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This paper argues that shifts in access to housing - both in relation to rental and ownership - disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures. In this paper, we consider two key questions: (1) What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change? (2) How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this? Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction. We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cityhas, from its inception, paid close attention to London, to the ‘World City’ or ‘Global City’ ideologies underwriting its concentration of wealth and of poverty and to challenges from among its citizens to the prevailing orthodoxy. This paper focuses on London's extreme experience of the housing crisis gripping the UK—itself the European nation with the fastest long-term growth of average house prices and widest regional disparities, both driven by overblown financialisation and the privileging of rent as a means of wealth accumulation, often by dispossession. Londoners’ experiences stem partly from four decades of neo-liberal transformation and partly from accelerated financialisation in the last two decades and are now being accelerated by the imposition of ‘austerity’ on low- and middle-income people. The social relationships of tenancy in social housing, private tenancy and mortgage-financed owner-occupation are, however, divisive and the paper ends by identifying what may be the beginning of a unified social movement, or at least a coalition, for change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a response to the paper by Manley and Johnston (2014, “London: A Dividing City, 2001–11?”City18 (6): 633–643) which analyzed occupational class change in London 2001–14. While it queries some of their classifications, the census data show that middle class growth seems to have stalled in proportionate though not in absolute terms from 2001–11. However, this does not fundamentally challenge Hamnett and Butler's thesis that the middle classes, upper and lower, have grown substantially in London over the last 50 years as a result of changes in industrial and occupational structure. The paper discusses some of the possible reasons for changes in the last decade and reiterates the importance of using census data as a tool for the analysis of urban social change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a response to the paper by Manley and Johnston (2014, "London: A Dividing City, 2001–11?" City 18 (6): 633–643) which analyzed occupational class change in London 2001–14. While it queries some of their classifications, the census data show that middle class growth seems to have stalled in proportionate though not in absolute terms from 2001–11. However, this does not fundamentally challenge Hamnett and Butler's thesis that the middle classes, upper and lower, have grown substantially in London over the last 50 years as a result of changes in industrial and occupational structure. The paper discusses some of the possible reasons for changes in the last decade and reiterates the importance of using census data as a tool for the analysis of urban social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the processes by which middle-class belonging is generated, through the exploration of social and spatial trajectories in narratives of residential choice and mobility. It is based on an understanding of residential choice as indicative and constitutive of social mobilities. In particular the paper builds on the discussion of the match between habitus and field that lies at the root of the notions of middle-class belonging and place attachments to draw attention not only to the conditions under which ‘fit’ is possible, but also acknowledge that belonging is a dynamic process, generated and maintained through residence that feeds back into understandings of classed identities. This paper argues that residential space is not just appropriated to reflect pre-existing tastes and lifestyles, but may also contribute in the transformation of habitus to fit to particular neighbourhoods and ways of living. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the debate on London’s social class structure at the start of the 21st century. That debate has focused on the use of census metrics to argue the case for whether or not the capital has become more or less middle class in composition between 2001 and 2011. We contend that the definition of the middle class has become confused in the course of this debate and is of less critical importance for an understanding of the city’s contemporary class structure than is a focus on London’s elite. We make use of data from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS) to shed light on the social, cultural and economic resources of this group, in addition to their spatial location. We then return to the census data for 2001 and 2011 and posit that belying the image of stability in London’s class structure these data suggest clear and localised patterns of intensification in class geographies across the capital, an intensification characterised by a growing cleavage between Inner and Outer London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of gentrification in London have shown that some groups of middle-class people have been attracted to poor and multi-ethnic areas of inner London in part because of their social and ethnic mix. However, the attraction has often not translated into everyday interaction. In an earlier account of gentrification in Brixton this de facto social segregation was typified as a process of ‘social tectonics’. In this paper we compare two ethnically and socially mixed neighbourhoods, Peckham and Brixton, that at different times have represented the ‘front line’ of gentrification in London. We examine the extent to which the gentrification of Brixton in the late 1990s is being mirrored by the gentrification that is occurring today in Peckham – a similarly mixed and counter-cultural area of South London. Whilst we identify continuities between the gentrification process in these two areas separated by a decade of boom and recession, we suggest that the Peckham example demonstrates the need for a more developed approach to the issue of social mixing than that implied by the social tectonics metaphor. Specifically, we argue that there is a need to explain how the presence of classed and ethnic ‘others’ can be central to the formation of identities within some middle-class fractions in such enclaves in the inner city, and how attitudes and neighbourhood practices can change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that becoming a parent/carer can be seen as a new field of social relations and suggests how gender is the key mechanism in the reconfiguration of class relations in this field. By conceptualising parenthood as a field, that is a social world with specific stakes and rules, this study suggests that residential decisions and strategies developed by different middle-class households do not solely depend on their class habitus, but also on gendered positions and dispositions in respect to division of labour, child care and school choice. Drawing on interview data from London and Amsterdam, this study re-addresses the issue of middle-class time-space trajectories at a specific period in the life course. We contend that the middle classes are not just differentiated by various orientations of capital (economic versus cultural) but that interaction of class and gender is also key for understanding practices of the middle classes as they enter the field of parenthood. These practices are strongly influenced by labour market and welfare regimes (as the Netherlands/England comparison makes clear). In the new field of parenthood the work of realigning class habitus (through social reproduction) is highly gendered, but to different degrees that are made evident in the different neighbourhood settings. In terms of urban space this points to the significance of the particular neighbourhood structure and opportunities of the city as a whole as well as a more active idea of the role of space in the particular working out of class and gender in specific neighbourhood contexts. Urban space is a situating framework and an active process in trajectories of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a recent debate regarding London's changing class structure and residential mosaic. Using census data for 2001 and 2011, this paper addresses key hypotheses in that debate regarding the expansion of the middle class and a consequent decline of the working class—both numerically and in the areas of the city where they dominate. The analyses falsify those hypotheses: London's working class did not decline over that decade, nor was there any marked shrinkage in the area where it dominated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a valuable and engaging critique, Hamnett and Butler conclude that our analysis of the socio-spatial dimensions of inequality in London originates from a ‘parallel universe’, that it is ‘bizarre’ for us ‘middle-class university professors’ to claim that ‘the middle class does not exist,’ and that our approach involves 'looking into the rear view mirror or class structure in the 1840s.' In this paper we provide a response, and we reiterate the urgent need for class-conscious politics and method in contemporary urban research. Dominant narratives of postindustrial transnational urbanism tend to erase any concern for class conflict, as old occupational structures that once closely reflected locally-observable relations of production are replaced by a much more intricate and respatialized occupational matrix of positions that (when analysed in conventional ways) creates an aspirational mirage of utopian middle-class opportunity. Yet the materialist conditions of capitalist urbanization intensify class antagonisms, while polarizing social relations within domains typically understood as 'middle-class' (including the professoriate). At the same time, the Right has hijacked traditional Left commitments to radical openness to difference and contingency, thus diverting critical energies away from fundamental challenges to class inequality into the safer technocratic territory of managing inequalities with a creative, de-classified menu of friendly-sounding policies of inclusion, mixing, tolerance, and social sustainability. One way to challenge this dangerous trend involves a fusion of multivariate quantitative analysis with contemporary critical social theory (drawing on Žižek and others) to account for the new multidimensional relations of postindustrial occupational structures within the increasingly severe class antagonisms of capitalist urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper is a response to Davidson and Wyly. While we agree with them that class and class conflict is an important element of cities, we disagree with many of their claims and assertions regarding our work. In particular, we argue that the growth of the middle class does not mean that we consider the working class unimportant or to have largely disappeared as they suggest. This is to muddle empirical findings and political agendas. The working class is still clearly present, even though it has shrunk. Nor does the growth of the middle class imply that inequality has become unimportant. On the contrary, we argue that the growth of the middle class is one of the key reasons why London has become more unequal. We take issue with their claim that the middle class does not exist, and we argue that their analysis of 2001 census data, while interesting, does not look at the changes which have taken place over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we draw on three studies of social class change amongst the middle classes undertaken in London over the last 25 years to reflect on the changing values expressed by respondents to school choice. We argue that there has been a hardening of attitudes to school performance and a loss of middle-class autonomy towards schooling. Increasingly we note a concern to navigate the few areas of privilege in a school system designed for working class children but now expected to cater for a vastly increased and educationally-anxious middle class. We specifically address the way in which choice of school has become enshrined in legislation but has itself become constrained by the lack of places in popular schools. We argue that the consequence has been to diminish the amount of choice and ensure that 'distance from school' becomes the sole arbiter of access to most popular schools. Thus an attempt at widening access to education has in effect restricted it to those able to access the housing markets nearest to the most popular schools. Taken together with a series of policy interventions designed to circumvent middle-class families playing the system, this has in effect reduced the element of choice by forcing most parents to play for the 'safe option' in the fear of being allocated to something worse. We conclude by suggesting that this policy is unsustainable in the longer term and suggest that the government policy of building new Academies is a means of re-engineering London's system of secondary education to reflect the aspirations of those living in its recently gentrified areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]