- Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Neil Gray
University of Glasgow, School of Social and Political Sciences, Department Member
- Neil Gray is a researcher and writer in urban geography whose work currently focuses on four main strands: (1) The st... moreNeil Gray is a researcher and writer in urban geography whose work currently focuses on four main strands: (1) The structural role of devaluation in contemporary urban regeneration strategies; (2) Rent, the rent gap and its discontents (3) Housing and tenants' movements; (4) The spatialities of Italian autonomous Marxism.
His edited book, 'Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle', was published in 2018.(Neil Gray is a researcher and writer in urban geography whose work currently focuses on four main strands: (1) The structural role of devaluation in contemporary urban regeneration strategies; (2) Rent, the rent gap and its discontents (3) Housing and tenants' movements; (4) The spatialities of Italian autonomous Marxism. <br /><br />His edited book, 'Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle', was published in 2018.)edit
With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago.... more
With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago.
Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggles asks what housing campaigners can learn from a proven organisational victory for the working class.
A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
My Introduction to the book is available here: https://ws1.nbni.co.uk/widgets/page/5b8cfb86f5ba7407e8544359/0
Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggles asks what housing campaigners can learn from a proven organisational victory for the working class.
A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
My Introduction to the book is available here: https://ws1.nbni.co.uk/widgets/page/5b8cfb86f5ba7407e8544359/0
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Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well placed to contribute to radical geographical debates. In particular, the methodology of 'class composition' analysis provides a rigorous,... more
Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well placed to contribute to radical geographical debates. In particular, the methodology of 'class composition' analysis provides a rigorous, materialist critique of transforming capitalist social relations. This paper first provides vital historical-theoretical context from the milieu of Italian Operaismo, before emphasising the value of autonomist Marxist analyses of three contemporary geographical frontiers: labour process, migration, and social reproduction. It ultimately argues that the laudable motivations of the autonomous geographies project, explored in this very journal, would be better served through an explicitly materialist autonomist geography.
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Comparing case studies of long-term, large-scale urban regeneration projects in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland, this paper brings together two addendums to the rent gap model in the shape of the 'reputational gap' and the 'state subsidy... more
Comparing case studies of long-term, large-scale urban regeneration projects in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland, this paper brings together two addendums to the rent gap model in the shape of the 'reputational gap' and the 'state subsidy gap'. These neologisms are mobilised to clarify the risk-laden centrality of the state's role in both the formation and potential closure of rent gaps in large-scale areas of disinvestment and devalorisation. Whilst such projects often appear as expressions of capital's state-mediated extractive power over the built environment, we consider them as examples of capitalist failure or fragility-for even with striking levels of public subsidy to address 'market failure' the land and property market has not been reinvigorated according to plan. This highlights the need, we argue, for further critical scrutiny of failed or stalled urban regeneration projects as a means of foregrounding the instability, rather than the omnipotence, of contemporary urban capitalism.
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Class composition was the most important concept to be developed within the rich milieu of Italian autonomist Marxism, acutely addressing subject-object dichotomies and organisational problems of internal differentiation in and between... more
Class composition was the most important concept to be developed within the rich milieu of Italian autonomist Marxism, acutely addressing subject-object dichotomies and organisational problems of internal differentiation in and between classed, raced and gendered social formations. Yet "compositionist" analysis has received remarkably little attention within urban-geographical literatures. This paper reviews and develops the class composition concept, offering the first fully developed theorisation of spatial composition and underscoring its relevance for a contemporary politics of space. It stresses the importance of immanent, reflexive non-teleological periodisations of capitalist relations for anti-capitalist struggle through the intertwined concepts of spatial composition and the tendency. Through this theoretical lens it narrates the innovative and under-examined spatial praxis of often women-led urban movements in 1970s Italy, arguing that these remarkable struggles provide vital lessons for thinking through the diverse modalities of organisation and class recomposition emerging in the material geographies of social reproduction today.
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This paper develops the neologism state subsidy gap to underscore the necessity of state intervention in the formation and potential closure of rent gaps. The state subsidy gap is the economic gap that must be bridged by the state to make... more
This paper develops the neologism state subsidy gap to underscore the necessity of state intervention in the formation and potential closure of rent gaps. The state subsidy gap is the economic gap that must be bridged by the state to make a currently unviable urban investment scenario potentially profitable for private developers. The pertinence of this conception is particularly apparent in old industrial, relatively impoverished cities where global capital is less likely to dump its surpluses with secure expectation of profitable returns. The issue is exacerbated in economically risky neighbourhoods encompassing fragmented land ownership, poor infrastructure and large-scale areas of urban devalorisation. Such conditions necessitate substantial derisking public intervention if ‘market failure’ is to be addressed—yet success is never guaranteed and is far from universal. It is argued that much closer attention to the stalling, interruption or failure of urban regeneration projects is imperative given the extent of public expenditure and the limited social outcomes arising from attempts to correct market failure. Here, the concept of the state subsidy gap shows its value, shedding light on unjust social outcomes, exposing capitalism’s inherent vulnerabilities, and illustrating the dependence of private capital on public interventions for its reproduction.
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In this conversation, RHJ editors have asked Amanda Huron and Neil Gray to reflect on their approach to strategies and histories of tenant and resident militancy and what lessons can be learnt from the past to shed light on contemporary... more
In this conversation, RHJ editors have asked Amanda Huron and Neil Gray to reflect on their approach to strategies and histories of tenant and resident militancy and what lessons can be learnt from the past to shed light on contemporary housing struggles.
The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with... more
The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state-form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard-fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of " Laboratory Italy " thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.
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Speirs Locks is being reconstructed as a new cultural quarter in Glasgow North, with urban boosters envisioning the unlikely, rundown and de-populated light industrial estate as a key site in the city's ongoing cultural regeneration... more
Speirs Locks is being reconstructed as a new cultural quarter in Glasgow North, with urban boosters envisioning the unlikely, rundown and de-populated light industrial estate as a key site in the city's ongoing cultural regeneration strategy. Yet this creative place-making initiative, I argue, masks a post-political conjuncture based on urban speculation, displacement and the foreclosure of dissent. Post-politics at Speirs Locks is characterised by what I term 'soft austerity urbanism': seemingly progressive, instrumental small-scale urban catalyst initiatives that in reality complement rather than counter punitive hard austerity urbanism. Relating such processes of soft austerity urbanism to a wider context of state-led gentrification, this study contributes to post-political debates in several ways. Firstly, it questions demands for participation as a proper politics when it has become practically compulsory in contemporary biopolitical capitalism. Secondly, it demonstrates how an extreme economy of austerity urbanism remains the hard underside of post-political, soft austerity urbanism approaches. Thirdly, it illustrates how these approaches relate to wider processes of 'real abstraction' – which is no mere flattery of the mind, but instead is rooted in actually existing processes of commodity exchange. Such abstraction, epitomised in the financialisation and privatisation of land and housing, buttresses the same ongoing property dynamics that were so integral to the global financial crisis and ensuing austerity policies in the first place. If we aim to generate a proper politics that creates a genuine rupture with the destructive play of capital in the built environment, the secret of real abstraction must be critically addressed.
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When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega-event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the " state of exception ". Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the... more
When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega-event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the " state of exception ". Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of " necessity " combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.
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Focusing on Glasgow’s East End, home to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper explores the ways in which narratives of decline, ‘blight’ and decay play a central role in stigmatising the local population. ‘Glasgow East’ represents the... more
Focusing on Glasgow’s East End, home to the 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper explores the ways in which narratives of decline, ‘blight’ and decay play a central role in stigmatising the local population. ‘Glasgow East’ represents the new urban frontier in a city that has been heralded in recent decades as a model of successful post‐industrial transformation. Utilising Löic Wacquant’s arguments about advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation in the urban context, we argue that narratives of decline and redevelopment are part of a wider ideological onslaught on the local population, intended to pave the way for low grade and flexible forms of employment, for punitive workfare schemes and for upwards rent restructuring. To this end, the media and politicians have played a particularly important role in constructing Glasgow East as a marker of a ‘broken Britain’. While the focus of this paper is on Glasgow’s East End, the arguments therein have a wider UK and global resonance, reflected in the numerous cases whereby stigmatised locales of relegation are being re‐imagined as elements in wider processes of neo‐liberalisation in the city.
Key words: advanced marginality, territorial stigmatisation, blight, urban frontier, neo‐liberalisation
Key words: advanced marginality, territorial stigmatisation, blight, urban frontier, neo‐liberalisation
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A short contribution to a Planning, Theory and Practice intervention issue suggesting a shift from workers' inquiry to 'neighbourhood inquiry', premised on a possible politics arising from the general trend from industrialisation to... more
A short contribution to a Planning, Theory and Practice intervention issue suggesting a shift from workers' inquiry to 'neighbourhood inquiry', premised on a possible politics arising from the general trend from industrialisation to urbanisation. A precursor of what I've been calling 'territorial inquiry' lately.
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Capitalism is a particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the private ownership of the means of production (MP) and its operation for exchange value, and the related need for people to sell their own... more
Capitalism is a particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the private ownership of the means of production (MP) and its operation for exchange value, and the related need for people to sell their own labor power (LP) to make a living. Dialectics and class struggle From a Marxist dialectical perspective, society is personified by two fundamentally opposed classes (capitalist and proletariat). As an outcome of class struggle, society can be transformed through time, from one hegemonic mode of production to another (e.g., feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to communism) as the oppressed class (e.g., workers) seeks to overthrow and liberate itself from the oppressor (e.g., the capitalist class). Surplus value Surplus value is value created by the unpaid labor of wage workers, over and above the value of their LP (necessary labor time), and appropriated without compensation by the capitalist. For Marxists, the production and appropriation of surplus value is a fundamental aim of capitalism. Commodity fetishism The term used critically by Marxists to describe mainstream economists' failure to acknowledge, and attempts to mystify, the social relations (and exploitation) that underlie the production of commodities. Uneven development The tendency under capitalism for some places to develop very rapidly while other places experience decline. The Marxist theory contends that the two countervailing tendenciesdof growth and declinedare fundamentally related and intrinsic to capitalist forms of production. Spatial fix The stabilization of capitalist production through geographical extension and reconfiguration via particular organizational place-based forms and locational arrangements for the purpose of expanded capital accumulation.
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Following an industrial boom from the mid-to-late 19th century, Glasgow's East End underwent exceptional levels of industrial decline. By the 1960s, it suffered from wholesale abandonment and devaluation, visible through widespread... more
Following an industrial boom from the mid-to-late 19th century, Glasgow's East End underwent exceptional levels of industrial decline. By the 1960s, it suffered from wholesale abandonment and devaluation, visible through widespread swathes of vacant and derelict land and decrepit building structures. After several unsuccessful regeneration attempts over the decades, in 2007 Glasgow City Council (GCC) won the bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games in the East End. In 2008, the same area was subject to the largest regeneration project in Scotland-Clyde Gateway-rooted in sustainability discourses and the provision of new green and blue infrastructure. This chapter critically inquires into who has benefited from this process.
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A co-written chapter on the use value of gentrification theory across differing socio-geographical contexts. My contribution, ABSTRACTION? LET'S ASK LEFEBVRE, draws on philosophically inclined Marxist theorists, including Marx himself,... more
A co-written chapter on the use value of gentrification theory across differing socio-geographical contexts. My contribution, ABSTRACTION? LET'S ASK LEFEBVRE, draws on philosophically inclined Marxist theorists, including Marx himself, Henri Lefebvre, Alfred Sohn-Rothel, Derek Sayer and others, to defend the political and analytical utility of real or determinate abstraction in theory.
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Using spatial composition analysis, I aim to show the ongoing relevance of the 1915 Rent Strikes by situating them within wider concerns over social reproduction and rent; concerns which have often been obscured historically by the... more
Using spatial composition analysis, I aim to show the ongoing relevance of the 1915 Rent Strikes by situating them within wider concerns over social reproduction and rent; concerns which have often been obscured historically by the theoretical separation of productive and reproductive spheres. Manuel Castells (1983) typifies a certain reading of the Rent Strikes within the Marxist tradition, designating housing and social reproductive struggles as a secondary contradiction behind the primary contradiction of workplace struggle. With this analytical framework, the ongoing relevance of women-led direct action by tenants in the Rent Strikes has often been relegated behind a ‘forward march of labour’ that has since lost its way in the factory desert.
Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.
Emphasising the primary circuit of capital accumulation (industry and manufacturing) at the expense of the secondary circuit (land, real estate, housing and the built environment), Castells continues Engels’s polemic in The Housing Question: there can be no solution to the housing problem while the capitalist mode of production continues to exist. This argument made both political and economic sense in the 19th century when the euthanasia of the rentier was widely predicted, and when industrialisation was becoming hegemonic over agricultural production. In a context where urbanisation has superseded industrialisation, however, it makes less sense now. Re-deploying the Autonomist Marxist methods of ‘class composition’ and ‘the tendency’, I will re-examine the Rent Strikes through a distinctive ‘spatial composition’ analysis, showing how the ongoing problems of housing, rent, and social reproduction have radical political potential today.
Research Interests:
Britain and Ireland are in the grip of an entrenched and escalating housing crisis. This book exposes the causes and consequences of that crisis, revealing its more permanent character, and showing how tenants and residents have been... more
Britain and Ireland are in the grip of an entrenched and escalating housing crisis. This book exposes the causes and consequences of that crisis, revealing its more permanent character, and showing how tenants and residents have been challenging it. The book was inspired by the centenary of the 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, which played a decisive role in establishing rent controls in Britain for the first time and ultimately forcing the government to introduce public housing provision in 1919. It reexamines this formative moment of tenant organization in light of new empirical research and new theoretical understandings, exploring its relevance through a largely hidden continuum of tenant struggles following 1915 and through multiple contemporary case studies from the most significant housing struggles in Britain and Ireland today. The primary focus is on the particular context of Britain and Ireland, 1 but given the depth of the housing crisis across multiple borders, these studies will resonate with those attempting to comprehend and contest housing tyranny internationally. Here, I provide a brief historical overview of rent unrest in Britain and Ireland, focusing initially on the 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow but also on the many, largely hidden, tenant and resident struggles in the sphere of social reproduction before, during and after 1915. Such a summary is politically vital because the labour movement and related trade unions have often viewed the housing question as merely secondary to workplace struggles in the sphere of direct production (see Moorehouse et al. 1972; Sklair 1975; Englander 1983; Bradley 2014). Yet, as Bunge (1977) observes, it is precisely on the 'second front' of social reproduction that the everyday life of the working class (in all its diverse dimensions) is located. Exploring this blind spot is all the more crucial because the capacity for radical change in the workplace
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Co-authored book chapter with Libby Porter in (2018) Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells Us About Ownership, edited by Cockburn P J L, Thorup M, Brunn M H and Risager B S. London: Routledge.
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This report explores the state of energy transition within Europe’s municipalities, drawing on existing academic and non-academic literature, and primary data collection carried out as part of the mPOWER project. It highlights the key... more
This report explores the state of energy transition within Europe’s municipalities, drawing on existing academic and non-academic literature, and primary data collection carried out as part of the mPOWER project. It highlights the key role of municipal actors in the energy transition, although progress takes a wide range of forms including new forms of public ownership, utilising supra-national funding opportunities and increasing citizen participation.
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Currently, builders across the UK are charged 20% VAT for refurbishing residential properties and 0% for new-builds. The 20% VAT rate is for most work undertaken on houses and flats, including work done by builders and similar... more
Currently, builders across the UK are charged 20% VAT for refurbishing residential properties and 0% for new-builds. The 20% VAT rate is for most work undertaken on houses and flats, including work done by builders and similar tradespeople. The 0% VAT rate is for work on new build construction projects, or work closely related to it, including the demolition of existing buildings and site preparation.
The current VAT regime is a perverse charter for building decay and (heavily incentivised) demolition that presents a stubborn, unjust legal-financial constraint to building repair, retrofitting and rescue.
Yet, if current VAT rates were harmonised this would give builders a genuine choice between repair and retrofitting versus demolition and destruction. Given the extent of fuel poverty at a time of escalating energy prices and given the scale of carbon emissions from households and embodied carbon loss from demolition, the stakes are obvious for challenging energy injustice and meeting energy efficiency and carbon reduction targets.
Neil Gray, writer, researcher, and housing activist with Living Rent tenants’ union, interviews Malcolm Fraser, architect, writer and built environment campaigner about his long-term campaigning work on the Builders VAT issue.
The current VAT regime is a perverse charter for building decay and (heavily incentivised) demolition that presents a stubborn, unjust legal-financial constraint to building repair, retrofitting and rescue.
Yet, if current VAT rates were harmonised this would give builders a genuine choice between repair and retrofitting versus demolition and destruction. Given the extent of fuel poverty at a time of escalating energy prices and given the scale of carbon emissions from households and embodied carbon loss from demolition, the stakes are obvious for challenging energy injustice and meeting energy efficiency and carbon reduction targets.
Neil Gray, writer, researcher, and housing activist with Living Rent tenants’ union, interviews Malcolm Fraser, architect, writer and built environment campaigner about his long-term campaigning work on the Builders VAT issue.
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Interview with Neil Gray, Glasgow, for MieterEcho tenant magazine, Berlin, Germany. The interview focuses on the destruction and privatisation of public housing in Glasgow, concentrating especially on the demolition of the Sighthill... more
Interview with Neil Gray, Glasgow, for MieterEcho tenant magazine, Berlin, Germany. The interview focuses on the destruction and privatisation of public housing in Glasgow, concentrating especially on the demolition of the Sighthill high-rise housing estate and the Red Road high-rise flats. Interview conducted by Matthias Coers and Grischa Dallmer.
Video interview available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vswy9l7YAPw&feature=youtu.be
Video interview available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vswy9l7YAPw&feature=youtu.be
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An interview with Hamish Kallin for Antipode Foundation:
https://antipodefoundation.org/2018/07/27/author-interview-neil-gray/
https://antipodefoundation.org/2018/07/27/author-interview-neil-gray/
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This exchange with John Holloway follows on from our engagement with his most recent work, Crack Capitalism (2010). Holloway’s work has become well known in and beyond activist circles since Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)... more
This exchange with John Holloway follows on from our engagement with his most recent work, Crack Capitalism (2010). Holloway’s work has become well known in and beyond activist circles since Change the World Without Taking Power (2002) was published and widely read. This intentional popularisation has, arguably, tended to obscure Holloway’s previous work while drawing strength from it. … While Holloway’s recent work draws strongly on his interests in the Zapitistas and other movements and struggles in the Global South, where he is presently based, it should also be noted that he was, for some time, based in Edinburgh and wrote regularly for Common Sense: Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists....The ideas presented in Common Sense deserve a wide readership, particularly at a time when left liberalism in the UK, as Holloway challenges below, seems determined to "lock us firmly into capital and close down all alternatives' through regressive campaigns such as ‘Right to Work’ or the recent ‘March for the Alternative’."
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Through the prism of the ‘communisation thesis’, Gray/ Vishmidt reflect upon: human capital exploited as investment portfolio in ‘The Big Society’; affirmation and negation as political potentialities; the fragmentation of the class... more
Through the prism of the ‘communisation thesis’, Gray/ Vishmidt reflect upon: human capital exploited as investment portfolio in ‘The Big Society’; affirmation and negation as political potentialities; the fragmentation of the class relation based on waged work; financialisation and the collapse of social democracy; the politics of reproduction; and the imposition of, resistance to, and potential negation of debt. Not just a change in the system, but a change of the system; not later on, but now.
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A false division exists between those in work and those ‘out of work’, and, despite the correlation between welfare and work, there have been few effective movements to defend the unemployed and low-wage workers collectively. However,... more
A false division exists between those in work and those ‘out of work’, and, despite the correlation between welfare and work, there have been few effective movements to defend the unemployed and low-wage workers collectively. However, with the unemployed increasingly herded into a privatised workfare industry, and with the onset of large-scale unemployment under recessionary conditions, there lies the possibility of a convergence of interests and perspectives between the unemployed, people in precarious work, and all those who contribute to society outside of the wage-relation. In the context of punitive Welfare restructuring there have been some challenging community responses - ECAP and Edinburgh Claimants are among those groups that are only too well aware of the implications. Variant interviewed them, as building and strengthening coalitions between people in low paid work and people on benefits is surely more urgent than ever.
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The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is the latest film by Anja Kirschner and David Panos, based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th Century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, the ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’.... more
The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is the latest film by Anja Kirschner and David Panos, based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th Century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, the ghostwriter of Sheppard’s ‘autobiography’. Set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble financial crisis of 1720, the film explores the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th Century and remain relevant to the present day. Bringing to bear a host of allegorical associations and narrative forms, but re-fashioning them to create uneasy resolutions that probe into the problems and possibilities of class politics, the boundaries of different genre styles, the false division between high and low art, and the vexed question of ‘political art’, Neil Gray asked the film-makers to discuss their work.
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A polemic examination of the emergence of Build to Rent and Purpose Built Residential Accommodation (PBRA) in Glasgow, particularly in Partick. It also connect these developments with Clyde Waterfront regeneration project and wider... more
A polemic examination of the emergence of Build to Rent and Purpose Built Residential Accommodation (PBRA) in Glasgow, particularly in Partick. It also connect these developments with Clyde Waterfront regeneration project and wider questions around Glasgow's rent crisis. Written initially as research notes for the Partick branch of Living Rent Tenants' Union and developed into an online article for Bella Caledonia.
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This co-written post with Melissa Garcia-Lamarca forms part of the series “Green inequalities in the city”, developed in collaboration with the 'Undisciplined Environments' blog. The series seeks to highlight new research and reflections... more
This co-written post with Melissa Garcia-Lamarca forms part of the series “Green inequalities in the city”, developed in collaboration with the 'Undisciplined Environments' blog. The series seeks to highlight new research and reflections on the linkages between the dominant forms of “green” redevelopments taking place in cities and questions of urban environmental justice, and the challenges and possibilities these imply for more just and ecological urban spaces.
The post is intended as an opening salvo for a more extended paper on green gentrification in North Glasgow.
http://www.bcnuej.org/2020/12/02/what-will-glasgows-smart-canal-mean-for-its-historically-deprived-communities/
The post is intended as an opening salvo for a more extended paper on green gentrification in North Glasgow.
http://www.bcnuej.org/2020/12/02/what-will-glasgows-smart-canal-mean-for-its-historically-deprived-communities/
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Neil Gray, Joey Simons and Bechaela Walker summarise the origins, achievements and ambitions of the Living Rent tenants’ union.
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The development of housing as a major site of class conflict cannot be separated from wider processes of urbanisation and land enclosure. If housing has been reduced and fragmented into myriad specialised sub-disciplines in the worlds of... more
The development of housing as a major site of class conflict cannot be separated from wider processes of urbanisation and land enclosure. If housing has been reduced and fragmented into myriad specialised sub-disciplines in the worlds of policy, journalism, academia, and economics, the task of housing movements is to conceptualise housing within wider processes of capital accumulation, contradiction and struggle. In the first workers’ inquiries conducted by Italian Operaismo in the 1960s, members of the Quaderni Rossi journal, alongside workers from the Olivetti factory in Turin, interviewed over one hundred workers in every sector of the factory allowing a deeper understanding of each worker’s ‘part within the whole’ and opening up new perspectives on class composition. Corresponding to a new spatial composition of capital—founded on the centrality of housing to contemporary political economy, tendential urbanisation, exacerbated land commodification and struggles in and over the built environment—it is necessary to undertake similar investigative processes at the urban level through practices of neighbourhood or territorial inquiry. Such practices would, belatedly, acknowledge the economic importance of the so-called ‘secondary circuit’ of capital in the built environment, while giving due weight to the spheres of consumption and social reproduction as arenas of political-economic contestation. Drawing on my own experience engaging in territorial inquiries, I speculate here on what a territorial inquiry might look like in practice and how it might provide an effective framework/methodology for the instigation, maintenance, and development, and recomposition of urban class struggle.
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A long overdue critique of Scottish Housing Associations as a trojan horse for housing privatisation under current housing policy. Published in Bella Caledonia:... more
A long overdue critique of Scottish Housing Associations as a trojan horse for housing privatisation under current housing policy. Published in Bella Caledonia: https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/30/nothing-exceptional-scottish-housing-associations-and-the-erasure-of-scottish-social-housing/
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Eoin Anderson, Neil Gray and Emily Roff discuss the privatisation of urban space, honing in on plans to re-shape and commercialise Glasgow's central George Square.
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A comment on the material written by the Workers City group before, during and after Glasgow's 1990 European City of Culture year and its relation to the contemporary services and cultural economy. The website was constructed as an online... more
A comment on the material written by the Workers City group before, during and after Glasgow's 1990 European City of Culture year and its relation to the contemporary services and cultural economy. The website was constructed as an online archive of Workers City writing by The Strickland Distribution, an artist-run group supporting the development of independent research in art-related and non-institutional practices.
http://www.workerscity.org/
http://www.workerscity.org/
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In Rebel Cities, David Harvey exhaustively tracks capitalism's turn to real estate speculation and rent extraction, while imagining a reciprocal and reinvigorated urban politics. But his neglect of autonomous urban struggles in '70s Italy... more
In Rebel Cities, David Harvey exhaustively tracks capitalism's turn to real estate speculation and rent extraction, while imagining a reciprocal and reinvigorated urban politics. But his neglect of autonomous urban struggles in '70s Italy and concentration on rights, suggest an adherence to older political forms inadequate to the attack of the social factory – writes Neil Gray.
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Neil Gray and Leigh French argue that Glasgow scandals of political corruption are symptomatic of Glasgow's business-friendly entrepreneurial politics.
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prole.info's 'The Housing Monster' sets out to de-fetishise housing as a commodity form by means of an illustrated book. That we have waited so long for such a clear and compelling introduction to this subject says much about the aporias... more
prole.info's 'The Housing Monster' sets out to de-fetishise housing as a commodity form by means of an illustrated book. That we have waited so long for such a clear and compelling introduction to this subject says much about the aporias of the productivist Left which has traditionally relegated reproductive issues, including housing, behind workplace issues. The book’s arrival provides an opportunity to discuss housing in a way that does not merely replicate the dull compulsions of social democracy, which assumes that distribution always follows behind production, and thereby implicitly accepts the capitalist relation in the wage-labour form. The book is notable for its attention to the individual forms of stress and estrangement that the vast majority of us experience on the capital-deficit side of property relations. This book is an attempt to lift the cap from over our eyes again – the monsters must be slain!
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Early reflections in Variant on the art of rent, or rent seeking in Glasgow's creative city narrative.
Public and social housing is being attacked like never before, and much of it is justified by a campaign of vilification which judges the people who live in public housing, just as harshly as the public housing itself. 'Militant... more
Public and social housing is being attacked like never before, and much of it is justified by a campaign of vilification which judges the people who live in public housing, just as harshly as the public housing itself. 'Militant Modernism', by Owen Hatherley, and 'Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World', edited by Sarah Glynn, however affirm the benefits of public housing in quite different ways, but in ways that help provide a critical, progressive conjuncture if we think them both at once. At a time when the dogma of ‘no alternative’ is a neoliberal commonplace – despite signs everywhere of that creed’s decadence – Hatherley’s excavation of ‘Socialist Modernism’ and Glynn et al’s affirmation of collective housing struggle offer primers for a different kind of future.
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It is a banality that we need to work in order to produce for our basic needs. But what is the nature of that work, for whom, and to what end? Useful work? Or useless toil? Recent UK welfare reform proposals maintain that work is the best... more
It is a banality that we need to work in order to produce for our basic needs. But what is the nature of that work, for whom, and to what end? Useful work? Or useless toil? Recent UK welfare reform proposals maintain that work is the best route out of poverty, yet ignore the fact that the wage-labour relation has become a source of built-in insecurity and social instability. Wage-labour is the central pillar of capitalist relations, and the drive to productivity and valorisation of work is to be expected from the point of view of capital. However, how have social-democratic institutions, nominally of the Left, come to be complicit in the subjugation of labour through the mantra of productivity?
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Another early Variant article on Glasgow's pretensions to instrumentalised creativity and culture Richard Florida-style. When written, a timely and necessary riposte.
Examining the "biggest regeneration programme in Scotland", Gray probes the "disjuncture between the triumphal neo-liberal ideology of the city – of successful self-regulating markets achieving optimally balanced economic growth – and the... more
Examining the "biggest regeneration programme in Scotland", Gray probes the "disjuncture between the triumphal neo-liberal ideology of the city – of successful self-regulating markets achieving optimally balanced economic growth – and the everyday reality of uneven development, intensifying inequality, and generalized social insecurity..."
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David Panos & Anja Kirschner's film, Trail of the Spider, allegorises the public-private land-grab known as ‘urban regeneration' using the form of the Spaghetti Western. This is no shallow postmodern genre surfing, writes Neil Gray, but a... more
David Panos & Anja Kirschner's film, Trail of the Spider, allegorises the public-private land-grab known as ‘urban regeneration' using the form of the Spaghetti Western. This is no shallow postmodern genre surfing, writes Neil Gray, but a passionate re-engagement with history for the sake of the present.
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An article following the argument behind an important Tehelka magazine expose of Hindutva in India - a communalist Hindu Nationalist ideology seeking to equate the very idea of ‘Indian-ness’ with ‘Hindu-ness. The expose of the horrendous... more
An article following the argument behind an important Tehelka magazine expose of Hindutva in India - a communalist Hindu Nationalist ideology seeking to equate the very idea of ‘Indian-ness’ with ‘Hindu-ness. The expose of the horrendous Hindutva-led pogrom of Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, took place in a context where neoliberal advocates and boosters, fronted by the bought media worldwide, were busy extolling the ‘competitive’ and ‘dynamic’ virtues of India’s de-regulated economy.
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This paper examines the emergence and prosecution of neoliberalism in Glasgow as it impacts on the urban realm. Drawing on urban and social theory, it shows how Glasgow conforms to a model of urban land revaluation whereby discourses of... more
This paper examines the emergence and prosecution of neoliberalism in Glasgow as it impacts on the urban realm. Drawing on urban and social theory, it shows how Glasgow conforms to a model of urban land revaluation whereby discourses of ‘blight’ and ‘obsolescence’ are mobilised to justify wholesale redevelopment and capitalist accumulation strategies based primarily on rent extraction.
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The publication of the first ‘critical introduction’ to David Harvey is long overdue and most welcome. Aimed at degree students and more experienced readers seeking to gain a broader understanding of Harvey’s voluminous oeuvre, the book... more
The publication of the first ‘critical introduction’ to David Harvey is long overdue and most welcome. Aimed at degree students and more experienced readers seeking to gain a broader understanding of Harvey’s voluminous oeuvre, the book is clear and comprehensive, making a strong defence of the ‘power of abstraction’ in his work and productively centring crisis at the core of his writings. The book fills an obvious need in terms of the reception of Harvey’s work and is to be commended for the breadth of its engagement, but is rather pessimistic on Harvey’s wider impact. This is my main contention with what is otherwise a fine introduction to Harvey and a necessary, if contestable, contribution to studies of Marxism and Marxist geography.
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Review of Christophers, B. (2018). The new enclosure: The appropriation of public land in Neoliberal Britain. London: Verso.
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Review of Safe as Houses: Private Greed, Political Negligence and Housing Policy After Grenfell by Stuart Hodkinson.
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A review of Stanley Corkin's book on the filmic representation of New York during a period of major political-economic restructuring.
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A review of Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden's selection of essays by Henri Lefebvre on the state, autogestion and 'mondialisation'.
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Joey Simons (Living Rent Tenants’ Union) interviews fellow Living Rent union member, Neil Gray, author of Rent and Its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (2018).