Creating Hackney As Home: Youth Perspectives on Gentrification in London

This paper focuses on how studies of and with young people contribute to our understanding of contemporary urban redevelopment including processes of gentrification. Within urban centres, demands from competing stakeholders have led to juxtaposing expectations of space use and a concomitant potential for everyday conflict between residents, local authorities and developers. These processes of change are being documented through various approaches but there remains a need for more focus on how young people experience this urban transformation and what this means for urban theory and practices of redevelopment.

The Creating Hackney as Home project, working with five peer researchers, has used participatory visual methods to document young people’s experience of gentrification in the London Borough of Hackney. This area has been marked by rapid transformation given its location close to the financial centre of the city and the Olympic site. The project found that young people maintain an ambivalent relationship with this locality, recognising that changes can be beneficial but ‘not always for them’. Feelings of exclusion from planning processes and displacement from their neighbourhoods were matched by expressions of comfort in new public spaces and shops. Participants noted the uneasiness generated by changing demographics, such as the movement of creative industries and young urban professionals into the borough, as well as the skills necessary to adapt to these new circumstances. In conclusion, the paper highlights the complex, ambiguous processes of growing up in post-industrial cities.

Project information and the films can be found at: www.hackneyashome.co.uk