Alongside the strike by university workers about employer attacks on the USS pensions scheme and disputes over the casualisation and discriminations of university jobs and pay, there will be a teach-out on Tuesday 3 December at 11:30 in the brick circle @ Tolmers Square NW1 2PE
How can land rent theory help us fight today’s battles? A #ucustrike teach-out, looking back & forward at land, rent, housing, planning with numerous contributors, including
Andrew Purves
Notes from Michael Edwards
- Rent as a feature of class relations in the division of the social product, rather than simply another kind of transaction among individuals in markets;
- Rent and private property relations not only a mechanism for distributing part of the social surplus between capitalists and landowners (Topalov), but one which can profoundly affect the whole structure of the economy, at times fostering particular types of growth, at other times frustrating and extinguishing branches of production (examples of Ben Fine’s analysis of coal mining or, currently, the fortunes of retailing, the stalling of productivity growth);
- A determining factor in the structure and evolution of construction, the choice of technologies (Michael Ball and Andy Cullen) and the labour process of architects and other built environment trades and professions;
- Mainstream strategies for London dominated by a crude, Neo-classical, supply/demand analysis, an imperative justifying state violence in support of speculative housebuilding, not the meeting of needs;
- Density controls on London housing which were largely circumvented in our notoriously ‘flexible’ planning system, followed now by the controls being scrapped in favour of ‘design considerations’, fostering developer over-bidding for sites;
- The fetishisation of ‘agglomeration economies’ to sustain an imperative for London’s growth, underpinned by state investment in infrastructure, with value harvested by landowners including owner-occupiers; (HS2 is ripping up the Tolmers Square area right now.)
- Endless increments of building height and density in a (?doomed) quest to finance infrastructure from developer profits, with social housing loosing out (Jenny Robinson).
- Calls for land nationalisation could simply make a more efficient capitalism (Singapore, new towns (a warning by Massey and Catalano 1978)
- Calls for Land Value Taxation could simply hand extra power to a (fairer, more wholesome) market, instead of reversing commodification. (Analogous to the UBI dilemma.)
Tolmers Square…
…is part of a development by Camden Council for social housing, secured as a compromise after a long struggle by tenants, squatters, students and local businesses against a huge office development planned by the same developer who had transformed the NW sector of the Warren Street intersection into offices. There are a book and a movie by Nick Wates about it. The photo is from 1977 by Nick Wates and Caroline Lwin (c)
