{"title":"How to Make a City into a Firetrap: Relations of Land and Property in the UK's Cladding Scandal","authors":"Callum Ward, Frances Brill","doi":"10.1111/anti.12970","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire-prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm.</p>","PeriodicalId":8241,"journal":{"name":"Antipode","volume":"56 1","pages":"353-373"},"PeriodicalIF":3.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anti.12970","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Antipode","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12970","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"GEOGRAPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire-prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm.
期刊介绍:
Antipode has published dissenting scholarship that explores and utilizes key geographical ideas like space, scale, place, borders and landscape. It aims to challenge dominant and orthodox views of the world through debate, scholarship and politically-committed research, creating new spaces and envisioning new futures. Antipode welcomes the infusion of new ideas and the shaking up of old positions, without being committed to just one view of radical analysis or politics.