1Over the past three decades, cities in Western capitalist countries have been transformed under the policy prescriptions of “neoliberal urbanism”. Neoliberalism’s emergence as a strategic capitalist response to the world profit crisis of the 1970s dramatically restored (finance) capital’s power vis-à-vis labour. But the consequences of the restoration of market rule have extended far beyond the labour process into the very governance and production of urban space. Local authorities and the physical territories they managed have been gradually transformed from local providers of “services, facilities and benefits to urban populations” into urban entrepreneurs “embedded in a framework of zero-sum inter-urban competition for resources, jobs and capitals1 ”. The re-imposition of the law of value has translated into urban and regional policy. Local authorities are pushed into mobilising “city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices2 ”. Gone are the days of bridging the spatial inequalities within national territories caused by capitalist uneven development by closing the gap between regions through the redistribution of wealth3. Instead, urban and regional policy is based on the neoliberal notion of “trickle down” that actively encourages the formation of urban growth poles around which other spaces must find a new, subservient role if they are to have any share of wealth created. It is therefore no coincidence that just as neoliberalism sees the abandonment by governments of the post-war commitment to social justice through redistribution, full employment and welfare (which of course varies enormously by country according to starting points and retreats), the urbanisation of neoliberalism sees the re-emergence of spatial injustice as a leading controversy of our times.

2This paper critically explores how spatial injustice is both produced and challenged through the example of Leeds, a Northern English city heralded by municipal leaders, government, and academics as a role model of urban renaissance in former industrial cities. I will argue that the local authority’s official aim of rejuvenating the city’s deprived inner-city working class estates and neighbourhoods in order to “narrow the gap” with the prosperous urban core and Northern suburbs has little to do with spatial justice but is in reality a gentrification programme that aims to both privatise and demolish public housing in order to create new development opportunities for finance capital and in the process displace sections of the existing community in favour of a wealthier set of owner occupiers. By critically unpacking this central government regeneration scheme using private finance in Little London, a post-war public housing estate on the edge of the city centre, the paper argues that cities like Leeds are trapped in a “neoliberal straitjacket” that unless unstitched will eventually see the privatisation of all local public lands, assets and revenues and the creation of a neo-feudal local governance system run for, and increasingly by, corporate capital. As such, the neoliberalisation of cities is better understood as evidence of what have been called the “New Enclosures” with (global) capital once again in the ascendancy in its “totalising drive” to “commodify” and “enclose” all aspects of social life for the purpose of accumulation4.

British Neoliberal Urbanism and the Role of Housing Policy

3Ever since the Labour government was bailed out of the sterling crisis in 1976 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in return for public expenditure cuts and the abandonment of the social contract with the trade unions, Britain has been a driving force of neoliberal policies at home and abroad. While much has been written in particular about the wholesale privatisation of state enterprises, monetarist policies to curb public spending, labour market deregulation and the dismantling of the welfare state under Thatcherism, the urbanisation of neoliberalism has received rather less attention. Since the early 1980s, successive governments under both Conservative and Labour rule have sought to transform the built environment of major cities for the purposes of speculative property investment, elite consumption and the growth of the finance and service sectors. To achieve this, local authorities have been forcibly turned into entrepreneurial actors competing aggressively for inward investment5.

4Housing policy has played a central role in this paradigm shift. Following the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979, public housing was targeted for privatisation and residualisation. Tenants were given the “Right to Buy” their council house at large discounts on the market value of their homes while some local authorities were given little choice but to sell off their housing stock to not-for-profit companies usually called Housing Associations6. This went hand in hand with the deregulation of protections and controls="true" in both the private rental sector and the mortgage industry to re-insert housing into the private market, restoring the social power of private property and its disciplinary role in the labour market. These policies were largely retained by the incoming Labour government in 1997 so that since 1979 some 35 million homes developed and managed by local authorities for affordable rents have been sold off7. In the process, the role of local authorities has been decisively undermined, assets sold off for tax-cuts for rich, and more working class people have been brought into property ownership and mortgage debt, weakening socialist politics and strengthening the ever deregulated labour market and property industry. The remainder of public housing has become a tenure of last resort for those in dire need.

5But the neoliberal assault on public housing is also intimately connected to the capitalist production of space in the city. The particular history of public house building in Britain has produced large concentrations of local authority estates in highly desirable suburban greenfield locations on commuter belts or on lucrative city centre sites next to prime office, residential and retail developments where land values far exceed the rents currently extracted from either public or private owners, what Neil Smith formulated as the “rent gap8 ”. Privatisation goes hand in hand with other state and corporate strategies to unlock, increase and exploit the land rents of these publicly-owned spaces. We can see how housing privatisation dovetails with what Harvey calls the “urbanisation of capital” in the Labour government’s 2003 Sustainable Communities Plan that aims to both tackle entrenched poverty in the most deprived areas and encourage “a design-led’Urban Renaissance’agenda fostering the physical, aesthetic and economic regeneration of all cities9 ”. To achieve Sustainable Communities, the government wants to improve the physical standards of all social housing through its Decent Homes programme and intervene in areas of so-called “housing market failure” by demolishing empty and undesirable housing. However, running through the various funding schemes to improve housing and neighbourhoods is a requirement to demolish working class housing-whether local authority owned or privately occupied-in order to create profitable opportunities in property speculation and public service delivery for finance capital, and to introduce a greater mix of tenure in the “failing communities” in order to help them rejuvenate-in other words, to spatially engineer communities in order to gentrify them and increase their prentable values10. We can see these processes at work through a case study of housing regeneration in the northern English city of Leeds.

Housing Regeneration in Leeds

6Once a world manufacturing and trading centre for textiles and engineering, Leeds fell into relative decline during the international recession of the 1970s and 1980s. In past decade, however, the city has revived its fortunes as one of the fastest growing economies in the UK and is heralded as a role model of “urban renaissance”. Previously abandoned industrial quarters have been revitalised, headed by speculative waterside developments, while the city centre has been restored as a leading retail and consumption zone11. By the mid-1990s, however, Leeds had become dubbed by academics a US-style “corporate city12 ”, and the City Council was increasingly criticised from grassroots and disadvantaged sectors of the city for failing to tackle the entrenched deprivation zones in the inner city and outer council estates.

7The election of Labour in 1997 after 18 years of consecutive Conservative rule was heralded by previously critical commentators as marking a “change from a narrow entrepreneurialism to a more inclusive social agenda for the city13 ”. Recently, Leeds City Council has unveiled a regeneration strategy for its deprived inner urban areas aimed at “narrowing the gap between the most disadvantaged people and communities and the rest of the city14 ”. No fewer than eight separate major housing-based regeneration initiatives have been launched since 1999 (see Figure 1) covering in the immediate southern, eastern and western hinterlands of the city centre that house the city’s worst concentration of poverty, ill health, benefit-dependency and unemployment15. However, the City Council’s regeneration strategy for its deprived communities and estates remains wedded to the neoliberal urbanist approach : all are public-private-partnerships, all are based on property-led development, and all involve the demolition of public housing and facilities and their replacement with private housing for market sale. In other words, regeneration means rolling out the city centre’s gentrification frontier to its surrounding poor urban hinterlands. What follows is the story of arguably the most controversial of these regeneration schemes-the Little London Private Finance Initiative.

THE REGENERATION OF LITTLE LONDON UNDER THE PRIVATE FINANCE INITIATIVE

8Sandwiched in-between Leeds’booming central zone and its expanding university quarter, on the inner north-east rim of the city, lies Little London, a once popular modernist public housing estate with imposing high rise tower blocks, flat roofed maisonettes, terraced two-up two-downs, and semi-detached housing. By the late 1990s, Little London had become another victim of Thatcherism, gaining a dis-reputation as a “no-go area”, full of drug-dealing, deprivation and physical decay. In summer 2001, Leeds City Council officially informed tenants of its intention to “regenerate” Little London using the government’s housing PFI scheme to “improve the standard of homes, shopping areas and the wider environment” so that “residents have the quality of life they deserve16 ”. However, when the Council unveiled its original 45 million pounds regeneration blueprint for Little London, the plan went far beyond simply refurbishing Council homes and improving the area for the people already living there. The Council’s vision was to recreate Little London as a desirable “mixed community” that would both serve the city centre housing market and bring “the benefits of the city centre housing boom to Little London17 ”. According to the plan, at least 150 council homes would be demolished on the most lucrative development land nearest to the city centre and the cleared sites would be sold to developers to build private housing for market sale. Three high rise blocks towards the city centre, containing 300 council flats, would also be sold off to developers to be refurbished as “middle market” homes for rent or sale. The rest of the estate would be given a radical facelift to fit in with the urban form of the city. In concrete terms, hundreds of poor families and individuals would be forced to leave their homes and community, with limited re-housing options and a derisory compensation package.

9Armed with “evidence” from international property consultants Kings Sturge, Leeds City Council justified its strategy on the basis that the estate’s social problems were linked to “specific property types” such as the high rise tower blocks and maisonettes, which had high turnover, low demand and problem tenants (in the shape of mainly young people with “challenging” and “anti-social behaviour” requiring welfare support)18. PFI would provide the “higher than average investment’required to deal with the flats’physical disrepair, and tenure diversification through private development would solve the social problems by helping to “maximise the market potential of the area”, maintaining “demand for flats from a diverse customer group where applicants needing support do not predominate ” (emphasis added)19. In other words, regeneration was about reconstructing the local housing market to enable house prices and rents to rise in line with city averages and reflect the true market value of their prime city centre location, while replacing a large number of the poor with a more economically desirable population.

10Despite the Council bombarding the local community with pro-PFI propaganda and thinly veiled threats to vote “yes” or be cut adrift, the local community rejected the PFI scheme by 54 % to 46 % in the official ballot. The strength of feeling was reflected in the turnout-67 %-that dwarfed the average of 20 % in local and general elections. Leeds City Council, however, had no intention of allowing such large amounts of investment to be lost. It refused to accept the ballot result, blaming the “misleading” propaganda of the anti-PFI campaign, and held a “fresh” ballot just two months later on what it called a “new’PFI scheme that no longer proposed to demolish two tower blocks (100 flats) as originally planned. Just to be sure, the Council redrew the boundaries of the proposed PFI scheme so that they cut out sufficient numbers of “no” voters identified on the edge of Little London. Inevitably, the result this time produced a “yes” vote for PFI, with 56. 7 % in favour but on a much reduced turnout (46 %). The progress of the Little London PFI scheme was then delayed again for three years due to the government’s doubts about the affordability and manageability of the scheme, requiring a fresh consultation exercise in February 2006.

11This time, however, the Council did not offer tenants a ballot, and rebranded its preferred scheme as the “Comprehensive Regeneration Option” with mention of PFI deliberately avoided where possible. The two towers previously “saved” were once again earmarked for demolition, but a new carrot was put forward : 125 new council homes would now be built to replace them. The catch was a reduction in both the number of council homes to be refurbished and maintained, and the frequency of major renewal, with the contract length reduced from 30 to 20 years. Surprisingly, in March 2008, the Council confirmed that, due to the “global credit crunch” and “housing market slowdown”, it had abandoned its plans to sell off three tower blocks containing 297 flats to a developer and would instead retain and refurbish them as Council homes. This decision was also undoubtedly influenced by local resistance, which included a (failed) legal challenge and the emergence of a new tenants and residents group for the condemned blocks. At the time of writing, the PFI scheme, which was put out to tender in July 2007, is currently in the procurement phase with physical regeneration work not expected to begin until early 2010, a full nine years after Leeds City Council first applied to the housing PFI scheme.

Private Finance Initiative and the Production of Spatial Injustice

12In many ways, Little London is a perfect example of “neoliberal urbanism” being transmitted through the specific context of Leeds. A victim of the roll back years, Little London’s central geographical location has now left it “out of step” with the prosperous urban core and created a “rent gap” sufficiently large to invigorate local state and private actors to restructure the local housing market and release for capital accumulation the highervalue land and property through the PFI. At the same time, however, this analysis does not go far enough because it does not appreciate the decisive role played by the PFI in both shaping Leeds City Council’s specific housing regeneration blueprint for Little London and placing powerful privatising pressures across the entire public services and assets of the city. To do so, we need to understand the neoliberal straitjacket of housing PFI and how it has operated in Little London.

13Under PFI, the entire process of financing and carrying out the design, the building, and the operation of public infrastructure (that is, the physical facilities, not the actual frontline service itself) is packaged into a lucrative long-term contract (normally20 to 30 years). These are then bid for by private consortia (each typically comprising a construction firm, a facilities management company and a bank to finance the scheme). The winning PFI consortium will receive regular performance-related payments that cover the entire cost of the scheme and include a large profit for the companies involved, estimated at between 7 % and 20 % of the total payment 20. There is now a wealth of documented evidence exposing the controversies and problems of the PFI across the public sector, particularly in hospitals and IT systems : it is proven to be on average 30 % more expensive than publicly financed projects because of the higher cost of commercial borrowing, and is notorious for escalating project costs and delays, poor quality building work, service failure, worker exploitation, a lack of accountability and corporate profiteering21. However, while the costs and risks of the PFI are of major concern, the real significance of PFI lies in the broader social restructuring processes it is helping to unleash.

14To summarise, there are three main neoliberal components of housing PFI. The first is the set of very specific market-friendly policies such as gentrification and privatisation that local authorities must follow in designing their regeneration scheme. Detailed examination of government guidance reveals the strong top-down pressure on local authorities since 1998, and especially after 2003 with the sustainable communities plan, to devise housing PFI schemes that create “mixed communities” (read : gentrification) and “tenure diversification” (read : demolition/privatisation of council housing). While the government’s language reads flexible, it is in reality a highly prescriptive framework to ensure that up to 410 local authorities potentially competing for just a handful of places on the PFI programme come up with the most “attractive” schemes that will satisfy the Treasury and entice the private sector (emphasis added):

The Office would like to see schemes, which are mixed developments.
The standard approach. takes in new build, upfront refurbishment or demolition and reprovision works, ongoing housing management services, and repairs and maintenance services. Any further benefits of the PFI bid should be described such as tenure diversification and the creation of additional public and private housing funded outside housing PFI credits22.

15Leeds City Council has followed these guidelines to the letter. Using a matrix of refurbishment, selective demolition, privatisation and new private housing development, the regeneration approach is a deliberate strategy to reduce both the amount and proportion of rented public housing in favour of private housing tenures, and in turn produce an identical transformation in the class composition of the local community away from the urban poor in favour of middle-class homeowners and upwardly mobile private tenants. Importantly, this has not only been a top-down process. As Leeds City Council23 admitted to tenants in a moment of rare candour, housing PFI offered it the “capacity to’design out’. the most needy people” from the estate, which it believed would enable the community “move from the current “crime and grime” focus towards a more aspirational agenda”. In other words, government policy empowered the Council to demolish out some of the undesirable tenants and build in the private residents it wanted to attract as part of its city centre regeneration drive.

16The second neoliberal component of housing PFI is the specific financial system that local authorities must adopt. In short, the government provides an annual “capped” subsidy (“PFI credits”) to cover the “capital cost” of the PFI scheme, while the local authority must fund the day-to-day operational costs of the 20 or 30 year contract as far as possible from within existing local budgets that are already extremely tight under neoliberal austerity. This financial model economically incentivises local authorities in the first instance to demolish public housing and create development sites to sell on in order to finance the proposed improvements to the PFI regeneration zone. Because of the hugely complex process of creating an output-based contract that incorporates all of the predicted costs and revenues for each financial quarter (e. g. general inflation, building costs inflation etc.) of a 30 year period, any delays before a contract is signed have potentially huge additional cost implications due to the higher predicted future cost scenarios of the later start and completion date. Any escalating costs of PFI contracts become the responsibility of the local authority, placing it under constant pressure to “transfer resources from other parts of the housing budget to pay for its PFI obligations24 ”. Once that revenue stream dries up, the local authority may look to cut other budgets or outsource some services to the private or voluntary sector.

17For the Little London scheme, the annual repayment to the PFI consortium is currently expected to be 9. 443 million pounds for the duration of the 20 year contract, an eventual total cost to the public purse of 211. 9 million pounds. While the government will contribute just over three-quarters of these costs, some 1. 52 million pounds must be found every year by Leeds City Council for 20 years. In the first instance, this must come from its housing budget, and then from “other resources” as needed. This long-term contractual commitment to provide a guaranteed revenue stream to the PFI consortium has already shaped the amount of council housing included in the refurbishment and maintenance scheme. The Council has had to balance the long-term revenues provided by tenants’rents with both long-term risks (i. e. whether there will be sufficient demand for council housing in the future) and short-term income generation opportunities to reinvest in the PFI scheme (i. e. selling off public land for private development). This has resulted in the Council creating a number of development sites (some that involve clearing existing council homes) within the Little London PFI zone that it will sell for mainly private housing development. It has also reduced the proposed contract length from 30 to 20 years in order to minimise the long-term financial risks to the Council25. This shows how PFI financing offers both carrots and sticks to councils aimed at privatising public assets and reducing service provision.

18The third component is the “locking in” of market forces and interests into the eventual PFI scheme through the exposure of the public sector throughout the design and procurement phase to the overcrowded (and thus very competitive) buyers’market for PFI contracts. When the future uncertainties and risks generated by fluctuating performance and forecasts of economic growth and financial markets are added in, this environment usually creates an evolution in a scheme’s design and features in the direction of generating greater profitability opportunities and away from social provision, high quality service performance and workers’pay and conditions. For example, the spectre of these risks being locked into a 20-30 year contract have a strong influence on the kind of housing scheme the local authority will design, in order to minimise the risks both to itself and the private sector in order to make the scheme attractive in a competitive market. These “carrots” to the private sector usually involve what Whitfield26 calls the “privatization of the development process” through land and property deals that enable capital to gain control of “surplus land and buildings such as school playing fields, vacant land, empty hospital buildings and so on for property development”.

19Confidential council documents reveal just how far the Council went in internalising the logic that the regeneration of Little London using PFI was ultimately dependent on “the private sector’s willingness to invest in the area27 ”. In 2005, following another round of market testing, Council officers argued for the need to re-scope the PFI scheme to “create a more favourable investment opportunity28 ”. In other words, the needs of capital accumulation were prioritised above the social needs of the community. This constant exposure to market forces has so far seen the Little London regeneration plan change seven times in seven years as council planners and housing officers have been forced to come up with increasingly “bolder proposals to create mixed tenure ; larger development sites to create’critical mass’29 ”. Worryingly, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Council has a radical “plan b” if the private sector is eventually not satisfied with the current proposals : to demolish up to six more tower blocks on the estate30.

Wider Implications : the New Urban Enclosures ?

20The implications and effects of these three driving forces of neoliberalisation extend way beyond any single PFI scheme-they encompass the entire local public sphere. By entering into long-term, legally binding contractual commitments to make regular profitable payments to capital, the local authority is forced to adopt an increasingly entrepreneurial and commercial understanding of its entire portfolio of services, land and property holdings. It employs financial consultants like KPMG and Price Waterhouse Coopers, who have already earned millions of pounds from government and private sector contracts to help set up PFI contracts, to now help them make efficiency savings (cuts in services and staff) and offload “surplus assets” (sell off public buildings, spaces and land) to capital in order to attract scarce resources to their city. All local public services and buildings thus become at risk of being sold off, creating strong incentives for the public authority to enter into yet more PFI contracts in order to raise short term finance for vital public investment, simply strengthening and speeding up the vicious circle.

21This is where the seminal work of Dexter Whitfield comes into its own. He explains how once local authorities are locked into this path an ever increasing proportion of public budgets will be committed to financing PFI schemes leaving an ever smaller proportion of revenues to deal with non-PFI services, “thus limiting an authority’s ability to respond to changing social needs and priorities31 ”. At the end of the long-term contract, instead of reverting to public ownership and management as they should, the assets that have been built and maintained under PFI will probably either be subject to another PFI contract or will be “sold at residual value to the private sector32 ”. This is because after 20 to 30 years, public bodies may not have the capacity or political commitment to take the facilities back. By this time, Whitfield predicts that the artificial separation of public services into “core” and “non-core” categories will have been once again closed due to corporations’pressure on government to allow them to expand their business interests further into publicly-funded, guaranteed and underwritten new profit streams. Eventually, Whitfield foresees that the many PFI/PPP schemes across a city will be gradually become centralised under a small number of parent companies through buy-outs and mergers, leading to contract rationalisation and job losses, and, ultimately, a publicly-financed but unaccountable “company town”:

[.] the company town is reemerging, not dominated by one industry or family, but by business elites through their involvement in regeneration, partnerships, outsourcing and sponsorship of arts and culture. The local state transfers assets and defers to the needs of and interests of the business sector first and foremost. Local authorities are increasingly corporatised and influenced by business elites33.

22Consequently, following the insights of autonomist Marxists such as Midnight Notes Collective34 and Massimo De Angelis35, it is possible to see the contemporary privatisation of British cities as both a return to, and a continuation of, the processes of “enclosures” from the late 1400s to the 19^th century that expelled the vast majority of people from the land and transformed various forms of property (Church, state, feudal, clan and commons) into private ownership, “separating” the producer from the means of (re) production and creating a population of workers with only their labour to sell to survive36. Instead of seeing what Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital as taking place at the beginning of capitalism, these theorists argue that the process of enclosure-that is the separation, expropriation and privatisation of resources from people - is the process of capital accumulation, a process with “totalising drives” to colonise all aspects of social life for profit in response to the constant battle with “other forces that act as a limit on it”, giving rise to what De Angelis37 calls “value struggles” (or class struggle):

It is either capital that makes the world through commodification and enclosures, or the rest of us-whoever is that “us”-that makes the world through counter-enclosures and commons38.

23In its drive to accumulate, “capital has to devise strategies of enclosures, either by promoting new areas of commodification vis-à-vis resistance, or by preserving old areas of commodification vis-à-vis ex novo attacks that it faces by’commoners’39 ”. Public management and private finance systems like PFI can thus be understood as consciously designed mechanisms to build in and embed semi-automated processes of enclosure into the financing and delivery of local public services. These processes create a dialectical interaction between different dynamic forces of commodification, financialisation, privatisation and competition, forming a vicious circle that makes the functional logic of the local state to “enclose” more and more of the public sector-and the city itself-for capital.

24In the case study of Leeds, the process begins in Little London with the very real enclosure of housing and land previously held in a form of municipal common ownership, and the direct replacement of subsidised and protected rented housing based on “need” with private market housing for sale based on ability to pay. While those social tenants who have been forced to leave their homes are not immediately flung onto the private market due to the Council’s guarantee to re-house, the net reduction in the supply of public housing in a city with a waiting list of over 30,000 people does mean that more people elsewhere will be in effect be separated from these scarce commons and forced into the private sector. This process of separation and market capture is reinforced by the accompanying gentrification and marketisation of Little London’s local housing supply, which pushes up rents and property prices, encouraging council tenants to take up their discounted Right to Buy in order to make a large profit in the future, meaning yet more public housing and land is enclosed.

25The enclosure dynamo does not stop here. By entering into a long-term contract with capital, Leeds City Council is legally bound to honour a financing model in which the government’s contribution remains “fixed” throughout. This means that in an already fiscally austere environment for local authorities, the Council must shoulder the rising costs of the scheme as they occur, regardless of other commitments or local needs, by transferring revenues from other budgets and selling assets from elsewhere in its portfolio to meet the PFI repayments. If this was the only PFI scheme that Leeds City Council had to finance, then the rising costs would probably be quietly absorbed within a huge local authority complex employing approximately 35,000 people and delivering over 500 services to 730,000 people on an annual budget of over 1,000 million pounds with a huge property and land portfolio valued at 3. 33 billion pounds40. However, this is not the only PFI scheme-in its push to meet government targets and attract as much extra investment as possible for its regeneration schemes and public services modernisation, Leeds City Council has become the leading (and award-winning) local authority for PFI contracts in the UK. In total, Leeds has successfully attracted more than 1 billion pounds worth of “PFI credits”, with a further 550 million pounds awaiting decision, covering street lighting, new schools and leisure centres, social housing, joint services and waste management41. Given that the full costs of PFI are usually between two and three times the headline figure and increase over time, the City Council could eventually be liable for at least 1 billion pounds in PFI repayments over the next 15 to 30 years, and on current trends, the Council could have acquired a further 10-15 billion pounds worth of PFI schemes over this period, meaning an additional £ 2-3 billion pounds in debts to PFI consortia lasting well past the year 2050.

26The implications of having to meet these huge future commitments in a context of growing fiscal austerity under neoliberalism could be catastrophic for the local public sector in Leeds. The Council would have to raid other budgets or sell off more public assets to ensure that all of its PFI schemes were financially solvent. This may start with service cuts and property sales from within the physical PFI zone, spreading out to general budgets and assets associated with the particular scheme (e. g. housing or education). Then might come the cuts in grants for the arts and culture as well as non-frontline services, but as the liabilities stack up, the process may gradually encompass health and education services, and the closure and sale of community centres, schools, libraries, art exhibition premises, museums, leisure centres, prestigious listed buildings and so on in order to create development or investment opportunities for developers and real estate corporations. Like climate change, this is not some far distant dystopia-it is already happening. Since 1998, Leeds City Council has operated an increasingly sophisticated Asset Management System designed to, amongst many things, identify a continuous supply of “surplus property” to sell off and reinvest the proceeds into the Council’s Capital Investment Programme, which is of course increasingly dominated by PFI schemes and their rising costs. As a result, since 2002, Leeds City Council has sold off more than 130 million pounds worth of public property and land, and forecasts that by 2012 a further 105 million pounds of assets will be privatised42. These “surplus assets” have so far included : several schools and playing fields, hundreds of council homes, some 22 community centres and 16 public toilets. However, the Council own figures suggest that no matter how much it raises in capital receipts from selling off its assets, there is always an annual shortfall in its capital investment commitments. This transmits into increased targets for raising additional funds from privatising council assets. For example, up to 6000 council houses are currently earmarked for demolition to sell development sites to private developers as part of the city’s regeneration strategy for deprived areas43.

Towards a Spatial Justice Politics ?

27Unless there is a change of direction soon, it is a real possibility that Leeds will gradually become completely “enclosed” with all public services, spaces and assets owned and controlled by global corporations and citizens at the complete mercy of the “market”. We cannot imagine the possible night- mare scenarios of spatial injustice that this would bring. Yet, in the gloom, there is still hope. The very material processes of enclosure-school closures, housing demolitions, public space erosion-provoke very real material responses in the form of popular opposition and resistance seeking to “reclaim social spaces. and turn them into spaces of commons44 ”. In Little London, a small but committed group of tenants has questioned and fought the Council’s PFI scheme since it was first unveiled in 2001. While they have narrowly failed to stop the PFI scheme, their resistance has forced the Council to make decisive concessions, such as the like-for-like replacement of demolished council homes with social rented housing, and the retention of 300 flats originally scheduled for privatisation. In other words, they have saved some 430 public housing units when previously told that there was no alternative. Moreover, their dogged resistance has sparked the formation of a growing city-wide housing movement, supported by local academics and trade unionists, that aims to learn from the Little London experience and fight the planned demolitions, privatisations and gentrification policies across Leeds45. This has the potential to link up with the revived Leeds Tenants’Federation as well as the renewed squatting and social centre movement that in other cities has seen the occupation and reopening of public swimming pools, community centres, schools, abandoned warehouses and so on46.

28While these struggles remain marginal and marginalised for the time being and will require a major and sustained organising and educational drive by progressive forces to reverse the current trends, there is hope that capital will never be able to exercise the sole “right to the city”. Without being overly prescriptive, a strategy for uniting people around a common agenda for spatial justice might, as a starting point, set out to build a broadbased campaign of tenants, home owners, community activists, trade unionists, existing councillors, anti-capitalists, academics and others. This campaign would push for affordable, tenant-controlled public rented housing as part of anti-poverty coalition at the local and regional level. Buil- ding unity could be achieved by a dual commitment, on the one hand, to the defence of existing public housing provision from privatisation, as well as homeowners and tenants under threat of compulsory purchase or eviction in regeneration areas and, on the other hand, to put forward alternative solutions and visions of the city that support common ownership and democratization. Empty or misused private land and property could be occupied to provide free squatted housing, and public meetings would be held to highlight the contradiction between private property and housing waiting lists, demonstrating the power of everyday commons in praxis. The long-term aim of such a strategy would be to create a critical mass of diverse strategic and tactical interventions, from blocking privatisation and gentrification, stopping the closure of community facilities, and occupying land to winning seats on the local council. These tactics would force periodic concessions from state and capital, and help to re-energise the housing campaign and keep it going until such point as it reached an as-yet undefined future guided only by principles of the commons.