Background

For far too long urban communities and neighbourhoods have been reimagined by corporate power, whether it is global developers, the super-rich, oligarchs, powerful institutions or other power brokers that influence key decisions taken at the highest level. The overriding vision and drive of this commanding and forceful group is to determine the urban future, which with its top-down development of our cities, has created and sustained poverty, dispossession and urban blight among the poorest of our populations. The strategy practised by this corporate power and the super-rich has brought into sharp relief the city as a commodity, where class, power and politics are interwoven to dominate the urban landscape. The outcome is a continuing housing shortage deepened by the increasing pursuit of huge profits rather than human need, which has created significant socio-spatial segregation and inequality between the super-rich, the rich and ‘the rest’ of us.

These outsiders, with their power, influence and money, are demolishing long-established communities and repopulated brownfield sites to make way for massive office blocks and sprawling retail parks while creating new urban neighbourhoods with high-density housing that is unaffordable for most to purchase. This powerful and massive juggernaut of change has side-tracked the token consultation processes involving existing communities.

Introduction

We begin, first, by introducing the reader to Deptford, in Southeast London, a relatively small geographically urban community and part of the London Borough of Lewisham. Bordered on the north by the River Thames and squeezed between the London boroughs of Southwark and Greenwich. Less than five miles from the financial capital of the world, the City of London.

We discuss its diverse demographic make-up and, importantly, its significant maritime history, with reference to Convoys Wharf, a large, empty, post-industrial brownfield site facing the River Thames. A site that lies at the heart of the contested battle between a global developer and the local Deptford community. It is this site and its heritage, largely forgotten and ignored by this developer, that epitomizes the rapidly changing face of the Deptford community.

The voices of Deptford residents graphically highlight this transformation, the sense of felt loss as the developers move in and reshape their community. However, within this acknowledgement of their powerlessness to stop it happening lies the seed of ‘this is wrong and unjust’, a remembrance of the Deptford community's history of their reluctance to merely accept and to challenge injustice.

Deptford

Deptford is in Evelyn Ward, with a population of just over 31,000 and one of 19 wards within the London Borough of Lewisham. An inner South London borough with a population of over 300,000, making it the fourth largest of London's 32 boroughs (Lean, 2019).

Introduction

The challenge to top-down ‘land grab’ urban redevelopment or regeneration across London was extensively explored in the previous chapter with the detailed case study of the unique Voice4Deptford campaign in Southeast London. Community campaigns such as this have a continuing historical lineage in resisting, organizing and ‘fighting back’ against developers, from the regeneration of the London Docks in the early 1980s up to the numerous active campaigns of the present day by communities under threat of losing their homes, jobs, their sense of community and their ‘way of life’, which are now part of the changing London urban fabric.

This chapter will discuss this historical lineage, followed by highlighting a number of current community campaigns and action across London's diverse communities. How developers’ proposals to displace existing communities by ‘social cleansing’ are challenged; how ‘community plans’ by communities themselves provide a community-led alternative to developers’ visions; and how the use of differing approaches to tackle ‘top-down’ regeneration by campaigns offers a range of methodologies in fighting back. How their creativity, the demands for genuine involvement and a say in the future of their communities challenges developers’ commercial interests, as Elms remarked: ‘You don't want luxury apartments, gymnasiums, concierges and endless poxy coffee shops’ (2019: 229).

It concludes with an example of community resistance in the form of highlighting the ‘buying-up’ of expensive properties and land by the ‘super-rich’ in London's wealthiest borough.

A story worth telling

In this chapter we focus on a unique campaign to resist a proposed massive private housing development facing the River Thames in Deptford, Southeast London. Members of the Voice4Deptford campaign tell the story of resisting the demands of a global developer and working for imaginative community alternatives.

From its beginnings in 2013, the chapter tells of how a group of residents, activists and their supporters succeeded in diverting agency, power and knowledge away from outside holders of power and experts into the orbit of the community. How the campaign has actively encouraged and supported local people, residents, to step forward and incorporate Gramsci's idea of community ‘organic intellectuals’ based on who they are, their expertise, local knowledge and class heritage (Forgacs, 1988). By doing so, now in its eleventh year, the campaign continues to challenge the developer, local power holders and their entitlement to retain a hegemonic hold over the Deptford community by denying them their voices, their real participation and their plans for the future.

Essentially, how the campaign is at the community level is a key example of developing a counter-hegemonic action that feeds into the wider left and progressive movement against resisting the ruling and accepted political, economic, beliefs and power.

The chapter opens with how the campaign began, the formation of the initial ‘Convoys Wharf Community Group’, and the trials and tribulations of daily campaign life.

The links between the local and the global have greater relevance than ever right now and not just in relation to the climate crisis. Far from it in fact. Urban regeneration processes need to be understood in precisely such terms too. And this is most especially so in a global city such as London. Social geographers such as Doreen Massey (Massey, 2007) and Saskia Sassen (2014) have pointed to precisely these interconnections already, identifying the brutality and complexity inherent in the global economy. This very complexity has been making it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacement, evictions and eradications that contemporary capitalism produces, with its logics of expulsion, logics that hit working-class communities with particular intensity in global cities such as London.

Which makes this book all the timelier. Communities need to be equipped to analyse these interconnections between the local and the global if they are to respond strategically, understanding the different levels and spaces of power, rooted in the power of global capital, along with the power of the property development industry, too often supported, rather than effectively challenged, by the state at both local and national levels.

The authors’ case study of community action in Deptford, Southeast London, offers the basis for unpacking precisely these interconnections. This is the story of the power of global capital, on the one hand, and working-class communities’ strategies to resist displacement, on the other – social cleansing in the context of ‘feral capitalism’, as David Harvey has so aptly described these processes (Harvey, 2013).

Background

Keith Popple has clearly outlined in Chapters 1 and 2 how the impact of neoliberalism is destroying the notion of democracy and representation, and has created severe inequality and social and economic injustice for communities. How global investment in London is remaking this capital city for profit while badly distorting the housing market in favour of the wealthy. It is a view of neoliberalism that Cedric Johnson, writing in the Jacobin magazine, concurs with, adding that ‘[t] he experience of neo-liberalization … has left joblessness, a crisis of affordable housing, economic insecurity and social precarity in its wake’ (2020: 132). Monbiot and Hutchison are clear that it is an ideology that has seen the rich becoming richer and more powerful with the rest of us becoming poorer and no longer ‘citizens’ but ‘consumers’ (2024). It is a process occurring in other major cities around the world, whereby investment seeking profits via property development and rental value is displacing existing communities and their livelihoods. However, as Lee and Edwards argue, what is happening across London is uniquely different:

Introduction

We have titled the final chapter ‘Whose City? Communities versus Capital’ as that is at the heart of this book. We have shown how neoliberalism's corrosive impact on democratic society, its institutions, the lives of people, their communities, and politics in general, is a global phenomenon. It has encroached on many, if not all, aspects of our daily lives. It has produced a stupefied version of ‘goggles’ through which we view what is happening to us, and around us, with its destruction of the ‘social’ as normal, as ‘common sense’. We are still experiencing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis with excuses to burden the people of the Earth with more austerity and further inequality. These events, and many more within national boundaries, have produced catastrophes exacerbated by neoliberal greed and government negligence, with global income inequality substantially increasing (Deaton, 2021), so the rich get richer and more powerful. Meanwhile, the rest of us get poorer, with the growing numbers of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder now out of sight.

The neoliberal ‘takeover’ of London by corporate developers, global investors and the ‘super-rich’, with profits for shareholders paramount, irrespective of the impact on working-class communities who are deemed as mere collateral damage, is but one example of where this is happening and which forms the central argument of this book. Cities such as London, together with those across the UK and indeed the world, are evolving in the image of those with the power and the money to determine citizens’ futures.

Introduction

In the previous chapter we examined the centrality of neoliberalism in determining and shaping global and national economic and political affairs and how this powerful regressive hegemonic project creates and sustains growing poverty and inequality. At the same time neoliberalism produces and reproduces massive financial gains for global corporations and the already super-rich.

We considered how these global corporations together with national governments and international financial organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as enormously wealthy individuals, have advocated neoliberal economic and social policies that encourage and reward the privatization of public assets, and the reductions in progressive taxation. This approach goes hand-in-glove with imposing legal restrictions on trade unions and reducing spending on key public services like education and health services.

To further understand the extent of the far-reaching tentacles of neoliberalism we introduced the writings of the neo-Marxist philosopher, writer and political activist Antonio Gramsci, whose erudite work on cultural hegemony demonstrates how the ruling elite shapes culture for its own advantage. This dominant ideology is presented as ‘common sense’, ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’, which contributes to enabling the powerful and super-rich to subordinate and exploit the majority.

In this chapter, we look at efforts to counter the neoliberal hegemony. We do this by first considering the impact neoliberalism has on democracy, which some consider, in its present form, is not fit for purpose (Lim, 2017).

Introduction

There is little doubt that we are living in a precarious, turbulent and uncertain period in our global history. A world where vast inequalities are increasingly opening between and within countries. This phenomenon is in parallel with, and often a significant contributor to, a series of dangerous outbreaks of conflict around the world as countries face down geopolitical threats. We are now living in a constantly changing strategic environment with more conflicts than at any time since 1945 (Wintour, 2025). Added to this, there are widespread concerns that in many countries democracy is severely at risk. At the same time there is a growing global climate emergency of momentous proportions. Mixed into this dangerous scenario, governments and people everywhere are dealing with the outcomes of the unpredictable, unorthodox, authoritarian approach of the world's most powerful elected politician, Donald Trump, the president of the United States.

Almost daily, in the UK, we are confronted with seeing or hearing about the growing real-life difficulties facing millions of people living in poverty and unable to properly feed themselves and their children while struggling to pay for the heating and lighting of their home (JRF, 2024). According to a report from the independent Social Metrics Commission (2024), 24 per cent of the UK population is judged to be in poverty, with more than a third of all children (36 per cent) in poverty in 2022/2023. This is an almost five percentage point increase since 2019/2020.