From Derelict Estates to a Mixed-tenure Neighbourhood: Social Housing Tenants’ Experiences of Neighbouring in Peckham, London

Abstract

In many countries in the Global North, interventions in deprived neighbourhoods have attempted to tackle poverty by spatially deconcentrating it. This has commonly been done through housing restructuring programmes in areas of social housing. Supported by the ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis, such interventions promote the diversification of housing tenures and housing typologies, based on the idea that a wider mix will result in increased opportunities of interaction across housing tenures and in local social networks becoming more heterogeneous. Using data from interviews, surveys and participant observation in meetings and events organised by local residents in North Peckham, an area in South London which in the 1990s and beginning of 2000s was the site of a large-scale housing restructuring programme, this chapter explores the expectations and experiences of neighbouring of long-term and newer arrival social housing tenants. This chapter shows that their different experiences of the neighbourhood and of physical and social change, as well as their diverging socio-economic characteristics – long-term residents tended to be older and retired while newer residents tended to have more complex needs – highly influenced perceptions of neighbourly relations and the significance attached to them. Despite finding high levels of neighbourly interaction and assistance, it also shows that attitudes and expectations towards neighbours were marked by a sense of nostalgia among long-term social tenants, stigma due to the area’s past and towards newer social tenants and by feelings of alienation due to the perceived residualisation of the social housing tenure and increased housing unaffordability.

Citation

Moreira de Souza, T. (2022), "From Derelict Estates to a Mixed-tenure Neighbourhood: Social Housing Tenants’ Experiences of Neighbouring in Peckham, London", Cheshire, L. (Ed.) Neighbours Around the World: An International Look at the People Next Door, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 93-110. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83909-476-720221006