Living Room: refusing the demolition assemblage on a London housing estate
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Sartori, Caterina. 2025. Living Room: refusing the demolition assemblage on a London housing estate. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (Living Room: refusing the demolition assemblage on a London housing estate)
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Abstract or Description
This thesis takes the demolition of a public housing estate located in the south of London as its object of study, analysed through situated, engaged, visual methodologies. The demolition analysed here is the result of a long-term municipal urban regeneration scheme which proposes a redevelopment predicated on a public land sale, an increase in building density, an increase of private ownership and ‘intermediate’ rental solutions, and a reduction of social housing. Using the conceptual apparatus of critical urban theory which understands housing estate regeneration/demolition as a form of accumulation by dispossession and privatisation which results in gentrification and displacement as a starting point, the thesis aims to analyse demolition as an assemblage composed of processes that unfold across domains, sites, scales and temporalities. A selection of these are covered in the thesis: specifically, the areas of the law, infrastructural managed decline, financial and symbolic devaluation are foregrounded. The privileged location through which the demolition is analysed is the space of the home, and a focus on home unmaking runs through the work, while my main interlocutors, collaborators and epistemic partners are those residents who enact forms of refusal towards the regeneration/demolition. Particular attention has been paid to Right to Buy leaseholders and their specific understandings of value creation and investment in processes of home making and unmaking. An attention to the relation between property and citizenship rights, and histories of racialised exclusions is an additional central framework of the thesis. An array of visual methodologies were employed to engage with residents and their refusals, and the resulting interactive documentary aims to visually reflect the demolition assemblage in a form that highlights its non-linear, iterative and conflictual modalities.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
Housing, visual anthropology, urban anthropology, interactive documentary, architectural modernism, urban inequality, urban regeneration, demolition, housing estate |
| Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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| Date: |
30 June 2025 |
| Item ID: |
39170 |
| Date Deposited: |
11 Jul 2025 13:17 |
| Last Modified: |
11 Jul 2025 13:24 |
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URI: |
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