From Regeneration to Repair: Exploring Alternative Directions for Urban Development in Twenty-First Century London

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A city of intense and intensifying inequalities, urban development in London is increasingly defined by displacement and displaceability. Although predominantly read through the prism of housing, this trend also envelops the economic, social, cultural and community infrastructures which comprise the city's diverse popular neighbourhoods. Within this story, regeneration planning not only has a hand in shaping the construction of displaceable subjects in the city, it has also emerged as a locus of struggle and contestation for alternative regeneration futures. Zooming in on the London Borough of Southwark (LBS), this thesis will explore how displacement and displaceability is being constructed and contested in local regeneration planning. Picking up and amplifying calls for alternative ways of knowing (and thus acting in) the city. At a time when municipalism is once again emerging as a 'cipher of hope' for urban justice movements the world over, maintaining critical attention on the agency of municipal planners in the making (and unmaking) of displaceability in the modern city is essential to keeping the idea of planning in play as a (re)claimable force for change. Although grounded in the situated reality of one inner-London borough, the experience of Southwark will be connected to locally and globally resonant conversations about who and what the city is for and, within this, how and under what conditions regeneration planning might be (re)claimed as a lever for progressive change. Drawing inspiration from ideas and emphases more commonly associated with the so-called southern turn in planning theory and practice, this thesis seeks to switch the debate from regeneration to repair exploring this as a propositional alternative to dominant and displacing urban development approaches in the capital.The central research question for the project is: How is displacement and displaceability constructed and contested in contemporary regeneration planning?