ABSTRACT
Chapters 6 and 7 have discussed the politics of HMR. Housing market renewal is constituted on dominant views of the market for houses, as a space of positions. Working-class people who do not relate to the market for houses in these terms tend to oppose it. This suggests that there is nothing inevitable about its implementation, which many working-class people resist. This is evident in the public enquiries that have taken place to (ostensibly) examine the concerns of working-class residents who are being subjected to HMR. This chapter now examines the politics of implementing HMR in Kensington. The chapter further develops themes that have run through previous chapters by discussing the rationale for working-class resistance to HMR. It then moves on to examine institutional responses to this working-class resistance. Institutions that are wedded to the dominant doxa, that the market for houses consists of a space of positions, and meta-doxa, that terraced housing has reached the ‘end of history’, cannot grasp HMR other than in terms of its self-evident benefits. It will inevitably produce ‘something better’.
