Reconstructing Public Housing

Front matter

PUBLIC HOUSING i)

Matthew Thompson=

Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives

Part I Introduction

1 Introducing Collective Housing Alternatives Why Collective Housing Alternatives?

Articulating Our Housing Commons Bringing the State Back In

2 Why Liverpool of All Places?

A City of Radicals and Reformists A City on (the) Edge?

A City Playing the Urban Regeneration Game

Structure of the Book

Part II The Housing Question 3 Revisiting the Housing Question Nouns and Verbs: On the Nature of Value Exploitation and Alienation: On the Contradictions of Capitalism

Ends and Means: The Point Is to Change It!

xi

XV vi Reconstructing Public Housing

Rehabilitating Housing in a SNAP

You Hold the Pen, We’ll Tell You What to Draw!

Competition: The Counterintuitive Component of Cooperativism 5 Liberal Compromises: Diluting the Cooperative Revolution?

You Can Have Any House You Like So Long as It’s a New-Build Co-op

Utalitarianism (Utilitarian plus Totalitarian): On Form Following Function

Contradictions of Choice: Defensive Urbanism or (Extra)Ordinary Sub-urbanism?

6 Municipalisation: A Militant Response to the Housing Question A Tory—Liberal Plot: The Gravedigger of Municipal Housing? Defensible Principles and (Policy) Design Disadvantagement

Keeping the Cooperative Spirit Alive: The Movement Migrates to Knowsley

Part III The Neighbourhood Question 7 Locating the Neighbourhood Question Liverpool’s Second Blitz How to Make Water Flow Uphill Can Collective Housing Save the City? 8 The Eldonians: From Parish Politics to Global Exemplar

Militant Tactics, Boss Politics, Tribal Loyalties, Friends in High Places

We Do It Better Together: Towards a Self-Regenerating Community

Eldonia: An Independent Micro-State?

60 65 76 85 89

99 103 107 110

123 124 128 135 140

147 151

Contents

Singing the Post-Development Blues: On Revolutionaries Retiring

Third Sector Empire-Building The Story So Far: How Self-Regenerating, Really?

Part IV The Urban Question 10 Grappling with the Urban Question Weapons Wielded against Enclosure of the Commons Grounding Capitalism in the Land Question

Housing Market Renewal, Neo-Haussmannisation and the New Urban Enclosures

11 Growing Granby from the Grassroots: A (Plant) Potted History Living through Hell: On the Violence of Managed Decline Putting the T into CLT; Finishing the Work that SNAP Started From Success to Failure: A Great British Property Scandal

12 Technocratic Experiment or Experimental Utopia? Dereliction-by-Design and Transatlantic Knowledge Transfer Homebaked: Brick by Brick, Loaf by Loaf, We Build Ourselves

Seeing Liverpool’s Housing History through a Bifocal Verb—Noun Lens

Part V Conclusion 13 Reconstructing Public Housing (History) In, Against and Beyond Public Housing

How to Answer the Housing, Neighbourhood and Urban Questions?

Using the Master’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House vii

160 161 167

177 178 185

275 285 viii Reconstructing Public Housing

14 On (Myth) Making History From Heroic Event to Boring Bureaucratic Process The Myth of Liverpool Exceptionalism

Recipes for Revolution: From Cultivating Local Delicacies to Sourcing Essential Ingredients

15 Building a Bureaucracy from Below Dormant, Not Defunct: Self-Funding the Next Co-Op Spring Realising Municipal Dreams

Recoding the DNA of Collective Alternatives

Epilogue: Translating Between Inward, Upward and Outward Languages

Artificial Hells, Social Practice and Artistic Spectacle: Who (or What) Is All This For?

Index

289 294 300

303 311 313 318 323

335 345 363

Figures

1 Dilapidated dwellings and neighbourhood abandonment in Liverpool 8 in 2015.

2 “Utalitarian” community architecture of the Weller Street Co-op.

3 Typical Eldonian Village streetscape, overshadowed by the world’s largest brick warehouse at Stanley Dock.

4 Subverting “target hardening” with artistic symbols of hope.

5 Granby Street Market relocated to Ducie Street during Cairns Street renovation, 2015.

6 Dereliction by design: irreverent Scouse wit on display in Anfield.

All figures are photographs taken by the author.

38 84

100 211

217 240

CDP CDS CIC CLT CPO EGL HAG HMR KTP LHT LIFE

MHOS MIH NDC NWHS RIBA SNAP URBED URS ZOO

Abbreviations

Community Development Project

Co-operative Development Services (Liverpool agency) Community Interest Company

Community Land Trust

Compulsory Purchase Order

Eldonian Group Ltd

Housing Association Grant

Housing Market Renewal

Knowledge Transfer Partnership

Liverpool Housing Trust

Lead—Influence—Follow—Exit (Council policy for Housing Associations)

Mutual Home Ownership Society

Merseyside Improved Houses

New Deal for Communities

North West Housing Services (formerly CDS)

Royal Institute of British Architects

Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project

Urbanism Environment Design (planning consultancy) Urban Regeneration Strategy (Council policy programme) Zone of Opportunity

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the people of Liverpool, past and present. It is a story about their history—albeit one strand in a colourful tapestry—woven out of oral testimony and multiple personal reflections. A large part of the narrative has been composed through conversations with numerous insightful participants who each, in one way or another, helped make history in Liverpool. They include Jane Corbett, Chris Davies, John Earnshaw, Juliet Edgar, George Evans, Ed Gommon, Bill Halsall, Jackie Harris, George Howarth, Richard Kemp, Eleanor Lee, Rob MacDonald, Tony McGann, Erika Rushton, Max Steinberg, Bill Taylor and many others who wish to remain anonymous. I am especially indebted to Paul Lusk, whose first-hand account of the co-op movement helped frame my own, for guiding me, step by step, through the potted history of cooperative development on Merseyside. To Jack McBane, for his hospitality and enthusiasm for my project, in many ways extending his own on the Eldonians, who he worked so closely with to construct and materialise their vision. To Jonathan Brown (of Share the City and SAVE Britain’s Heritage) who introduced me to Liverpool’s urbanism and its controversial politics of housing regeneration through his excellent tours. And also to (the late) Des McConaghy, former director of the Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project (and the first person I interviewed for my doctoral research upon which this book is broadly based) for his take on the early period of experimentation in Granby.

I would especially like to thank Ronnie Hughes, Granby’s own unofficial urban historian and photojournalist, who has been a brilliant help in piecing together the history since SNAP. And Gemma Jerome, a Terrace 21 cooperator and Granby CLT collaborator, who first introduced me to the neighbourhood and its emerging CLT campaign. Likewise, her Terrace 21 comrade, Marianne Heaslip, has generously imparted critical insights into both Granby and Homebaked. To Ronnie, Gemma and Marianne, I am grateful for the dialogue we have continued on and off over the years since we first met in 2013. More recently, the Homebaked collective have been a real inspiration to me. I would like to thank them all for their warm welcome in bringing me into the fold for an all too brief period in 2017 and 2018, when I served as a participant-observer on the CLT board. Alongside Angela McKay, Sue Humphreys, Ralph Bullivant, Peter Colby, Andrew Beattie, Sam Jones, Paul xi xii Reconstructing Public Housing

Kelly, Sally Anne-Watkiss and (the late) Cal Starr, Britt Jurgensen in particular has been an amazing critical friend in helping me get the narrative right, as someone so passionately committed to crafting and realising Homebaked’s collective vision. In (re)constructing Liverpool’s hidden history of collective housing alternatives, I have drawn upon, and been influenced by, the testimony of all these participant-contributors. What follows, however, is not a direct, unmediated representation of their views but wholly my own, distinct take on events, one triangulated with multiple secondary sources and alternative analyses and refracted through a theoretical lens that I feel illuminates this history most clearly—a necessarily partial interpretation which, no doubt, will be seen in a different light by others.

Writing this book has been a long, meandering journey that began back in 2011 when I started my PhD at the University of Manchester. I am forever grateful to Graham Haughton and Ste Hincks for showing me the way—in equal measure encouraging and challenging in their tireless (and tirelessly entertaining) supervision. I want to thank Graham for introducing me to the work of Colin Ward (Graham’s own unique brand of radicalism is not unlike Ward’s: modest, respectable, scholarly). And Ste (born and bred on Merseyside) for persuading me to study the history of collective housing alternatives in Liverpool rather than in Manchester or London. Neil McInroy and Alex Lord, too, my third and fourth supervisors, for bringing fresh perspectives and making connections. Manchester’s PhD programme and cohort within the geography, planning, international development and architecture departments—and politics, too—was a hotbed of radical intellectual activity; the extraordinary richness of which I have only come to appreciate since moving on to pastures not quite so green. In reading groups and seminars— often degenerating into long, ale-fuelled sessions at Sandbar—I made so many friends and comrades whose energies have, each in their own way, fed into the conception and writing of this book (not least Abby Gilbert, Ben Sessions, Craig Thomas, Chris Foster, Dan Slade, Esther Meininghaus, Gareth Price- Thomas, Gemma Sou, Jess Hope, Jon Las Heras, Nadim Mirshak, Natalie Langford, Paul James, Phil Horn, Purnima Purohit, Rachel Alexander, Roisin Read, Sally Cawood, Sam Hayes, Shamel Azmeh, Simon Chin-Yee, Soma Laha, Tomas Maltby and, through association, Charlie Winstanley and Dale Lately). The Urban Rights Reading Group organised by Melanie Lombard was really constructive. Through working (and playing) with the OpenSpace collective—Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, Lazaros Karaliotas, Ioanna Tantanasi, Nadim Mirshak and Caglar Koksal—and organising a number of critical urban studies events together, I was introduced to Andy Merrifield and Japhy Wilson, whose work on Henri Lefebvre and the production of space has been a major inspiration. Andy’s passion in articulating a Lefebvrean perspective on the city, and on his home town of Liverpool, has been a guiding light throughout. My interest in Marxist and critical urbanism was first piqued

Acknowledgements xiii whilst studying for a Masters in Urban Planning at UCL—particularly by Michael Edwards’ enlivening teaching and a reading group on David Harvey’s Limits to Capital convened by Louis Moreno. Whilst at UCL, my knowledge of community land trusts, which were to become the main subject of my PhD, was initiated through conversations with fellow students, Daniel Fitzpatrick and Dan Durrant especially.

My understanding of CLTs has been honed over the years not only through engaged research in Liverpool but also discussion at conferences and other events with a number of practitioners and scholars, not least Tom Moore, whose pioneering efforts at bringing together a network of CLT researchers from the across the UK has been instrumental to the development of my own research. Catherine Harrington and Tom Chance at the National CLT Network, as well as action-researcher Tom Archer, have each helped me get to grips with the complex policy landscape and technicalities of CLTs. Similarly, David Rodgers (formerly CDS Cooperatives) was a fount of wisdom on co-ops; Hugh Ellis (Town and Country Planning Association) on utopian planning alternatives; and David Ireland (World Habitat) on self-help housing and bringing empty homes back into use. I owe an intellectual debt to countless scholars and theorists of capitalism, cooperativism, housing and the commons who have helped me see many of the conceptual connections I make in what follows—too many to list here but whose names can be gleaned from glancing at the bibliography.

Many of the theoretical arguments I make in the book were first tested out at various academic conferences through dialogue with comrades I met along the way, not least Michele Vianello, Hamish Kallin and Jessie Brennan. Conferences proving particularly formative include the 9th International Social Innovation Research Conference in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017, the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography in Ramallah, Palestine, in 2015 and the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Young Academics Network conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2014. Melissa Garcia Lamarca and Philipp Horn were frequent fellow travellers from Manchester to such conferences and astute critical friends in shaping my arguments. At an AESOP PhD workshop in Belfast in 2013, Ben Davy pushed me to develop my ideas further. Since first meeting her at the 2013 RGS-IBG conference in London, Antonia Layard has always been really supportive. David Mullins was particularly encouraging when I first met him at the Housing Studies Association Conference in York in 2012; I thank David, and also Quintin Bradley, for such generous critical feedback as peer reviewers of the first draft submitted to Liverpool University Press (LUP). I am grateful to Alison Welsby, my editor at LUP, for her encouragement and patience with continual deadline extension requests; and for backing this book to be made open access online as part of a demonstration project in open access academic publishing funded by the University of Liverpool xiv Reconstructing Public Housing

Library. I can only hope the finished product lives up to these expectations placed in it.

I would like to thank Alan Southern for all his support and sage advice over an exciting, if rather unstable and precarious period marked by informal short-term postdoctoral contracts during which he has been my mentor as well as comrade. So too Pete North, who had the unenviable task of examining my PhD thesis in 2015 and who has since provided great guidance, particularly in our recent work together, with Alan and others such as Vicky Nowak and Helen Heap, on researching and cultivating the social and solidarity economy in Liverpool and beyond. The planning academics at Liverpool University—particularly Alex Lord, Olivier Sykes, John Sturzaker and Bertie Dockerill—invited me to give a number of guest lectures around 2016 and then welcomed me as one of their own while I was writing up the book, or trying to. I would also like to thank Len Gibbs for putting his faith in me, inviting me onto the board of EPIC Housing Association (Empowering People, Inspiring Communities) in Stoke-on-Trent in 2016. My few years there volunteering as a board member taught me a great deal about the practical and policy challenges—and ethical dilemmas—facing community-based housing associations in this difficult era of commercialisation and ratcheting austerity.

This book has been (almost) completely rewritten and reconstituted from its embryonic form as my PhD thesis. I am grateful to my good friends Will Wheeler and George Hoare for reading and reviewing in great depth the new introductory and concluding parts which has certainly sharpened up my analysis; and to Matt Ingleby for coming up with the title, amongst other imaginative alternatives. I am indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for providing the financial support enabling me to dedicate much of my time to writing and editing during the first year of my early career fellowship. The majority of the writing, however, took place while I was unemployed, between postdocs, living back in my home town with my mum and dad, Chris and Brian, over the summer of 2018—long, productive days bookended by beautiful bike rides into the South Downs or runs on Bognor beach. Being unemployed has never been so much fun; but it was only because of mum and dad that this was made possible. I am grateful for all their love and support over the years. Finally, none of this would ever have seen the light of day were it not for Abby—she is an unstoppable force of ruthless critique and joyful inspiration. Doubtless I could not have remained so energised about the radical potential residing in the everyday life of collective housing activism were it not for Abby’s loving spirit and unwavering faith in the actual as well as the possible.

Prolo gue

In 2015, a long-neglected neighbourhood on the south side of inner-city Liverpool, Granby, was thrust into the media spotlight when a small resident-led experiment to bring empty homes back into community use, the Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust, became the first ever architectural or housing project in the Turner Prize’s controversy-punctuated history to be nominated for and indeed win Britain’s coveted national art award. The community land trust (CLT) and their architects Assemble were up against the usual (dis)array of avant-garde nominees and were bemused to be shortlisted by the judges for a prize that recognises cutting-edge interventions in the visual and material arts—not so much architecture, and certainly not so-called ‘community architecture’ associated with vernacular housing (and for many decades derided by the architecture establishment). What had regenerating housing in a self-consciously amateur ‘do-it-together’ approach that decentred the role of the architect and, by the same token, foregrounded residents as the collective ‘artist’ got to do with art? Thus ensued a debate in the national press about the function of art and the merits of an award that continually sought to push the boundaries—beyond breaking point for many critics—of the very concept it celebrates. Some commentators rolled their eyes; others pointed to the way in which these four streets, saved from demolition by their few remaining inhabitants (the majority having been forced out years ago by urban decline and state-led demolition threats), had been turned into a work of art through spontaneous acts of guerrilla gardening, street planting and wall murals. Tricky questions were raised over the changing role of art in society; over why the prize had been awarded to Assemble rather than the residents who had been working hard to transform the streets for years before the trendy architectural collective arrived on the scene from London; and why it had been left to citizens and artists—however (re)defined—to regenerate public space and renovate housing, much of it ex-council and now owned by housing associations, more obviously the responsibility of the state.

When the news broke of Granby Four Streets’ Turner Prize victory, I was fortunate enough to have been observing the project for a number of years as part of my doctoral research. I was based nearby in Manchester at the time and, in seeking to study alternative approaches to public housing and urban regeneration, I had been seduced by Liverpool’s rich history of cooperative

XV xvi Reconstructing Public Housing housing as well as the city’s two CLT campaigns, Granby Four Streets and Homebaked. Both projects were pioneering in their application of the CLT model—originally developed out of the American Civil Rights movement and imported to Britain in the 1990s to tackle rural affordability issues—to an urban context suffering disinvestment and decline. They aimed to demonstrate how housing and neighbourhood governance could be done differently, more imaginatively and democratically, by drawing people together around a common project of breathing life back into urban spaces long left to rot by public authorities and private landlords alike.

My involvement with Granby was only ever very partial. I was an outsider looking in—and there were many of us. Those community activists that I met in the early days of my research were understandably reticent to give me much of their time. They complained of ‘researcher fatigue’— referring to the growing number of students, researchers and journalists who were each asking for a little of their time. It soon adds up of course. Trying to find the extra time and energy outside of their day jobs and family and personal lives to give to the CLT campaign, let alone deal with research requests, was challenging to say the least. I intended to make my approach as participatory and reciprocal as I could; in return for access and information, I wanted to get involved and offer up my skills in whatever way might be helpful. An opportunity arose to do just that when Assemble asked me to write a short reflective piece on the theoretical and historical background of the CLT model as a chapter in the catalogue they were putting together to present to the Turner Prize judges at the exhibition of the nominations in Glasgow." I was incredibly honoured to be invited to play a part, however small; that was where my formal involvement began and ended.

By 2016, having defended my dissertation, I moved to Liverpool and found myself getting more involved with Homebaked as part of new research I was undertaking on the city region’s social economy at the University of Liverpool. I was invited onto the CLT board as a participant-observer and so I began working closely with activists, residents and other board members on how to turn their vision for a revitalised local high street of community-owned enterprise and housing into a reality. Witnessing at first hand the travails of a small community project to bring creative ideas to fruition, I was impressed by the energy and commitment invested but so too exasperated by the barriers imposed by policy and bureaucracy at various levels and the sheer complexity of coordinating so many actors and interests towards a common goal. It was an insight into a slow collective learning process—a steep curve no doubt scaled by countless others before Homebaked and many others still to come. There was a sense among activists that they were reinventing the wheel; that surely all this had been done before and it was merely a matter of finding out how.

1 “What Exactly is a CLT?”, in Assemble, eds, Granby Workshop Catalogue 2015, pp. 56—59.

Prologue xvii

That was one impetus for writing this book. I wanted to show how similar things had been done in the not too distant past, in the same city, often in the very same street, by other collective housing movements that shared so much, if not their name, with Liverpool’s budding community land trust movement. In the 1970s, fuelled by tenant protests over poor conditions and the displacement entailed by the council’s ‘slum clearance programme’, one of the largest and most imaginative housing co-operative movements in Britain if not Europe was born—Liverpool’s so-called ‘Co-op Spring’? or ‘Co-operative Revolution’.’ With unprecedented levels of resident participation and democratic decision-making in all aspects of housing, the new-build co-op movement was heralded at the time as a possible—but ultimately unworkable—paradigm shift towards Public Housing 2.0. Nonetheless, some 50 housing co-ops can still be found across Merseyside to this day—a not insignificant sum for a British city. This book aims to bring the historical development of Liverpool’s co-op movement into conversation with the presently unfolding CLT campaigns through tracing historical, geographical and conceptual connections.

In excavating Liverpool’s role in Britain’s ‘hidden history’* of housing co-ops, I found other important experiments that seem to have been largely forgotten or else overlooked by activists and policymakers as well as scholars. The co-ops came out of a time in which voluntary associations were beginning to vie with municipal authorities in the provision of public housing and the governance of neighbourhoods. Liverpool proved especially fertile ground to grow housing associations and, as I dug deeper, it seemed to me that these associations had grown out of a radical era of activism against council-led demolition of inner-city ‘slums’ in the 1960s and 1970s—an era in which the homelessness charity Shelter was founded and which experimented with an innovative approach to rehabilitate rather than demolish run-down housing in Granby called the Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project or, quite simply, SNAP. In the policy switch SNAP initiated, Liverpool City Council supported the growth of old and new housing associations, which took on municipal stock precisely in order to rehabilitate it, helping develop the city’s burgeoning co-operative movement. SNAP also saved from demolition the four streets that would later become the site of Granby CLT. In the intervening years, as society has been reshaped by the tightening grip of neoliberalism, these same housing associations have become bureaucratic behemoths with large-scale for-profit development arms and instrumental roles in the latest round of clearance and redevelopment that has in turn provoked new waves of housing

2 José Ospina, Housing Ourselves (Hilary Shipman Ltd, 1987).

3 CDS, Building Democracy: Housing Cooperatives on Merseyside. Update ’94 (Cooperative Development Services (Liverpool) Ltd, 1994).

4 Johnston Birchall, “The Hidden History of Co-operative Housing in Britain”, Department of Government Working Papers 17 (1991).

xviii Reconstructing Public Housing activism, leading to the contemporary CLT movement, which includes several failed campaigns as well as the two success stories. This book, then, is also about how collective housing activism has influenced the direction of neighbourhood renewal policy and demonstrated a more sensitive way of doing urban regeneration as an alternative to the large-scale redevelopments that all too often befall our cities.

In reconstructing Liverpool’s history of collective housing alternatives, it became clear that the movements came in waves and that the force of these waves was heightened by the swell created by the last. Historical waves deposited resources for activists of the future to salvage from the beached wreckage of past struggles and use afresh. Local cultural practices of cooperation and community organising developed by the co-op movement provided just such a depository of stored energy and practical wisdom for contemporary CLT campaigns. Collective memory of cooperative campaigning implanted in place the seeds that would eventually flower when the climatic conditions were once again favourable. After a long dormancy, from the 1980s through to the 2000s, collective housing was reactivated when Granby and Homebaked CLTs were established in 2011—the year in which ‘the political’ erupted back onto the world stage after decades of neoliberal inertia and technocratic tinkering with redoubled force in global urban occupations; the year of dreaming dangerously, as Slavoj Zizek has put it.” The critical geographer Don Mitchell goes so far as to position the embryonic Liverpool CLT movement alongside the ‘movements of the squares’, as part of a radical tradition of anti-capitalist struggle and experimentation that had its last pivotal moment in the events around May 1968. “Homebaked Community Land Trust and Co-operative Bakery Anfield”, writes Mitchell, “are just as thrilling as the example of the neighbourhood park forums that developed across Turkey after Taksim Square was cleared out. They show that urban space can be collectively taken and collectively remade, that use can dominate exchange, that our fate is not necessarily a fate written by the tendency towards abstract space in capitalism”.° Whilst Homebaked and Granby CLTs are clearly not so dramatic or disruptive events as, say, Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring, they nonetheless seem to reignite the political possibilities and creative transformation latent in Liverpool’s own ‘Co-op Spring’, its housing cooperative revolution in the 1970s. The co-op and CLT movements are each the product of particular openings in the ideological fabric that wraps our world with a veneer of stability and certainty, but which blinds us from seeing political alternatives. These movements represent two such alternatives—what I call collective housing alternatives—to the bipolar status quo, the public—private,

5 Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Verso Books, 2012). 6 Don Mitchell, “Taking Space”, Stages: Liverpool Biennial #2, Homebaked: A Perfect Recipe (2014).

Prologue xix state—capitalist system of owning and managing housing that has dominated our political economy for over a century.

But what caused these collective alternatives to flourish when they did? Was it just a sign of the times, or a factor of political, economic and cultural conditions embedded in a particular geography? Or, does it have something to do with the specific legal and institutional designs of the co-op and CLT models themselves? This book tells the stories of the people and movements involved in bringing these abstract models to life in Liverpool and how those models in turn shaped their social and urban environments as and after they were instituted. It is thus a tale of the dialectical interplay between collective actions and institutional forms, which, like skeletons, give strength and structure yet contort the muscle tissue that animates collective alternatives.

What hope do we have for institutionalising collective housing alternatives without compromising their radical political intentions? What changes occur in the transition from the excitement of political campaigning to the procedural task, once the campaign is won, of developing governance mechanisms for the ongoing practical management and maintenance of housing? Why have the most experimental and radical ideas for developing public housing gradually shifted outside the purview of the local state and into the hands of professional and community groups in civil society? Why has what was once deemed public housing provision delivered by the state become the subject of art? What does this categorisation as art say about how our approach to providing shelter for everyone has changed over time? Can collective housing alternatives become a mainstream tenure as part of a revitalised municipalism or are they fated to remain marginal, bespoke solutions to specific urban problems? What distinguishes the ‘common’ and the ‘public’ in housing? Can we rethink these two categories together? Is there something in the co-op and CLT models tried and tested out in Liverpool that could provide a real utopian vision for the future renewal of public housing and the expansion of our housing commons? Why did all this happen here, in Liverpool, of all places? Can it be replicated elsewhere? These are some of the critical questions to which this book seeks answers.

Part I

CHAPTER 1 Introducing Collective

Housing Alternatives

As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself.’

These words, written in 1872 in The Housing Question by Karl Marx’s comrade and collaborator Friedrich Engels, distil the problem of the housing crisis down to its essence: as one of the capitalist modes of production, initiated by state-enforced enclosure of the commons and only ever resolvable through its abolition and transformation. Engels does not offer us any intermediate solutions and, moreover, derides the ‘bourgeois reformists’, utopian-socialists and anarchists, who all in different ways sought to combat the housing crisis wrought by capitalism through some form of alternative: common or state ownership. A debate ensued—over the nature of revolutionary social change, over the value of housing, over the place housing occupies within the capitalist economy—which has never really been fully resolved. It is no accident that, after many decades of relative obscurity, The Housing Question is once again commonly cited in critical commentaries—some even proclaiming the ‘return of the housing question’—revealing startling parallels between Engels’ and our own age of capitalist urbanisation.’ Even in a globalised process of capital

1 Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 73—74.

2 Manuel B. Aalbers and Brett Christophers, “The Housing Question under Capitalist Political Economies”, Housing, Theory and Society 31.4 (2014): 422—428; Stuart Hodkinson, “The Return of the Housing Question”, Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 12.4 (2012): 423—444; Danny Dorling, All That Is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster accumulation increasingly predicated on speculative investment in (fictitious) financial, land and property assets rather than production of (real) commodities, it seems we cannot escape Engels’ devastating logic in his original formulation. This book is one attempt to find possible pathways beyond this impasse and to outline some cursory, necessarily partial answers to the housing question through a political and social history of Liverpool’s unique experiment with precisely those ‘isolated solutions’ dismissed by Engels. This is a book about finding collective alternatives to public housing and urban regeneration in, against and beyond capital and the state.