Ward, C. orcid.org/0000-0002-1768-1725 and Brill, F. (2024) How to make a city into a firetrap: relations of land and property in the UK's cladding scandal. Antipode, 56 (1). pp. 353-373. ISSN 0066-4812
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | assetisation; fire; cladding; housing; social murder; remediation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 20 Sep 2024 09:17 |
Last Modified: | 20 Sep 2024 09:17 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/anti.12970 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217429 |