The role of asylum in processes of urban gentrification

Emma Hill,Nasar Meer,Timothy Peace

doi:10.1177/0038026120970359

Emma Hill, Nasar Meer + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120970359

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Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between the accommodation of Dispersed asylum seekers and urban gentrification in the UK. We argue that alongside other racialised and classed minorities, asylum seekers are vulnerable to spatial strategies associated with gentrification such as neighbourhood ‘dumping’, containment and ‘territorial stigmatisation’, the highly coercive quality of the UK government’s Dispersal Scheme means that any relationship between asylum and gentrification must be treated as deliberate, the result of the multiscalar interests which have a stake both in Dispersal and urban ‘development’. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Glasgow, the recipient of the largest asylum seeking population annually in the UK, we find that asylum accommodation processes and gentrification have developed a symbiotic dynamic, whereby the ‘failure’ of mid twentieth-century urban ‘regeneration’ provided means and motive for Dispersal, and Dispersal provided sufficient resources to fuel further rounds of urban ‘regeneration’. We also find that recent changes to the Dispersal contract, from a dynamic in which resources were associated with housing availability, to one in which they are associated with maximum housing capacity, have created conditions for alternative forms of gentrification, in which strategies such as rent gap suppression are seen as having potential to yield more capital than infrastructural development. Finally, we argue that the respective spatial politics of both Dispersal and gentrification must be understood as mutually-interested, coercive technologies, which work together to contain and exploit racialised and bordered urban minorities. We call for urgent further research into how the asylum border is embedded in contemporary urban spatial economies.

Highlights

This article critically studies the relationship between urban gentrification and the processes through which asylum seekers are accommodated by the UK government
The ability of the Council to draw on accumulated Dispersal funds to finance future ‘regeneration’ indicates several changes to their approach to Dispersal. It indicates that in the process of accommodating asylum seekers, it was able to extract more funds from asylum tenancies than was needed to renovate the properties in which asylum seekers were accommodated; second, that it was able to do this on a scale that later enabled large-scale development programmes; and that third, by channelling these funds into the ‘mixed tenancies’ of Transformational Regeneration Areas’ (TRAs) sites, it had abandoned a closedcircuit approach to social housing improvement, and instead was pursuing a project that would court the finances of private companies and consumer citizens
We question the sequence of causality in the spatial relationship between asylum accommodation and gentrification in Glasgow

Summary

Introduction

This article critically studies the relationship between urban gentrification and the processes through which asylum seekers are accommodated by the UK government. Asylum seekers are vulnerable to ongoing urban spatial inequalities, and subject to a highly coercive border regime which allows them no choice over their own accommodation, and to an environment in which local actors are empowered to enforce immigration measures through housing control. ‘Gentrification’ is often described as advancing a classed (see Atkinson & Bridge, 2005; Gray & Mooney, 2011; Smith, 1996) and racialised ‘frontier’ (Jackson, 2017) upon neighbourhoods occupied by minority and marginalised populations: a politicised and coercive process (Slater, 2017; Smith, 2002), which, by manipulating the spatial economy of contemporary cities, seeks to ‘refashion’ urban residency towards consumer citizenship (Paton et al, 2017). The questions that this article seeks to answer are, to what extent does this occur? And what are their consequences? Put another way, how might the colonialist metaphor of gentrification as ‘the frontier’ be put to better use to understand what happens when ‘the frontier’ – and in this case, the asylum border – comes to gentrification? We situate our enquiry in Glasgow, a city with an established history of distinctive and destructive ‘regeneration’ policies (McIntyre & McKee, 2008; Paton, 2009), and with a more recent precedent for accommodating Dispersed asylum seekers

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