Temporalizing “justice” in urban regeneration: thinking with Lockleaze

Abstract

In recent years, municipal governments in the UK have come under increasing pressure to address the county’s housing crisis by providing affordable housing. In response, they have adopted the supposedly environmentally and socially progressive solution of “densification”. Against this backdrop, the paper focuses on the case of Lockleaze, a north Bristol suburb targeted for “affordable housing” developments. Here, two existing scholarly angles are relevant to framing the spatial injustices involved. First, a distributive justice angle frames the property-led regeneration as displacement, with the higher rents arising from new capital investments likely to price out existing residents. Second, an epistemic justice angle pays greater attention to how modes of valuation are being homogenized – e.g. how dominant policy dialogs recognize land only as a quantifiable market commodity, disregarding other modes of valuation inseparable from a situated context. Moving beyond these two, transitionalist pragmatism understands “justice” as a moving stream of provisional human practices towards more ethical living, allowing us to witness the moral dilemmas that acting subjects face in their struggle for a better future. Through a qualitative research approach, the paper demonstrates how thinking with an empirical case helps us temporalize justice as a lively situation in practice.

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