Neoliberalism and Urban Regeneration: London’s Communities Finding a Voice and Fighting Back

This edited collection from Roger Green and Keith Popple tells an important, common, hopeful, yet ultimately sad story of a community under siege from a multinational organization intent on stealing their sense of place right from underneath them. It is the story of a community—Deptford—embattled against a multinational corporation intent on procuring local land for property development, the group of activists engaged in fighting this development, and the benefits that the campaign brought to the area and its residents in spite of their ultimate defeat. The story is told in seven chapters, with the voices of the main authors and editors, Roger Green and Keith Popple, supplemented by those of various actors and activists who have played a role in the cause. Keith Popple helpfully sets the scene with two academic chapters contextualizing key concepts referred to throughout the text—neoliberalism and hegemony—referencing Antonio Gramsci via Louis Althusser. Roger Green, together with various colleagues, provides the subject context with an account of the broader regeneration backdrop of a continually remaking and remade London and, crucially, what these processes mean for those who have always called London their home. The reader then gets to the heart of the matter, with three chapters, again authored by Green with support from additional voices, which detail the main subject of the text—the south east London district of Deptford, the threats its community life has faced from faceless real estate developers, and the community activists that stood up to these threats. The book closes with a Freirean rallying call to arms against multinational mega powers, and pleas for greater collective action, solidarity, and speaking truth to power via ‘alternative counter-hegemonic patterns of community democracy’ (p.142).