Abstract
Housing activism and the fight against gentrification is becoming central in working class communities all over the United Kingdom. Therefore a critique and analysis of this fast moving situation is needed. Luckily for us Kirsteen Paton’s book examining how gentrification is experienced by working class people could not be timelier. Paton’s research is set in Glasgow, a city that has been part of the mass gentrification of British cities, particularly those that were devastated by de-industrialisation during the 1980s. Although the book is steeped in sociological theory and very carefully outlines the importance of social theory in explaining working class experience, there are painful and emotional qualitative responses from Paton’s respondents describing the difficulties of being working class in the last thirty years and of being part of a city that is changing around them.
Setting the book in Glasgow is its real strength: for an English academic it can be difficult to fully understand the political revolution that is currently happening in Scotland. However, after reading Paton’s careful and detailed account of this working class city, I understand its importance and centrality to working class Scottish identity. Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective is not only relevant to Glasgow – the stories and narratives that have been so carefully presented are familiar to me, having grown up in Nottingham, another post-industrial working class city (Mckenzie, 2015). It also speaks to the grass-roots movements that are becoming very powerful throughout London, in places like Brixton, Stratford and Hackney: places that seem very far away from the industrial heartlands of the North.
The first chapter, ‘Restructuring Theory’, uses the age-old sociological dialectic of structure versus agency and Paton lays out the arguments – derived from Beck, Bauman and Giddens – that individualisation is vital to understanding identity (p. 45). However, the author argues strongly that these ideas of ‘new identities’ have rarely been used in understanding the industrial working class – an argument that is really important to working class studies, as working class people are often seen and researched as one-dimensional, homogeneous and uncomplicated.
Throughout the book Paton constantly brings us back to a common trope and one of the most misrepresented narratives about the industrial working class: that they have disappeared, gone away, vanished. What Paton does, and what has been desperately needed for several generations, is show that the industrial working class never, in fact, disappeared; only the supposed importance of the identity connected to specific types of employment has disappeared. Here, the author feeds into a new and emerging body of work that emphasises that social class is as important in 2015 as it was in 1965. Only class dynamics have changed and Parton maintains that the ways in which we think and theorise social class also need to change.
In the chapter ‘Restructuring Class Identity’ Paton argues successfully and strongly through the narratives of her respondents that the decline in industry, and the subsequent occupational changes do not mean that the term ‘working class’ is not meaningful to the people in her study. Equally it is still important for sociologists to understand that inequality and community are central to understanding class identity. What Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective clearly shows is that the connection between identity, class and place is where we need to look as sociologists and critical social policy analysts if we want to know anything about class in Britain today. Using the schema that results in class being solely defined by occupation is anachronistic and reductively simplistic and crude.
Paton successfully shows the power of reinvigorating class analysis through neighbourhood, community and space. She dismisses the view that working class people are ‘fixed’ and have no agency and instead uses Mike Savage’s theory of ‘elective belonging’ that has been most commonly used to describe the experience of middle class space (p. 122).
Finally, what I most liked about this book (not least because it is about working class people) is the critique that Paton directs at the neoliberal project. This is related to the gentrification of communities that were once working class spaces. They are becoming something almost unrecognisable and this is resulting in hurt and pain for working class people as they try, and often fail, to become ‘gentrified’ themselves.
This is a book that is highly relevant to 2015 and throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Gentrification and its consequences have both positive and negative effects on neighbourhoods and people. The uncomfortable transitions prompted by urban change and the issues that relate to gentrification, community and identity are becoming the most common experience for working class people. However, what is not so common is an authentic account of gentrification from a working class perspective.