Rowland Atkinson, Gentrification and The Guardian
Posted on 6 August 2013
London's world status and house price boom is now hurting the middle class and gentrification has adopted an exaggerated and accelerated form in the capital, hurting communities from Brixton to Belgravia.
Dr Rowland Atkinson, an urban studies expert, says it is no longer fanciful to equate London with Paris, with the poor banished to distant suburbs, or subsisting in the centre.
"The kind of city that results speaks of the kind of unfairness of the system. What worries me particularly is the capacity for very affluent people to navigate their way through urban space in ways that mean they don't even have to be confronted by any forms of poverty."
The rich and powerful, formerly at least, encountered people who were obviously different, he says: "That makes people behave slightly more morally, perhaps. What you see now is that the central city becomes a playground for the rich. It feels insulated from social difference and from poverty. The physical structure of the city thereby supports a kind of social politics which is absented of debates about how we accommodate people who are different from ourselves."
Read the full article and watch the video at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/02/london-inequality-house-prices