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Related: Watch 'Regeneration Game', VICE's film about the battle to live in London
The city can be thought of as a collection of "formal" and "informal" spaces—the sterile, stage-managed financial districts, and Westfield centers, against the beautiful chaos of the social territories where culture is kept alive. When there is "no such thing as society," social space is subversive. Following the riots every housing estate in London is being mooted as a "brownfield site" suitable for development, with "problem" communities such as Broadwater Farm—the epicenter of the unrest—singled out for "regeneration." All new housing developments must submit plans to the police for approval, while the criminalization of squatting makes self-organized housing an imprisonable offense.
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If anyone doubts the direction things are going in Peckham, the council's "Action Plan" helpfully clarifies; boasting that thanks to Southwark's "close relationship with developers," 40 percent of the area is now undergoing "regeneration" in deals worth over £4 billion [$6 billion]. If the first act of any war is to map the territory, the Action Plan's careful detailing of almost every artistic space on Rye Lane as a development site suggests that the comparatively small scheme at the Bussey Building is merely the avant garde. The entire Copeland Industrial Estate—home not just to the Bussey, but hundreds of creatives, clubs, and social spaces—is slated to go. The proposed schemes are just the thin end of a very big wedge: Peckham Rye is one of seven areas across Southwark mapped by the council, six of which are the focus of intensive gentrification."The cultural scene has come to Peckham because gentrification has pushed it out of everywhere else… Where will be left for culture to flourish? Where are we going to live?"
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