Community and Urban Resistance Leadership

This project is interested in workplace and community organising in the UK, in the context of austerity and the slashing of local government budgets. Particularly, it focuses on the "resistance leadership" that occupies this space, and how it mobilises grassroots counter-planning in an attempt to reorganise the city through aspirations of self-management. I propose to understand these conditions of struggle through an extended case study in Tottenham, particularly at the "Latin Village" market, observing how forms of leadership have arisen from below (Woodcock, 2014). Tottenham, both today and historically, is a key site to observe the effects of finance-led urban regeneration in London and the UK. The "Save Latin Village" campaign takes place against a backdrop of the shift towards private ownership of housing, begun under the Thatcher government, and the subsequent financialisation of urban space, both of which have seen the make-up of UK cities drastically change in recent decades (Harvey, 2012; Blakely, 2019; Rolnik, 2019).