sociological approaches to gentrification, which one would expect to capture the tensions between structural and agential processes and groups, frequently attend to the lifestyles of only the middle class (Butler with Robson, 2003; Rofe, 2003; Savage et al, 2005). Deeming meaningful place-based attachment and ontological insecurity a middle-class concession forecloses the possibility of a similar working-class association, and serves to reify the middle-class role in the justification and delivery of social mix policy rather than problematise it. The working class tends to be omitted from gentrification research while current representations of, and conceptual language used to describe, working-class lives have waned within mainstream sociology in general. Yet, paradoxically, they are the key targets of gentrification as social mix policy. Moreover, it is not only this social group that is obscured; the wider neoliberal agenda that heralds privatisation and the end of social housing and social welfare more broadly is not brought to the fore nor connected with working-class experiences in a theoretical or conceptually meaningful way.

In this chapter, I attend to these shortcomings and overcome the binaries in explanations of gentrification. I offer a sociological perspective on the working-class experiences of state-led gentrification. This begins by problematising gentrifiers’ sovereignty within the context of public policy and social mix. N.Smith (2002, p 445), in his critique of state-led gentrification, suggests that ‘probing the symptomatic silence of who is to be invited back into the city begins to reveal the class politics involved’.