Urban Regeneration Essay

Decent Essays
According to Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of urban regeneration is “the improvement and sometimes replacement of buildings in a city, especially of whole neighbourhoods of housing” (“Urban”). In the midst of the controversial academic debate of regeneration, I will reconstruct Michael Romyn’s academic journal on the regeneration of the Heygate Estate and then place it in the context of the larger theme of gentrification. The Heygate Estate, comprised of around 1200 high-rise flats, was constructed in the 1970s in Southwark, South London. Initially, the Heygate Estate flourished as a close-knit community; however, the Southwark Council devised a plan for regeneration in 1997 and by June 2014, the Heygate Estate was completely demolished. Currently, the land has not been further developed, but the plan is to construct around 2700 new homes, 80 of which will be socially rented (Cathcart). Although the regeneration plan of the Heygate Estate was economically logical, the plan had particularly detrimental effects on the tenants.
In his academic journal, The Heygate: Community Life in an Inner-City Estate, Michael Romyn explores the destruction caused by regeneration of the Heygate Estate in inner-city London through oral interviews with the previous tenants. The unique perspectives offered by the sixteen interviewees
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Often, the blame of gentrification falls on the politicians and council managers rather than society as a whole. Although the political powers do play a major role in the gentrification of an area, the social views also contribute. Romyn emphasizes how the media portrayals and society’s assumptions of the Heygate Estate were as much at fault as the political powers. With this emphasis on social perceptions of social housing, Romyn encourages the reader to question their own assumptions of social housing and hopefully, to eradicate

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