David Cameron has put the demolition of council estates at the heart of his plans to “wage an all-out assault on poverty and disadvantage.”

Citing the “severe social segregation” of tenants living in council estates, Cameron has committed £140m to redevelop 100 postwar housing estates across Britain.

The prime minister has pledged to “learn the lessons from the failed attempts to regenerate estates in the past.”

But instead of issuing a new, evidence-based plan for regeneration, Cameron has regurgitated the Blairite strategy of escalated privatisation and gentrification.

These plans signal the final death knell for council estates in England, and the imminent destruction of the communities and livelihoods of some of Britain’s most disadvantaged citizens. We know this, because we have seen it all before.

Gentrification by stealth

Back in 1997, Blair launched his regeneration policy from the stigmatised Aylesbury Estate in London, promoting the rebuilding of estates as “mixed communities”. The idea was to eliminate “no hope areas” by redeveloping estates and building private housing to subsidise social housing.

But the result was gentrification by stealth, as middle class populations replaced low income groups. Take the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle – now demolished and in the process of being rebuilt as a new ‘mixed income’ community.

The 3,000 or so residents once living there are gone. They have been displaced. They say, they have been socially cleansed. The map (right) shows where former tenants of the Heygate Estate have moved, based on FOI data obtained from Southwark Council.

These displacements have been echoed on many other ‘regenerated’ estates across London and elsewhere, as private, affordable and social housing has replaced council housing. But with affordable housing usually priced at 80% of the market rent, it is unaffordable for most ex-council tenants. And social housing is usually managed by a housing association, which is more expensive and does not have the same protections against possession claims as council tenancies do.

Now, Cameron’s regeneration strategy is continuing what Blair started. And it is interesting that he has incorporated old Thatcherite ideas about the flawed design of high rise or brutalist estates:

“Step outside in the worst estates and you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers.”

It’s revealing that Cameron’s words echo those of geographer Alice Coleman, who wrote a trenchant critique of modernist high rise estates, arguing that their design caused a myriad of social problems. Despite Coleman’s thesis being heavily criticised as a naïve piece of environmental determinism by her academic peers, it propped up the Conservatives’ privatisation agenda in the 1980s under Thatcher, and fits well with Cameron’s rhetoric today.

Indeed, the proposals made by real estate firm Savills – which Cameron earmarks as an example of what he wants to accomplish – include plans to demolish council estates and, in some cases, replace them with nice little terraced houses, something Alice Coleman would likely love to see.

Q: What is a ‘sink estate’? A: A term granting developers a licence to demolish

But ‘sink estates’ – that is, council estates with high levels of socio-economic deprivation – are not created by architectural design. In fact, the label has only tenuous connection to the reality of the lives of people on an estate.

Take, for example, the Aylesbury estate in London, which became a national symbol of British, high-rise sink estates. It has been demonised as a run-down hotbed for crime on TV shows such as The Bill and Spooks, and Channel 4 caused controversy by adding trolleys, laundry and rubbish to change the look of the estate for one of its adverts.

But when I interviewed the residents of the Aylesbury estate as part of my research, they were clear that although there was poverty on the estate, it was wrong to classify it as a ‘sink estate’. In many cases, residents contacted the newspapers and complained about the way their home was being represented. One resident said:

“I wrote back and said [the Aylesbury] is not a hell hole to live in … don’t just keep telling us we live in shit and that we’ve got drugs, crime, prostitution and everything around us when we haven’t … that really, really angers me.”

The truth of the matter was that the labelling of the Aylesbury as a ‘sink estate’ helped the local council to argue that it needed to be demolished. And in 2010, the first phase of that demolition began.

Some residents have had to find alternative council housing via the Council’s Home Search on-line bidding system, others have been decanted to other council housing in south London and beyond. Some have lost their right to council homes. The map below shows where tenants in the current phase of displacement have moved to – the displacements as they continue will no doubt stretch further afield.

Through my research, I heard many accounts of the terrible toll that displacement can take on council housing tenants: isolation, disruptions to education and employment, depression and suicide all featured. ‘Regeneration’ has come at the cost of long-established communities, as this resident says:

” … from the very first day that the demolition was announced, the social bond was affected, because people knew that ultimately within the framework of the next few years, they wouldn’t be seeing each other on a daily basis again. They wouldn’t be part of the same community.”

Fighting back: renovation costs a fraction of ‘renewal’, and keeps communities in their homes

As a London-based urbanist, I have spent the last five years investigating what can be done about this. In 2014, with the London Tenants Federation, Just Space and SNAG, I co-produced Staying Put: An Anti-Gentrification Handbook for Council Estates in London – a resource designed to assist local communities faced with the gentrification of their council estates.

We found that there are alternatives which can keep housing affordable for these residents. Council estates can be refurbished, rather than demolished – as Islington Council did with the Six Acres Estate, at a cost of around £10,000 per dwelling; far less than the circa £60k per dwelling, which Southwark Council is spending on emptying and demolishing the Aylesbury estate.

Then there’s co-operative housing, where properties are controlled (and in some cases owned) by a democratic community organisation, typically made up of the current tenants. Housing co-operatives allow tenants to take responsibility for key decisions about repairs, rents and membership.

Community land trusts offer another alternative, whereby properties are sheltered from price increases because a trust owns the land. And resale restrictions ensure that when homes are sold, they go to low-income buyers.

Then there’s community housing associations and even community self-build housing – the list goes on. So when Cameron complains that “tenants’ concerns about whether regeneration would be done fairly” prevented progress, it’s clear that he hasn’t learned anything from the previous attempts at urban renewal.

If Cameron is serious about improving Britain’s council estates, there are ways he could do it without destroying communities, and ultimately people’s lives.

Loretta Lees is Professor of Human Geography, University of Leicester.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

It’s become an annual tradition. Every year, Oxfam publishes shocking statistics on inequality just days before the global elite gather at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, an invitation-only event that hedge fund billionaire-philanthropist George Soros once termed a “big cocktail party”.

With the WEF, as Yogi Berra once said, it’s like “déja vu all over again.” This year was no different. Indeed, the Oxfam report drives home the fact that inequality is rapidly getting worse.

In 2010, the wealth of 388 individuals was equivalent to that of the world’s poorer bottom half; five years later, a mere 62 individuals had the same wealth as the bottom half.

The wealth of the richest 62 had risen in that five-year period by 44% while the poorer half’s assets had declined in value by 41%. Oxfam concludes, “Far from trickling down, income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.”

Corporate chieftains that WEF serves and celebrates undoubtedly benefit from these flows of wealth, in part because they own the machinery that ‘pumps’ it upward. So what does a typical ‘Davos Man’ think about upward redistribution?

On the surface, it would seem they are worried. WEF elite surveys since 2012 have fingered “severe income disparity” as a serious source of risk both for social and political stability and for the expanded purchasing power so vital for the corporate bottom line.

In these surveys of risk perception among WEF’s ‘communities of leaders’, attention to inequality is sometimes strong, often not. But broadly their views have come to echo recent talk at high levels in the ‘aid and development’ world, notably in the IMF, which has also begun to send off signals that inequality is bad for economic growth.

Remedies? Recycling failed paradigms

The solution to any crisis is more collaboration and ‘partnerships’ with corporations. So what do they propose as a solution?

WEF’s recent paper, The Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2015 gives some perspectives. While it sidesteps questions of what drives inequality, the Report does at least accept that “a geographically and ideologically diverse consensus has emerged that a new, or at least significantly improved, model of economic growth and development is required”.

Would that mean consigning today’s neoliberal model, that has created the transfer of wealth upwards to history’s trash-heap? Perhaps it is not a great surprise that the answer is – no, not at all.

Rather, the WEF report pooh-poohs redistribution and skilling-up policies as too narrow in scope. Instead it plumps for globalised growth and business as usual, arguing that it is important not “to miss the fuller opportunity to adapt or ‘structurally adjust’ one’s economy” to global forces as they present themselves. With the WEF, as Yogi Berra once said, it’s like “déja vu all over again.”

Beyond the waffle, and references to popular protest about what people “perceive as a distorted and non-inclusive economic and political system”, Davos Man maintains an ironclad faith in technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and corporate-led globalisation.

Moreover, rather than just seeking to sustain the existing system, WEF’s delegates are seeking to entrench it by reducing the role of nation-states in governance, and promoting corporations as new ‘global citizens’.

Entrenching corporate governance

For the WEF, national governments and political systems often get in the way of a globalised future. The solution to any crisis, such as inequality or climate change, is more collaboration and ‘partnerships’ with corporations.

For example, the WEF Global Risks Report 2015 holds that multinational companies and consumers should seek “global collaboration in the face of growing pressures to prioritize national economic self-interest”. Much of these partnerships are proposed in the shape of ‘multi-stakeholder’ platforms, thousands of which exist already addressing issues from forest management to internet name allocation.

By far the most ambitious of these is a big plan for running the world, the Global Redesign Initiative. Nothing so grand has been imagined since the Bolshevik’s dream of a ‘World Socialist Soviet Republic’. By far the most ambitious of these is a big plan for running the world, the Global Redesign Initiative.

Fortunately, a team at Boston University has analysed the initiative and its first blueprints. The team found that if WEF’s planetary governance system were put into motion, it would further blur the lines between corporate and governmental spheres.

Replacing laws with guidelines – except when it comes to protecting business

Multi-stakeholder governance would mean increasingly replacing legislated ‘hard law’ and policy with normative guidelines (‘soft law’) favoured by corporations. Compliance by corporations would become voluntary; enforcement through penalties, fines and jail terms would be discouraged, (except, of course, where business interests are at stake).

A globally-redesigned, multi-stakeholder world is a free world, corporations can simply decline tasks if they so prefer. Multi-stakeholder governance would therefore be a hit-and-miss affair; just where buck stops, and who must account to citizens, is left vague in this frankly frightening dystopia.

Multi-stakeholder governance is accompanied by a constant push for public-private partnerships (PPPs) as an answer to almost any problem of research, development and investment. At first glance, they are attractive inasmuch as they mobilize private monies where public treasuries allegedly face constraints.

But the reality of PPPs going by their track records, is anything but positive for citizens, especially in the long run. A specialists’ report published by the European Union concluded in 2014:

“PPPs are by far the most expensive way to fund projects. Equally important, the cost is often non-transparent and not accountable to auditors, parliaments or civil society groups. Similarly, debt sustainability assessments do not currently take account of this cost as these are treated as off-budget transactions, and PPPs have also tended to be very high risk financing”.

In most cases then, we shouldn’t touch public-private partnerships with a barge pole.

PR versus practice

Meanwhile, to demonstrate their social concern, the corporations at WEF emphasise their involvement in voluntary corporate social responsibility codes. But what does CSR actually accomplish, and for whom?

A comprehensive, and damning answer comes from a major three-year research programme funded by the European Commission and involving 17 European business schools and think-tanks that probed the impact of CSR as practiced by more than 5000 Europe-based firms.

The study’s headline conclusion: “the aggregate CSR activities of European companies in the past decade have not made a significant contribution to the achievement of the broader policy goals of the European Union.”

Most CSR activities are managed by public relations departments; CSR rarely enters core corporate strategies. As the researchers see it, CSR as practiced today should be consigned to the history bin. Public laws and regulatory measures are far more important if public goals respecting job quality, the environment and the economy are to be achieved.

Further discrepancies between corporate rhetoric and reality have been revealed in research coordinated in the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business. The study compared the effective tax rates paid by a sample of American firms between 2002 and 2011 with a measure of those companies CSR programmes.

Talk CSR, from the comfort of tax havens

It found that the companies which bang hardest on the CSR drum also strive the hardest to avoid paying tax. Further, companies with high CSR scores tend to spend the most on lobbying to lower their tax. In other words, most corporations use CSR as a public relations gimmick and as a substitute for taxes they should be paying.

Oxfam’s own research showed that 9 out of 10 of WEF’s corporate partners are registered in tax havens. So much for corporate ‘citizenship’. The companies which bang hardest on the CSR drum also strive the hardest to avoid paying tax.

Apart from having corrupted political life, the most disturbing thing about corporate pressures to lower their taxes is how overwhelmingly successful they have been. According to a 2015 study by IMF economists, corporations in richer countries are today taxed at rates approaching half of what they paid in 1980.

Losses to public treasuries in rich countries have been substantial, while for poorer countries the losses have been massive – an estimated $200 billion per year, equivalent to 1.7% of their GDPs.

Under pressure from corporations, politicians have made laws (and under-funded tax offices and regulatory watchdogs) that permit corporations and individuals to channel and hide their profits and other assets in low- or no-tax secrecy jurisdictions (e.g. Switzerland, Lichtenstein) and other low-tax offshore financial centres (e.g. Delaware, Ireland, the Netherlands).

As ever, the real solutions come from below

So while some have welcomed the fact that the Davos Man is talking about inequality rather than ignoring it, the fact that it is getting worse each year under their governance suggests it is rather short-sighted to believe that the World Economic Forum will ever be a place to look for solutions.

Not only does Davos fail to turn its rhetoric on social responsibility into any real practice, it continues to advocate policies that will exacerbate inequality. Worst of all, they are seeking to build a system of multi-stakeholder governance that will keep power and policies under elite control.

Real solutions to inequality will, as they have always done, come from movements ‘from below’ demanding redistribution of wealth and power.

David Sogge, based in Amsterdam, is an Associate of the Transnational Institute (TNI) and works as an independent researcher and writer. As an associate of the Norwegian think-tank NOREF, he currently focuses on public control over transnational flows affecting societies on the global periphery.

Nick Buxton is a communications consultant, working on media, publications and online communications for TNI. He has been based in California since September 2008 and prior to that lived in Bolivia for four years, working as writer/web editor at Fundación Solón, a Bolivian organisation working on issues of trade, water, culture and historical memory.

This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

This week, the front pages have been plastered with the news that trillions of dollars have been wiped off global markets, a dramatic shock which has been felt by all the main share indices worldwide.

The significance of these events depends on who you ask: some urge ‘optimism’, while others predict we may be on the cusp of a new Great Depression, at least as dangerous as the Great Recession of 2008, although different in kind. One thing is certain – we are entering a period of enormous uncertainty.

A perfect storm of factors have combined to precipitate this. First is the kickback from the end of QE in the US, the monetary policy pursued by the US Federal Reserve which gave markets an artificial lift.

There’s the unprecedentedly low oil price, caused by ongoing geopolitical struggles between the oil-producing nations. Given the crisis in Syria, these are unlikely to be resolved any time soon (though some instability can be banked on…).

And then there is China, a country whose phenomenal growth has been a fixed point in the global economic constellation for the last 25, which is finally showing signs that the ‘fairy-tale’ is coming to an end.

Is consumerism running out of steam?

Against this backdrop it would be easy to have missed another piece of news, an economic ‘and finally … ‘ item giving us a welcome break from worrisome world affairs. At a panel discussion organised by the Guardian newspaper in London, the sustainability manager of furniture giant Ikea let slip that he believed the West had reached “peak stuff”.

People were increasingly starting to consume less, instead being content to reuse, repair and recycle what they already had. Young people especially, it seems, are moving beyond the need constantly to chase the best, newest and flashiest – be it home interiors, cars or even clothing.

Coming from a man whose salary would seem to depend on whether Ikea can persuade us to to keep buying its ‘stuff’, this was a striking admission. It seemed a far cry from the tremors that were rocking the entire global economy.

Yet viewed with clear eyes, these two stories are one story: a tale of a global economy at a vital turning point. China’s ability to ‘weather the storm’, the economists tell us, depends on whether it can ‘transition’ from reliance on foreign investment to a ‘consumption-based economy’.

So far, China’s growth has been dependent on the West’s hunger for consumption. Where previously Western companies would have ploughed their money into China, the 2008 crash has forced firms to sit on large cash piles in order to insure themselves against further market turmoil.

Meanwhile, ‘consumers’ have woken up to the reality of the global market system. When the recession left them jobless and indebted, the richest in society only increased their wealth. Unflustered, the world’s biggest companies continued to push us further towards an environmental catastrophe that may rob us of our shared heritage: the stable global ecosystems (including of course climatic systems) upon which we depend for our survival.

The question, therefore, is not whether the emergent Chinese middle class can take up the reins of consumption left for them by the West. That model has already failed. We do not need to wait for China to repeat our mistakes to discover that the continual seeking after growth must eventually hit a wall.

And have bankers run out of ideas?

QE is arguably another chapter in the same tale. To the layperson, QE sounds almost unbelievable: central banks give away free money to institutions that don’t really need it, in the hope that greater liquidity will allow them to take more risks, which ultimately boost growth.

So dependent are our lives on growth that it apparently makes more sense to bankroll stock market gambling than it does to help people make investments that could support their livelihood for years to come, and benefit their communities. Instead of financing small businesses, locally-owned renewable energy, and transport, monetary policy-makers chose to boost asset prices.

This helped bankers, who did not pass the gains on to their consumer arms, and fund managers, who did not use gains to boost pensions. The end of the Federal Reserve’s programme of QE in October plunged us again into instability, having prioritised quick growth over building a stable base. In Europe, Mario Draghi’s announcement on Thursday indicated the ECB was set for another round of QE, which reveals scale of the China problem.

The commodities market is also part of the story. It is true that the current problem is an over-supply of oil: the Pyrrhic attempt by the states of the Arabian peninsula to drown out their rivals the USA and Russia. The lifting of sanctions on Iran has fanned the flames still further.

Yet the situation lays bare our world’s dependence on what are, when we take a slightly longer view, desperately scarce natural resources – and with it, dependence on a shady cadre of unaccountable oil producers capable of keeping the us in a choke hold.

Our economies depend for survival on the growth-generating potential of fossil fuel markets. Perturbations in those markets lead to crisis, whether they are the result of global politics, scarce supplies or decreasing consumption. Thus perversely, policy-makers are incentivised to support fossil fuels, while their science advisers tell them this is the one thing we cannot afford to do.

The ‘fourth industrial revolution’ – what’s that?

It’s ironic that as economic leaders woke up to the news that the Chinese industrial downturn was starting to wreak havoc across the world, they were gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, whose theme this year is “the fourth industrial revolution”.

It’s an article of faith that as we run out of markets to develop and resources to exploit, technological advancement will keep the wheels of growth turning. While leaders were worrying about how to manage a futuristic economy based around robotics and artificial intelligence, conventional industrial growth stalling presented a much more contemporary crisis.

At some point in their careers, the finance executives assembled in Davos will probably have heard the canard, beloved by motivational speakers, that “the Chinese word for crisis is the same as the word for opportunity.” We shouldn’t let truth stand in the way of a good line.

Yet the present market shock does indeed present us with an opportunity. Either we continue to rely on uncertain – and frankly dangerous – growth to support the very fabric of our society, both our vital needs – pensions, social security, healthcare – and those things which enrich our lives – education, culture and leisure.

Or we can put society first, and construct our economy in a way that promotes our flourishing. This means a post-growth future. Because we in the UK are living as if we have four planets at present, post-growth is unlikely even to be enough.

Attaining one-planet living will probably involve in due course achieving degrowth in countries such as ours: building down our economy to a safe level. Then we will have a society that is not reliant on expanding GDP, and that can remain in a steady state without putting society itself at risk.

Growth or happiness? Isn’t it obvious?

Thus our argument is that the Chinese ‘fairy-tale’ was only ever make-believe. Endless growth is a fantasy; it doesn’t make us happy; it demands rampant and frankly obscene levels of inequality; and it is destroying our common future, including the very air we breathe.

The Chinese crisis is thus indeed an opportunity. The time is ripe for turning from the failed narrow-minded outdated pursuit of ‘growth’ to a future that will prioritise survival and well-being.

How can this be done? It will require radical changes to global governance structures, so that democratic imperatives come to replace market imperatives. We simply cannot afford to leave global supplies of energy, not to mention things like food, to the discretion of a few clandestine entities.

It will require a revolution in domestic governance: the decentralisation of power and wealth, the creation of strong local economies and a re-evaluation of the relationship between politicians and the corporate world. And it will require each of us to look closely at our own values.

If happiness, rather than growth, is to be the measure of a healthy society, it is up to us to decide what kind of happiness we want to achieve.