Radical Scholars Working with London’s Council Estates Residents on Alternative Visions

Pablo Sendra, The Bartlett School of Planning 

While many local authorities have declared “Climate Emergency” in the last two years, in London, many of the local authorities’ approach to estate “regeneration” is demolishing the existing homes and replacing them with a new development. This seems rather contradictory, given the impact that demolishing and rebuilding has on the embodied carbon of the buildings. In addition to having a strong impact on carbon emissions, demolishing homes implies that residents need to be moved out and rehoused somewhere. This has a strong social impact on the residents, particularly on those like the elderly or other groups that heavily rely on their networks of mutual support. Economically, it does not make sense either, since the model is based on the hypothesis of an infinite demand of housing at unaffordable prices.

As a radical scholar, after publishing the open access book Community-Led Regeneration –which explores cases of residents and activists resisting demolition and proposing alternative plans – I decided to take a further step and use the results of my research to take action. Through my research, I had interacted with residents and activists from various estates. I thought that both the results of my research and my design skills as an architect and urban designer would be helpful to the resistance. So far, I have worked with residents on putting together two Community Plans (also referred as People’s Plans), which are collective alternative visions for the future of the neighbourhood. These visions, which are co-designed with residents through a series of workshops and activities, consist of urban design and architectural proposals that explore how to improve the neighbourhood without demolishing it. The Community Plans go along with a social impact assessment (co-produced with residents), a financial viability assessment, and a Life Cycle Analysis that looks at the carbon emissions of refurbishment vs demolition. 

The first estate residents I worked with were those from the tower blocks William Dunbar and William Saville Houses in South Kilburn Estate, London. The proposal from the council consisted on demolishing the existing 147 homes and building 213 new homes. Through workshops with the residents, we explored the social impact that this would have, particularly on those residents that needed more help from their neighbours, and proposed an alternative proposal that consisted on refurbishing the existing 147 homes and building 47 new ones through infill development: on top of a car park and a one-storey small office building. The scheme also proposed new community facilities, new local shops and improved green spaces. We worked with a Chartered Quantity Surveyor to do a financial viability assessment and we calculated that it was possible to deliver 75% of social rent homes in comparison to the 17% of the council’s scheme. The process of running the workshops and coming out with the Community Plan was a knowledge exchange for everyone. Residents said they had never had the opportunity to discuss openly how they felt about their homes and living near their neighbours and they welcomed this opportunity. Through the workshops, they also gained planning knowledge and explored how their neighbourhood could be in the future. For us the team at UCL facilitating the workshops, we learnt how urban developments can affect communities and their social relationships.

Currently, we are involved in developing the Community Plan with Alton Estate residents. For that project, we are collaborating with the local campaign Alton Action, who are documenting on their website all the process of co-producing the plan. In Alton Estate, Wandsworth Council intends to partner up with a private developer for demolishing around 300 homes and build around 1000 new homes. While we were engaging in conversation with Alton Action to start this project, the private developer Redrow decided to pull out of the scheme in August 2020. Due to the impact of the pandemic, they were stopping their operations in London. This is clear evidence that these schemes are not economically sustainable. Despite this evidence, the council wants to carry out with the scheme. In the meanwhile, Alton Action and our team have co-produced with residents an alternative scheme, which propose to refurbish the existing homes and build new homes, community facilities, workspaces and shops.

Community Plans are not official planning documents. They are just a community vision that can be used to show evidence that an alternative proposal is viable and more sustainable. They are also a piece of activism, and a document that can be used to negotiate other possibilities with local authorities. Residents can no longer be accused of being merely oppositional, since they can point to an alternative proposal they feel identified with.