London: Aspects of Change

London: Aspects of Change: Spatialising London gentrification, 60 years after Ruth Glass – London, 4-6 July 2024 – proposals due 2 April 2024

The intention is to publish key contributions from the conference and we are in discussions with publishers. Further information will be available shortly.

Ruth Glass’s famous introduction to London: Aspects of Change (Glass 1964), published in 1964, presented a view of gentrification that has become definitional, even though, at the time, Glass only attempted to “deploy a colloquial-jokey term” to characterise one of London’s ‘aspects of change’ (Johnson-Schlee 2019: 6). Since then, sixty years of empirical and theoretical analysis of gentrification settings in London have elapsed. In these intervening years, gentrification has been studied in the developed world, the global south, and has been seen to be a global phenomenon. This three-day conference seeks to bring the focus back to London, where it was coined, to look back to Ruth Glass’s definition and to examine London’s current development for signs of gentrification’s latest stages, and of the latest manifestations of resistance to gentrification. It seeks to return the discussion of London’s gentrification back into London as a globalised city, and also as a place – or series of places – in which gentrification occurs.

Since 1964, the definition of gentrification has also extensively evolved in different ways. While Glass’s definition referred to the direct displacement of ‘working class quarters’, it is now no longer the only form of displacement (even though it still does exist). First, the very notion of ‘displacement’ in London has grown to be understood in a broader sense. A case in point is the debate since the early 2000s, which has homed in on new-build residential developments as a form of gentrification with indirect displacement (Davidson and Lees 2005). Second, the notion of super-gentrification – developed by Butler and Lees (2006) through their analysis of the changes taking place in Islington, one of the boroughs which Glass had in mind when she coined the term forty years earlier – is further evidence that even wealthy professionals are priced out of London boroughs.

Taking Glass’s introduction as a starting point, this conference partially follows on from the 2014 event organised by UCL Urban Laboratory to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1964 publication (UCL Urban Laboratory 2014). The 2014 event brilliantly re-explored and debated the aspects of how London had changed over fifty years (through five short talks on five different chapters of the celebrated book). Yet, this 2024 conference intends to bring the focus back to the concept of gentrification in London per se and rethink it.

The conference will then encourage investigation of under-researched topics and novel avenues for research to explore the ‘aspects of change’ in London today. Contributions can reflect varied scales (at the street, district, borough, city-wide level) in Inner or Outer London. We also welcome paper proposals on any novel aspects of gentrification in London, including, but not limited to, those listed hereinafter.

Paper proposals should report on the latest manifestations and effects of gentrification in London, and on their contributions to our understanding of London as a series of places..
To continue this discussion, geographically-bound, the conference invites contributors to examine whether some places could be listed as ‘ungentrified’, i.e. places impervious to the gentrification process. Contributors could also question if places of resilience or resistance to gentrification in London still exist while Glass deemed the process as ‘inevitable development’. They can also question the form resistance practices can take – a research field which has begun to flourish over the past few years but which remains largely understudied in the London context (Hubbard and Lees 2018).
Contributions can also delve into the relationship between public policy and gentrification building on the existing literature (L. Lees 2014; Cooper, Hubbard, and Lees 2020; Reades et al. 2022).
Contributions are also invited to examine the evolution of the terminology of gentrification in London, a study initiated by Glass in her iconic definition through her tongue-in-cheek comment of ‘the new real estate snob jargon’ when referring to the ‘houselets’ of her time. Indeed, curiously little attention has been paid to the linguistics of the term in the London context.
Amongst other research interests, paper proposals can examine the ethnic/racialized dimension of the process in London, a dimension which may have been almost completely left untouched regarding London’s multicultural boroughs contrary to American cities (L. Lees and Hubbard 2022). While Glass at the time referred to migrant communities, to date, the racial aspect of gentrification – whether on the side of those displaced or the actors of gentrification – has largely remained underexplored in London.
As far as displacement is concerned, while some academics have recently started to track the trajectories of the displacees (Reades et al. 2022) and to look into individual survival strategies (L. Lees and Robinson 2021), these studies have clearly highlighted the need for more research.
We also seek to place Glass’s observations of ‘displacement’ in the context of the other urban battles in London in the early 1960s, notably the proposals for ‘Ringways’ (Dnes 2019), a series of concentric motorways, that would have resulted in massive demolition, displacement and transformation of London’s urban landscape, including some of the neighbourhoods to which Glass refers.
Lastly, the architecture of gentrification in London largely remains unexplored territory. Thus, contributions are also invited to question the evolution of its diverse forms since Glass’s time, when ‘elegant, expensive residences’ were built from ‘modest mews and cottages’.

To perpetuate the tradition in the field of gentrification studies, interdisciplinary approaches will be strongly encouraged (planning, social science, history, geography, urban studies, political science, etc.).

Date and place

We will use the venues of The King’s Foundation (TKF), with the main sessions for the conference in Chelsea and in Shoreditch in the East End of London. Walking tours offered in conjunction with the conference will include the eastern frontier of the London Docklands, to allow participants to experience a ‘transect’ of gentrification in London in the first quarter of the 21st Century.

Call for Participation

Abstracts of 300-500 words along with a short biographical and bibliographical notice are invited to be submitted in the format of a single Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Proposals are due by 2 April 2024.

The organizers invite conventional paper proposals, but welcome other appropriate formats to our subject matter such as poster presentations, films etc.

The conference organisers are Dr Matthew Hardy (The King’s Foundation), Dr Marie-Pierre Vincent (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Dr Mike Raco (The Bartlett Planning School, UCL), Dr Stéphane Sadoux (Université Grenoble Alpes), Dr Wilf Middleton (The King’s Foundation) and Dr Susannah O’Carroll (Université Grenoble Alpes).

This conference is hosted by The King’s Foundation in London.

#ruthglass60