Impact case study database

Government efforts to promote urban development can sometimes displace pre-existing populations, whether through direct expropriation, such as the £1.03 billion Land Assembly Fund pledged by the May Government’s (2018) Homes England Strategic Plan to “acquire challenging sites” and “release surplus public land” for redevelopment, or more indirectly, through market forces and knock-on effects on community composition and place identity.

Leicester research has helped secure the rights of those threatened by such state-led gentrification in several ways. First, Professor Lees has raised wider public awareness of displacement and other gentrification impacts. Her 2014 TEDx Brixton talk on ‘Gentrification and what can be done to stop it’, has more than 57,000 YouTube views, and was incorporated as a key resource for the 2016 WJEC A-level Geography, which has now been taken by 5,415 students [E1]. Since 2014, Lees’s research has featured in 35 newspapers, in all the major UK broadsheets as well as newspapers in the USA, Germany, India, Costa Rica, and Chile. She has done broadcast interviews for BBC Radio4 four times, BBC World Service, and the CBC National News, Canada. Her interview discussing displacement for the 2018 BBC documentary The death of the council home? was viewed more than 4,000,000 times in September 2018. It was clipped for the BBC London News prior to initial broadcast on London Inside Out on 3 September 2018, which “proved so popular” that the BBC aired the piece twice more on a nationwide basis over the BBC News Channel [E2].

The Antipode project displacement maps also featured prominently in Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle a documentary screened nationally in cinemas over 150 times (June 2017 – August 2018) [E12]. The ESRC research on London is available through [R4]: since its launch in June 2020 to October 2020, it had 3,480 users (71% UK, 22% USA, 4% China, 3% rest of Europe). Lees received invitations to present the research to the UK Industry and Parliament Trust (September 2020), and the UN-Habitat Global Future Cities Programme (October 2020), knowledge-sharing with more than 400 participants from the Global South and East, including governments and providers. In recognition of her work with communities across London, Lees was made Chair of the London Housing Panel (GLA/Trust for London) in September 2020, enabling her to raise awareness directly with government and policy makers.

Second, Leicester research also built the capacity of campaigners to evidence displacement and resist gentrification. With more than 3,000 downloads alone in 2019 [E3], approximately five years after initial release, “The Staying Put booklet [R2] became an invaluable resource” for campaigners [E4]. Its displacement maps and organising toolkit have informed campaigns against at least eight estate demolition proposals across London, e.g., the Carpenters Estate and Cressingham Gardens [E5]. In the context of the demolition of 1,006,000 Miljonprogrammet public housing units, it also “served as a crucial model” for a Swedish version— Rätt att bo kvar (Right to stay put)—which helped activists “change the course of the events positively for some collectives of tenants in Göteborg and in Stockholm” [E6]. Staying Put! An anti-gentrification toolkit for Southern Europe, the key output from the EU and ESRC IAA research, “stimulated connections between local communities, social movements and university networks” which “led to positive and hardly calculable effects on social networks and groups” across southern European cities, such as Rome, Lisbon, Madrid and Athens [E7].

Lees provided evidence that led to changes in law, policy, and guidance, shaping multi-billion pound commitments by the UK Government to redevelop urban council estates across England. Pointing to negative impacts highlighted by Professor Lees in a testimony to the 2015 Aylesbury Public Inquiry [R3], the Secretary of State quashed Southwark Council’s Compulsory Purchase Order for leaseholders’ right-to-buy homes on the Aylesbury Estate for disproportionately “interfering with the human rights of the lessees” [E8]. By highlighting the “likelihood that leaseholders will have to move away from the area” and the “consequential impacts” of doing so, particularly for Black and Ethnic Minority populations facing “dislocation from their cultural heritage”, this precedent-setting decision “raises the weight to be given to residents' expectations that they will be able to remain in their community . . . . [which] will clearly be a significant factor in future CPO decisions” [E9].

Lees’ research informed two policy changes: her “detailed analysis” for the Haringey Council Scrutiny Panel Session on the GBP2,000,000,000 proposals for the Haringey Development Vehicle, “had a huge impact on our committee and contributed to our overall view that this project should not proceed” [E4]. Her 2018 evidence to the revised Aylesbury Public Inquiry on “the trauma and inconvenience caused to displaced homeowners affected by regeneration” led to a new rehousing policy by Southwark Council: a rehousing assistance scheme for homeowners affected by regeneration that goes beyond their statutory rehousing duty under the 1973 Land Compensation Act (amended) [E10].

Finally, Lees’ calls for obligatory resident balloting on estate redevelopment proposals, influenced the Mayor of London’s Good Practice Guide for Estate Regeneration. Its final version “now includes this essential principle of democracy in planning” thanks to “a strong campaign working with academics including Professor Lees” to strengthen the provisions for resident consultation outlined in the 2016 Estate Regeneration National Strategy. Whereas the national strategy only recommends estate residents be given “the option to return to the estate”, “both the Mayor’s Good Practice Guide and his new draft London Plan documents, also now include a strong requirement for the replacement of any demolished social housing on ‘identical’ terms with a right of return for all social housing residents”. This is in response to the demands of Professor Lees, the London Tenants Federation, and Just Space, who cited University of Leicester evidence about the hardships and scale of displacement caused by estate renewal [E11].