Forgotten Estates: The Precarity of Neighbourhood Restructuring in Salford, UK

Since the 1980s, the Northern English city of Salford has undergone intense deindustrialisation and been subject to systematic waves of urban regeneration. A key aspect of these regeneration efforts has been to rebrand and reconstitute the city and its districts from 'grimy' and 'old Salford', to dynamic and cosmopolitan. Under the aegis of the 'New Deal for Communities' policy, one specific district in the mid 2000s was earmarked for a distinct process of redevelopment entailing the demolition of public housing stock and the construction of private housing developments within newly enclosed estates and along the profitable local riverside. Ten years on and amid a challenging fiscal climate, this redevelopment vision has largely stalled resulting in an amalgam of complex neighbourhood impacts and processes encompassing partially demolished public housing estates, threats of further eviction for housing tenants, the arrival of new private owners and a severly disinvested community infrastructure. Drawing on a programme of recent qualitative research, this paper examines the impact on new and established resident experiences of this stagnated and disrupted restructuring process to unpack the damaging, but under-researched effects of a neoliberalised regeneration logic gone awry in an already severly unequal city. The findings of the research invite us to consider how spatial injustice is compounded not only by rational, unstoppable forces of eviction, erasure and gentrification, but by the limbos, uncertainties and abandonments wrought by entwined market-led dismantling and renewal agendas.