Surveillance in supportive housing: Intrusion or autonomy?

Cameron Parsell

University of Queensland, Australia

In my article entitled, ‘Surveillance in supportive housing: Intrusion or autonomy?’, I examine surveillance in supportive housing.

Both our theories of human behaviour and people’s relationship with place suggest that surveillance poses an intrusive force. The experience of home relies on privacy and the absence of surveillance. Home is, or at least is idealised as, a place where we can experience the freedom to live of our own volition. As a place of privacy home is juxtaposed to the city; in the modern city surveillance is omnipresent. Home is positioned as a refuge from the fluid and monitored spaces of our cities.

Theories about home, privacy, and our expectations of being free from surveillance are intuitively appealing. Although children are supervised by parents and significant others, as adults we expect to live as we choose and without scrutiny at home. Home is a place where we can do what we want, including inviting and restricting visitors as we see fit. Indeed, violence and oppression experienced in the home violate our normative expectations that home is a place of peace and order where we can exert control.

The significance of home as a place free from surveillance, on the one hand, and new models of supportive housing that purposefully adopt surveillance mechanisms, on the other, motivated the research driving my article. I wanted to examine the function of surveillance. In the research I sought to empirically study how tenants experienced surveillance, and how housing and support providers understood the role of surveillance in the lives of those monitored.

The research identified two key findings. First, and consistent with existing theories, surveillance was controlling and restrictive. Tenants experienced, and housing and support providers advocated for, surveillance to intervene to restrict freedoms and to protect vulnerable people. It was recognised among tenants and housing and support providers alike that surveillance is counterproductive to achieving independence and self-determination.

Second, the research found that instead of simply being passively subject to surveillance, tenants purposefully used surveillance for their advantage. Surveillance in supportive housing was a resource actively used by tenants to create the conditions to control their lives. Tenants saw surveillance as playing a desirable role. Surveillance, as provided through the concierge and onsite support workers, meant that tenants could achieve safety and security by minimising the threats posed by others. Tenants used surveillance to restrict unwanted visitors. Contrary to what may be expected based on theories of home as a place of privacy, surveillance was a resource that tenants drew on to exercise control and autonomy over how they lived.

The research’s contribution is to demonstrate the desirability and utility of surveillance in supportive housing as a mechanism to achieve safety and control for tenants who had otherwise experienced violence and marginalisation in mainstream housing and as homeless. For people who had experienced unsafe neighbourhoods and forms of accommodation – for people who were unable to draw on informal resources and networks to achieve safety and control – formal surveillance constituted a useful resource. Although surveillance acted to limited autonomy, it was also used as a resource that enabled people to exercise control. Surveillance is thus not the antithesis of home.

Sol Gamsu - The re-location of elite and middle-class schools

Sol Gamsu, King's College London, discusses his article "Moving up and moving out: the re-location of elite and middle-class schools from central London to the suburbs". Download the article here: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/27/0042098015601593.abstract?rss=1

Collective or individual titles? Conflict over tenure regularisation in a Kenyan informal settlement

Andrea Rigon - University College London, UK

http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/05/0042098015602658.abstract?rss=1

The urban regeneration of poor neighbourhoods is an increasingly common intervention in cities across the world. These interventions are often accompanied by market displacement and gentrification, processes through which some local residents benefit from the increased value of their properties whilst others cannot afford to continue living in the area and are replaced by more affluent people. A key policy concern is therefore the ways in which such interventions can protect current residents from displacement and allow them to remain in their neighbourhoods. In the context of fast growing African cities – where land is rapidly appreciating and often contested – ensuring that residents of informal settlements, particularly tenants, can continue living in their settlements of origin after regeneration interventions is particularly challenging.

My research analyses a specific slum-upgrading project in an informal settlement of Nairobi in which there were different interests amongst diverse groups of residents. I explore the negotiations over tenure regularisation, including in particular the proposed use of a collective form of land titling through the creation of a Community Land Trust, explicitly with the aim of reducing displacement and gentrification. While at first glance a very attractive option, I argue that such tenure reforms are always shaped by context-specific power relations, and that in this particular case the process came to be dominated by the implementers’ need to maintain fragile agreements with local elites in order to avoid conflict. Elite pressure led to a change in project’s objectives, which makes it more difficult for tenants to afford living in the settlement in the long-term. Ultimately, then, what my case shows is that tenure reforms are based on different ideas of whose rights should be recognised and competing claims that are both negotiated through and shaped by the implementation process.

This research contributes to policy-oriented and theoretical debates on how to approach the complex task of upgrading informal settlements, which now host a quarter of the world’s urban population and over 60% of Africa’s urban population, according to UN-Habitat. While policy innovation, in terms of new tenure approaches is sorely needed, any project should be aware that technical solutions are likely to fail if they do not take into consideration power relations and how these shape implementation through the daily encounters between different groups of residents and project implementers. In particular, urban land reform outcomes are likely to be shaped by local power relations and the relative power of state and non-state actors involved in the process of detailed planning and implementation rather than land policy decisions taken at higher levels.

Transforming transport planning in the postpolitical era

Crystal Legacy (Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Australia)

 

http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/08/27/0042098015602649.abstract

This research examines the transformation of the democratic systems that support transport decision making in Australian cities. The focus of the paper is the controversial East West Link road tunnel proposed for the inner suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. Following the state government decision to fast track the signing of the contracts for this project, concern that this would remove public debate about the efficacy of the proposed tunnel eventually proved unfounded. Instead, the closing down of debate by the government spurred debate to occur elsewhere.  My ambition in this project was to understand the intricacies of the opposition to this controversial road project, but, more specifically, to examine the ways in which different community-based groups organised to stop a project and do so in a way that offers a transformative urban transport agenda for the State. When a government deliberately closes its door to open citizen engagement, particularly around discussions of transport priorities, I was interested in investigating how community based groups and individual residents alike can move beyond NIMBY-focused and site specific agitation to garner a spatially dispersed re-politicisation of urban transport priorities? I set out to consider how a reconceptualisation could transpire, and in what ways could a political orientation of the problem provide a platform for a redemocratisation of transport planning?

When the research commenced, I was nearing the end of my semester of teaching Integrated Transport Planning. Motivated by the high level of student activism that catalysed the creation of the Students Linking Melbourne Sustainably (SLiMS) group, my research assistant Daniela Minicucci and I set out to follow and engage groups like SLiMS through an ethnographic study of the politicisation of transport in Melbourne. This included participation in community organised street protests, engagement in public forums and debates about urban transport policy at community meetings and in the media. I also followed Twitter feeds and hastage discussions as well as participated in meetings with leaders in the community campaign against the East West Link.  To develop a more robust understanding of the motivations and strategies embraced by the groups, and to help with my analysis of the variety of ways these groups were working collectively to stop the project, I also conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with the lead campaigners. Even though the substantive aspect of my research focused on a 6 month period of state-led community engagement with a highly flawed Comprehensive Impact Statement process, my interest in these groups continued unabatedly into the state election in November 2014 when, following months of political pressure from these groups in the lead up to the election, and after signing the contracts, the party in power was defeated. Through the campaign, which included savvy engagement with the political parties and major media outlets, the community-based groups were able to position the project onto the state’s political agenda in the lead up to the election. This enabled the newly elected government to remove the East West Link from the top of the transport infrastructure priority list following the election. Shortly thereafter the contracts were broken.

The paper’s contribution is to illustrate how the politics of transport evolves and is played out.  Any decision to remove the community from the processes that determine the priorities of transport investment, are inherently political decisions and therefore any attempt to depoliticise decision making, be that through streamlining decision making or by narrowing the scope for citizen participation, only serves to hyper politicise projects. A key conclusion of the paper is the need for new urban governance settings that both respond to and embrace the political aspects of transport planning and decision making.  But in the absence of inclusive governance arrangements, politically engaged citizens will go to great lengths to create their own spaces where deliberations about transport problems, priorities and investments can occur, but in a manner that allows alternative transport futures to also be considered. These informal processes offer an illustration of the redemocratisation of transport planning. To the extent that citizens can influence transport decision making (and they can!), a closed system of transport decision making does not close down debate and community action.   

 

The impact of highway proximity on distribution centres’ rents

Gaston Tchang, VU University Amsterdam

http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/28/0042098015596930.abstract

Driving along Dutch highways I often see distribution centres located in the vicinity. I wondered if the reason just is just to be seen by passing traffic or, thinking as an economist, that there is another cost-related reason. With common sense one expects higher rents near highways due to scarcity of land adjacent to highways and as well as being visible to passers-by.

When I was searching the literature on the impact of the proximity of highways on rent, I found that most  of the articles were about the impact on housing rent. There were also a lot of studies about the impact on office rents. But I couldn't find one about the impact on distribution centres' rent. Given the importance of transport costs in the logistics industry it is surprising that there had been no previous study. So this was a good reason to conduct a study myself. Since I am familiar with logistics in the Netherlands, and had access to Dutch data, I focussed my research on the Netherlands.

My aim was to find out how much rent of a distribution centre increases when accessibility improves. I have taken two different approaches. First I looked to the impact of the proximity to the nearest highway. Then I examined the impact of the distance to the centre of the Netherlands on the basis that a central location can reduce transport costs for logistic companies. I found an increasing rent for a decreasing distance. When distance decreases transport costs will be saved. As long as transport cost savings exceed the increased rent it is more attractive to choose a location closer to a highway or closer to the centre of the Netherlands. Transport costs are a major cost for logistic companies.

The results found are entirely plausible and may be useful for policymakers which are responsible for the development of industrial areas, e.g. at a local level to set the land rent and e.g. at a regional level to determine the zoning of land (e.g. by limiting the surface of industrial area allocated to distribution centres in a region). I suspect that real estate developers already advantage from the willingness of logistic companies to pay higher rents to locate  close to highways since land rent is often determined per industrial area or by the type of industrial activity according to the zoning.

The abstract can be found at: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/28/0042098015596930?papetoc

                                           (Author's own)
                         
                               A distribution centre located in an industrial area in the Netherlands

Displacement and gentrification in England and Wales: A quasi-experimental approach

Lance Freeman (Columbia University, USA), Adèle Cassola (Columbia University, USA), Tiacheng Cai (Columbia University, USA)

Abstract can be found: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/03/0042098015598120

The question of gentrification’s impact on low-income households remains a topic of heated debate among urban researchers and residents. In recent years, numerous studies have been dedicated to examining one of the most traumatic potential outcomes of gentrification – the direct displacement of the neighborhood’s existing residents. Several U.S.-based studies have examined whether gentrification leads to displacement using quasi-experimental methods, which try to account for what would have happened in the absence of gentrification by comparing mobility rates in neighborhoods that are similar but for experiencing gentrification. These studies have found no consistent evidence that low-income households are more likely to move out of gentrifying than non-gentrifying neighborhoods. Our study was motivated by the notion that because people move less frequently on average in England and Wales than in the US, it might be easier to distinguish patterns of elevated mobility due to gentrification in this context.

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we compared households’ odds of moving in three types of neighborhoods: disadvantaged neighborhoods that did not gentrify between 2001 and 2009; disadvantaged neighborhoods that gentrified during this period; and relatively advantaged neighborhoods. For the entire sample of England and Wales, low-income and working-class households living in gentrifying neighborhoods were not more likely to move than comparable households in neighborhoods that did not gentrify. In London, on the other hand, low-income households in gentrifying neighborhoods were more likely to move than similar households in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. However, because this finding did not hold up when different measures of gentrification were used, we cannot make a strong case that gentrification leads to displacement based on this analysis.

The lack of compelling evidence of gentrification-induced direct displacement in this and previous quasi-experimental studies is hard to reconcile with first-hand accounts of direct displacement. Displacement from gentrifying neighborhoods clearly occurs, so why have so many statistical studies failed to detect higher rates of mobility among vulnerable residents from these neighborhoods?

We suggest the following explanation. Turnover rates tend to be higher in disadvantaged neighborhoods, but when such neighborhoods gentrify, some residents who would otherwise have left might decide to stay put because they like the neighborhood’s trajectory. Others might dislike the changes and move. Others might wish to move, but find no acceptable alternatives. Still others will be directly displaced from the neighborhood. However, the increased mobility due to direct and indirect displacement and the reduced mobility among those who stay put may balance each other out. Consequently, the overall rate of mobility may differ little from what existed prior to gentrification.

A failure to statistically detect direct displacement therefore does not mean that we can write off gentrification as a policy concern. Moreover, direct displacement is not the only form of displacement experienced by residents of gentrifying neighborhoods. Those who are not directly displaced may nonetheless feel alienated by the changes occurring in their neighborhood. Gentrification may also reduce the stock of low-cost housing in affected neighborhoods, thus excluding low-income households that otherwise would have moved in. Given the complexity of these processes and their enduring impact on urban residents and neighborhoods, there is no doubt that gentrification and displacement will continue to inspire much debate and research in the years to come.  

Better residential than ethnic discrimination! Reconciling audit andinterview findings in the Parisian housing market

François Bonnet (CNRS, UMR Pacte), Etienne Lalé (Department of Economics, University of Bristol), Mirna Safi (Department of Sociology and OSC, Sciences Po) and Etienne Wasmer (Department of Economics and LIEPP, Sciences Po)

Abstract can be found: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/07/28/0042098015596107.abstract?rss=1 

We started out this research with two questions. First, is there a banlieue effect operating in the Parisian housing market, i.e. does living in a deprived neighborhood per se undermine the prospects for residential mobility? Second, is it possible to separate this effect from discrimination caused by another potential stigma, namely the ethnic origin (North-African background) of those living in the French banlieues? Answering these questions is of importance for a broad range of academics studying discrimination and the cumulative effects of residential and ethnic/racial inequalities. The French context makes this task all the more challenging and interesting. Indeed, the French Republican model embraces a color-blind, universalistic model of race relations, which notably implies rejecting ethnicity as the basis of categories for official statistics. Recent studies, partly in the aftermath of the 2005 urban riots in France, have challenged the myth of a color-blind society.[i] They provide evidence of discrimination in the labor market. However, at present, there is almost no audit study based evidence of discrimination in the housing market in France.

A distinctive feature of our research is to make complementary use of two methodological designs. We conducted: (i) an experimental paired-testing audit study involving (fictitious) housing applicants and (ii) a series of face-to-face interviews with real-estate agents in Paris and the Paris region. Thus, our research has potential of offering both statistical and discursive evidence on discrimination in the housing market. After juxtaposing the findings from the audit and the interviews, we do find an interesting paradox:

• While the current (alleged) residence of housing applicants has a significant negative effect in the audit, real estate agents clearly deny its relevance as a discriminatory factor affecting access to housing;
• Real estate agents overwhelmingly report that ethnic origin has a discriminatory impact, whereas ethnic origin has no significant effect in the audit when we control for the current residence of housing applicants.

We offer several hypotheses that may solve this apparent paradox. We especially favour the following two hypotheses which, in our view, should not be seen as mutually exclusive.

First, the findings could reflect statistical discrimination whereby real estate agents seek to proxy the risk of non-payment of the rent (insolvency). In particular, residential and ethnic origins could correlate with access to housing simply because real estate agents use these characteristics to infer the risk that truly matter to them. Real estate agents deny the relevance of residential origin as a discriminatory factor with good reasons, in that only insolvency is relevant. In the meantime, if residential origin is strongly correlated with the risk of insolvency, then controlling for this variable explains why ethnic origin does not play a statistically significant role in the audit study data.

            

The other hypothesis is that there is an ethnic stigma and that residential origin is used to proxy ethnicity. That is, it may be that overt information about ethnic origin (like, for instance, an African name) is not used to discriminate against housing applicants because such biased decisions appear highly undesirable. Strong correlates with ethnicity (like, for instance, residential origin) are instead used to select housing applicants. This would explain why real estate agents report that residential origin is not a discriminatory factor while ethnic origin is. This would also help understanding why, in the audit study, overtly signalling ethnicity through the housing applicant's name did not result in discriminatory behaviours.

The more important conclusion of our article is that the complementary use of different methodological designs helps overcome the shortcomings of each. In this respect, the paradox we find is anything but a weakness of this research: it proved very instrumental in developing rich hypotheses to understand discrimination.

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[i]      To our knowledge, the most comprehensive study is the audit conducted jointly by the ministry of labour and the International Labour Organization in 2008. The results, presented in a report written by Eric Cediey and Fabrice Foroni (“Discrimination in access to employment on grounds of foreign origin in France: A national survey of discrimination based on the testing methodology of the International Labour Office”), reveal  that employers prefer candidates perceived as being of “national” origin (French) to strictly identical candidates of African immigrant background in 80% of all cases.