ABSTRACT

Chapter 6 argued that the official rationale for ‘restructuring’ the Kensington housing market, to reposition it within the space of positions in the Liverpool housing market, sits alongside an unofficial rationale for ‘restructuring’, which is to ensure that Kensington makes a ‘statement’ about Liverpool as a ‘City of Culture’. The ostensible aim of ‘City of Culture’ status is to produce social and economic (as well as cultural) benefits to the city and its residents. However, as working-class houses are demolished so that they no longer dominate the urban landscape of the ‘City of Culture’, the question of whether working-class people will actually reap any benefits from demolition remains unanswered. There are two dimensions to this problematic. The first concerns the working-class relation to the City of Culture. This chapter shows that working-class people, whose lives are characterised by their proximity to necessity and distance from symbolic economies, are simply unable to ‘grasp’ the City of Culture as something ‘for the likes of them’. So the City of Culture programme that is partly driving HMR in Kensington means nothing to the people that live there.